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Because the Irish writer Abraham Stoker authored the Victorian gothic novel Dracula (based on the real Vlad Dracule Tepes and the history of vampires in the region.)
I've also read some interesting books about the history of alleged real-life vampires, living dead, and ghosts in eastern Europe.
A foreign Count Dracula travels from Transylvania to bring 'evil' to a xenophobic Victorian English society in the novel... by unleashing their hidden carnal desires. The novel was aimed at a suffocating Victorian society with Bram Stoker winking at his Victorian audience. The count was afraid of the sun, ageing, and dying... and wanted to stay forever young and preserve his carnal flesh by feeding off the living. In the end the Count is murdered and killed with a holy stake through his heart.
Tourists visit the castles in Transylvania associated with Count Dracula. I saw a video once of a man who spent a night by himself sleeping on the floor with his rucksack in a remote castle on a hilltop in Transylvania... and there was an open roof to the dark sky with all these bats flying around the castle walls above him.
But I can think of far creepier places on the planet.
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