Vampires are a normal part of everyday life today!

We think that we know what vampires should look like!

We think that we know what to doTo stop a vampire attack!

But how do we know about them?

And why are we obsessed with them?

The most common Vampire traits are:

Evil Pale Skinned Drink Blood Allergy to lightSharp teeth

How to stop a vampire:

GarlicHoly WaterCrossesSunlightStake through the heartDecapitation

But are there any truths to theVampire myths

or is it all just a load of HOKUM!

No – the real Dracula, Vlad Tepes, Count Dracu,

Vlad the Impalerwas based on a real person.

Count Dracula was based uponA real historical person known

As Vlad Tepes or Vlad the Impaler.

He was much worse than any horror character ever created!

There have been many myths and legends surrounding the most infamous monster the

world has ever known.

Was he just a man and ruthless tyrant named Vlad the Impaler?

Was he a creature of the dead who preyed on the living?

Was he the Devil himself?

Vlad Dracula was born in November 1431, in

Transylvania.

He was born into a land at war. Cutthroat was its nature. It was a land that knew battle, the clanking

of their breastplates being a daily and customary din.

When blood wasn't being spilled over religious

cause, it was spread over right of land. Fights were

continuous.

From an early age Vlad and his brothers were taught by their father to steady a bow, wield a blade and ride bareback before they reached the age of their scholastic studies. The art of warfare was important if they were to survive.

His mother taught him religion and Vlad became a devout religious figure.

But he was captured with his fathers and brothers during a battle and left to die in a prison. Here he watched people impaled upon spears.

At first Vlad was sickened at the site of impalement. But he grew fascinated by it. Impalement, the most inhuman of punishments, involved piercing a body length-wise with a sharpened pole, the victim then left to die atop the raised pole. Death was excruciating and sometimes slow.

Vlad watched victims squirm, scream, haemorrhage, then die. He saw the crows pick at their carcasses that were often only blistered meat.

Dracula detested the Turks for their cruelty and wished that he could be given the chance to impale them.

Battered, starving, cut, singed and now having to view what the Turks did several times a week just beyond his windowsill, he probably went mad.

Vlad the Impaler was born!

Vlad the Impaler’s father died on the battlefield and his two brothers became traitors. When Vlad found out he found a sympathetic jailor and planned his escape.

He rescued his father’s sword from the battle field, gathered a powerful army and then marched to the nearest village where his army captured 300 Turkish men, women and children who were chained together and marched to Wallachia to build him a castle.

Prince Dracula's "reign of terror" lasted from 1456 to 1462. No one was safe from the his deadly decree of revenge.

By today's standards, he would be called a mass murderer.

Most of his killings were politically targeted – against domestic and foreign enemies – but sometimes he killed merely because he was bored.

He hanged his victims, stretched them on the rack, burned them at the stake, boiled them alive, but mostly impaled them.

Estimated numbers of victims vary between 30,000 and more than 100,000.

During an outdoor festival of St. Bartholomew, Dracula had 20,000 citizens impaled in one afternoon on the outskirts of a forest.

He sat at a dining table of fine food and wine so that he might enjoy his lunch by watching the tortures at close range. He occasionally had a servant dip his bread in the blood of the dying souls so that he could savor the taste of life.

He noticed one of his knights holding his nose at the smell of death in the air. When he asked the soldier if he was making fun of the situation, the fellow stammered, "No, my lord, my stomach churns, but –" and he quickly added, "I am not of the stout heart that my prince be.“ "But, why would I want in my service a man who cannot look at death without regurgitating? Death is a soldier's livelihood!" And with that, he called to his bodyguards to impale the feeble fellow.

Dracula was sympathetic towards the downtrodden of his land – the poor, the invalid, the cripple, the infirm. One evening, he invited hundreds of paupers to his dining hall at his castle, treating them to something they had not had in years: a filling meal.

After the desserts were served, Dracula and his staff slowly meandered out, leaving only the ragged guests alone in the hall of stone.

This is when Dracula's skilled archers shot arrows of fire through the hall's tall windows from outside, igniting the tapestries, curtains, carpets and dinner linens into a blaze that erupted into an inferno.

The peasants banged helplessly against the bolted doors. Dracula remarked "The poor unloved creatures, it is best that they leave this world now, on a full stomach."

Why wasDraculalike this?

What he saw as a child growing up

in a dungeon shaped him.

He did it all in God’s name to punish the

heathen Turks!

He wanted revenge forhis father’s death!

Dracula was not insane,

no, but he was very, very confused.

A disease called Porphyria.occurs when the body does not put

heme into your body. In the pastpeople believed that drinking blood

Would replace it!

One may wonder why any woman in her right mind would marry Dracula, but someone did.

It was either an arranged marriage or, as some critics suggest, he simply saw her, wanted her and took her.

Who she was is uncertain; there are theories – a member of Moldavian royalty, a Hungarian princess, a daughter of a Wallachian nobleman.

The marriage was tragic and brief and did not to produce any qualities of home-and-hearth in the prince. He still kept his mistresses at the castle he lived in.

How Dracula died is anyone's guess...assumptions are many and witnesses unreliable.

Some saw him fighting to the last until in a battle until speared by a Turk.

Some saw him taking a blow from an axe by one of his own men in confusion; or shot through the head while cheering his men's bravery.

But, one fact is certain – it was recorded by the monastery monks – his body was found mutilated in a nearby bog:

The only way the good priests could tell who he was came from the medallions and the princely vestments he wore.

He was decapitated, seemingly in ritualistic style after death. His head was nowhere to be found.