Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm editor Knda Skipson, joined day by Josh Clark. Hello Candice,
Speaker 1: Hello Ja, Candice. I was walking down the sidewalk the
Speaker 1: other day, going to get some lunch, as I do
Speaker 1: from time to time, and I noticed lying in the
Speaker 1: gutter were a pair of those plastic vampire fangs. And
Speaker 1: I thought, oh boy, I'm halfway to my Halloween costume, right,
Speaker 1: All I need is to cape and there you go.
Speaker 1: So I put the fangs in my mouth and I'm
Speaker 1: walking along to go get lunch. And um, I started
Speaker 1: thinking about this, uh, this story I'd heard once, Um
Speaker 1: about this guy named Max Shrek. He actually played uh
Speaker 1: Dracula uh in the first vampire movie ever called Nose
Speaker 1: fra Too. It was released in nineteen two. Is a
Speaker 1: silent movie, very creepy movie. Is this the one that
Speaker 1: they sort of like redid version of John Nalkovich Shadow
Speaker 1: of the Vampire? Look at you? So do? I so do?
Speaker 1: I'd love to be John Malkovich. Um, actually no, I wouldn't.
Speaker 1: I think that I learned my lesson from that cautionary tale.
Speaker 1: But So have you seen Shadow of the Vampire then yes, okay, alright,
Speaker 1: good wow. Um, So in that movie they basically, uh
Speaker 1: portray Max Shrek um as an actual vampire who eventually
Speaker 1: kills off all of the cast and crew by by
Speaker 1: basically eating them during filming. Um. And there's actually a
Speaker 1: rumor that that Mr Shrek was a vampire. He had
Speaker 1: a really weird appearance and he had really strange habits. Um.
Speaker 1: So I started to do a little research and it
Speaker 1: turns out that's not the case. Um, he was not
Speaker 1: in fact a vampire. He was actually a very well
Speaker 1: respected German stage actor. Um and after No s Ferat
Speaker 1: he became very very famous and went on to starting
Speaker 1: like twenty more films. So thinking he wasn't actually a vampire,
Speaker 1: that's that's what I got. But I do understand that
Speaker 1: there actually was a real Count Dracula that Bram Stoker
Speaker 1: modeled his character on. Um, that there was a man
Speaker 1: who actually lived. Is that is that fact or fiction?
Speaker 1: Was there a real Count Dracula? There really really was?
Speaker 1: Who it was this man named Vlad Tepish and he
Speaker 1: was a fifteenth century prince from Wallachia, Glad the Impaler. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and well that wasn't the name he preferred. And Paler
Speaker 1: was you know, sort of like I don't know, calling
Speaker 1: someone a gossip. Maybe it's true about that person character,
Speaker 1: but you wouldn't say to that person's face. And his
Speaker 1: subjects didn't, they didn't touch that. There's plenty of propagandist
Speaker 1: spread about him at the time that called him the Impaler,
Speaker 1: but he actually preferred the name uh Vlaude Dracula, which
Speaker 1: translated to a son of the dragon, So that name
Speaker 1: really that bram Stoker didn't make that name up straight
Speaker 1: from the record to the British Museum, Draculum and son
Speaker 1: of the dragon. His mother was vlad drug Cuele, and
Speaker 1: he chose the dragon, you know, to embody his character
Speaker 1: as a very sort of like fearsome and bow down
Speaker 1: before me leader. And ironically enough, he really wasn't like that.
Speaker 1: He was pretty subservient to the Turks, and Vlad grew
Speaker 1: up essentially being told he also would be subservient to
Speaker 1: the Turks. Didn't his father send him as like a
Speaker 1: gift to the Sultan. He did, and Vlood started, you know,
Speaker 1: plotting his revenge, and he was a defender of Christianity
Speaker 1: and so he decided he was going to overthrow the Turks,
Speaker 1: and overthrow them he did. He was pretty intense about
Speaker 1: his mission. He consolidated power and his hometown as part
Speaker 1: of his mission to bring a more unified front eastern Europe.
Speaker 1: And it's pretty crazy the way he did this. He
Speaker 1: invited all of the regional nobility to dinner, and he
Speaker 1: got them in his dining room, and then essentially he
Speaker 1: was like, and change of plans. Instead of eating dinner,
Speaker 1: you know, we're gonna get readabilitate this old, delapidated castle.
Speaker 1: So he had the march fifty miles away and he
Speaker 1: put them to work restoring this castle, not like a
Speaker 1: fun tie Pennington way, but like in a really scary
Speaker 1: work until you die. And if you don't die doing this,
Speaker 1: I'm going to and pale you later. And didn't he didn't.
Speaker 1: He kill off the infirm and the elderly first, and
Speaker 1: then you know, put the stout ones to work and
Speaker 1: they worked for a while doing this, right they did,
Speaker 1: they did. Finally they got the castle in working order.
