The True Story of Dracula

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, let's fucking podcast.

Speaker 2 (00:10):
This is a behind the Bastards listeners, It's a podcast
about the worst people in all of history. And I
got I got very hyped there, so you might think
this is going to be a high energy podcast episode.
But I am years old or something like that, and
last night I went to bed at three am.

Speaker 1 (00:32):
I just feel we have to cut that because some people.

Speaker 3 (00:35):
Yeah, we'll believe it out, we'll bleep it out. So okay,
we'll bleieve it out.

Speaker 1 (00:38):
Safety.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
Yeah, I don't even fully remember. I just I'm telling
you right now people, I'm the kind of hungover that
you get, not because you've gotten you were drinking or
doing drugs, but because you are in your mid thirties
and you stay up slightly later than normal. That's that's
where I am right now. I'm pounding coffee. I'm trying
to do better.

Speaker 3 (00:58):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (00:59):
And here to just distracked from my my decrepit elderlyness,
is Jack O'Brien the.

Speaker 3 (01:07):
Most decrepit old person you've ever seen, the crypt keeper.
What's up, guys? How are you doing? Jack? I'm doing
all right.

Speaker 1 (01:15):
Why are you like seven mountain dues.

Speaker 3 (01:18):
Or what's zero mountain dues in but it's still early.
What is it? Is it a security risk to tell
people how old you are or just like I don't
know what.

Speaker 2 (01:32):
We like to filter out disinformation, Like there's a lot
of listeners who think my real name is and you know,
I don't tell that for a specific reason. But the
more lies there are out there, right, like, the the
better it is for me.

Speaker 1 (01:46):
Okay, yeah, people don't like us, Jack, but you.

Speaker 3 (01:50):
Also don't know how old you are, so I know, like,
could you could use some crowdsourced research put into that, right,
But that's right.

Speaker 2 (01:58):
I was born on the Bayou and they don't they
don't take notes about when.

Speaker 3 (02:01):
You were born there.

Speaker 2 (02:02):
That's actually I'm actually who that credence song was true.

Speaker 3 (02:06):
Yeah, well, it's great to be here. It's great to
see both of your faces. Thank you for thank you
for having me back.

Speaker 2 (02:11):
Good to see you, Jack, attack Jack. It's the spookiest
month of the year. I think we can all accept that.

Speaker 1 (02:18):
And on the day this drops, Happy Halloween.

Speaker 2 (02:21):
Yeah, Happy, happy Halloween, everybody, Happy Halloween.

Speaker 3 (02:25):
Happy Halloween. It's Tuesday Halloween. I do apologize. I feel
like we all are getting a little screwed there, right yeah, yeah, yeah, Halloween.

Speaker 2 (02:36):
We need to make it be like Thanksgiving, where it's
always on like a Friday.

Speaker 3 (02:40):
Yes, but you bet a couple of days off before
and after.

Speaker 2 (02:43):
Yeah exactly, But but that's not the case. So it's
a Tuesday. I wish you all the best. But because
we wanted to try to help make Halloween extra good,
we have an episode about the man who put the
spook in Spooktober, which is what I call October Dracula. Yeah,
that's right, that's right, motherfucking I mean, the title of

(03:05):
the episode is just motherfucking Dracula comma bitches. But they
probably won't let us use the episode exclamation point, thank you.
I don't think we can put that on Spotify.

Speaker 3 (03:14):
They'll get angry. Jack, What do you know about Dracula.
I am a big fan of his cereal.

Speaker 2 (03:26):
I just count Shocula, which is I mean, honestly, Jack,
a little racist, all of the all of the dah
the same, right, Yeah, I.

Speaker 3 (03:36):
Am not that from it. Like, I know there are
historical roots to the character, but like in terms of
who it's based on or what they did to have
such a horrible story told about them, which which is
what it is I mean, it feels like it could
just be like from a middle school burn book, right,

(03:59):
like just like like I heard they go into people's
rooms and try and bite their neck and suck on
their wad. Yeah. So I don't know what I'm curious
to learn more. Yeah, well you're going to learn way
too much today. So good, that's what I come here for.

Speaker 2 (04:16):
If you're you know, most people I think are broadly
aware that Dracula the Vampire from the Bram Stoker book
and then from I don't know, like a million other
books and pieces of media sense is based on a
real guy of Vlad Tepesh, better known as Vlad the Impaler,
and we have gotten over the years.

Speaker 3 (04:35):
Yeah, yeah, Lad, that's right. I've always resented this guy
a little bit because he took a nickname that I
always wanted. Yeah, Jack the Impaler. Yeah, yeah, you remember
like how hard I tried to go. Yeah, going back
into cracked days.

Speaker 2 (04:52):
For the record, Jack, You're always the first Impaler in
my heart, or at least in the top like three,
certainly before Dracula.

Speaker 3 (04:58):
A lot of people say like, I don't pale that
many things, and I would point out, like, wait, have
you not seen me eat with a fork.

Speaker 2 (05:06):
Yeah, Or I mean you've cooked kebab a couple of
times out of stuff.

Speaker 3 (05:11):
I don't generally cook it, but I will eat off
of a kabab, so that gives me rights to that.
But yeah, I think I think he just got to
it first. Otherwise I would be known, you would have
been introducing me as Jack.

Speaker 2 (05:25):
There's all there's a lot of unfair things like that,
like the the Wachowski's get credit for creating the matrix,
even though just seven or eight years later, I had.

Speaker 3 (05:32):
An idea that was very similar to the matrix.

Speaker 2 (05:35):
So like who gets the credit, you know, But yeah,
it's unfair, it's unfair. And also my version of the
matrix all Danny DeVito we get, we get those we
get those talentless hacks out of there, and we go
pure divito.

Speaker 3 (05:49):
It's predvito. It's multiplicity matrix, matrixplicity, it's multiplicity the matrix.
And that's how you can kind of tell things are
off a little bit. Yeah, this is a world of alldvitos.

Speaker 2 (06:02):
Because you're like, I'm used to some Danny DeVito's, but
not quite as many as we're getting.

Speaker 3 (06:07):
So like, sure, we've heard of like you go into
work and it's mostly de Vito's but not pure Divito,
and that's how things are a little bit, yeah, a
little bit twisted at the robots have taken so Dracula,
So Dracula. Sorry, this becomes a dragon who could be
ably played by Danny DeVito is based on a real guy.

(06:30):
Shock he should be Vlad the Impaler, And a weird
number of fans over the years have been like, you
should do with Lad the Impaler episode and there are
a lot of lurid stories about what he did. But
the reason why we haven't covered him before and we're
not really going to do an episode focused entirely on
Lad the Impaler is that he's the kind of historical
bastard where like you don't actually know if any of

(06:53):
that's true or if most of that is true. Like
every if I was just doing a Lad the Impaler episode,
every other sentence would be me being like reading a
paragraph where somebody from like the sixteen hundreds is writing
about an atrocity he was supposed to have committed a
couple of hundred years earlier, and then me going, but
also maybe that's not true, because it's it's it's more
based on these like other myths or whatever that came

(07:16):
about in a previous age or you know, here's all
these reasons why that might not be the that's the
case flying around, Yeah, for some reason. So there's reasons
to Yeah, I always got the sense, and I think
this is why I like didn't dig into it that much.
Is I always got you know how Einstein gets credit
for every smart thing, very smart sounding thing that anyone's

(07:39):
ever said. Now they're like, well, you know what Einstein said,
the definition of is doing the same thing over and over.
And it's like, first of all, that's not insanity and
that's not a smart thing. But second ball, Einstein like
never said any of that. But it's like I always
got the sense of Vlad the Impaler and slash Dracula
just like got his brand was really strong, Like we

(08:02):
needed somebody to be spooky, and so we just gave
him all the dark shit. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (08:09):
History, Yeah, that is probably a lot of what happened.
It's one of those like he was a ruler in
the fourteen hundreds, which was a pretty brutal time, especially
in Eastern ye Eastern Europe doesn't have a lot of
periods of time where things weren't fairly brutal like it is,
and he's but I don't know on his own, I

(08:30):
don't know that I would qualify him as a bastard because, like,
for this show, just kind of to make things narratively
make sense, I have adopted sort of a definition where
it doesn't just being a bastard doesn't just mean you're
a bad person. It means you actively like made the
world worse and stood out in your time as a
shitty person. Like I wouldn't do a Behind the Bastards
on a random plantation owner in the South, right, not

(08:52):
because that's not a bad thing to do, because it's
but because like what is there to say, right, Like
he was one of a bunch of people who were
part of this really awful system. I would do an
episode on Robert E. Lee, right, because the things that
he was trying to do not only like extended the
Civil War and made this conflict bloodier, but he was
actively attempting to set this system up in a way

(09:13):
that would allow it to like persevere longer into the future.
So he was somebody who was actively not just part
of a bad system, but like making things worse in
his existence right, whereas in Vladi Impaler, I'm not sure
if that really qualifies. He's a ruler in Wallachia during
which is you know, part of Romania now during this

(09:33):
really brutal period. He definitely, like all rulers in that,
does some horrible shit. But most of the stuff about
his like real horrible crimes against humanity. Some of it
may be true, but a lot of it is the
result of propaganda for a bunch of Catholic monks who
were like really pissed at him because he had killed
a bunch of the Germans in his country. And I

(09:54):
don't know, you know, mixed bag as to whether or
not like it's fair or just kind of of like
a part of a political dispute basically that has echoed
down And like anybody who is a ruler in Europe
in this period's going to do some massacres. But if
like you're doing the same kind of horrible shit as
everybody else in the area, I don't know that I'm
going to like want to cover you in behind the bastards.

(10:16):
So what makes Tepees interesting is the degree to which
is how he becomes Dracula, right, And that is a
story that involves a lot of other people's bastardry. It
involves a really fascinating look into human folklore and the
kind of stories that we tell about our monsters, and
I think ultimately it has a lot to say about

(10:36):
like why we are the way we are. So that's
kind of the story we're going to be talking about today,
how Vlad became Dracula. But that is going to start
with a little bit of a bio on Vlad v Impaler.
So are you ready to learn about v the MP V.

Speaker 3 (10:51):
The MP I am a little VMP action.

Speaker 2 (10:54):
Yeah, that's right, that's right. So Vlad was born in
fourteen thirty one. Maybe he may have been born as
early as fourteen twenty eight. We're not gonna know, because nobody,
really nobody was like putting down birth certificates. I'm gonna
guess people didn't always know what year it was. Like,
if you traveled like seven miles by foot, you probably
would go to a place like, no, it's not fourteen

(11:15):
twenty eight, it's fourteen twenty nine.

Speaker 3 (11:16):
Whatever.

Speaker 2 (11:17):
I like to keep it mysterious, like you do with
you exactly exactly. Lad also is trying to avoid getting
doxed so he was probably born in Transylvania. That part
of the books is likely accurate. The town he was
born in is I'm going to do my best here, Sigiswara,
which was then part of the Kingdom of Hungary. Hungary

(11:39):
and Romany, I mean, Romani is not a thing at
this moment as like an independent nation. But they're going
to wind up spending quite a bit of time having
a little kerfuffle over this specific area that he's born in.
Eastern Europe in his time was a place of chaos
and violence, one in which the medieval traditions of serfdom
and feudalism they were starting to fade in the west.

(12:00):
Right in western Europe in the fourteen hundreds, serfdom and
kind of a lot of these feudal attitudes are giving
way to what's going to result in like a more
modern concept of like states in the relationship between people
and rulers that's starting to happen in the West and
the East. All of that shit is really kind of
coming into its height, right because it's, you know, just

(12:22):
a different part of the world. The chief powers in
Vlad's time in the area where he grows up are Hungary,
that's like the big Christian Kingdom, which was a closely
related foreign kingdom to Wallachia where his dad is going
to be ruling in the not too distant future.

Speaker 3 (12:39):
And then the other big power, Yeah, I've heard of Hungary,
not Wallachia. Well, so everybody gets an idea of how
dumb I am. Yeah on this whole thing.

Speaker 2 (12:47):
I had a friend in high school, as a Romanian national,
who would always insist that he was Wallachia, not just
not Romania. Like Wilaki is like the center of what
becomes the state of Romania. And so the other big
power in the You've got Hungary on one side, and
like the Holy Roman Empire, which is like, you know,
kind of governing the major Christian states in that region.

