
Willow Sam: That's right, Big Boy. Come and get it.
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[this from a Bathroom Reader]
The real Dracula's ancestors were warlord princes of Wallachia, a principality in what is now Romania. Dracula's father, Basarab, was in line for the throne, but there were a lot of relatives in the way. So for the moment, Basarab had to settle for the post of governor of Transylvania. In 1431 he was inducted as a knight into the Royal Order of the Dragon. He started calling himself the Dragon, which in Romanian is Dracul. His second son, Vlad, was born a few months later, and the little tyke was nicknamed "Dracula" which means son of the dragon.
[yadda yadda yadda]
In most stories, it's the White Knight who rides in on his charger and saves the day. But this is real life. And this particular White Knight wanted more than anything to be the king of Hungary. He saw Wallachia as a stepping-stone, and the Dragon as an impediment. The White Knight killed Vlad's father, mother and older brother, and took the throne of Wallachia. When Vlad found out what had happened, he vowed revenge.
[blah blah blah]
He sometimes wiped out entire villages for no reason but he didn't just kill his own people. Foreign dignitaries and traders, monks, priests, Turks- everyone was a likely candidate. Travelers started to go the long way around Wallachia. It was during this time that the Turks named him "Vlad the Impaler."
Virtually any crime was punishable by impalement. Sometimes Vlad killed just because he was bored. He tortured and mutilated people, hanged them, burned them at the stake, and boiled them alive, but impalement was his favourite. It's estimated that Vlad the Impaler was responsible for 100,000 deaths.
[...]
Vlad was killed outside Bucharest in a skirmish against his oldest enemy, the Turks, but it's a historical toss-up as to whether he died in battle or was killed by his own men. The Turks decapitated him and sent his head to Constantinople, where it was put on display to prove that the man they had named "the Impaler" was really dead. His body was buried at a monastery near Bucharest, but disappeared. When archaeologists in the 1930s removed the slab over Draculas supposed grave, they found an empty pit. Think about it.