28 May.--There is a chance of escape

28 May.--There is a chance of escape, or at any rate of being able to send word home. A band of Szgany have come to the castle, and are encamped in the courtyard. These are gipsies. I have notes of them in my book. They are peculiar to this part of the world, though allied to the ordinary gipsies all the world over. There are thousands of them in Hungary and Transylvania, who are almost outside all law. They attach themselves as a rule to some great noble or boyar, and call themselves by his name. They are fearless and without religion, save superstition, and they talk only their own varieties of the Romany tongue.

I shall write some letters home, and shall try to get them to have them posted. I have already spoken to them through my window to begin acquaintanceship. They took their hats off and made obeisance and many signs, which however, I could not understand any more than I could their spoken language . . .

I have written the letters. Mina's is in shorthand, and I simply ask Mr. Hawkins to communicate with her. To her I have explained my situation, but without the horrors which I may only surmise. It would shock and frighten her to death were I to expose my heart to her. Should the letters not carry, then the Count shall not yet know my secret or the extent of my knowledge . . .

I have given the letters. I threw them through the bars of my window with a gold piece, and made what signs I could to have them posted. The man who took them pressed them to his heart and bowed, and then put them in his cap. I could do no more. I stole back to the study, and began to read. As the Count did not come in, I have written here . . .

The Count has come. He sat down beside me, and said in his smoothest voice as he opened two letters, "The Szgany has given me these, of which, though I know not whence they come, I shall, of course, take care. See!"--He must have looked at it.--"One is from you, and to my friend Peter Hawkins. The other,"--here he caught sight of the strange symbols as he opened the envelope, and the dark look came into his face, and his eyes blazed wickedly,--"The other is a vile thing, an outrage upon friendship and hospitality! It is not signed. Well! So it cannot matter to us."  And he calmly held letter and envelope in the flame of the lamp till they were consumed.

Then he went on, "The letter to Hawkins, that I shall, of course send on, since it is yours.  Your letters are sacred to me. Your pardon, my friend, that unknowingly I did break the seal.  Will you not cover it again?"  He held out the letter to me, and with a courteous bow handed me a clean envelope.

I could only redirect it and hand it to him in silence. When he went out of the room I could hear the key turn softly. A minute later I went over and tried it, and the door was locked.

When, an hour or two after, the Count came quietly into the room, his coming awakened me, for I had gone to sleep on the sofa.  He was very courteous and very cheery in his manner, and seeing that I had been sleeping, he said, "So, my friend, you are tired? Get to bed. There is the surest rest. I may not have the pleasure of talk tonight, since there are many labours to me, but you will sleep, I pray."

I passed to my room and went to bed, and, strange to say, slept without dreaming. Despair has its own calms.

Comments

[Ben]

This is a comment from a thread in one of my blog entries asking for mysterious stories. The comment was made by Soj, an American living in Romania who writes one of the best blogs on the planet, Flogging the Simian. Link here http://www.weblog.ro/soj

From Soj:
I remember years ago, maybe 2002, and I was on a trip to Romania (where I now live), specifically to Transylvania. Everyone here probably knows that Transylvania was the setting for Bram Stoker's novel Dracula but few people probably know that Romanians in the countryside still believe in "vampires".

Not the "vampires" of movies, wherein a well-dressed man with fangs turns into a bat and all that nonsense. The vampires here are called strigoi and are believed to be unclean spirits (duhuri necurati) of people who are dead but not finished with this realm, who sap energy and health from the living. The only way to stop the strigoi is to dig up the corpse and burn it to ashes. Sometimes they also eat the heart of the body first. And yes this still happens even in 2005 although the police try to stop it...

I thought all this was amusing local folklore until the time I was staying in a small town adjacent to one of Vlad Tepes (Vlad "The Impaler") old castles. We visited the castle by day and it was interesting but not particularly noteworthy.

It was later that night when darkness fell and a silence came over the valley that I began to feel "something" that badly frightened me. What, I don't exactly know, but I could see out of my window the castle and the ramparts leading up to it. I imagined the horrific violence that must've occurred there, with Vlad's troops battling the Turks, capturing thousands of prisoners. Vlad's technique of "dissuasion" was to take captured prisoners and impale them on a wooden stake, which was inserted upwards through the anus. A most horrific and painful way to die...

Transylvania is a very old and very powerful land and I tell you I can feel the energy here like nowhere else. I'm not a "psychic" person or sensitive to these kind of things, but I've had too many strange incidents to discount them.

Are the peasants who believe in strigoi just ignorant country folk? Or do they recognize something that exists?

[Baby Jinx]

I don't know about the ramparts in Transylvania, but I am reminded of an incident I experienced at a fortress in Sedan, France. Myself and two others spent the afternoon touring this massive castle. Since we were staying overnight in town, after a late dinner we decided to take a "midnight" stroll around the fortress (at that point, it was closed).