(13:08):
And then the other big power is the Ottoman Empire.
And the Ottomans have not taken Constantinople yet, but they're
they're working on it, right, They're in the process of
making Constantinople into Istanbul. You can refer to that. They
might be Giant Song if you want a little bit
more information on that. It's pretty pretailed history exactly too many. Yeah,

(13:30):
so Constantinople has not gotten the works yet, but the
Turks are in the process, so they are making constant
incursions into this chunk of Eastern Europe. They control some
of the surrounding territories. And like when you read like
weirdo right wing dudes with like Twitter accounts that are
named I don't know, like cultural critic or whatever, they

(13:51):
tend to like. They always like to frame this as
this bone deep clash of religions and cultures that are
just completely different and can never live together. That's not
what anyone living through it sees it as.

Speaker 3 (14:02):
Right.

Speaker 2 (14:02):
If you are actually living in the area at this point,
your life is a lot more muddled. Vlad the Impaler's father,
who is Vlad the Second, who's going to wind up
ruling Volakia, he spends most of his life allied to
the Ottomans, right like, he is an Ottoman vassal, and
he is also he's fighting when he goes to war,
he's often fighting on behalf of Sultan Morad the second,

(14:23):
And a lot of people go back He's going to
go back and forth. His son's going to go back
and forth. A lot of people in this border area
are like, well, right now, it looks like the Ottomans
are a better bet, so I'm an automan vessel. And
then like, oh, now the holy Roman Emperor seems like
he's got you know, some shit on his he's got
some weight behind him, so I'm going to go over there.
That's just how people are right like it. It doesn't

(14:43):
make any sense to be super rigorous about it, because
that'll just get you killed.

Speaker 3 (14:46):
Sure.

Speaker 2 (14:47):
So it is from the Emperor Sigismund that the family
gets their imposing title Dracule. Dracuel is not like a
last name. It is a title that they are given.
And obviously that's the root of the word Dracula. If
you've seen that new movie The Last Voyage of the Demeter,
which is about one chapter in the bram Stoker Dracula

(15:07):
book where Dracula travels over to this little coastal English
town on a boat. Doesn't go well for the people
on the boat. The crate that he's loaded under the
ship in has a dragon on it. That's because the
word dracul means dragon, although in Romanian it can also
mean devil. Both are It's kind of like it means
both and yeah, the reason why he gets that title

(15:31):
is that Sigismund is trying to get Vlad the Second,
Glad the Impaler's dad, and a couple of these other
kings and stuff who are sort of on the fence.
A lot of them kind of go back and forth
between him and the Ottomans. He wants to get them
locked in on his side, right because he's trying to
build up a solid He's trying to like make sure
his power base stays solid. And so he creates this

(15:52):
nightly order called like the Order of the Dragon, and
Vlad the Second is one of the guys he brings
into this. Most kind of layman's histories of Vlad the
Second and of Lad the Impaler will describe the Order
of the Dragon this way. And I'm going to quote
from an article by the Warfare History Network quote a

(16:12):
group of European leaders who were sworn to defend the
Holy Roman Empire against infidels. Now again, that kind of
leans into a lot of popular conceptions about how this
period of time works. Some of the sources I've read
kind of make it look again a lot more muddled.
There's a pretty interesting book on Vlad the Impaler by M. J. Trow,
who is a crime novelist. And we'll talk about our

(16:35):
historian that we have as a source here in a second,
but he describes the order and he has some pretty
good sources to back this up in more mafioso terms,
So not this alliance of Christians against the infidels, but
more of like a system of mutual aid designed by
Sigismund to tie regional rulers to him and to each
other to reinforce his own power. More of like a

(16:56):
secret society right where it's like, get this impressive and
this title will kind of bind them to me and
to each other and will promise to like help each
other out. I'm trying to make this kind of like
intimate cultural bond to set us all together, but more
because I want them. I want them to feel like
they have a sense of like owing me something.

Speaker 3 (17:17):
Right, and they do because that nickname is awesome name.

Speaker 2 (17:22):
If I get to call myself the fucking Dragon, yeah,
I'm gonna be. I'm gonna be like if Kentucky were
to award me the rank of colonel. You know, if
I could be at Kentucky colonel, I would I would
be much more pro Kentucky than I currently yea.

Speaker 3 (17:34):
And you would have. Yeah, the branding is just incredible
and great that they had a sense of it at
the time. I love that. It was just like, well,
if you want to like have this cool nickname, yeah,
then you gotta be cool with Sigis Mandy. Yeah. Yeah.
It's like a you know, a five year old creating
a club that's like the super Cool Ninjas. Yeah that

(17:56):
like you get to call yourself a super cool Ninja
if you join up, Like hell yeah, that's worked from
the beginning of time.

Speaker 2 (18:02):
Yeah, because like I think every man, I think I
speak for literally the entire male population when I'm like,
we all want to be nicknamed the Dragon.

Speaker 3 (18:11):
The Dragon. But if kind of our only goal, yeah,
like if you were to introduce yourself as the Dragon,
people would be like you give yourself that nickname? Yeah right, yeah.

Speaker 2 (18:21):
But if you're like, no, man, somebody else said I'm
the Dragon and like they're the Holy Roman Emperor, then
you're in. Then you're in, you know, like in like Flynn,
I guess that's that's really the goal here, and it's
I don't know, it's debatably successful, but that's where they
get the nickname from. Now we have basically no real
information on the kind of childhood that Lad would have

(18:42):
experienced our lad, not Lad the second his dad. There
are some things we can infer his family was extremely wealthy.
These guys are nobility, right, They're they're bowyers, which is
like what you call nobles in in in this region.
They have numerous servants and body guards. And for most
of Ladd's early childhood he's effectively like his dad is

(19:05):
the governor of Transylvania for Hungary, watching for a Turkish incursion.
We don't know who his mother was. It's possible she
was like basically a prostitute. This is not like normal
in like Western Europe and what not. That would make
him like a bastard, right, like in a literal.

Speaker 3 (19:22):
Sense federal master.

Speaker 2 (19:23):
That's not the case in this part of the world, right,
Wallachian in Transylvanian culture, certainly in this period is not
very pro woman and so and to the extent that,
it doesn't really matter who your mother is.

Speaker 3 (19:35):
Right.

Speaker 2 (19:35):
What determines whether or not you are a legitimate and
that's in the parlance of the time, a legitimate son,
right in order to like inherit and stuff, is just
who your dad is. Right, It doesn't actually matter who
your biological mother is. So Vlad is his dad's actually
is an illegitimate son, So it's not. One of the
things about this is that there's this quasi aristocratic democracy thing,
where like winding up in charge is the result of

(19:57):
a bunch of these other boyers supporting you having a job.
So the fact that Vlad the Second is like an
illegitimate son probably doesn't really hurt him because he's able
to get a lot of support to put him in power.
But Glad the Impaler is his dad's like legit son,
and he's the second son of the family under his
elder brother Mercea. His youngest brother, Radu is also known

(20:19):
as the handsome and m J. Trout writes, quote, yeah,
he's hot as hell.

Speaker 3 (20:25):
MJ.

Speaker 2 (20:25):
Trow writes about his about all of their upbringing. Actually,
he would have had a steward to organize the servants,
order the food and the wine, and regulate the day.
Numerous skivvies would be employed to cook, clean and sew.
The male children would have learned to give orders and
adopt the airs and grace is expected of men that
one day rule an entire country, however small by modern standards.

Speaker 3 (20:45):
Yes, the one picture of Vlad the impaler that I've
always seen. The main thing that I take away from
it is that he looks like a rich guy from
another era. Yeah, he's for sure bobbles and like just
various fancy news. His hair is like looks like it
has been combed by someone who is not him for

(21:05):
like hours a day. Oh yeah, the thing he's wearing
makes him look like a Christmas tree ornament. Yeah, that's
kind of his overall.

Speaker 1 (21:16):
His mustache. What do you think of the mustache mustache?

Speaker 3 (21:19):
I always assume that's just from another era. Yeah, And
it also looks like he might have taken one of
his locks and just like put it across his upper lip.

Speaker 1 (21:31):
So there's a serious curl going on on.

Speaker 2 (21:33):
His I'm imagining there's like a backstory to that mustache.
Like if you guys have watched Brea Hercule Perro movies
like the second the second one opens with like the
the gritty backstory of a mustache. It's amazing anyway, That's
what I imagine. So in his book, M. J. Trow
cites two historians, Fluorescue and McNally, who write this about

(21:55):
Flats upbringing. There were the usual distinctions that followed the
feast days, puppets, ambulant artists, acrobats, mini singers, and in
summer there were ball games, running and jumping contests, and
games on quadrilateral swings made of red cloth and fashioned
in the form of a pyramid. In the winter, they
hunted eagles with sling shots the Sigasuarrez slopes on primitive

(22:16):
double runner sleds trapped hairs. That is pretty cool. Eagles
with sling shots.

Speaker 3 (22:21):
Eagles with slingshots is red.

Speaker 2 (22:24):
The degree of deadly skills you had to have even
to be like a pampered rich kid in this era
is amazing.

Speaker 3 (22:30):
Like you're just fucking bull saying an eagle with your
so funny shooting eagles out of the fucking clear blue sky. Yeah,
sling fucking.

Speaker 2 (22:41):
Rock and a piece of elastic. Yeah, amazing.

Speaker 3 (22:44):
And they didn't have elastic, so it was just like
a slid like you had to swing it around and
like it David's style, right, Yeah, probably.

Speaker 2 (22:52):
I think maybe they had more modern slingshots than I
don't know. I'm not a slingshot expert. In fourteen thirty six,
the ruler of Wallachia, Vlad the Second's brother, died of
natural causes. Now he had spent. Vlad's brother, had Laed.
The second's brother had been the kind of guy whose
primary focus was not pissing anyone off too much. So
he had tried to be friendly with the Hungarians because

(23:15):
they're right next door. But he'd also paid tribute to
the Sultan and been in a military alliance with them.
And this is the kind of thing where like nobody
trusts each other. So when you're in a military alliance
with a guy like the Sultan, you send them a
bunch of your family members, right, your family, some other nobles,
and you send him to Istanbul. And that's like your
guarantee of good behavior. If you don't keep up with
the treaty, they'll kill your family, you know, Like that's

(23:37):
the way it goes here, everyone, Robert here, I fucked
this up. I misspoke. Obviously, the Ottomans had not captured
is Stanbul at this point, which we talk about later
when they do. Believe the capital of the Ottoman Empire
at this phase was Adirney edr Ine. That's how it's anglicized.
But if you keep up with the treaty, the family
is a pretty good life, right, Like they're not locked

(23:58):
in a cell or whatever in court. They generally attend
like schools and whatnot in the area. Like it can
be a pretty decent experience depending on where you are.

Speaker 3 (24:07):
This puts it in a whole new perspective that you
guys made me send my kids to yeah, stay with
Sophie while we recorded this. That is that is the
case you said, case go sideways? Yeah, okay, yeah, in
case you to support another group of advertisers.

Speaker 1 (24:23):
That's right.

Speaker 2 (24:24):
So Vlad the second his brother dies and he becomes
the ruler of Wallachia next, and he does this with
the backing of Sigismund. Right, Sigismund was not happy with
Lad the Second's brother. He's like, this guy is in
an alliance with the Sultan. I'm not a big fan
of the Sultan. I want to put a guy on
the Wallachian throne who's like my dude, right, and who I.

Speaker 3 (24:47):
Holy Roman Empire?

Speaker 2 (24:48):
Yes, yes, he's the holy and the king of Hungary. Right,
got you know you can. He's a triple threat, at
least a double threat, probably triple. I assume there's another
threat to him.

Speaker 3 (24:58):
Holy Roman Empire or or the Dragon. They're the ones
who came up with that idea. To let them call
them those dragons. Okay, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (25:05):
So the family, the Dragon family moves to the capital
of Wallachia, tiergo Viste, and into a big fancy castle.
Now Glad, being paler age six or seven, starts his
night training at this point, which is like every little
boys dream. I think we all wish we could have
trained this a night when we were six or seven.
Oh ak, yeah, okay, yeah, so cool.

Speaker 3 (25:25):
But I thought like they were like, okay, you're now
ready to do battle at night like a ninja, Like
that is what he's going to wind up doing under
cover of darkness. This is this is when we do
our nighttime seals training.

Speaker 2 (25:38):
It is you have to start early, not just for
a kid. But oftentimes I'm not one hundred percent sure
if this is the way, but I think it is
the way that they do in Willachia. But like even
going back to the ancient Greece, if you're the kind
of dude who, because of your position in society, you're
going to be expected to fight on horseback. You are
often raised like with your horse, because it takes sometimes
ten fifteen years to like really train a military horse

(26:01):
to be able to because like horses don't want to
fight right like, they don't. They don't want to charge
a bunch of angry armed men. That's scary for a horse,
so you have to it. Often, like these societies, like
this is the case with the Macedonians back in the
time of Alexander, they spend a lot of their childhoods,
like both kind of growing up and training with their
horses so that they can fight together, because it takes

(26:24):
that long to make a good war horse.

