Perhaps the least believable part of University alumnus Paul Bibeau's new book about Dracula is that it was his wife's idea to spend part of their honeymoon at the famous vampire's real castle. Yet like everything else in "Sundays with Vlad," it's all true -- and he has the signed affidavit to prove it.
Of course, Bibeau and his wife didn't know at the time that their honeymoon would involve a trek of some 1,500 steps through densely forested mountains, over a rickety, cobbled-together bridge all to see a pile of ancient bricks about the size of a dorm room. So much for the "stately and majestic Castle Dracula."
The new Mrs. Bibeau was so disappointed, she insisted these caveats find their way into her signed statement. But her husband was not. For him, the decrepitude of Vlad the Impaler's home only made him more curious how the man who inspired Dracula evolved from just another Romanian prince into a cultural icon.
Before his book was complete, this question had led Bibeau to do everything from rioting with biker gangs in Bucharest, to defying death on Romanian roads, to rooting through some of New Jersey's most historically important ashes. He learned about intellectual property rights, the Numa Numa Dance, a great chicken recipe and even a thing or two about Dracula. And when he came to speak at the Jefferson Society meeting last Friday, he was happy to share it all with the delighted crowd.
It wasn't just that unsatisfactory sight in the Wallachian mountains that inspired Bibeau's fascination with vampires. He had been captivated by the bloodthirsty ghouls since he was 8 years old, when his sister, wearing glow-in-the-dark plastic fangs, leapt out of a darkened crawl-space "like it was a crypt." Seeing the same mystery pondered on Leonard Nimoy's television show "In Search Of ..." certainly fostered his fascination.
The obsession grew even stronger in his college years at the University, when he took Slavic Languages and Literature Prof. Jan Perkowski's class about vampires.
"I read everything" in the class," Bibeau said. "Not just the required reading -- everything I could. Some of my fondest college memories are of sitting in my room, reading old legends out of the Xeroxed course book."
The readings kept him on edge.
"Paul was a jumpy student," recalls former University English Prof. Jonathan Coleman. "I was always afraid he would become a writer."
But it wasn't the modern-day books and movies about vampires that held Bibeau's attention.
"I was always more interested in the lore and history of vampires" than the fictionalized versions of them, he said. "They held some reality ... some peasant hundreds of years ago really believed in them."
After leaving the University, Bibeau made a name for himself writing for numerous magazines, completing some of the research he would use in his book while writing for "Maxim" about the Romanian inability to capitalize on Dracula's fame.
"Dracula is the thing that [the Romanians] have," he said. "... The whole country is filled with places where he ate and that he slept and that he crapped and where he killed his enemies," he said.
And yet the country has not been able to capitalize on its mythological celebrity. Perhaps, Bibeau notes, it has to do with Universal Pictures' ownership of the Dracula character; the government would have to pay royalties if any of their schemes, such as the proposed "Draculaland" theme park, were to get off the ground.
It turns out there's a lot more to the story than you'd think -- and you don't have to brave the terrifying Transylvanian streets to find out about it. Bram Stoker, the Victorian novelist whose acclaimed "Dracula" brought the now-famous vampire onto the world stage in 1897, spent much of his time researching and writing the novel in Philadelphia, and the Rosenbach Museum and Library there holds the remaining notes he took during the process, including outlines.
It turns out Stoker knew next to nothing about the historical Vlad the Impaler.
"He didn't even know he impaled people," Bibeau said.
Stoker did, however, know he liked the sound of the nickname that had been given to him, and he hastily changed the main character to the notorious Dracula.
"You can actually see where, on his notes, he's crossed out 'Vampir' and written in 'Dracula,'" Bibeau added.
Vlad the Impaler did commit his fair share of offensive acts, but he was almost certainly no vampire. That allegation arose from the imaginations of his terrified Saxon subjects, many of whom fled, encountered the printing press and set to work producing pamphlets slandering him. In fact, Bibeau said, for a time before his death, more anti-Vlad pamphlets were being printed than Bibles.
So how did the connection between Vlad and Dracula make it into the popular culture of the United States? Believe it or not, the first Americans to experience Vlad as the bloodthirsty vampire of legend were not literary or film critics but bored teenagers looking for a place to make out. The "Castle Dracula" ride in Wildwood, N.J., built in 1976, was one of the earliest American locations to have imagery of Bram Stoker's Dracula alongside that of the historical Vlad the Impaler.
Unbeknownst to Bibeau, Coleman had worked on the ride in his youth.
"The ride was always breaking down, and parents were always shouting at me to run in and save their kids, stuck with a monster about to jump out into their faces," he laughed.
So, of course, Bibeau had to go check out yet another run-down Castle Dracula.
Unfortunately, Wildwood had just suffered its arson incident, and Castle Dracula was among the casualties. All that remained was a grossly inaccurate fiberglass crest that had been saved from the ride's façade by a fireman. Bibeau spent the afternoon sorting through the rubble and enduring nauseating experiences with funnel cake.
While "researching" in a local bar, however, Bibeau made an interesting discovery: The ride's owner, as one drunken patron put it, was "king of the Gypsies" -- a very prominent and well-respected man in the Roma community. Ironically, Bibeau noted, one of Vlad's most targeted groups now held power over his reputation -- and was apparently burning his home down to collect the insurance money.
Vlad's legacy was even the catalyst for an interesting intellectual property debate, Bibeau said, when Bela George Lugosi, son of Bela Lugosi, the actor who played Dracula, sued Universal for its use of his father's likeness as Dracula in promotional materials. The outcome of Lugosi v. Universal led to the passage of the Celebrities' Rights Act, under which Vanna White later successfully argued she was indistinguishable from a robot and gave Keanu Reeves an opportunity to sue virtually everybody for infringing on his trademark bad acting.
Bibeau's talk ended with applause and laughs. Second-year College student Sara Irvani said the presentation was enjoyable, adding that she "never imagined the depth" of Dracula's history.
So, this Halloween, if you pop in the fangs, don the cape and head out into the night, remember you're not just role-playing a centuries-old prince from a distant province of Romania, and you're not simply dressing as another campy movie villain. You're part of a legacy that's been evolving and spreading since the 15th century. And who knows -- you might terrify some poor kid and inspire another potential journalist.
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