Humans are fascinated by gore and violence, but even more so the mysterious and unsolved.

Interest in these disturbing and unpleasant subjects is called morbid curiosity, and it has gripped millions of people throughout the ages.

I am one of those people.

My name is Halley, and this is the Morbid Curiosity podcast.

Music Podcast.

Dracula. The name itself brings imagery of blood, vampires, and tyrants. Most of us know

of Dracula, the vampire from the 1897 novel by Bram Stoker. Suave and sinister, Count Dracula is still

one of the most popular vampire characters in literary history.

Most of us also know that this fictional vampire was named after a real person, Vlad Dracula.

Vlad Dracula was also known as Vlad the Impaler, a nickname he earned through bloodshed and brutality during his rule. I already

discussed Vlad the Impaler in part one of this series on Patreon. In this episode, we're going

to explore Brom Stoker's Dracula and how he changed vampire lore forever. We shall start from the beginning. Abraham Stoker, whose pen name is

Bram Stoker, was an Irish novelist. His writing career started as a theater critic for the

Dublin Evening Mail, a newspaper which was co-owned by Sheridan LaFanoe, another Gothic writer, famous for his vampire novel, Carmilla.

After giving a favorable review of famous actor Henry Irving's performance in Hamlet,

Stoker became Irving's personal assistant, and later the business manager for his theater

in London's West End. Through this connection to high society,

Stoker met many famous writers, including Oscar Wilde and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. When not busy

managing the theater, Stoker traveled and wrote short stories and books. He visited the English

coastal town of Whitby in 1890, and it said that

during this visit was when he started writing Dracula. According to Dr. Elizabeth Miller,

Stoker spent several years researching Central and Eastern European folklore and myths surrounding

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