Speaker 3 (26:26):
Yeah, it's been a constant struggle with me and my horse.
My horse is more into the arts, yeah, and dressage. Yeah,
and yeah hates when I just try and ride it
into a fist fight.

Speaker 2 (26:39):
No, you have tried to invade Persia several times and
your horse just won't see it.

Speaker 3 (26:44):
It's not going well. It's not going well. Yeah, very
bad at it.

Speaker 2 (26:48):
This period in his life where he's kind of living
in tigiv Ste, he's training on being a knight. It
ends pretty quickly for little baby Blaid the Impaler, because
in fourteen thirty seven, when he's some between seven and
nine years old, probably the Emperor Sigismund dies and his
plans to create this grand anti Ottoman alliance kind of
crumble the whole order of the Dragon thing. They keep

(27:10):
the title, They're always going to use that title. That's
fucking do. It's not going anywhere, you know, it doesn't
really mean much in the now that Sigismund's died, and
there's this like kind of right as he dies, there's
a peasant uprising in Wallachia that's pretty brutal to put down,
weakens them militarily, and then there's a wave of plagues,
probably spread by rats, that hits right at the same

(27:32):
time and kills just a fuck load of people. So,
you know, get rid of rats people. It just makes sense. Now,
Glad the Second, Glad the Impaler's dad has no choice
but to make the same decision that his brother had
made and bin the knee to the sultan right now. Thankfully,
Marad the Second is a pretty cool dude as sultans go.
He's famous for being tolerant, particularly of like heretical religious

(27:56):
sects in his own country. Right there's all these like
little weird religious groups that have some take on you know,
the corona or whatever. That's like kind of very much
not in the mainstream, and like a lot of other
sultans probably would have punished them, but Morad is just
kind of like interested in that sort of stuff, so
he he'll give them money, He'll like support them and

(28:17):
be like, yeah, I just am kind of curious what
you're gonna I just want to let you cook, you know,
like tell me some shit. You know, there's not TV
back then, so maybe like encouraging heretical religious sects is
kind of like funding Netflix.

Speaker 3 (28:28):
Y what these crazy fuckers. He's also known as being
super nice to his slaves, which is again kind of
the like are you a good person? It doesn't mean
like not having slaves. It means are nice to them, right,
nice to it.

Speaker 2 (28:41):
Yeah, But that said, as that probably suggests, good dude
is a relative term when we are talking about medieval rulers,
and as relatively chill as Marat is, he's still the
kind of dude who punishes his enemies by impaling them
in mass because that's just kind of how the Ottomans be, right,
everybody's got their own ways of like killing your enemies.
The Ottomans, one of the things they like to do

(29:02):
is impale. That's not They're not the only people doing impaling, right,
Impaling's popular. Everybody We always like a good impaling. Oh yeah,
but yeah, lots of different ugly none of the ways
people kill each other in the Middle Ages are nice.

Speaker 3 (29:14):
Yeah, they like to really make a show of it,
make a meal. Yeah. Yeah. Of the thing, So when
you say impale, is that just like run through with
a sword or.

Speaker 2 (29:25):
And sharp stick going going through you in a way
that's unpleasant.

Speaker 3 (29:29):
And then gravity doing some work? Is that?

Speaker 2 (29:31):
I think gravity often I mean the same way that
like that's what kills you to an extent when you
get like crucified, right, yes, yeah, that whole process.

Speaker 3 (29:40):
So do they impale you and then just like let
you slide down a like do they put it upright?
Is that what when they're when we're saying someone's an
impaler because I am again still trying to get the
nickname to go, and I'm trying to see like what
type of impaling I could do to like get this
ship to finally catch on, Like is it a big

(30:01):
wooden stick? Sharp wood stick? And then you put it
upright and they're just kind of like hanging there in
the air. Yeah, Like yeah, Jason X, the.

Speaker 2 (30:13):
You're kind of are letting them slide down it. It's
often a punishment for like crimes against the state, right
it is. It is a particularly nasty one, so people
who like it threatens sort of the stability of the
government often do it. There's a few different ways. It's
one of those things where sometimes people are dead when

(30:33):
they do this and you're just kind of doing it
as a show of force. Sometimes it's a very quick death,
right like you're And there's a couple of different ways.
There's like through the abdomen or whatnot, like directly to
the heart. There's like the reverse way. There's like putting
it basically going in through the outdoor, so to speak.
I'm sure you can kind of guess what I'm saying.

Speaker 3 (30:55):
There through the butt hole for the butt yeah, yeah, yeah,
And there's a but you know, it can it can
be the kind of thing where like you die pretty quickly,
or it can be the kind of thing where.

Speaker 2 (31:04):
It's like slow and it takes days. That sort of
depends on the region and what you did.

Speaker 3 (31:08):
Okay, so that will that sort of thing will get
people's attention. Yeah, I can understand where somebody who does
that a lot would get a nickname.

Speaker 2 (31:18):
It'll get your attention. But back to what we were
saying about like where this lands within the morality of
the time. Pretty common. A lot of states do impaling, right. Basically,
any ruler has the potential to impale a dude if
they commit the right crime in this, especially in Eastern
Europe and in kind of like Middle East North Africa,
a lot of this, a lot of impaling going on, right,

(31:40):
and that they're not the only ones. Western Europe has
it's impaling traditions too, don't get me wrong, And this
has gone on. I think the Assyrians are some of
the first people we know we're doing in paling. So
this has always been a popular way to get rid
of people you don't like. So Marad the Second, pretty
nice guy, also an impaler. Vlad the Second signs a
treaty with because he's like, well, Sigismund's down now he's

(32:02):
still going by Vlad Dracul. Don't get me wrong here, Okay,
smart man understands branding. Yeah, he gets branding. So in
fourteen thirty eight, the year after Sigismund dies, the Sultan
goes to war with Transylvania with the Hungarians right, and
Vlad the Second has to join on his side and
winds up fighting against the people he had just been governing.

(32:24):
Now he's willing to do this because he doesn't really
have any other option, but his heart is not in it.
And within a couple of years he's like publicly, you know,
a vassal of the Ottomans, but he's also covertly supporting
an anti Ottoman alliance led by John Hunyati, who's the
Transylvanian governor for the Hungarians. There's this series of battles.
Hanyati does pretty well against the Ottomans, they win a

(32:47):
few of them, and this causes problems for the Dracule
family because like now they've picked the wrong side of
this conflict, right, they bet on the Ottomans. The Ottomans
aren't doing great so far. And I'm going to quote
now from a biography of life Lad Tepees by Kurt Trepto,
who is an American historian from Miami Beach, Florida.

Speaker 3 (33:05):
Quote.

Speaker 2 (33:06):
After Hanyati defeated Ottoman forces in Transylvania in March fourteen
forty two, vlad Dracule was called to Adrianople to demonstrate
his loyalty to his suzerain, leaving his eldest son Mercea
as governor in Wallachia. As a result of what he
considered to be Dracul's treachery, the Sultan imprisoned the prince
at Gallipoli and ordered an attack on Wilakia. This new
Ottoman assault was again repulsed by Henyati, who used the

(33:28):
occasion to install his protege Besab the Second on the throne.
Realizing the danger posed to the Empire if Hanyati controlled Volakia,
the Sultan decided to release Vlat Dracul at the end
of fourteen forty two, but required him to leave his
two youngest sons as hostages. So there's this kind of
you see how messy this is, right, Yeah, Sultan gets

(33:49):
angry that he's been supporting the Hungarians, so he arrests
Vlad the second. Vlad the second son is in charge
in Wallachia for a while, but then the Hungarians push
him out of power and stick a new guy on
the throne. And the Sultan's like, well, I guess this
family there's still my best bet, right, So I'm just
going to take his kids as hostages and hope that
that works to keep him loyal, right.

Speaker 3 (34:10):
Right, Yeah, I think that inspires a lot of loyalty
and people generally like it when you do that.

Speaker 2 (34:15):
Yeah, that's a big, big big fans. So vladd and
his sexy brother Radu are going to be the hostages here.

Speaker 3 (34:21):
Now. Is this how last names happened back then? Because
it feels like we're going from their old last name
to like the Dracule family. Was it just a thing
where people were like, actually, this is cooler. Somebody called
me this.

Speaker 2 (34:36):
I don't think that they would have been called the
Dracule family. It's more that because the dad has this title,
when he dies, the one who inherits it is going
to be Dracula, which is like son of the dragon. Okay,
basically right, that's that's the way I was just it's
fun to use this name a lot because it's pretty
fucking cool. So I just said Vladin his sexy brother
Radu would be those hostages. I probably shouldn't have said

(34:58):
that about Radhu because I have to know something uncomfortable
here about our historian source Kurt Trepto. So again, we've
got the two books I read. One is by this
guy who is you know, it's a pretty good pop
history book, but it's not perfect. And the other is
this book by Kurt, who is definitely a historian. He
is a fulbright scholar and an expert on Romanian history.

(35:19):
He is somebody who certainly has the academic credentials to
back up his book. Unfortunately, a scholar is not the
only thing that he is, because as I was writing
this episode, I came upon a two thousand and seven
article by the History News Network that notes about Kurt
Trepto quote he was sentenced to the maximum of seven
years in December two thousand and two for offenses involving

(35:39):
two girls aged ten and thirteen, who we invited to
his home in Lasi. A Romanian woman convicted of being
his accomplice is still in prison. Trepto, who looked visibly
emaciated as he left the prison, declined to comment. The
historian was released early because he wrote a book entitled
The Life and Times of Vlad Dracul while he was
in prison. His lawyer, Livu Broun said the book September

(36:00):
two thousand and three until October two thousand and six
was counted as community service, Bron told reporters. Bron told
the court during his trial that his client had sex
only with the thirteen year old girl and that he
did not know she was a minor.

Speaker 3 (36:12):
So there's a lot there. Oh my god, that is
uh uh something else. Yeah, I didn't primary source here. Yeah,
it's he is a historian. He's a fulbright scholar. He
also wrote his Dracula book as fucking community service for
being a pedophile. I'll se a pedophile. Yeah, you know,

(36:36):
I don't know what else to say about that. I
figured I should live much to say.

Speaker 2 (36:43):
You know, Trepto's book is okay. Treu is a better writer, right,
but he's not a historian. And I did find a
couple of minor errors in there, so I wanted to
like read both of them. And then as I was
writing the script, I learned that unfat pleasant reality. The
lesson here should be obvious. Never check your word right.
There you go, there you go.

Speaker 3 (37:03):
Then you won't learn stuff like this. Yeah, absolutely so.

Speaker 2 (37:07):
In the time when Vlad the second had been out
in Automan captivity, he had lost control of Wallachia to
one of his many noble rivals. He took it back
in fourteen forty three, and our friend the pedophile historian
notes that this is probably because he was a pretty
popular ruler. From what we can tell captivity was not
like bad for the dracul brothers, right, the Draculas, the Draculai,

(37:31):
the Dracules La. Anyway, they learned how to fight in
the Ottoman style. Now, Solad future of Lad the Impaler
has now learned how to fight as a European night
and how to fight as an Ottoman. Right, so he
gets a whole new set of weapons. He's having fun
different kind of like classes on that sort of stuff.
There's some evidence that they converted to Islam for a
period of time. This is unclear. Vlad the Impaler is

(37:54):
gonna like mix and match faiths a bunch. He's a
little bit like that one character from The Mummy who's
just got like all the religion symbols. Right, He's going
to be Orthodox, he's going to be Catholic for a while,
he's going to be probably may have been Muslim for
a while.

Speaker 3 (38:07):
So you know, bumper sticker, you know. Yeah, he's a
very coexist kind of guy, Lad the Impaler. Yeah, so
things go less well. He's you know, while Lad the
Impaler and and Radu are are hanging out with a sultan,
things are not going great for his father, Lad the
Second Hunyati, the Hungarian leader is not a forgiving kind

(38:28):
of dude. And once it becomes clear that yet again,
the mister Dracule has backed the Ottomans, Transylvania goes to
war with Wolakia of Lad the Second loses this war,
he gets captured and is executed alongside his eldest son,
who had ruled in his stead while he was out fighting. No, no,

(38:48):
that's Marseilla. I don't think he's particularly handsome. He gets
so while his dad is losing this ward to Transylvania,
like a bunch of these boyers in in Tigovitay, like
see where the wind is blowing. And so they capture
his son Mercea and they they kill him by burying
him alive, and they are there's some suggestion among scholars

(39:09):
that maybe this is part of how that myth about
like Dracula being being buried alive. Yeah, yeah, exactly, Maybe
that's part of it, right. I feel like, if you're
executing the eldest son and the next eldest is Vlad
the Impaler, I guess he probably doesn't have that nickname.
He doesn't have that. Yeah, he's not impaling yet if

(39:30):
he's given off even like the slightest of impaling vibes.
I don't know if he's like trained as both like
in Eastern and Western fighting, and is like fighting as
a knight with one hand. He is like Jean Clade
van Dam in an early nineties movie, right, exact, just
like kind of but I don't know.

