Count Dracula

Count Dracula is a fictional character in Bram Stoker's masterpiece of horror, the novel Dracula. Not much is revealed about him except that he is a vampire, and lives alone in an old castle in Transylvania. His subjects are afraid of him, and see him as the devil. They try to prevent one of the characters of the book, Jonathan Harker[?], from going to the castle.

The character of Dracula may have been derived, in part, from a real Eastern European nobleman, Vlad III Dracula, Prince of Wallachia, whose chief claim to fame was his defense of Wallachia against the Turks. Vlad III Dracula, also known as Vlad the Impaler for his practice of impaling enemies on wooden stakes, sometimes styled himself Vlad Dracula, after his father, Vlad II. Vlad II, Prince of Wallachia was called "Dracul" - Romanian for "dragon" or "devil". Thus Dracula derives as "son of the dragon", since most scholars agree that Vlad II and Vlad III used the word in reference to Vlad II's induction into the Order of the Dragon[?].