RedHanded - ShortHand: Vlad the Impaler - The Real Dracula

Episode Date: October 2, 2026

To round launch our month of spooky eps, our Halloween ShortHand covers the life and afterlife of one of the most sinister, blood-thirstiest bastards in all of human history: Vlad the Impaler, otherwise known as Vlad Dracula.We dig into the legends surrounding the savage ruler – including an al fresco lunch among hundreds of thousands of twitching, impaled enemies – and see how they tie into the modern, blood-sucking vampire legend. Happy Halloween…--Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesYouTube - Full-length Video EpisodesTikTok / Instagram

Oh my God, my neck. Oh, God, what have you done? I don't know. My head felt weird this morning when I woke up, like the back of my head. I was trying to figure it out and I was like, oh my God, did I fall over? Like, what happened? And then I realised, no, I was in the hairdresser yesterday. And it's from the, like, sink.

I see. But I was very relieved when I worked that out. Well, there you go. Well, anyway, hello everybody. Hello, and welcome. Cold open. Yes. A cold open from two warm women.

So. So warm. Because it is balmy in London today. I know you are listening to this in October, but we are recording this in September. Yes. But don't let it dash the illusion of the festive spirit. No, I'm not feeling it.

We are here. We're doing this in September because for once in our fucking lives, we continue to remain ahead of the game. And also, because we just love October. Spooky Month here at Red-Handed. So if you have been listening, you will know that we have already covered all myriad of fucking exorcisms.

We have, yeah. witches, more exorcisms, and even occult-obsessed Nazi soldiers in an ancient castle in the black forest. So to cap it all off on this spookiest of all days, because today, Hannah, the day that our beautiful listeners are listening to this, is in fact Halloween day. All Hallows Eve. All Hallows Eve. So, happy Halloween, everybody, and let's get into it, because today we are going to be talking about one of the most sinister, bloodthirsty people in all of human history. and unpumped, because we are talking about Dracula, right? And no, we are not talking about the pale, slightly camp, garlic, averse count in a cape.

We're talking about Vlad Tshapesh, Voivod or Valacia, otherwise known to his mates as Vlad the Impaler, or eventually, Vlad Dracula. And unlike the vampiric count, who waits patiently outside to be invited in, this Dracula didn't wait for an invitation to tear through Central Europe, inflicting untold suffering as he went. He is believed to have impaled tens of thousands of his writhing enemies onto spikes while they were still alive. Now that's the real deal when it comes to spooky ship.

So here is your final, terrifying, shorthand. Hannah and I have, in fact, a few years ago, been to Romania, very specifically to Transylvania and very specifically to Vlad the Impalers house. Yes, I guess we have. Well, there's castle. Well, no.

So I think we went to Sigashwara because that's where he was born. Yes. And there was like an insignia on the door of the dragon. Yeah. And then the castle we went to, I think is just the castle that the castle in Dracula is based on

and actually just like was really boring. It was some like princess or something. But we did have great soup. We fantastic soup, but no good pictures. Because the only place you can take a picture of that castle is some really grim car park. We tried so hard. It was a fucking cool castle as well. But yeah, so we did have the very intense pleasure of going to Romania. We had a fantastic

time. Transylvania lived up to all expectations and Sigishavara was absolutely beautiful. Anyway, we're well off track. This is not under the duvet. Let's get back to it. Let's get back to it. And let's get back to the start, which is at the start of the 15th century, where the country we now know as Romania was actually three informal principalities, Moldavia, Valkia, and the most famous Transylvania. And the Maldavians, the Valakians and the Transylvanians all had a pretty rough time defending their land. They were stuck slapbang in between Christian Europe and the Muslim Ottoman Empire, and they just couldn't catch a break. These were sites of endless power struggles and ideological clashes and plenty of bloodshed. Now Vlad, the guy we're talking about

today, Vlad the 3rd, was, surprise, surprise, son of Vlad the 2nd, ruler of Velakia. Vlad the 2nd came from a respected line of leaders, the founders of Velakia, in fact. He belonged to a crusading Christian order, which marched under the banner of a dragon, and became known because he lives in Game of Thrones, apparently, as the order of the dragon. And as the leader, Vlad 2nd, earned the nickname Dracul, which, no points for guessing, means dragon. Yeah. Since Wallachia was Christian and big buddy, big pals with Hungary and the rest of Europe, their original enemy was, of course, the Muslim Ottomans.