Speaker 2 (39:51):
I say this a lot, listeners. If you are executing
a family for their loyalties to the Sultan.

Speaker 3 (39:56):
Says all the time, Yeah, keep an eye out. Does
one of them look like they might be an empale?
Maybe don't do that execution, you know, keep him second
in line, is all I'm saying. So, uh, it's unclear
if Laude and Radu are free or still with the Sultan.
They probably are still with the Sultan when their dad
and brother get killed. But whatever the case, Vlad winds

(40:17):
up going back to Murad and is like, Hey, they
killed my family. I need to go.

Speaker 2 (40:22):
Do you know a pretty dope vengeance quest thing? I
feel like I'm a good guy to have a vengeance quest.
You know, all of this, all this martial arts training
and shit I got Can I have some dudes, you know,
some like some like fighting dudes, right, and Marad is like, Yeah,
they'll probably work out pretty well for me. Have some dudes.

Speaker 3 (40:40):
So you know.

Speaker 2 (40:41):
Part of why this is noteworthy is that not long
after his death he's going to become a symbol first
of sort of resistance to the Ottomans and eventually of
like Romanian independence. He's going to get this reputation is
like the shield of the West from the marauding Ottomans,
and his memory is used. You can find a lot
of weird right wing culture warriors with Vlad the Impaler
shit to this day. It's worth noting he only gets

(41:02):
to power because he's cool with the Sultan right on
both sides. Yeah, yeah, he's a both set, which is
very much in line with other rulers and with how
his dad had played things, you know, Yeah, and his
uncles had played things.

Speaker 3 (41:14):
Yeah, you do whatever is going to allow you to
survive to the next day. Yeah, it's a rough time
out there, yeah, exactly. So this works.

Speaker 2 (41:24):
He winds up being coming the ruler of Wallachia for
what will be the first of three times. He is
in and out of there several times. The first piece
of documented evidence we have from Vlad the Impaler is
this letter he writes right after he comes to power.
It's the first documented like piece of writing that was
done by his hands. And this is not like a
big deal, but it's interesting that this first Lad the

(41:46):
Impaler letter is written on All Saints Day or Halloween
of fourteen forty eight.

Speaker 3 (41:51):
That's kind of cool. Yeah, a man knows his brand.

Speaker 2 (41:54):
That's incredible branding, right, that's the visionary site. Yeah, oh
my god. So he is seventeen when this happens and
all probably and he is already a hardened combat veteran,
but he is not going to be ruler for very long.
Within two months of taking power, one of his regional
rivals invades Wallachia and forces young Vlad the Not Yet

(42:15):
an Impaler to flee the scene. So by Christmas of
fourteen forty eight, he is out of power.

Speaker 3 (42:20):
But with that nickname, they should have known he was
going to be an impaler. Yeah, and his name is
Lad than not Yet an Impaler. You got to keep
checking his Wikipedia page to see if it's it's safe
to fuck with him. Yeah, still not, but I've got
bad things are coming for us. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (42:36):
Yeah, that's the that's the moment in the movie, like
they're checking their smartphones as they wait for the battle
to start, and they're like, oh shit, it just got updated,
and like the mods aren't reverting it, guys, we might
be fucked.

Speaker 3 (42:47):
Bad news.

Speaker 2 (42:49):
So Ladsman the next couple of years bouncing around kingdoms
ruled by his relatives in Moldova, cementing alliances, building a
base of power. By fourteen fifty two, he's reconciled with
him Hanyati and he's promised to serve the Hungarians as
defender of Wallachia. So he betrays the Sultan. Now this
is a bad time to betray the Sultan because right
after he's like, nah, I'm totally team Hungary, Constantinople falls

(43:12):
to the Turks, which is not a great position to
be in. Right this whole place, like this is where
you know, if you're fighting with the Turks and things
go badly, you can retreat in the direction of Constantinople.
That's going to stop being an option for these guys
very soon. So by July of fourteen fifty three, lad
has retaken power in Wallachia by personally hacking to death

(43:34):
the guy who had usurped the throne from him, probably
single combat, which is pretty cool. Right, Yeah, that is
how I.

Speaker 3 (43:40):
Became the host of this podcast, right, Yeah, it was combat.
Yeah yeah, so just hacking to pieces, that's right, hacked
two pieces. So in fourteenth makes a statement, Yeah yeah,
that's the best way to hack someone to pieces. O guy, Yeah,
to that other guy, to the taptain of this podcast.

(44:02):
Yeah yeah, you guys will take my kids.

Speaker 2 (44:04):
So that's right, that's right, that's why we do it.
So fourteen fifty seven is the year when which Vlad
will commit the first massacre that kind of starts his
reputation off with a bang. As this history should drive home,
there's a lot of turnover and willocke in politics, right.
His family is in and out of power constantly, and
a lot of this has to do with the boyers, right,
these local nobles who are the rulers support system and

(44:26):
his primary threat, right, because you can't rule without the
support of the boyers. But also they're always, you know,
angling to get someone in who's better, right, better for them,
So I Vlad eventually gets kind of tired of this
whole game, and in Easter of fourteen fifty seven, he
invites all of his boyers for a big feast and
while they're eating, he kills the yeah, don't Yeah, somebody's

(44:50):
like in the bathroom, like you know, just kind of
freshening up and checks his phone. It's like, oh shit,
they changed his Wikipedia guys, we got to bounce.

Speaker 3 (44:59):
Oh man. I'm going to quote from it called the Feast, Yeah, yeah, exactly,
real red wedding vibes.

Speaker 2 (45:05):
I'm going to quote from a contemporary account here. While
all the citizens were feasting and the younger ones were dancing,
he Dracula surrounded them the boyars led them together with
their wives and children, just as they were dressed up
for Easter, to Ponari, where they were put to work
until their clothes were torn and they were left naked.
So basically, he makes them build his castle. These like nobles,
he forces, enslaves them, forces them to build his castle,

(45:28):
and then he impales them to death, right them and
their wives.

Speaker 3 (45:31):
All these dudes and their.

Speaker 2 (45:32):
Wives killed shit out of them, right, ugly stuff. Now,
there's a lot of stories of impalement from his reign.
This is kind of the first one, but you're going
to get a lot more. The most commonly told one
is that he wins this big victory against the Turks,
and he has maybe tens of thousands of their soldiers
impaled on the road leading to his capital, which is
so frightening that the Sultan in his army retreat rather

(45:53):
than advance further into Wallachia. It's impossible to know how
precisely true that all is, but again to a lot
of these weird right wing myths about the guy, it's
worth noting if he did impale the Sultan's army, which
is pretty likely, most of the guys, if not all
of them that he impaled, would have been like Christian Europeans,
because that's how the Ottoman army works, right, Like a

(46:13):
lot of their soldiers are these kind of like local
levees and stuff, often who are basically given to them
as like this is part of if you're allied with
the Ottomans, you send them an x number of kids
every year, right, and they train a lot of these
guys up as soldiers. Now, it's kind of unclear how
many people I've lad the Impaler kills, but it's a shitload.

(46:35):
Fifty thousand is probably a pretty good low estimate. Some
higher estimates are up to like one hundred thousand people,
and most of these are various forms of execution, including impalement.
But despite again this reputation, he starts to get as
the shield of the West. The majority of the people
that he's going to kill are his own folks, right,

(46:55):
you've got your boyers. Obviously, he kills a few hundred
of them. He kills a lot of purported spies and criminals,
and also just kind of anyone he thinks is a
danger to his rule. Vlad the Impaler early on is
going to be like, you know, what's going to keep
me in power is becoming a law and order guy. Right,
So he declares war on the homeless population, on beggars

(47:15):
and stuff indigence. He gathers a huge number of these
guys up and he burns them all to death, and
like a barn. Basically truly a right wing hero, this
guy is. He is very much a right wing era.
He is again a law and order guy. His royal
propaganda Burea will spread all these stories about like, oh,
you know, this merchant came to a town that that

(47:36):
Dracula was controlling one day and was like, somebody stole
my gold, and Dracula, you know, would do something brutal
to get it. Back right, like because there's you don't
commit crime, right, there's one of this One of the
common stories you hear is that like there's this watering
post for people like traveling through a rural area and
Dracula leaves this ornate golden cup there. And it's the

(47:57):
point that he does this is that like, as long
as the is there, you know that he's in power
because nobody would dare steal anything when when Dracula's running
the shit right almost certainly just like bullshit.

Speaker 3 (48:08):
But that's the story.

Speaker 2 (48:09):
One of the stories that gets told about this guy,
the reality.

Speaker 3 (48:12):
Myth like the yeah, the good branding got him, a
myth about him being good at branding. Yeah, exactly, that's
a but that that's a cool story, a cool story.
Golden cup.

Speaker 2 (48:24):
Again, probably not true because while he's in charge, there's
a bunch of uprisings. People are in fact not too
scared to piss off Dracula. Right, maybe they should have been,
because these don't go well. But I'm going to quote
again from Troe, who is our source, that is not
a priminal quote. The villages of satuln Hosman and Casults
were burned to the ground by his cavalry and the

(48:46):
supporters of Lad the Monk were butchered. Who is one
of these uprising leaders? A lot of lads Bode was
totally destroyed. Talm's left blazing, and it's people hacked like
cabbage in the town square. Merchants who are now expected
to sell their wares at the specified towns of Tigovi
State Tigsor and simplelun Cabbage like cabbage.

Speaker 3 (49:05):
Yeah, hacked like cabbage.

Speaker 2 (49:07):
Hacked like cabbage, Yeah, just to pieces shredded. Merchants who
are now expected to sell their wares at below the
market rate were rounded up for non compliance and according
to these Saxon accounts, impaled by the road or boiled
in cauldrons. The young men to whom it was claimed,
had been sent to Alakia to learn the language, were
likewise executed quite simply because they were clearly spies and

(49:28):
the Sacks. And the reason he brings that up is
that like a bunch of these German types have like
moved into Romania over the preceding generation. So there's like
German communities in a bunch of the cities in Wallachia.
And as is always the case, these guys, a lot
of them become like merchants, right, So these are kind
of like your upper middle class merchant class, and a
lot of these towns, that's a good group of people

(49:50):
to blame all your problems on. So Lad's going to
really do a lot of murdering of these German types.
And so that's where a lot of the stories of
him come from. Is these these especially these monks who
like flee from him. You know, he fairly brutal to them,
rain and they tell these they exaggerate these stories, right,
he certainly did some fucked up shit, but they're also
they're trying to like spread propaganda about this guy because

(50:12):
he killed their friends.

Speaker 3 (50:13):
So they're also they're they're pumping it up a little bit, right, right,
But does that help or does that just like make
him more terrifying and people want to I.

Speaker 2 (50:23):
Mean, it's why he has this rep right, just because
of these German germanic like monk accounts of his fatality.

Speaker 3 (50:30):
The monks had burn books, but they also were some
of the only people who knew how to write, ye
is that right? Yeah? So like a lot of this
stuff is just the guy who was meanest to monks
becomes a great historical monster. Just because monks knew how
to write. Yeah, we say a lot. History is written
by the victors, but it's also written by the people
who know how to write, and so you've got a

(50:51):
real advantage if you're the monks in that regard, you know. Yeah,
so yeah, flat Again, as we noted above, he's not
just impaling people. He'll boil alive.

Speaker 2 (51:00):
He's got some more creative methods though. But impalement gets
a lot of attention right in part because it's it's
kind of identified with the East, even though they're not
the only people who do it. And the most infamous
story of Lad the impaling some people comes after a
military victory he won against his his rival with a
very silly name, Dan the Third. He's like, he's got

(51:21):
all these wild ass Hungarian Romanian names, and then there's
just Dan hanging out there, like yeah, all these guys,
you've got Vlad the Dracule and then like yeah, and
then there's Dan the Third.

Speaker 3 (51:34):
Dan. They don't like, who is going to win that one,
DrAk or Dan the Third the Third Dan? Yeah? Third?
So he beats this ship.

