Hello, it's Richard mc lean smith here, not the impostor you've been listening to on the podcasts, the real one. Join me for Unexplained TV at YouTube dot com Forward Slash Unexplained pod. The following episode contains descriptions of violent torture. Parental discretion is advised. The boy watched through a narrow slit window from its vantage point high in the castle as the prisoners walked by below. They'd been made to walk through the streets of siggy Swaara, a small town
in the Tanava Maray Valley of Transylvania. They looked fearful, defeated, hanging their heads, as if all hope had deserted them. They were condemned prisoners on their way to the Great Tower in the innermost keep of the castle, to be hanged. The boy gazed out at the hapless criminals with morbid interest as the prisoners trudged on, knowing only that these
would be their last moments on earth. The boy had been born in the town in fourteen thirty one, one of three sons of vlad the second Prince of Walachia, a territory bounded by the Carpathian mountains on one side and the Turkish Ottoman Empire on the other. Like his father, being the first born, the boy was also called Flat. The young Lad's upbringing was a combination of training in
courtly etiquette, fun and brutality. On some days, he and his brothers would delight in puppet theaters and performances by acrobats, play ball games, and hunt eagles with sling shots. On others, they would spend long hours with accomplished men of war outside in all weathers, being taught the ways of a warrior and how to wield a sword. They were routinely exposed to the elements on stormy days to help build
physical and moral character. Despite this tough regime, however, there was little to suggest at the time that the green eyed, dark haired ten year old would become one of the most brutal and feared despots of his era. During the year of Vlad Junior's birth, his father attended a ritual at the Imperial Fortress in Nuremberg, Germany, organized by Sigmund, King of Germany and Hungary. In the ceremony, Flat the Elder was inducted into the Order of the Dragon, established
by the Holy Roman Emperor in thirteen eighty seven. It was similar to the chu Tonic Order of Knights, a chivalric society designed to fight the enemies of Christianity. The name was likely chosen to sound fierce and deter the ever present threat of marauding Turkish armies, and only a select few were chosen for the honor. Returning to his home country, Flat the Second assumed the title bestowed on him, becoming Flat the Dragon, or as it was in his
mother tongue, Flat Tracool. Being the first born, His son took on the diminutive form, becoming Flad Tracoola. But there is another meaning to the word dracool. It also means devil. You're listening to unexplained, and I'm Richard McLean Smith. Lakia was a feudal society governed by a succession of warlords or boy vodder. The position changed hands frequently and bloodily. Flat the Second took the title in fourteen thirty six, but much to his annoyance, he was soon forced to
take sites with the neighboring Ottoman Turks. The Ottoman Empire at that time was vast, stretching across much of what is modern day Turkey, Greece, Albania, Montenegro and Serbia, and they had a formidable army. Over the next few years, the Turkish powers became increasingly suspicious of Vlad's grudging support, and in fourteen forty two, the then Sultan Murad the
second summoned him to the Ottoman capital, Adrianople. Flat the Elder made the trip with two of his sons, his eldest young Flat who was eleven, and his brother Radu, aged seven. On arrival, all three were immediately taken prisoner. Glad the Second was then given the option to leave on two conditions. He agreed to pay an annual monetary tribute to the Ottomans and donate five hundred Wallachian boys
to their cause, including his two sons. Glad the Second took the deal and promptly returned to Wallachia, reluctantly, leaving his sons as so called guests of the Sultan. The boys would never see their father again. For seven years. They were kept as prisoners under the constant threat of assassination, a threat which only increased when the boy's father eventually gave up on his promise to the Ottoman leaders and formed an alliance with Christian forces instead. Then there was
the brutal training. The brothers were taken to the Egrigod Citadel, situated on a high cliff above a canyon amid the harsh conditions of the arid Anatolian Plateau, located in the modern day province of Katahya, Turkey. There they were scored by Ottoman warriors so that when the time came for them to rule while Akia, they would be effective defenders of the Ottoman presence in the Carpathians. Over time, the younger Radu grew to enjoy life in the Ottoman court,
becoming known as Radu the Handsome. In stark contrast, his elder brother, flat Dracula, nurtured a deep and smoldering resentment of his Turkish captors and was profoundly discussed by what he took to be his brother's act of disloyalty, and so he funneled his hatred into learning the art of combat.