After walking once around it, I happened to look up and saw what looked like a man standing on the ramparts, dressed all in black, wearing what looked like a black cape. I glanced away for a few seconds, but when I looked back, the figure was gone. When I described what I saw to my two friends, the one who had been talking and looking away claimed not to have seen anything. But the other person said that he saw it, too, and was just as puzzled about it as I was. The figure looked to both of us like a vampire looking down at us, there one minute and gone the next. The sight was so eerie that I wrote about it on the alt.vampyres newsgroup when I came home.

Myself, I don't believe in vampires of the undead, supernatural type, but I'm still at a loss to explain what I saw and the feeling it gave me at the time. It still sends shivers down my spine, and it happened some 8 or 9 years ago.

[Baby Jinx]

Well, I thought I wrote about it on alt.vampyres, but I just did a google search and can't find it. Several years later, I worked that experience into an interactive fiction story I was writing about a vampire named Armond, but the addition of Armond came years later. Oh well.

[Elizabeth Miller]

Methinks Soj may be indulging in a bit of fictionalizing. There is no castle in Transylvania that can be designated as Vlad's. His princely palace as well as his fortress (Cetate Poenari) are located in Wallachia, not Transylvania. There is Bran Castle, which is located in Transylvania and is often referred to (erroneously) as "Castle Dracula." But it was never Vlad's castle. At best, he may have stayed there overnight during his travels. It has been promoted falsely by Romanian officials for years as Castle Dracula - for the benefit of tourists.

I have been to Transylvania 9 times and can attest to a number of reactions to it (including my own). It is difficult, if not impossible, to visit the area "tabula rasa". We project onto it what we want/believe/fear it to be, with varying results. Even a die-hard realist like me cannot remain unmoved, so powerful is the archetype.

[Guinn Berger]

...But maybe, Elizabeth, there really IS 'something' there? : )

I've never had any ghostly encounters that I'm sure were ghosts, and not my imagination. But while helping my sister move from our late parents' home, I saw a shadow move across the enclosed front porch, as if someone were walking just out of my range of vision. I'd seen this phenomenon many, many times while my father was alive and spent a lot of his time on the porch, reading and smoking cigarettes, so I thought nothing of it; I assumed it was one of the movers or a member of my family. But when I walked out there only a moment later, no one was there.

It gave me a bit of a creepy feeling, especially later, when my sister confided to me quite spontaneously that she was glad to be leaving the place; she'd begun seeing 'things' just at the edge of her vision, too, and I hadn't mentioned that day's 'odd' event to her.

[Elena]

Sometimes forms, lights and shadows play tricks upon us. People are so good at recognising patterns and shapes that sometimes we see them where they aren't... this phenomenon is called pareidolia.

[HP]

Ahh, but paraeidolia works hand-in-hand with culture and suggestibility. Buddhists don't see Mary in a piece of cheese toast, but they might see Quan Yin in a slice of lotus root.

I've had a fair number of hair-raising, eerie experiences (warning: blogwhoring - http://mvaldemar.blogspot.com/2005/04/haunted-house-conclusion.html) when I've lived or traveled along the path taken by "Mad Anthony" Wayne from Fort Washington to Fort Ouiatenon, but folks with no knowledge of that particularly dark chapter in U.S. history don't notice anything in particular about the countryside. (FYI: Toni Morrison's novel Beloved touches briefly on some of the ghosts left in Wayne's wake.)

[HP]

Elizabeth, I take issue with your choice of the word "fictionalizing." I think a better term is "confabulation." When you say "Fictionalizing," the implication is that Soj is just taking the piss, just jerking our collective, web-enabled chain, and I don't that's what's happening.

I think rather that, when people experience things that don't really make any narrative sense, they "confabulate" until it holds together as a story (cf the Satanic child-sex cults of the 1980s.) I see "confabulation" as a largely unconscious process of making disjunct or coincidental experiences fit a particular narrative. I know that I confabulate all the time; I'd be very much surprised if you don't, as well. (I'd think that lack of confabulation would be a sign of some kind of pathology, akin to Asperger's.) Most of time, confabulation works. We only notice it when it breaks down.

[Baby Jinx]

Re: Gypsies being "without religion"

Here, Jonathan is either showing that condescension we spoke of earlier or perhaps his ignorance about Gypsies, for the Gypsies did indeed have a strong sense of religion albeit not "religion" as a Brit might define it. One of their best known dieties was the Black Sara, whom some say descended from the Indian Kali (Gypsies, although their name means 'little Egyptians', actually came from northern India).

There is also their strong belief in the mullo, ghosts that return from the dead to rejoin the living, doing all sorts of things from helping out with household chores to wrecking venegeance on those who crossed them during life. Many vampirologists feels that it was the Gypsy mullo that fueled the image of the vampire as we know it today.

One thing different about the mullo and today's vampire, however, is that the mullo was believed to have the ability for sex, either with his widow or someone else who caught his eye during life. It was the offspring of a mullo and a living human that was said to have the powers of the dhampir of which we spoke about earlier in the comments section.