Speaker 2 (51:48):
And yeah, this Dan at a town called Brassov quote.
It was here that the inhabitants were impaled in large
numbers as the chapel of Saint Jacob burned to the ground.
According to the poet Mikhel b him, the the impaler
sat at a table in the open air and mopped
up from his plate the blood of his writhing victims.
The boyer, who complained of the foul stinch, was impaled
higher than the rest. Now most yeah, pretty cool.

Speaker 3 (52:11):
Yeah, mainly like watching everybody get impaled and killed and
complained that it smelled bad.

Speaker 2 (52:17):
Yeah, well, and someone who was going to be Yeah,
it's fun.

Speaker 3 (52:21):
Yeah. I gotta tell you, man, this place smells like shit. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (52:28):
So most of the Wallachians he massacred are again Germanic
residents who have come to make up a significant chunk
of the mercantile class during a series of migrations in
previous centuries. And it's from a bunch of these guys
that we get the stories of lad teppers that take
him from he's just another guy in a pretty brutal
area to like fucking Dracula. And I'm going to quote
now from the Warfare History Network. Dracula's atrocities in Transylvania

(52:51):
caused a tremendous backlash in the German community, which began
to disseminate vicious propaganda against him. After extensive interviews with
the survivors of the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre, German poet
Michael Beaham wrote the story of a bloodthirsty madman called
Dracula of Lachia. In his poem, Biham describes the Vlad
as dining amongst his impaled victims after the massacre. He
even accuses Lad of dipping his bread in their blood.

(53:13):
The genesis of the enduring association of Dracula with vampires.
Vlad's horrific link to Transylvania as undoubtedly why Victorian novel
Bram Stoker later chose to turn the real life Wallachian
prince into a fictional Transylvanian count. So that's one argument
is to like where the German this comes from. And
some of the stories about Vlad are certainly true or
at least had a germ of truth, right, But the

(53:35):
whole legend of him is this bloodthirsty monster is the
result of an effective propaganda campaign, not just by his enemies.
They're one of them, right, These Germans want to turn
him into a monster. The fact that he is so
horrifying also helps to turn him into this like anti
Turkish figure, like the Shield of the West. But the
fact that he's so famous too. He's going to later
primarily under Chouchescu, who is the We've done episodes on Chouchescu,

(53:59):
the communist dictator in kind of the mid to late
twentieth century. He's going to become this figure of Romanian nationalism,
right because he's just like your first famous guy kind
of that you can call the Romanian figure.

Speaker 3 (54:11):
So the blood sucking of Dracula originated with like dipping,
like with kind of a like part time we're gonna
get it.

Speaker 2 (54:22):
We're going to get into that. There's more to the
blood sucking. But the first time you've got kind of
Dracula directly like tied to drinking blood is this story
of Laddy and Paler dipping his bread in blood, which
again is almost certainly a lie because like, you kill people,
but do you drink their blood?

Speaker 3 (54:40):
Really? I don't know, pretty gross. I wouldn't, so wouldn't,
But I also love dipping my bread and stuff, and
it's like such are to go about drinking blood? I mean,
but also very much less badass. I dip some.

Speaker 2 (54:56):
Bread bread out of blood every now and then. I
bet you could make a nice blood gravy that would
be pretty rich, but probably a little salty.

Speaker 3 (55:04):
Of the most British, I've tried the hell out of that.

Speaker 2 (55:06):
Yeah, I'll do anything with blood, those weirdos. So, speaking
of the British, our advertisers are not the British, so
you can feel good about spending your money with them.

Speaker 3 (55:18):
We have been working on just getting the British to
sponsor the show. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (55:22):
Yeah, it's not going great. Yeah, but we'll keep We'll
keep pressing the flesh. Don't worry.

Speaker 3 (55:35):
We're back.

Speaker 2 (55:36):
So Vlad is going to go to war with his
former allies the Turks in fourteen fifty nine. The Pope
calls a crusade, and Vlad is the only European head
of state to be like, yeah, I'll do that. Everyone
else is like, I feel like we tried a lot
of crusades and most of them didn't go well.

Speaker 3 (55:51):
So just Robert from my frame of reference, up to
this point, the wars are being waged, or you know,
when he's going in and like takeing out a rival
and killing his whole town. How many people, Like, is
it like sometimes thousands? Yeah, thousands, Okay, yeah, sometimes, Like
again we're talking thousand to one hundred thousand total. That's

(56:12):
he's going to massacre. And remember reading something about like
ancient Greek warfare where it was like the towns were
like so it was more on in line with like
a high school football rivalry, like a lot of the
towns and like the warring and like it was like yeah,
and then they like came to our town, and you know,
it's just like these small communities going to war with

(56:32):
one another, which I don't really have a frame of
reference for because war in the modern context is so massive.

Speaker 2 (56:40):
Yeah, I mean, this is definitely smaller than modern wars.
But he is killing a lot of people of these towns.
You're probably talking dozens or hundreds of executions, but like
he is, he is going to execute tens of thousands,
So like it's not not purely like this little shit either.

Speaker 3 (56:57):
Yeah. Yeah, so it almost makes it like area, you know,
it's pretty Yeah, everyone gets Whitely murdered in a massacre.

Speaker 2 (57:07):
Yeah, yeah, that's that is kind of how you have
to do it. Anyone left alive, that's like a threat
to your your power potentially, so he breaks his treaty
with the Sultan fourteen fifty nine. And part of this
treaty is that every you know, so often Wailakia has
to send several thousand young boys to serve as janissaries, right,
which is like this Turkish elite military unit made up

(57:29):
of like the kids of their rivals basically. And the
way vlad announces we're not friends anymore is when the
Sultan sends recruiting officers, Vladim pales them. And then when
the Sultan is like what the fuck and he sends
some diplomats to be like, hey, bro, what's going on. Lad,
It's not going to go great. Vladd nails their turbans

(57:50):
to their heads, which is going to piss off the
Sultan a lot. That would piss me off if I
sent diplomats and somebody nailed their their hats to their heads,
I wouldn't be thrilled time.

Speaker 3 (58:01):
If it's cool, it's cool, don't get me wrong. That's
a cool thing to do if you're a bad guy.
You know, if you're a bad guy and you're really
leaning into it. Yeah, Also, like maybe don't send the
second wave of I feel like the first sends a
message what we do. We think that he just didn't
like the recruiters specifically, and was like, these silver tongued

(58:23):
foxes will come and uh cool him down.

Speaker 2 (58:28):
I'm not gonna maybe this isn't the case. I'm not
a not an expert here, but if I'm in charge,
right and this happens, first thought I'm gonna have is like, oh,
I could promote some guys I don't like to diplomats and.

Speaker 3 (58:39):
Get rid of the fuckers.

Speaker 1 (58:41):
I could.

Speaker 3 (58:41):
I could drop a few of these dudes, you know,
just you my top diplomatic. Yeah, you're the you're the
head of foreign policy. I got a gig for you now.
So you breed like an elite fighting group made of
your enemy's children.

Speaker 2 (58:57):
Yeah, that's the janissaries, right, not necessarily like like you're
the rulers, but like basically, if you're a vassal to
the Ottomans, you send them some kids every year, and
there's some rules like it's not going to be your
only son. If you only have one kid, they're not
going to take that kid generally, and it's not the
oldest usually, I think is one of the other rules.
Like they they try because they don't want to piss
people off too much. But like they take these kids

(59:19):
in and they raise them and train them to be
like elite soldiers, the Janisaries.

Speaker 3 (59:23):
Your spare kids, your kids, Yeah, soldiers maybe if you
if you fuck around. Yeah, weird time, weird situation myself
as one of any of these people. And it seems like, uh,

(59:44):
and I'm not gonna lie a fucking waking nightmare.

Speaker 2 (59:47):
Yea to live at this time. Yeah, the past is
not just a foreign country, but almost like a different planet.
It's wild of the ship.

Speaker 3 (59:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (59:56):
Anyway, they go to Wark Vlad with the Turks, and
the thing about Lad the Impaler that we definitely know is,
by I think all accounts, he's a really good military leader.
He's like really very good at running an army. He
is outnumbered this whole time, often two to one, but
he wins regular victories against the Sultan, and obviously when
he captures Sultan's troops, he's got impale a shitload of

(01:00:19):
these guys. But it's also the Sultan's army is very
big and Vlad's is not, and so he suffers pretty
high casualties over the course of this fighting, and eventually
the elites back at the capitol are like, so, we're
just burning all of this money fighting this war that
we cannot, Like, the Ottoman Empire is much bigger than Wallachia.
We've already burnt through a lot of our army. You

(01:00:41):
are eventually going to lose this thing. So let's get
rid of this guy, because we don't want to keep
doing this shit, right, We want to do this stuff
that's fun, not slowly, slowly lose a war of grinding attrition.
So they overthrow Vlad. They put his sexy brother Radu
in charge, and winds up having to like flee the

(01:01:02):
scene after this battle and ends up in the care
of the Hungarian king, and he's like, hey, could you
give me an army to like take back power? And
the King of Hungary is like, dude, you you and
your family are the least reliable people on the planet.
Why would I do that? Right, Like, why would I
do that? You can't be trusted, None of you can.

(01:01:22):
So if Lad SPAN's twelve years as the King of
Hungary's prisoner, writer Mark Mark Longo notes quote that he
wiled away his time torturing and impaling rodents he caught
in his quarters. Maybe true, maybe not fun story either
way and on brand, you know, good. Good for him,
he's at least preventing the next plague by getting rid
of those rats.

Speaker 3 (01:01:43):
I done it. I'm not a big rat guy. Not
a big rat guy. He did a it's like done
an article at Cracked. I think where just about how
like wondrous rats are, Like, they're so smart and sourceful,
and they're also a pretty big danger though. Yeah, even

(01:02:05):
in a pet post ratituoy world, though, I would like,
at an instinctual level, rather they all die right now.

Speaker 2 (01:02:13):
Yeah, that's that's gonna be popular with certain quarters, unpopular
with some.

Speaker 3 (01:02:19):
Yeah. I mean, like intellectually I wouldn't do it because
balance in nature.

Speaker 2 (01:02:24):
But like my gut is just like ugh anti rat. Yeah,
I read too many stories about the Black Plague to.

Speaker 3 (01:02:30):
Trust him too, I think.

Speaker 2 (01:02:32):
Yeah, So he catches a lucky break Vlad because his
brother loses power in fourteen seventy three and vlad Or
Rodhu gets replaced by a guy who wants to be
friendly with the Ottomans. So with Hungarian backing, Vlad is
able to retake the throne from this guy who's overthrown
his brother in fourteen seventy six, and he takes power

(01:02:53):
for the third time, which lasts about two months, after
which he is found decapitated in a field.

Speaker 3 (01:03:00):
Is yeah. Wow. Yeah, it's like the ending of a
no country for old men man, right, he just like
having very killed at Jones, walks onto the sun said,
then gives the monolog It'll do till the mess gets here. Yeah, exactly,
it's part but good yeah, good line, a lot of

(01:03:21):
good lines. So he came back, did did power for
a little bit longer, and then they they took him out.

Speaker 2 (01:03:27):
Yeah, then they took him out. Yeah, it's a it's like, uh,
you know that banned the scorpions Jack, Yeah, of course,
it's like when they It's like when after they broke
up and then came back. It's just like that, don't
look up the scorpions. I don't know if that's true.

Speaker 3 (01:03:41):
So and then we're found beheaded in a field somewhere.

Speaker 1 (01:03:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:03:45):
Maybe, yeah, that that is what happened to the people
who wrote Rock You Like a Hurricane. It is also
worth noting that, like, you know, during this period of
time where he's this military leader of lad his his
big move is attack people at night. Also feeds into
the vampire. Right, He's this blood drinking dude who comes
after at the night, you know, at night his brother
got buried alive. You can see some of the pieces

(01:04:07):
of this, but there's a lot more to the story
about how he goes from this dude, who is again
pretty standard brutal Eastern European medieval leader to Dracula, the
guy recently played by Nicholas Cage in a fairly fun movie,
The Renfield Movie.

Speaker 3 (01:04:23):
I enjoyed it. Nicholas picture Nicholas Cage for this entire
story well, and Nick Cage and Nick Holt need to
be in more things together. Both both fascinating faces, both
of those guys. So back to the story. So we're
going to talk about how he goes from this European
military leader to the Dracula guy. And to do that

(01:04:46):
we have to, thankfully finally get to move from the
shady environs of ill documented old history into a well
trod field of solid folklorist research. And my main source
here is the book The Vampire, a New History by
English professor Nicholas Groom. Groom also writes articles about Nick
Cave as a folklorus. This is another thing he's interested in,

(01:05:08):
and I think that's pretty back. Yeah, definitely a vampire.
I will say, I think higher odds that Nick Cave
has drank the blood of his enemies than Vlad the Impaler,
like almost certainly, Like I have trouble imagining Nick Cave
drinking anything that's not the blood of his enemies. But
of course, yeah, that's kind of his vibe, that is
his vibe. Definitely mopped it up with a nice pa.

