To learn more about Dacre Stoker, read our story here.
Bram Stoker’s book, “Dracula,” might’ve been a work of fiction, but it was steeped in fact.
So much fact that it’s led Dacre Stoker, Bram’s great-grand-nephew, who calls Aiken home, to go on a quest to find the real location of Dracula’s fictional castle in Romania. He’s filmed a trailer and hopes to visit to film a full documentary when it’s safe to do so.
“There are 26 or 27 books in the London Library that are marked with his notes. It proves the library was ground zero for Bram’s research,” said Dacre, who has traveled all over the United States, United Kingdom and Romania to trace his ancestor’s footsteps and the journey he made while creating one of the most well-known horror novels of all time.
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Bram researched a variety of topics to create the vampire and multiple settings in the novel, Dacre has discovered. His ancestor researched science and the pseudo-science of the day. He read the writings of wise and educated people.
Many of the places described within the novel are real, said Dacre, and it would make sense that there was a real location for Dracula’s castle. While it’s widely accepted that Bran Castle in Romania fits Bram’s description of Dracula’s Castle, Dacre began to wonder if that was the actual location for Dracula’s castle.
For nearly two decades, Dacre has scoured Bram’s notes and met with other experts on the novel. One expert was Hans de Roos, a Dutch literary researcher who made sense of some of Bram’s cryptic notes.
“Bram’s handwriting was terrible,” said Dacre. “Some of it was written in pencil, and it was faded.” De Roos found a series of numbers written in a margin. De Roos thought they might be longitude and latitude, but the coordinates pointed to somewhere in Saudi Arabia.
“When he inverted them, it put us in Romania near the rivers Bram mentioned when the count tries to return home at the end of the book,” Dacre said. He also found scenes edited from the book including the mention of a volcano.
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Dacre went to Romania in 2018, and he began a search for the elusive location. Almost last minute, he hired a group to document his travel film.
“It was a lousy day. It was foggy and rainy,” he said
The location wasn’t an easy place to get to either. It required a treacherous hike via a logging route.
After returning from the trip, he put together a 30-minute segment. It was a rough cut with Dacre doing voice-overs, but he sees it could be so much more. He knows it will require another trip to Romania to produce a polished piece.
Dacre can’t make another trip to Romania any time soon, but he has been doing a virtual tour of Transylvania with a few others.
The Airbnb Dracula’s Transylvania available through Dracula’s Transylvania – Airbnb is scheduled for 11 a.m. Wednesday, Feb. 24 and noon Sunday, Feb. 28.
Charmain Z. Brackett is the Features Editor for The Augusta Press. Reach her at charmain@theaugustapress.com
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