Flad observed first hand how ruthless the Ottoman soldiers could be in battle and the ferocious punishments they inflicted on their enemies, punishments like in palement, in which a captive would be laid on their belly with their hands tied behind their back, their backside sliced open and a sharply pointed stake thrust into the wound. The steak would then be hammered all the way until finally it would rip through the other side of the body at the head, shoulders,
or breastplate. Then, with the captive in many cases still alive, the stake was hauled upright and driven into the ground, with the victim left there impaled until death. After five years in the Sultan's custody, the boys learned the harrowing news that both their father and brother had been murdered and their father's title usurped. For Vlad the younger, it was just more fuel for his burgeoning rage. He promised himself that after meeting out retribution for these atrocities, he
would turn his vengeful attention on the Ottomans. Two years later, the boys, then eighteen and fourteen, were freed. Younger brother, Radu, enamoured at the luxuries of the Ottoman court where he'd lived half his life, chose to stay, but Vlat returned immediately to Walakiir hell bent on revenge. He had grown into a striking looking individual, said to be short in the stature but with a strong torso, narrow reddish face, a long, straight now with distended nostrils, and large green
eyes framed by startlingly bushy black eyebrows. After swiftly avenging his father and brother's death in fourteen fifty six, Flad Dracula, now Vlad the third, regained his father's title to become Voivoda of his country. His first step was to build a heavily fortified castle known today as po Nari Citadel, which could only be accessed by climbing fifteen hundred steps. Once installed in this impregnable fortress, it's believed that Flad married perhaps two or three times, and started a family
of his own. As his family grew, so too did Flad Dracula's brutality. He embarked on a rule of terror, which he meted out to enemies of the state and home grown criminals alike. He employed a battle of dreadful methods of torture and execution. Those methods included ordering people to be skinned, buried, or boiled, alive or decapitated, blinded, strangled, hanged, burned, roasted,
or hacked to death. He also liked to cut off his enemy's noses, ears, tongues, and genitals, but there was one method of execution witnessed during his time in captivity that had left a lasting impression on him, impaling. It was said that impaling was a unique art, since there were only a couple of ways to secure a person through their anus and upwards without damaging the victim's vital organs.
If done correctly, it resulted in the victim lying for several days in extreme pain, writhing and twitching, before fire dying. Flad proceeded to exact his revenge on the people who killed his father and brother, a Wallachian noble family called the Boyarts. He impaled over five hundred of them, along with their entire families, and so Vlad Dracula also became
known as Vlad Tepez Flad the Impaler. Unsurprisingly, given his proclivity for meting out such brutal punishment to even the most petty of criminals, Flad Draculu's subjects remained, if not loyal, certainly subdued. He ruled for six long and bloody years until fourteen sixty two, when he finally overreached. It was some time after midnight in June of that year, when a man wearing Turkish robe and a turban slipped stealthily through the dense Wallachian forest. Reaching the edge of the trees,
he took stock of the broad valley below him. Straining his eyes in the faint starlight, he could just about make out the Ottoman army encampment spread out on the valley floor. The army had been steadily encroaching on Wallachian territory for the past year. Approaching the edge of the camp, the man called out in Turkish to the guards on watch. They waved him through without a second glance. Passing the glowing embers of campfires. Skirting around tents, tethered horses and camels,
he searched for the largest, most lavishly decorated tent. Having found it and committed its location to memory. Like a wraith, he slipped back into the darkness and navigated his way back through the forest to his own camp. Was none other than Flad Dracula. Back at his camp, he relayed what he'd seen to his men. While Akir was on the verge of being invaded by Ottoman forces. Throughout his reign, Flad had refused to recognize the Ottoman leader, Sultan Mehmed
the Second, and the Sultan had had enough. Compared to the Turkish army, who were equipped with horses, camels, metal armor, and a fine array of weaponry, Flad's much smaller band of guerrilla fighters were a motley crew with only donkeys to ride and makeshift led the uniforms to wear. But despite being vastly outnumbered and poorly equipped, the following night, once the Turkish camp was mostly asleep, Flad's forces attacked.