Speaker 2 (01:05:29):
Oh yeah, he's a waste not kind of guy. That
thing you know about Nick Cave. Murder Ballads, great album,
everybody check it out. Got a good song about Staggerly anyway.
Groom This Folklorus notes that the origins of the word
vampire are somewhat controversial. It is often credited to coming
from the French term avante paree, which means ancestor, but

(01:05:52):
this is inaccurate. The terms most likely origins are in
the Lithuanian word vompti, which means to drink, and the
Serbo Croatian vampire or the Old Russian word upir, both
of which are names right now. While the word vampire
is quite modern, stories of blood sucking undead monsters that

(01:06:13):
can change shape are about as old as civilization. It's
often noted that the ancient Egyptian deity sec Met had
some vampiric traits, but just drinking blood that doesn't make
you a vampire, right. That trait is old in folklore,
so it gets kind of put into vampires because we've
always had blood drinking monsters and gods in our myths.

(01:06:33):
But the most direct precursor to the actual like cryptid
basically monster, the vampire comes from Serbia, where the term
vukodlak refers to both a vampire and a werewolf. Right,
And it's worth noting considering how often these two go
together in like our modern horror stories. R Like you,

(01:06:54):
they come from the same origin, right, Vampires and werewolves
were originally the same thing.

Speaker 3 (01:07:00):
Make sense.

Speaker 2 (01:07:00):
They're both they both eat people, and they're both like
chained shape in the monsters right into animals, right, both
the vampires into bats, were wolves into wolves.

Speaker 3 (01:07:10):
So they started like like, so I have a five
year old and when he's playing, he's like, and then
I can do this, and then I can also do that,
and like sometimes it turned into a wolf, and then
I can turn then I have wings and I have
a and then I'm a bat. Like originally it was
all just like somebody doing that. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:07:27):
Look, the winter is long. You spend most of it
sitting inside your shack, hoping the wolves don't get you,
and eating I don't know whatever, like fucking shit you
managed to save from harvest time. There's not much to do,
and you're drinking, so you're going to wind up telling
a lot of stories about bullshit. Yeah, yeah, just kind
of like adding stuff to it over time. Now, while

(01:07:50):
the word vampire again, vampire is very modern, this is
not an old concept like what we consider a vampire.
So both kind of the werewolf and vampire mists we
have today started off as these kind of like the vukodlac,
this Serbian mythical creature, and they split pretty recently as
groom rites quote. There is, however, a significant distinction to

(01:08:12):
be made in the English language. In English, the werewolf
was established by medieval times as a human shape changer,
with origins and Anglo Saxon and possibly Old Norse culture,
as well as in classical accounts of the disease of licanthropy.
The word vampire, however, was adopted in the seventeen thirties
to describe a contemporary wonder. And this is really interesting

(01:08:33):
to me because the concept we have of a vampire
is inherently modern. You don't get a vampire with just
just with people telling stories in the woods.

Speaker 3 (01:08:43):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:08:44):
The concept of a vampire inherently brings comes out of
this sudden explosion in scientific understanding and knowledge that occurs
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which come with both
not just an understanding of like German disease theory, which
is part of the vampire higher myth, right, this disease
that gets spread through biting blood. But yeah, yeah, it

(01:09:04):
comes with an increased appreciation of understanding of like the
importance of blood in a medical and a forensic sense.

Speaker 3 (01:09:12):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:09:12):
The seventeen hundreds is when we start to use blood
to convict people of murders.

Speaker 3 (01:09:17):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:09:17):
Obviously you're not doing DNA tests then, right, But in
seventeen forty one, this English murderer James Hall gets convicted
because he kills a guy and he can't clean up
all of the blood, right, So there's like blood from
the murder, and it's also on some of his stuff.
And this is like, I think the first time, or
at least one of the first times that like blood
as forensic evidence was used to convict a dude, is.

Speaker 3 (01:09:39):
It because like, prior to that, just everything was covered
with blood. All this there's a lot of blood. Yeah, right,
I just slipped in some blood, Yeah, stepping out of
my house. Well I don't know where blood came from. Yeah, yeah,
I'm sure there were other times where that connection was made,
but this is like a famous case, and it's famous.
It's also like really noteworthy in the history of forensics,
and that's part of what's going to build to us

(01:10:02):
understanding vampires. Right.

Speaker 2 (01:10:04):
Another key aspect, key ingredient to creating the vampire is
the birth of print journalism, right, which plays a major
role in disseminating these true crime stories. The vampire is
a concept is inherently linked to true crime because starting
in the seventeen hundreds, in particular, we get all of
these viral news stories about serial killers and murderers. And

(01:10:26):
this really takes off in the eighteen hundreds because true
crime has always been a reliable moneymaker and that's a
big part of this myth. Bloom cites a book published
by demonologist George Sinclair in sixteen eighty five who describes
the murder of a man named Spalding in a town
of called dal Keith. And this he describes a murder

(01:10:47):
committed by a man named Spalding in a town called Dalkeith,
and Spalding gets caught and hung but reanimate several times. Right,
they don't quite kill him successfully, so he keeps coming back.
And this is sort of one of the story that
contributes to the birth of the vampire myth, right, because
it's really noteworthy. This guy is this, commits this brutal
murder and then you can't kill him, right. It's kind

(01:11:09):
of like the rasputant stories. It gets spread a lot, right,
and so people start like talking about it, and it's
in their mind consciously or subconsciously as they're continuing to
spend these folklore stories about monsters.

Speaker 3 (01:11:20):
Yeah, and it's like that there is I think an
under rated like blurriness to the barrier between life and death,
like you see even today. And you know, it's just
like at a certain point it's like I guess they're
like pretty dead, right, Yeah, like there there. You know,
it's like you don't know when a work of artist,

(01:11:41):
the artist is just like done when they're done. Yeah,
and it's like yeah, so yeah, it makes sense to
me that that would be a contributing factor because it's
still kind of confounding, and I think something that people
don't like to think about, yeah, from doctors, about like
not wanting to do a DNA or not wanting to

(01:12:02):
be resuscitated. It's because there's like this weird blariness where
you can be like kept alive even though you're mostly dead.

Speaker 2 (01:12:11):
Yeah, And it's also you know, it's it's not uncommon
for people to be buried alive back then, and it's
also not uncommon for people to commit murder. And some
folkloris there's a theory that a lot of monster myths
in the vampire would be kind of chief among them
have their origin and unreal crimes by like what we
now call serial killers, right, and people somebody in your

(01:12:31):
community who you've known surprises everyone by committing this brutal
series of murders. It's really maybe you don't want to
acknowledge that this. You could have just gotten this person wrong, right,
somebody had something dark inside them that you didn't see,
and they committed this terrible crime. So the more comforting
thing to believe is that they've caught some sort of
demonic infection, right, sure, you know, and you know, for

(01:12:54):
a while people just say, yeah, demons in them. But
like vamporism in this age of science, is a transmissible
in and that can explain how somebody can do something
seemingly out of character for them. Oh, this guy that
we all knew killed his wife and kids in this
horrible way. He's a vampire. He caught the vampire infection, right, Yeah,
And because there's this growing understanding of like vamporism as

(01:13:16):
an illness, there's a thing you can do as opposed
to just being horrified at this, at this terrible crime.
You execute the murderer, but you also have to ensure
that he's not going to reanimate, right, which gives you
some action that you can take that maybe makes you
feel like you're protecting yourself.

Speaker 3 (01:13:31):
Right, So you just hang some garlic around their neck.

Speaker 2 (01:13:34):
Well, that is one of the things that you do. Yeah,
there's a couple of things that you do that play
into the later myths. Right when somebody, when you think
somebody is a vampire, you cut their head off often
after you kill them, and you stake them. Not The
initial version is not that the steak kills the vampire,
but you stake them to their coffin so they can't
get it, they can't get out.

Speaker 3 (01:13:52):
That's why. That's why I do it mainly, And but
I did. I only rarely do the head cutting off thing. Yeah,
well that's the way you got such a vampire problem,
and that's why I'm my property is lousy with vampires.

Speaker 1 (01:14:05):
You to watch the Vampire Diary series, do I have
you not?

Speaker 3 (01:14:11):
I mean, I'm a young person who is pop culturally engaged,
so of course I've watched it and know exactly the
reference you're talking about.

Speaker 2 (01:14:20):
Yeah, why don't you explain that reference just to the listeners?

Speaker 1 (01:14:23):
Know, Mitt Robert and I obviously know is one of
the best television shows of all time. But the staking, yes,
the head cutting off, yes, But the garlic myth?

Speaker 3 (01:14:36):
Yeah, myth?

Speaker 2 (01:14:37):
Okay, Well, I mean you would often stuff garlic in
the mouth of the corpse too.

Speaker 1 (01:14:42):
You could also rip their heart out, that's the thing.

Speaker 2 (01:14:44):
Yeah, yeah, all sorts of stuff. People do a lot
of different shit, and they do it not just as
interesting because it's understood as a communicable infection. You don't
just do this to the murderer. You do this too
his victims too, because they might have caught it and
you don't want them to re animate.

Speaker 3 (01:15:00):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:15:01):
So again it's important to note this is all very
tied to old folklore and superstitious beliefs about monsters, but
it's also tied to medical science. You can look at
all these things that become part of the lore of
how you defeat a vampire as people trying to create
diagnostic and treatment criteria for a disease.

Speaker 3 (01:15:18):
Now evil, Yeah, it's the sixteen hundred, seventeen hundreds, early
eighteen hundreds. They're not good at that yet, right, like
they do. This is not I'm just saying this is
rigorous science, but it is. It is born out of
an attempt to do to think scientifically, right. That is
an key aspect to it. A lot of the modern
like serial killer psychological profiling stuff is also equally just

(01:15:41):
complete bullshit.

Speaker 2 (01:15:42):
Yeah, lots of total bullshit, and it does I think
a lot of our beliefs about like forensic science working
a lot better than it does a lot of our
desire to believe in like these competent hyper detectives does
come out of like the same thing as the concept
of a vampire, which is that, like, it's scary that
people can commit murders and get away with them sometimes,

(01:16:03):
and so it's comforting if you can find an explanation,
even if that explanation a lot of it's nonsense, right,
You know, forensic profiling is a flawed scientific field, but
at least it provides an answer, you know.

Speaker 3 (01:16:14):
Bring the scientists in, Yeah, now, make us feel better. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:16:18):
Vamporism is not just people wanting to like make things
seem comfortable. There are also good, at the time, pretty
good scientific reasons to believe that vamporism might be a
real illness. A lot of it comes from the fact
that rabies explodes in large parts of Europe during the
time in which vampires are born as a mythical creature. Right,
there's these huge outbreaks. Animals will bite several people, and

(01:16:39):
then those people rabies can cause you to get violently aggressive.
They'll bite people and they'll transfer the disease to those people, right,
And people who have rabies, there are certain things that
seem kind of like vamporism in them. One of them, obviously,
is this sudden, unexplained, violent aggression. They also have a
fear of water, right, that's noted as like a side
effective rabies. Vamp and folklore can't cross running water.

Speaker 1 (01:17:02):
Not true on the Vampire Diaries, Thank you so much.

Speaker 2 (01:17:05):
I'm glad the Vampire Diaries disagrees.

Speaker 3 (01:17:09):
So one fact check everything for us using the text
of the Vampire Diaries. So you get. One thing that.

Speaker 2 (01:17:17):
Differentiates the vampire from other beasts of legend is that
there isn't it. It is a scientific phenomenon. That is
how it's seen.

Speaker 3 (01:17:25):
It is a disease.

Speaker 2 (01:17:26):
You diagnose people with a it's not a Boggin's out
in the woods. It's an illness, right, And so there's
diagnostic criteria and a lot of beliefs about how vamporism
worked come from early attempts to grapple with germ theory
and the like. It's the result of an attempt at
scientific thinking that fails. And while a lot of monsters
and stories drink blood, Dracula, I think is the first

(01:17:47):
to suck it. So he's not just drinking it to
get nourishment. He is sucking it and like that is
providing him with like vital life force, right, And that
is tied to an early understanding of blood transfusion. Right,
that's we start transfusing blood into people in the late
sixteen hundreds.

