At the beginning, the Bran Castle has been a fortress built by the Teutonic Knights Order in 1212. Vlad Tepes (‘Vlad the Impaler’) used the Bran Castle as a starting point for his incursions through Transylvania. The Americans established in Romania visit this castle especially during Halloween, being one of the few places where you may feel the atmosphere of this holiday in our country.

The legend of Dracula became a myth in the 19th and the 20th centuries. This legend is connected to the historical figure of Romanian Count Vlad the Impaler, famous for his unlimited cruelty. The scripts from the 15th century have told his legend as two different images of the Count, one which presents his as a tyran and the other as a severe, unmerciful ruler but who loved the country and who was brave, a deadly enemy of the Turks.
Born in Sighisoara in 1431, Vlad the Impaler Dracula was a ruler who took care of his people and country, but times remind him with fear and terror.
They say that one day he went to battle and left his beloved wife, Elisabeth, alone, inside the castle. The Turks thought of a deep laid scheme and the queen kills herself which switches out the wrath. Vlad turns home and finds his wife in a blood bath. Filled with pain and rage he blasphemes God and stabs the cross which starts to bleed, and then he sells his soul to the Devil for his immortality.

The name of Dracula comes from impaling people, one of the most terrifying ways to die, being his favourite method of execution. In 1431 the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund de Luxembourg invests Dracula's father, Vlad, with the Dragon order, a knightly Order designed for kings, dedicated to battle against the Turks. The emblem of the Order was a dragon, symbol of the Devil.

Passing from Dracula, a king who punished with cruelty the villains, to Dracula the Vampire was made by associating the descriptions from the German stories that suggested the king's passion for bloodshed, as it happened when the king ate surrounded by the dead bodies of the noblemen who were impaled, and the popular beliefs regarding the ghosts, collected from Transylvania by the Austrian soldiers.