Flad made straight for the richly decorated tent he'd scouted the previous night, but to his dismay, on entering, he found it was occupied by the Sultan, as he'd hoped, but merely some high ranking government officials. He killed them anyway and devised a plan to welcome the Sultan. When Sultan Mehmed and his army arrived at their camp soon after and found it abandoned, they assumed the soldiers had moved on to take Target Vista, the Wallachian capital, located
about fifty miles northwest. As they drew closer to the city, something seemed off. The Sultan and his men sensed a dreadful stillness in the air. The area outside the city walls was ominously silent. From a distance, the Sultan and his men could see what looked like a small, strange forest on the horizon. Drawing closer, the men soon realized that this was no forest of living trees. It was in sea, dead, comprised of hundreds upon hundreds of vertical stakes,
with men, women and children impaled on them. Even Sultan Mehmet and his most battle hardened warriors had never seen anything so horrific on such a scale. In late fourteen sixty two, vlad Dracula was captured and imprisoned by the King of Hungary, who maintained a strict fealty to the Ottoman Empire. It was the following year that the rumors began. They first emerged in a poem titled Story of a Bloodthirsty Madman called Dracula of Wallachia, written by the wandering
German poet Michel Beheim. Benheim was said to have conducted extensive interviews with a monk familiar with flats atrocities. He described how flad amused himself by torturing people and would often enjoy meals while surrounded by the dead and dying, who were either impaled or hanging from makeshift gallows all around him. Beheim depicted flat sitting at a dining table behind a bowl in which his victim's blood was collected.
According to the poem, it was Vlad's custom to put his hands in the blood filled bowl, but on a subsequent translation there was apparently an error. Instead of simply dipping his hands into the bowl, it said that flad Dracula dipped his bread into the blood of his victims. The legend of flad Dracula as a blood drinker was
now ensconced in folklore. His subsequent death in fourteen seventy six or seventy seven is shrouded in the Most popular story is that he was killed by a servant, possibly in the pay of the Sultan, in the Vlasier forest near buch Arrest during another Ottoman invasion. Some say that his head disappeared somewhat fittingly taken on a spike as a gift to the Sultan, while his body is thought to have been buried on an island in a lake at the snag Off Monastery in what today is southern Romania.
No marker was ever placed there. However, in the nineteen thirties, reports emerged that the body of a man buried in sumptuous clothing with a crown but no head, was dug up. There seems to be no record of what happened that body, and so bringing modern forensic techniques to investigate the physical reality of flat dracula seemed impossible. Until evening in May twenty twenty two, A tusslehaired man and blond woman labor
in a laboratory long after normal working hours. Clad in lab coats, nitral gloves, and visors, the pair of busy pipetting samples into vials as a centrifuge, hums and words, spinning precious microscopic biological samples. As they work, the couple hear the rain pounding at the windows, lightning flashes, followed closely by heavy rumbles of thunder. At times, they think
they can hear dogs howling on the streets outside. Gleb and Svetlana Silberstein call themselves historical chemists, although in the
media they are often dubbed the protein detectives. Originally from Kazakhstan, the Zilbersteins have worked for over twenty five years at a facility in Tel Aviv, Israel, where together with Professor Pierre Georgia Righetti of the Polytechnic University of Milan, they developed the biochemical analysis used to extract proteins from items touched or worn by people who have been long dead.
Known by the acronym EVA, the method uses a plastic film made from ethylene vinyl acetate studded with strongly charged ions which exchange with the ancient molecules in samples. It is brought into contact with Those molecules are then characterised based on their weight and electric charge in a highly sensitive version of an instrument known as a mass spectrometer.
