Happy Halloween...the Real Dracula

Happy Halloween everybody. As you prepare your children to go trick-or-treating or perhaps prepare yourself for some Halloween partying, I thought I'd share with you some pictures I took of the real Dracula that I took when we visited Romania in 2011.

Bust of Vlad Dracula in Sigishoara, Romania

That's right people, Dracula was a real person. However, he was not a vampire of course. Rather, he was an extremely brutal, extremely bloodthirsty (in the traditional sense, not literally) dictator of the part of Romania that is now Wallachia and Transylvania. His name was Vlad Dracula and also known as Vlad Tepes...which translates to "Vlad the Impaler." Yep. He gruesomely impaled his enemies on huge spikes among other nasty violence.

Check out my set of Dracula pictures HERE. You can see a bigger set of shots I took on our trip to Romania HERE.

Meanwhile, the quick background on how the real Dracula had his name attached to the now famous fictional vampire character is that author Bram Stoker knew of Vlad's history and how bloody his methods of ruling were and he simply took the name and applied it to his fictional "Count Dracula"vampire character. Stoker also knew of the superstitions and legends of vampires in Translyvania, so he set the Count's home there.

Finally, if you're interested, you can read about our adventures in Romania by clicking HERE to get to my "On the Trail of Dracula" series.