Irish author Bram Stoker wrote the quintessential horror story, Dracula during the early to mid-1890s, publishing it in 1897–except Stoker didn’t write it “as fiction but as a warning of a very real evil” according to J.D. Barker’s history of the book.

Many events in the book were not fiction. The ship Dmitri (Demeter in the book) did run aground in Whitby Harbor, and it was carrying crates of dirt that had originated from the European port of Varna. Mr. and Mrs. Jonathan Harker and Dr. Seward were friends of Stoker who supposedly supplied first person accounts of the tale to the author.

Stoker’s publisher, finding the book too frightening for the public, only agreed to publish the book if the first 101 pages were left out along with extensive revisions to the story which took a very clear story of vampires in our mist to one of fictional horror. In the 1980s the original manuscript showed up in rural Pennsylvania with the first 101 pages still missing and was purchased by Paul Allen of Microsoft fame.

Source: Dracula by Bram Stoker. J.D. Barker, Bram Stocker published by Time.com. Graphic: Bram Stoker, circa 1906, Public Domain.