Speaker 3 (01:18:04):
Way too early. Yeah, we are not good at it.
You want to get sixteen hundred blood because it's.

Speaker 2 (01:18:14):
As soon as people develop the hypodermic needle and realize
that we can inject blood into our veins, it becomes
just the quackest quack here. You think these like rich
people today shooting their young kids blood into them are
are quacks? Oh, let me read you from This is
from Groom's book The Wild Story of a Guy named
Arthur Koga Quote Coga, a thirty two year old divinity

(01:18:36):
graduate of Cambridge University, was looked upon as a very
freakish and extravagant man. On twenty third November sixteen sixty seven,
he was treated to become more docile by receiving a
blood transfusion from a Lamb Peppies who's like one of
the doctors observed that the medical fraternity differ in the
opinion they have of the effects of it. Some think
it may have a good effect upon him as a

(01:18:56):
frantic man by cooling his blood. Others that it will
not have any effect at all. Coga saw the lamb
as emblematic of meekness and humility, declaring in Latin, the
blood of the sheep has symbolic power like the blood
of Christ, for Christ is the lamb of God. And
science there solid medical thinking.

Speaker 3 (01:19:14):
Yeah. The lamb's blood was transfused using quills and silver pipes,
but Coga received a payment of twenty shillings, drank canary
wine and smoked a pipe in celebration, and the operation
was repeated on twelfth of December. Coga's mood was not
noticeably softened by the treatment. However, some change has apparently
taken place. He wrote a begging letter to the Royal
Society complaining that he had been transformed into another species

(01:19:37):
and was reduced to pawning his clothes, or, as he
bombastically put it, he dearly purchases your sheep's blood with
the loss of his own woolen. This sheep racked vessel
of his like that of Argos. He addresses himself to
you and the golden fleece. He signed himself Angus Coga
or Coga the sheep. Wow.

Speaker 2 (01:19:55):
So this is probably a guy having like a mental
health crisis and They're like, we've got to shoot full
of sheep blood.

Speaker 3 (01:20:01):
You know what would help this? Yeah, he doesn't feel
good after this and convinces himself it's because he's been
turned into a sheep man. Yeah, that'll do it. Yeah,
I have a I have a quick question for you. Sure, sure, Jack.
So we've talked about this on my podcast, The Daily
Zeitgeist with Miles Gray. Yeah, the model of vampire fangs.

(01:20:24):
When you picture a vampire sucking blood, do you picture
the fangs having little hollow tubes inside them? Yeah? Yeah,
how the blood up like a reverse like snake fang.
And I assume that that leads into their veins, right,
and then that they get that blood in their veins.
That's my assumption. Well, on the Vampire Diary, I feel

(01:20:45):
like not on the Vampire Diaries, they kind of just
look like pointy little teeth. They really makes sense. We
we've always we've like talked about where we I think
I got that from the Reese's peanut butter cup ed Yeah,
where that is of most of my medical information? Yeah,
because it doesn't really like we've we've asked this of

(01:21:09):
a bunch of our guests, and like half of them
are like, yeah, of course that's exactly what happens in
my brain, and the other half are like, what are
you talking about? Why would that be? It? Like you
just they poke two little holes and then suck your blood,
as it's said, They don't. They don't say I want
to like have my.

Speaker 2 (01:21:28):
I want to suck your blood. I want to like
drink your blood and have it go into my stomach. Yes,
I think assuming that that line that I don't even
know where that comes from. I think that's like, that's
like Hanna bar Barrack cartoons in the seventies where he
probably started saying that. But I do treat that as
as vampiric fact for sure. Yeah, absolutely, yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:21:50):
But I was just I basically that is one of
the first questions I ask everybody. Sure, the horror subject
of vampire.

Speaker 2 (01:21:56):
Known for this, So by the seventeen hundreds, blood is
a central topic of scientific discussion, and all of these
factors are these intellectual people are shooting blood into each other. Right,
there's the birth of true crime as a genre. You've
got constant news stories that are just like lavish tales
of bloody, gory murder. You've got this early understanding of forensics,

(01:22:20):
this early understanding of germ theory, all of that is
going to play a role in what's called the Great
Vampire Epidemic.

Speaker 3 (01:22:28):
Were you aware that this was a thing, that we
had a vampire epidemic? I was not.

Speaker 2 (01:22:31):
No, it's fucking dope. It runs from about seventeen twenty
five to about the mid seventeen fifties, and it's basically
there's a moral panic about vampires, kind of the same
way we have it when like you get a terrorist
attack and then suddenly people in like rural towns thousands
of miles away are like they're coming for us next. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
you get all this kind of stuff, right, or you'll

(01:22:53):
get yeah, you'll hear a story about like a serial
killer in fucking Idaho, and then like people will start
flipping out, like I don't know, suburban Georgia that like
their next human beings are not good at threat modeling.
That happens with vampires, right. There's this suddenly, this explosion
in vampire tales all around Europe, primarily Western and Eastern Europe.

(01:23:14):
One write up on the Great Vampire Epidemic that I
found by researchers from the University of Virginia credits the
epidemic to outbreaks of both rabies and polagra. So you
have a bunch of rabies outbreaks. Not hard to see
why someone again not a rational that if there's a
rabies outbreak in your town and someone's like, it's vampires,
you'd be.

Speaker 3 (01:23:31):
Like, yeah, it seems like it sure looks like vampires.
Pale guy who has blood all over his mouth which
is crossing water eating people. Sure, yeah, it seems like
a vampire to me.

Speaker 1 (01:23:43):
Pale guys.

Speaker 3 (01:23:46):
Glad you had like nice tans? What was they just
looked normal?

Speaker 1 (01:23:50):
Yeah, they're just looked normal. Jack.

Speaker 3 (01:23:53):
Wow. Wow, Wow you said that like I was being Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:23:57):
You're not you're not familiar with the sacred Text. The
other disease out that contributes to vampire understanding is there's
these these outbreaks of what's called polagra. Now, polagra is
an illness. It's very new to Europeans, which is why
it freaks them out right, because it hadn't existed, because
it couldn't have because polagra is something you get as

(01:24:17):
a result of eating too much corn or improperly prepared corn. Right,
there's ways you have to prepare corn that we know
about now in order to avoid getting pelagra. But corn
has just it's this sexy new world crop that we
import here and start putting in everything. And so people
are getting pollagra because we're not used to corn yet, right,

(01:24:37):
And pollagra has a lot of symptoms that seem similar
to vamporism. You get a sensitivity to sunlight, right, you
can't be out in the sun. You get burnt really easily,
right obvious where that comes from. You get severe anemias.
Some people with pelagra will crave blood. Now again, animal
blood is often used in this period in various food sausages,
so it's not weird that somebody would have access to it.

(01:24:59):
But like people who can't be out on the sun
and crave blood, not hard to see where that fits in, right, yeah, yeah,
And I'm going to quote from the University of Virginia here.
Epidemics link rabies to a large number of deaths in
Eastern Europe, where vampire hysteria was particularly strong. Several hundred
cases of the disease were recorded, spread initially by rabid
wolves and then in at least some cases people. The

(01:25:20):
wolf and the vampire have a well known link as
being a creature the vampire can change into but further
the disease is spread through biting. Victims avoid sunlight, and
they can be repelled by strong odors, garlic being a possibility.
The hysteria that started to spread into the rest of
Europe led to the word vampire from the Serbian, first
entering German as their vampire around seventeen twenty six and

(01:25:41):
later into English vampire by seventeen thirty four at the latest.
As this epidemic is spreading, people are convinced vampires are
all over the place. They start decapitating all these suspected vampires,
staking them to their coffins. They start executing people and
then doing that to them because they believe that they're vampires,
and they start doing that to all their victims. So
there's this this God knows how many thousands of people

(01:26:03):
get like dug up and decapitated and staked to their
coffins because there's this belief that like they've caught the
vampire sickness and this is the only way to stop it. Now,
the real culprit is their corn, right, it's corn, and wolves,
as it always is in history, can't handle their corn.
But they don't know that yet because they're stupid old

(01:26:23):
time people, right, not a smart new time people who
understand diseasesn't always take precautions against them. They're dummies, stupid dummies. Anyway,
the Great vampire epidemic of the mid seventeen hundreds is
kind of like the last hurrah for believing in vampires
on like a widespread cultural level is like an actual

(01:26:45):
scientific illness. Because this kind of moral panic or hype
or whatever around vampires, it leads scientific men, men of
reasoning and understanding to finally reject vamporism wholly as a
real disease as they gain an actual understanding about like
what's causing their problems. Right, So this is in this
kind of the late sixteen hundreds early seventeen hundreds, you

(01:27:06):
can find a lot of quote unquote educated men who
will argue it's an actual illness that stops after the
Great vampire Epidemic. Now, the last crucial link in the
chain from Vlad the Impaler to modern Dracula myths was
the childhood of a guy named Bram Stoker. Bram is
an irishman, and if you know anything about the eighteen hundreds,

(01:27:27):
if you are an Irish child, in the eighteen hundreds.
You're gonna see some shit.

Speaker 3 (01:27:31):
Things are good, right, have a good time famously chill
time in Ireland eighteen hundreds.

Speaker 2 (01:27:37):
Yeah, so one of his first he's a sickly kid
and also everyone around him is dying all the time, right.
That is Bram Stoker's childhood, because he's an Irish kid
in the eighteen hundreds. One of his first early memories
is the great cholera outbreak in Ireland that occurs in
this kind of in the early mid eighteen hundred periods.

(01:27:57):
Cholera is an incredibly virulent illness that's spread initially by
contaminated water. As a result, once it hits a city,
like an urban area, it explodes. And this is cholera
is one of these things. When it hits an area
where you live, we're talking an end of days virus.
This is like the shit we make movies about, right.
Cholera is a fucking nightmare. And it hits the town

(01:28:19):
of Sligo where the Stokers live in eighteen thirty two.
Bram's mother Charlotte later recalled one evening we heard a
missus Feene, a very fat woman who was a music teacher,
had died suddenly, and by the doctor's orders, had been
buried an hour after with blanched faces. Men looked at
each other and whispered cholera. But the whispers the next
day deepened into a roar, and in many houses lay
one or two or three dead. One house would be

(01:28:41):
attacked and the next spared. There was no telling who
would go next. And when one said goodbye to a friend,
he said it as if forever. Because one of the
things about choler he mentions that she's fat.

Speaker 1 (01:28:50):
I don't.

Speaker 2 (01:28:51):
He's not like trying to fat shame or he's because
that means healthy, right if that means that, like you're nourished,
And it kills her like that because people you can
get color and be dead in twelve hours, right like
it is, And so it has this It is almost
like a monster, like a vampire, is just sweeping through
town in massacring families.

Speaker 3 (01:29:09):
That is the speed with which this thing kills. So
Bram's earliest memories and the stories that adults tell them
are about this implacable wave of death that is supernatural
almost in its power and totality, and because it is
so contagious, the need to there's this great need. You
have to dispose of the corpses of the people that
it's killing. You have to do it quickly. And because

(01:29:31):
medical science still isn't great, a lot of living people
get thrown into mass graves that they then dig out
over they're put into morgues. They're found to later be alive.
Some of them even survive through this because there's like
very drunk during a cholera alcore roll into a mass grave.

Speaker 2 (01:29:47):
Yeah, but also, like you can see how this is
all filming a part of a fertile uh like background
for Bram Stoker, right, He's going to have all this
stuff going around in his young mind. Now, Hoolera is
also a disease of capitalism, right, And it's also a
result of the new nature of life in these massive,
crowded cities that are fueled by products from far away.

(01:30:10):
So vampire is right, But it's also it's kind of
worth noting for brand because he is when he is
growing up, scientists don't believe in vamporism is a literal
thing anymore.

Speaker 3 (01:30:22):
He wouldn't have been raised that this was a real
literal thing. But it has.

Speaker 2 (01:30:26):
Become a cultural touchstone and it becomes deeply associated with
capitalism and wealth in the late seventeen hundreds. By the
time Bram is growing up, he's not hearing about vamporism
as this real thing, right because he's a cosmopolitan young man.
He is hearing about it in political treatises. It's being
used as a metaphor for the greed of bankers and

(01:30:48):
rapacious tax men. Right, because vampires suck blood. You can
call a fucking tax man a blood sucker, right. That
is his first the first time Bram is going to
encounter vampires, it's going to be people writing about them
as like a fill in for their their enemies generally,
like these businessmen and whatnot.

Speaker 3 (01:31:06):
And idea that the taxman I do call him a
bloodsucker every year on my taxi terms. That's right, that's right.

