Whats Your Thoughts On Vampires, page 2

The whole legend of vampirism started with the good, kind Vlad the Impaler. You know, the guy who would like to torture his victims, stick them up on stakes on the battlefield, and drink their blood. This, it is believed, started fears that he needed the blood to live, and those whose blood he drank became like him. This legend remained in the transylvania area, where Bram Stoker went, heard legends, and came up with a great idea for a book.

Dracula was born in November or December of 1431. He was actually named Vlad, as I said before, but we know him better as the former. He had an older brother, Mircea, and a younger brother, Radu the Handsome (don't know if this name was ment to be ironic

). Their mother may have been a Moldavian princess or a Tranyslvanian noble. It is said that she educated Dracula in his early years. Later he was trained for knighthood by an old boyar who had fought the Turks.

According to another story, he invited 500 boyars to a banquet and asked them how many princes had ruled in their lifetimes. They said they had lived through many reigns. Shouting that this was their fault because of their plotting, Dracula had them all arrested on the spot. The older ones were impaled; the others were marched 50 miles to Poenari where they were forced to build a mountaintop fortress. They worked a long time; when their clothes fell off, they worked naked. Most of them died, of course. And of course Dracula seized the boyars' property and passed it out to his supporters. In that way he created a new nobility, loyal to him.

Dracula liked to set up a banquet table and dine while he watched people die. His favorite form of execution was impalement. It was slow; people could take days to die. He liked to impale many people at once, arranging the stakes in fancy designs. Nothing was too brutal for Dracula - he enjoyed having people skinned, boiled alive, etc. He prided himself on making the punishment (supposedly) fit the crime.

By 1462, when he was deposed, he had killed between 40,000 and 100,000 people, possibly more. He always thought up some excuse for these executions. He killed merchants who cheated their customers. He killed women who had affairs. Supposedly he had one woman impaled because her husband's shirt was too short. He didn't mind impaling children, either. Afterwards he would display the corpses in public so everyone would learn a lesson. It's said that there were over 20,000 bodies hanging outside his capital city. Of course, the stories about Dracula's cruelty might have been exaggerated by his enemies.

So it's no wonder such terrible legends were created from such a loveable guy, and persist to this day. He was a sick f***! And thus the Goth culture was born...