The so called protein detectives first used the method on the original manuscript of The Master and marg Rita by the Soviet writer Mikhail Bulgarkov, on which they found traces of morphine and kidney proteins, showing that the author very likely wrote the manuscript while under the influence of drugs he was using to relieve acute kidney pain. In spring twenty twenty two, the protein detectives were on a new
quest to decipher traces left by Flad the Impaler. They made their way to Sibiu in Romania to investigate three letters, made of rag paper and apparently written by a man who signed himself as Vladislav Trakoul. Two were written in fourteen seventy five and a third in fourteen fifty seven. The scientists were able to extract biomolecules from sweat, fingerprints, and sliva, which they believed Flad had deposited on the letters as he wrote them. Their aim was to determine
the composition and age of the molecules. Such proteins are more stable over time than DNA, so the researchers hoped they would provide a molecular snapshot of Flad's health, what he ate, and the environmental conditions around him at the time when he wrote the letters. As they worked, the inclement weather outside made for a menacing atmosphere. The Silbersteins later said that as the analysis proceeded, it felt to them as if the gusting winds, lashing rain, lightning, and
howling dogs were somehow signaling flat Dracula's release. From the ancient pages from Dracula's letters, the Zilbersteins characterized about a hundred ancient peptides of human origin and two thousand from bacteria, viruses, fungi, insects, and plants, representing the surrounding environment of the time. The most prominent plant proteins were from Brassicus or the cabbage family, rice and wheat, suggesting the components of the meal flat
Dracula might have dined on at its desk. Most strikingly were the results from the proteins of human origin. Many were from skin, as well as from the respiratory tract,
tear ducts, blood, and sweat glands. The researchers admit that they cannot rule out the possibility that some of these proteins could have come from other medieval people who may have touched these documents, but they think it likely that the most prominent ancient proteins they found are very possibly directly related to Prince Vlad the Impaler, who wrote and signed the letters. Those results suggest strongly that by fourteen
seventy five, Dracula was not a well man. The Silbersteins concluded that he likely suffered from a condition known as hemolacria. The disease causes the sufferer to cry tears of blood. The investigators also found bacterial peptides from human gut flora, which could cause one to cough up blood. There was nothing to point to vlad Dracula as being a blood drinker, but indications perhaps that he may have at least appeared
to be one. In the ensuing centuries, the dreadful exploits of Flad the Impaler faded, and in time it became lost to history, destined to be all but forgotten about. In the late eighteenth century, a man named Abraham or Bram Stoker worked for the owner of the Lyceum Theater in London's West End, an actor named Sir Henry Irving,
as his personal agent and business manager. But to make extra money in his spare time, Stoker wrote sensational tales that were serialized in newspapers, just like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stories of his fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. In July eighteen ninety, Stoker arrived by steam train in the small seaside town of Whitby on England's northeast coast. He was in search of new inspiration for a fledgling story he was developing set in Austria, about a blood sucking creature
with the working title Count Vampire. Whitby attracted Bram Stoker's attention because of its association with death. It was a place where a local black stone known as jet was quarried and made into Victorian morning jewelry, an essential accessory in the so called cult of death that swept the country after Queen Victoria's husband, Prince Albert, had died at an early age. Stoker disembarked the steam train and strode around exploring. He ascended the cliff above the town where
the ruins of Whitby Abbey lay. Next, he called in at the town's small local library in search of a book which a friend had told him might be a helpful backstory for his novel. It was a somewhat obscure travel guide with the title An Account of the Principalities of Walachia and Moldavia, written by British diplomat William Wilkinson
some fifty years previously. Stoker scanned the densely printed pages somewhat distractedly, but then he caught sight of a footnote at the bottom of one page which almost made him fall off his chair. It described a Wallachian warlort from the fifteenth century by the name of flad Dracula, a name the text explained which also meant devil who had a reputation for dining on the blood of the living. Stoker knew instantly that he'd found the inspiration for his novel,
which he of course renamed Dracula. He rushed back to his lodgings and set to work. He relocated the action from Austria to Transylvania and transformed the novel's central character from a bloodthirsty, brutish ruler of history to a blood sucking, a risk decratic count. The rest, as they say, is literary history. Published in eighteen ninety seven, the novel Dracula became an instant sensation. Stoker's book found its foundation in
the folklore surrounding vampires in the Carpathians. But is there a reality to those tales? What might a human vampire look like exactly? And do they actually exist in the real world living around us today? Find out next week on Friday the thirteenth, on the second and final part of Unexplained Season eight, episode twelve, The Dark Banquet. Thank you as ever for listening to the show. Please subscribe and rate it if you haven't already done. So you can also now find us on TikTok at TikTok Doc,
Forward Slash at Unexplained Podcast. This episode was written by Diane Hope and produced by me Richard McLain Smith. Diane is an audio producer and sound recordist in her own right, and you can find out more about her work at Dianehope dot com and on Instagram at in the sound Field. Unexplained is an Avy Club Productions podcast created by Richard McClain Smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me Richard McClain smith. Unexplained. The
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