The town had now become a fashionable Victorian resort but it lends itself beautifully to a tale of Gothic horror, for on its eastern clifftop looms the stuff of nightmares: the skeletal remains of the thirteenth-century Whitby Abbey. Thirty years previously Elizabeth Gaskell had also visited Whitby, when traces of the original medieval fishing village were more apparent, and she used it as the setting for her novel Sylvia’s Lovers. His visit to Whitby marked the first time that he made notes for a supernatural story about an undead man. Stoker had already published three novels and was mulling over a new story to be set in Austria, featuring an evil character called Count Wampyr. Irving had recommended Whitby to him, having once run a circus there. Stoker was taking a break from his London job at the Lyceum Theatre as business manager for Henry Irving, the most famous actor of his time. Making straight for the steep cliff.Īt the end of July 1890 Abraham Stoker, his wife Florence and their son Noel, visited the Yorkshire seaside town of Whitby where they spent three weeks in Mrs Veazey’s guesthouse at 6 Royal Crescent, in a suite overlooking the sea on the West Cliff. No other form could be seen on the deck at all…īut, strangest of all, the very instant the shore was touched, an immense dog sprang up on deck from below, as if shot up by the concussion, and running forward, jumped from the bow on the sand.

The searchlight followed her, and a shudder ran through all who saw her, for lashed to the helm was a corpse, with drooping head, which swung horribly to and fro at each motion of the ship. And then, mirabile dictu, between the piers, leaping from wave to wave as it rushed at headlong speed, swept the strange schooner before the blast, with all sail set, and gained the safety of the harbour. The wind suddenly shifted to the northeast, and the remnant of the sea fog melted in the blast. It was now nearly the hour of high tide, but the waves were so great that in their troughs the shallows of the shore were almost visible, and the schooner, with all sails set, was rushing with such speed that, in the words of one old salt, “she must fetch up somewhere, if it was only in hell”… As time passed, it absorbed much of the town’s attention. And then the coastguard noticed a strange schooner out at sea ‘knocking about in the queerest way.’ It seemed to see the storm coming yet it steered erratically, turning this way and that with every puff of wind. The day of the ship’s landing had started fine but by afternoon gossips congregating by Whitby’s East Cliff churchyard had registered the appearance of ‘mares-tails’ high in the north-west sky, signalling an approaching storm. Count Dracula, disguised as a dog, is on board a Russian schooner bound for the English coastal town of Whitby.

Dracula bram stoker