Dracula Defanged: The REAL Story of the World’s Most Famous Vampire

If you grew up in an English-speaking country, then you’ve probably heard of Dracula, the “sensational true story” assembled and published by Irish author Bram Stoker in 1897 about the vampire Count who came to England and terrorized the population of a seaside English town. This book’s shocking claims about vampires – that they were murderous undead fiends with all sorts of unholy supernatural powers – were accepted as facts for more than half a century. Indeed, the book played the leading role in shaping the contemporary public opinion of vampires. For instance, historians cite the book’s enormous popularity as the catalyst behind the Vampire Exclusion Act of 1924, which banned all vampire immigration.

For thirty years after the passage of that odious Act, the consensus on vampires and the wild claims of Dracula that helped to form it, went largely unquestioned. But when courageous scholar Richard Renfield (no relation to the Renfield mentioned in the book) went digging into the book’s factual basis in the late 1940s, what he discovered shocked the academic world. According to Dr. Renfield’s painstakingly documented research, the book turned out to be “99% fabrication.” And, as the old lies crumbled under his careful study, the true narrative that emerged turned out to be almost the complete reverse of Stoker’s account.

The source material for Stoker’s book was a collection of letters and personal papers turned over to the author by a still-unknown doctor whom Stoker shielded under the pseudonym “Van Helsing.” While nothing yet has come to light that calls the authenticity of these documents into question, it is now virtually certain that they are untruthful. In fact, the chief purpose of the documents appears to have been to cloak the true events under a veil of secrecy and falsehood.

One of Renfield’s first important revelations was that Van Helsing was not a medical doctor, but a psychiatrist whose specialty was treating hysteria and psychosis and that nearly all the letters included were those of his patients. Van Helsing himself may have been experiencing some type of a nervous breakdown due to the death of his son and the suicide. This startling finding from Renfield was enough to suggest that the entire narrative of Dracula was the result of a collective psychotic break on the part of Van Helsing and his patients.

But the real truth may be more nefarious still. One of Count Dracula’s alleged victims, a Lucy Westenra, was romantically linked to three of the book’s authors: Arthur Holmwood, Quincey Morris and John Seward, all of whom proposed marriage to her at one time or another. By their own admission, these three men were to participate, along with Van Helsing, in the later decapitation and desecration of Ms. Westenra’s corpse, ostensibly to prevent her return from the grave. But as a result of forensic analysis obtained by Renfield, there is reason to believe that Ms. Westenra was alive when she was subjected to this gruesome ritual.

Renfield suggests that the men responsible were not acting out of concern for Ms. Westenra’s “soul,” as they claimed but had become violently jealous after the young woman developed a romantic interest in the Count. Spurred on by Van Helsing’s hateful theorizing, they subjected her to a grotesque murder and then blamed her death on the vampire. Not satisfied with one innocent life, Van Helsing manufactured another paranoid conspiracy regarding another young woman, Mina Murray, and provoked the same homicidal trio to travel abroad to murder the Count and his family in their ancestral home in Transylvania.

Who then was the real Dracula, if not the bloodthirsty demon fabricated by Van Helsing and his patients? All reliable evidence suggests that he was a kindly immigrant hoping to make a new home for himself and his family. After surviving an shipboard outbreak of Russian flu that wiped out most of his ship’s crew (a tragedy that the Captain blamed on Dracula despite no corroborating evidence), this gentle Count was hounded by violently xenophobic men from the moment he set foot on English soil. After being unjustly accused of corrupting the young women who had seen past the vicious slanders and befriended him, he eventually fled the country only to be followed to his doorstep and slain along with his family in their sleep.

Today we remember the tragedy of Dracula as a warning against the dangers that bigotry and xenophobia pose to vulnerable immigrant populations like our vampire neighbors. To honor his memory, and to remind all of us to be vigilant against the return of the kind of thinking that led to his murder, River City officially recognized November, the month of his passing, as Vampire Awareness Month. This November, be sure to visit the Duma Center for the Performing Arts for special programming to commemorate his life.