Where Dracula Was Born, and It’s Not Transylvania

From its quay in early summer, Whitby was a sun-scrubbed idyll, fluttering with the trimmings of a typical English seaside holiday. Souvenir shops hawked postcards and sand toys, pub bartenders poured midday pints of beer, and the smell of fish and chips hung on the breeze. Along the shore, a row of rainbow-hued beach huts sheltered swimmers brave enough to take a dip in the North Sea. A group of sunburned schoolchildren raced through cobblestone streets, past antiques shops and tearooms, toward the 199 steps ascending to a cliff. I followed them, listening as their excited chatter gave way to dead silence. “Please, Miss,” a little girl appealed to her teacher in an unnerved tone, “I can’t go up there.”

It wasn’t difficult to see why. At the top loomed the stuff of nightmares: the skeletal ruins of the 13th-century Whitby Abbey. Surrounded by gravestones, it offered the only obvious hint that this picturesque town on England’s Yorkshire coast is the birthplace of one of Gothic horror’s most famous villains: Dracula.

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