[Elizabeth Miller]

Re fictionalizing and confabulating:

In the case in point, what I see is the fictionalizing of history. Let's create a more familiar example. If a person were to write (as non-fiction) about a horrifying vision experienced at a plaza in Phoenix of Lee Harvey Oswald aiming a gun at JFK from a nearby building, I would as a reader have greater difficulty engaging in the narrative than had the teller correctly placed the event in Dallas. I would be bothered by the "fictionalizing."

I know that way of thinking is not PM, but in some respects I am still stuck in a pre-postmodern world. :)

[Ben]

Elizabeth Miller: I'll email Soj. My guess is she was simply mistaken or misinformed (and remember she was a tourist) rather than fictionalizing about the castle she saw as one of Vlad's. However, I hope the main thrust of her post hasn't been lost in the pre-post modernization discussion. I really liked the way that she described how theatmosphere of the land casts a spell on those who visit. In addition, there was a story on the BBC news site in February about six villagers in Transylvania who had dug up a corpse and were charged with mutilating it because they believed it a vampire so the old ways still persist in the 21st century there.

Baby Jinx and Guinn: great spooky stories!
Also Baby Jinx, I'm reading a book called Dhampir now. It's pretty good.

HP: We're blog whoring in the high-rent district here. Does that make us blog mistresses? ;^>

[Baby Jinx]

Ben re: Dhampir

Fiction or no? What's it about? There's so little out there about dhampirs.

[Elizabeth Miller]

Ben: I agree re not losing the main thrust of Soj's piece. Let us know what you find out. It's probably a case of a misinformed tourist. If she's referring to Bran Castle, that's very understandable. I have found it referred to as "Dracula's Castle" in what one would consider the most reliable of sources. There is a plethora of misinformation out there about Vlad (especially his connection to Stoker, _Dracula_ and vampires) due in large part to fictionalizing undertaken (in some cases knowingly) by historians Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu. But don't get me started on that! :)

Re the incident about digging up a "vampire". I read that and saved it but cannot find it right now. I am wondering just where in Romania it occurred. Sometimes Transylvania and Romania are used interchangeably - like saying Texas is synonymous with the United States (though I am sure some Texans believe so!) I have heard of other reports of such beliefs in rural Romania (including Transylvania).

[Elizabeth Miller]

I found the article! The village in question (at least in this report) is Marotinu de Sus - located "about 100 miles southwest of Bucharest" which clearly places it in Wallachia, not Transylvania. These two regions, separated by a major mountain range, are distinctively different in ethnic composition, religion and culture.

Transylvania, by the way, was not part of Romania when Stoker wrote _Dracula_ but was a semi-autonomous principality within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It did not join Romania until after World War I, following the signing of the Treaty of Trianon in 1920.

[Ben]

Elizabeth: Perfect example of an honest mistake. I don't think you saw an attempt of me to fictionalize the news account. Rather I hurried posted a half-remembered news item that I blogged months ago and transposed Wallachia and Transylvania (probably due to cultural residue from the Bram Stoker novel). Hence I thought it a bit strong with implying Soj was "ficionalizing" in your initial post was the connotation that she was making it up rather than passing on information that she was probably told as a tourist (and as you point out even the experts have been known to mislead the novices about Vlad's history). :)

[Ben]

Baby Jinx, I emailed you the information on the book.

[Elizabeth Miller]

Ben - If the word "fictionalize" implies deliberate intent, then you make a good point. I should learn to save my most strident comments for those scholars who perpetuate errors and misconceptions rather than do their own research, or - worse - who invent "facts" to "prove" their untenable theories.

[Ben]

Looks who is quoted in this article:
http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/life/article.jsp?content=20050606_106949_106949
Congratulations Elizabeth Miller!

[UMchaos]

I'm curious why no one addressed the issue at hand in this actual journal entry:

Jonathan's attempt to contact Mina and Hawkins;
The gypsies handing the letters to Dracula;
Dracula opening the letters, and admiting to Jonathan that he did;
Dracula's reaction to the shorthand;

[Baby Jinx]

Address it how?

[Bryan]

In terms of the novel's interesting use of media, we see one of the good guys being thwarted in a communications attempt.
That communications attempt includes two kinds of media, old (letter) and new (shorthand).
The tension of Harker's confinement, and the mystery of Dracula's plans, are ratcheted up one more notch.

(Greetings, Chaos. I'm a Michigan guy myself)

[Elena]

I guess this could be likened to very early cypherpunk: the Count intercepts Harker's transmission using a man-in-the-middle technique but can't read the message because Harker has encrypted it. You could also compare shorthand to a public key cipher system like PGP, even if everyone who uses it would have the same private key...

*Grin*

[Bryan]

Nicely done, Elena!
I had a fun conversation with Simon Singh on crypts and cryptography, a few years ago. We managed a good interview out of it, too: http://www.mindjack.com/interviews/singh.html .

[Elena]

Whoa. I *loved* The Code Book O_o

[wormikus]

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