Speaker 2 (01:31:12):
But no, it's worth noting one of the major guys
who spreads this kind of the use of the term
vampire to describe, you know, bankers and the like is
Karl Marx. He's a major figure in this period of
like the popular conception of the vampire. Groom writes quote
in the Class Struggles in France eighteen fifty, the French
National Assembly is described as a vampire living off the

(01:31:34):
blood of the June insurgents. Similarly, in the eighteenth Brumere
of Louis Bonaparte eighteen fifty two, in a reversal of
Edmund Burk's language condemning the French Revolutionaries, the bourgeoisie order
has become a vampire that sucks out the rural workers
blood and brains and throws them into the alchemists cauldron
and Marx and a bunch of other guys who are
proto socialists and socialist thinkers in this period use vampires

(01:31:57):
to describe capitalism because it's like, it's pretty good metaphor, right,
Like it's not. And this is where, if you'll notice,
when we're talking about the Great Vampire epidemic, vampires aren't
rich people. They're not powerful people. It's just whoever, right,
it's a disease. Right now, This is how vampires become wealthy,
cultured people, right is in this period of time they

(01:32:19):
start being discussed in like the concept of a banker.
That's why, ultimately, when Bram Stoker writes his Dracula book,
he envisions Dracula as a count, right, not just a count,
but like a real estate Baron. Right, A big chunk
of the Dracula book is Dracula doing like real estate transactions.
You know, he's like buying and selling properties and shit.

Speaker 3 (01:32:36):
Yeah, Sophie, Vampire diaries, do we have confirmation they're definitely.

Speaker 1 (01:32:43):
It depends on how old they are, like new vamps now.

Speaker 3 (01:32:47):
But they don't care about real estate because they can't
afford it.

Speaker 1 (01:32:50):
But they do seek out like foreclosured houses, and like
they kind of pick out like the best house in
the neighborhood and they like take it over because they
technically have to be invited in if it's a human
owned house.

Speaker 3 (01:33:02):
Yeah. Yeah, so that part holds up.

Speaker 2 (01:33:04):
Okay, that does hold up. So a couple of things here.
One is that the stories that Bram Stoker grows up
with the vampires, it's both this mix of like he's
a politically savvy, you know, guy who's plugged in. He's
reading a lot of articles that are using the vampires
as a sort of like an insult really to describe
these like rapacious early capitalists. The other place he's going

(01:33:25):
to encounter vampires is in kind of some of the
first horror stories, right, and these are like one of
the guys. Who is responsible for this is Lord Byron right,
who in eighteen nineteen writes an article called The Vampire,
a Tale by Lord Byron, and this is this is
going to spread. This is a very popular story. These
guys are kind of like some of the fact along

(01:33:45):
with Poe, some of the foundational horror authors. And the
Vampire is a really popular story by Lord Byron, and
in fact it spreads. This is kind of a little
bit of an aside, but it was too interesting not
to mention. Byron published this thing in eighteen nineteen, and
it's it takes you know.

Speaker 3 (01:34:03):
I'm actually just.

Speaker 2 (01:34:04):
Going to read a quote from this article in the
conversation quote. The Vampire did away with the Eastern European
peasant vampire of old. It took this monster out of
the forest, gave him an aristocratic lineage, and placed him
into the drawing rooms of the Romantic era England. It
was the first sustained fictional treatment of the vampire and
completely recast the folklore and mythology on which it drew. Now,

(01:34:24):
this story is initially credited to Byron. It's later found
out it was like a friend of his, this guy,
John Polodori. But that doesn't really matter all that much
other than that, like Byron kind of a fame hound.

Speaker 3 (01:34:35):
Yeah, with a cool name. People would rather cool vampire
story be written by Polidori Byron rather than Hey, it's
my boy, Johnny Pulidari, Yeah, j pol Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:34:47):
So one of the things that I didn't know until
I started doing that I was familiar with, like Byron
and him getting credit and being by this other guy.
It's like kind of the first vampire story in a
modern sense. But there's actually another vampire book that gets
that's extremely influential, that comes out before Bramstoker's Dracula, and
it's an American response to the Polidari story, The Vampire. Right,

(01:35:11):
And the title of this is The Black Vampire, A
Legend of Saint Domingo by one Uriah Derek d' rc.

Speaker 3 (01:35:18):
Now.

Speaker 2 (01:35:20):
I think a lot of people are thinking about the
movie Blackula, right, which is a black exploitation movie. But
this is actually this is not we're not talking about
like I don't know, Like, this is actually a serious
and influential work of literature, right, And it's interesting because
it is one of the first popular anti slavery narratives. Right,
This is written in the early eighteen hundreds. It is

(01:35:42):
the first American vampire story is of a black vampire,
and it is also it might be the first short
story to argue in favor of emancipation right. This is
published fourteen years before Lydia Child is going to write
a book called An Appeal in Favor of that class
of Americans called Africans, which is kind of probably the
first big anti slavery book. So it's one of the

(01:36:04):
first popular pieces of literature arguing for emancipation right. It
is not super well known, although you can find some
You can find copies of it online. Now I'm going
to quote again from the conversation here. Darcy's narrative begins
with a slave owner, mister Person in what is now Haiti,
repeatingly trying to kill a ten year old slave. Much

(01:36:24):
as he tries, though the corpse keeps reviving. Person orders
the child to be burned, but the boy moves with
supernatural speed and miraculously causes the slave owner to be
flung into the fire instead. Before mister Persone dies, his
wife informs him that the cradle of their unbaptized son
is empty apart from his skin, bones and nails. Some
years later, we returned to person's widow, Euphemia, who is
in mourning for her third husband. She is visited by

(01:36:47):
two strangers, an extremely handsome black man dressed as a
Moorish prince accompanied by a pale European boy. He charms
her with his elegance and beauty and rapidly wins her
hand in marriage, which takes place that evening. The same night,
he reveals that he is a vampire and converts Euphemia
to his bloodthirsty set. Married to a monster and now
a monster herself, Euphemia learns that the prince's pale young

(01:37:07):
companion is her vanished son, now also a vampire. And
so part of what's going on here is like vampism
is kind of standing in as like this thing that
people are judged for in the same way they're judged
for like interracial marriages and stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:37:21):
Like.

Speaker 2 (01:37:21):
There's a lot going on in this story. It's also
very much like a sympathetic narrative about the Haitian Revolution.
I had no idea this book existed, but this is
the first American vampire right as well as this black
vampire in this early pro emancipation narrative America loves to
forget about great shit.

Speaker 3 (01:37:39):
Yeah, yeah, that's pretty cool. I think that's pretty neat.
It seems relevant, it seems relevant all these different themes.
Huh yeah. And was it not popular at the time
at the time, or.

Speaker 2 (01:37:49):
It is it is it's reasonably popular at the time.
It's not huge, obviously, it gets kind of like forgotten
for the most part because it's not a touchstone. But
it's not like an unsuccessful story, I don't think. But
it's not going to be nearly as successful as Bram
Stoker's Dracula. And you know Bram, one of the things,
he's the manager of a theater, right, that's how he
makes a job money in his early life. So he's

(01:38:10):
he probably he reads, you know, Polidars the Vampire. He
also when he's kind of you know, doing this this
this gig managing a theater, he comes across this book
that had been written in eighteen twenty by a British
politician about the history of Wallachia and Moldavia. And because
lad the Impaler has become this sort of the Shield
of the West type figure and also this demonized figure

(01:38:32):
by the Germans, this book has a lot of stories
about the brutality of lad the Impaler. So, you know,
bram Stoker is becomes he's kind of obsessed with this
area that becomes Romania. He reads a lot about it.
He's also reading these stories about you know, cultured vampires,
getting these like rants about the vampires the symbol of capitalism,
and all of this kind of fuses together to create

(01:38:56):
the Dracula that he writes in his book Dracula in
eighteen nine, right, and that is eighteen ninety something like that.
That's how we get Dracula. That's where he comes from, everybody.

Speaker 3 (01:39:05):
And that's he's just kind of pulling a cool name
from this history book that he's reading. It's too cool.

Speaker 2 (01:39:11):
Yeah, he reads this and he's like, well, that's too
cool a name to not use. I gotta I gotta
call him fucking and he's got This guy is so brutal.
I want this to be a scary monster. Dude, this
guy scary as shit. Like, yeah, let's go for it.

Speaker 3 (01:39:23):
You know, is the is the impaling and the like
staking the vampire? Like are those two suspected two have
been yinked? I think they? I mean, it certainly fits together, right, Yeah,
and then the chocolate cereal with marshmallows, Like does it
where does that come up?

Speaker 1 (01:39:41):
Uh?

Speaker 3 (01:39:41):
Well, marshmallows, Jack, are the blood of uh candy, So
oh okay, yeah, yeah, yeah that makes sense though. Anyway, Jack,
that is the story of the vampire. You gotta got
a name. How you feeling. I'm feeling good, Man, Like
I'm a little bummed out because the guy did impale

(01:40:05):
a lot of like he earned number of people, sure,
like I was not. I think I'm gonna stop trying
to get people to call me Jack the Impaler because like,
I don't think I can impale that many people. Jack,
I just the nickname that ended up sticking. Sleepy Jack
the pumpkinheaded bitch is like terrible, It's not good, and

(01:40:30):
I just wish people would stop calling me that.

Speaker 2 (01:40:32):
But I'm going to tell you something Jack that my
grandma told me, which is that you're never going to
be judged by the number of people you were impaled.
You're always going to be judged by the last person
you impaled, right.

Speaker 3 (01:40:43):
And and the people you impale will not remember how many,
They will remember how you made them feel. Yeah, when
you when you were impaling them. Yeah, Grandma was so wise.
I have so many of her saying written down. He
said that a lot of them, almost all of them

(01:41:04):
had to do with him paling. Actually, it's really strange. Yeah,
what a what a tale. There's a lot of political
stuff happening in the middle in the middle there that
I was not fully aware of or able to wrap
my head around. But yeah, it's Bromstoker. Also an awesome name.

(01:41:28):
This story full of cool names and yeah, and then
people were shitty names that nobody remembers, like Dan the Third,
Dan the Third and John and whatever the fuck whoever.

Speaker 2 (01:41:42):
Is not a bad last name, but he really, he
really was fucking falling down on that first ass name.

Speaker 3 (01:41:48):
Yeah, John, just don't name your kids John John Damn. Yeah.
Isn't there also a John something that wrote vampire vampire
or vamp pull the door or whatever? Come on something
like Brohm Stoker?

Speaker 2 (01:42:06):
Yeah, or Lord Byron. I'm a Lord Byron Truther just
because I would rather say that name than John Polidori.

Speaker 3 (01:42:14):
What a dweb Anyway, it's funny there there are like
conspiracy theories that like Lord Byron actually wrote Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein and like would just like let her take the credit.
This motherfucker like didn't even write the one that he
supposedly write. Lord Byron just put his cool name on things. Yeah,

(01:42:36):
I'm sure there's some Lord Byron heads who are gonna
get mad at me for saying Byron. Yeah, the Byronians,
What a bunch of drips.

Speaker 2 (01:42:46):
Yeah me, I'm a Dan the Third Stand. I'm a
Dan stand baby the third.

Speaker 3 (01:42:52):
Yeah, oh, Dan the Third. All right, everybody? Well, Happy Halloween.
Halloween everyone listening? You know, plug Jack Attack. Yeah, you
can find me over five days a week at a
podcast called The Daily Zeitgeist that I record Miles Gray

(01:43:16):
and we also do an NBA podcast called Miles and
Jack Got Mad Boosties. It is an official partnership with
the NBA that I have to think the NBA regrets. Yeah,
just it's it's a very silly podcast. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:43:34):
You can also check out my partnership with the NBA,
which is has nothing to do with the sport is
an illegal gambling operations. So yeah, check that out too.

Speaker 3 (01:43:46):
There you go. Well, thank you guys for having me on.
And yeah, happy all hallows Eve, Happy Halloween. Everybody go
out and cast some mischief, you know, mayhem.

Speaker 1 (01:43:57):
Yeah, yeah, don't impale any one.

Speaker 3 (01:44:00):
Do not impale. And I'm going to tell you that
look impale if you if your heart tells you it's
the right thing to do. Yeah, yeah, well maybe yeah, yeah,
no I should say that thing. Sophie said, no, don't
do that. Ye'll do that. But it's just there's so
many people. He impaled, going to catch up.

Speaker 1 (01:44:19):
We're ending it.

Speaker 3 (01:44:21):
I believe it's over.

Speaker 1 (01:44:22):
Bye. But Behind the Bastards is a production of cool
Zone Media. Or more from cool Zone Media, visit our
website cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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