Speaker 1: And then you know his next step with his kingdom,
Speaker 1: and he didn't want any poor people bringing his his
Speaker 1: kingdom down, so he murdered all the poor. Yeah, tens
Speaker 1: of thousands, if not arguably a hundred thousand people died
Speaker 1: thanks to lad right. Yeah. And then he decided that
Speaker 1: he was going to you know, counteract the Turkish forces
Speaker 1: that might be closing in on him. So he took
Speaker 1: his people who were really sick, dress them up as Turks,
Speaker 1: send them to go live with the Turkish forces. And
Speaker 1: that was one of the first forms of biological warfare
Speaker 1: on record, because they spread their diseases. Yeah, and it
Speaker 1: worked like a charm as far as it did. But
Speaker 1: he he did hate the Turks that he was actually
Speaker 1: raised um for many years. He spent his formative years
Speaker 1: basically under Turkish control as a prisoner when his father
Speaker 1: sent him as a gift to the sultan Um. So
Speaker 1: he learned to hate the Turks. But he also learned
Speaker 1: something other, something very significant, from the Turks, and that
Speaker 1: was impaling, which is where he got vlad Tepish the impaler.
Speaker 1: He loved to impale people. And this is not one
Speaker 1: of my favorite part of the story, but I know
Speaker 1: it is one of yours, hopefully, y'all. Oh, you dazzle
Speaker 1: everyone with your definition of impalement. So basically with when
Speaker 1: you when you think about being impaled, you know that
Speaker 1: sounds bad enough, right. Um. I did some research on this,
Speaker 1: and there's actually a very strict procedure for impaling a
Speaker 1: human being. Uh. And Lad had this thing down, Pat,
Speaker 1: let's hear it. Okay, So you take some money, Um,
Speaker 1: you take a poor victim. Uh, and you tied one
Speaker 1: one foot to a horse and the other foot to
Speaker 1: another horse, and very slowly the horses would start to separate.
Speaker 1: So the eyes now up on his hands, with his
Speaker 1: legs spread behind him, with no recourse for shutting his
Speaker 1: legs whatsoever. Vlad preferred spears that were rounded at the
Speaker 1: tip and oil because he didn't want to tear any
Speaker 1: internal organs on the way in. Um, there's really no
Speaker 1: polite way to put this. Basically, while with the legs spread, uh,
Speaker 1: the the uh, the staff was introduced into the victim's
Speaker 1: anus and slowly pushed all the way through until it
Speaker 1: literally came out his or her mouth. Okay, that was
Speaker 1: just the beginning. After that, after they were fully impaled,
Speaker 1: they would be lifted up into a vertical position, h
Speaker 1: planted into the ground, and left to die, where they
Speaker 1: would spend sometimes days. Some some of these people actually
Speaker 1: died in starvation. They were fully aware of what was
Speaker 1: going on, and um, it was probably the worst way
Speaker 1: to die ever imagined by man. So if any of
Speaker 1: you were listening after that, um, As though that weren't
Speaker 1: bad enough, there were records that supposedly say that flawed
Speaker 1: Tepish a k a lad Dracula like to take his
Speaker 1: meals outside among the dying, impaled victim and you I
Speaker 1: imagine that there was a lot of groaning and screaming
Speaker 1: and it probably wasn't very pleasant sound, No, but he
Speaker 1: was a very sick man, Yeah, he was. There was
Speaker 1: also well I think this is probably where the Dracula
Speaker 1: legend came from. Uh. He supposedly once invited some Turks
Speaker 1: uh to meet with him, and when they got there, um,
Speaker 1: he had some prisoners that he'd already captured that were
Speaker 1: Turks uh, and he killed one of them in front
Speaker 1: of the Turks and and drank the blood of this victim,
Speaker 1: which caused the Turks to turn around and leave very quickly. Um,
Speaker 1: which I I imagine that's probably where the vampire legends
Speaker 1: that sort of sort of worked like a charm, and
Speaker 1: we invent and earlier, there was a lot of propaganda
Speaker 1: spread about Vlad Dracula, and conveniently enough this sort of
Speaker 1: coincided with the invention of Guttenberg's printing press, so it
Speaker 1: had more recently been used to print copies of the Bible,
Speaker 1: and next people turned to printing just volumes and volumes
Speaker 1: and volumes of documents against the horrors of Vlad Dracula.
Speaker 1: I think historians suggests that we would not even probably
Speaker 1: be aware of Lad Tepish had had this propaganda against
Speaker 1: him not been printed so voluminously. And uh, we probably
Speaker 1: probably would have been even further forgotten had bram Stoker
Speaker 1: not basically accidentally ran across these these pamphlets and these
Speaker 1: books h in the British Museum, so he his enemies
Speaker 1: basically um uh contributed to his everlasting lagend there youk
Speaker 1: out And even today apparently there's this new video game
Speaker 1: coming out. And I'm not much of a gamer myself.
Speaker 1: I'm more likely to sit down with the latte and
Speaker 1: a copy of Vogue. But a pair ly you can
Speaker 1: play this thing called The Path of the Dragon, and
Speaker 1: it takes you through the ruins of Vlad Tapiss Castle,
Speaker 1: and they call the village, I think of a lot
Speaker 1: of veast or something like that. And we know for
Speaker 1: a fact he didn't live in Transylvania. He lived in Lakia.
Speaker 1: But um, you could sort of go on a virtual
Speaker 1: tour of the castle. Just watch your stuff. You don't
Speaker 1: want to get them failed. Yeah, you can read even
Speaker 1: more about vlad Tapis in who is the real Countcula?
Speaker 1: Where was the real Count Dracula? And for other delightful
Speaker 1: stories of people who supposedly drank their victim's blood. You
Speaker 1: can also read about Elizabeth Bastery and was a Hungarian
Speaker 1: countess the Morald's most prolific serial killer, both on how
Speaker 1: staff works dot com for moral this and thousands of
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