I only very, this is very embarrassing for me. I only very recently learned that Attila the Hun was from Hungary. Oh, there you go. I didn't know that. I think I get confused with Genghis Khan. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, Valacia, their mates with Hungary, they're not so interested in hanging out with the Ottomans. But Vlad Sr. was only interested in one.

thing. And it was an ideology, it was power. He was known to be fickle and would switch sides on a penny if he thought his team was starting to lose. And he had three sons, Mercia, Vlad the Third, and Radu, who would go on to be known as Radu the Hanson, which is a much better name to go down in history than the impaler like his bro. But most people probably haven't heard of Radu the Hansom, have they? I wish I had. I have, because I'm a dog. I've watched this documentary so many times. Now, Vlad III was born in the small mountain town of Sigishwara in Transylvania, humble beginnings for one of history's most savage warlords.

But to be fair to him, it was a rocky start. His father's land was constantly at war, and young Vlad would often accompany Vlad senior on diplomatic missions across the state. And one of these meetings would have a devastating impact on the young boy. when young Vlad was but 11, his father headed out to Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, now Istanbul. And Vlad II had decided not to join the Ottomans in their new war with Transylvania, but he wanted to go to visit the Sultan to make sure that they were still big, body, big pals and everything was fine. And he brought with him his two younger sons, 11-year-old Vlad and 7-year-old Raji the handsome.

Big mistake. And when they all arrived in the court of Scyl. Sultan Murad II. The Sultan didn't quite buy that Vlad the second was still on his side because he quite literally was like, no. He had, after all, done plenty of Ottoman sieging in his time. So the Sultan said that Vlad could go as long as his two sons were left behind, as some sort of collateral one would assume.

Yeah, they're like, if you leave your sons here with me, you're going to be much less likely to wage war against the Ottomans again. Vlad's saw no problem with this, and left his kids behind as an insurance policy. And so, Vlad III and Hanson Radu were kept in a dark citadel. They were kept a prisoner there, and it sat atop a rocky precipice with a steep fall below. They were beaten and tortured by guards, and they grew to hate the Ottomans.

It's a very dark origin story so far, although the captors also taught the boys' lessons in the art of war, science and philosophy, presumably in between beatings. Young Vlad also developed a knowledge of twaseless. torture and learnt the power of violence as a means of control. Especially when his father, Vlad III, really pushed his luck by joining Hungary in a war against the Ottomans. Now the boys were spared and after five years of imprisonment were finally released. But it wasn't the warm welcome home that Vlad would have hoped for because he returned to a broken Velakia.

It had been invaded by Hungary with help from a violent coup. carried out within Valaccia by its aristocratic ruling class known as the boyars. Vlad II Dracall was cut down in the marshes behind his house and his eldest son Mercy was tortured, blinded and buried alive. So for his son, Vlad III was time for revenge. With his father and older brother slaughtered, Vlad II set out on a mission to take back his birthright and cover the land with blood.

He became known by his armies as Dracula, son of the dragon, and he set out on a series of bloody campaigns. And after eight years of relentless violence, he finally reclaimed the throne of Wallachia. So you might think that having got what he wanted, Vlad Dracula's score had been settled. But you, my sausage would be wrong, not by a long shot.

And the next move, in a lifetime of retaliation, happened over dinner. On Easter Sunday, 1457, he held a banquet for loads of local nobleman. Over 500 members of rival families and loads of boyars were invited to eat together and let bygones be bygones. They arrived at his castle called Pohanari in the mountains and ate a grand feast and just as they finished their last bites, they were all seized by Dracula's men. The boyars and their wives were attacked en masse and their twitching bodies were impaled. on spikes. Some young, able-bodied men were manacled and chained to each other and marched northward

by Dracula's men, ten years after they'd killed his father and his brother. Vlad got his Rewenge. According to some chronicles, there was a second dinner party a few years later. Vlad sent invites out to all the elderly, poor and sick from across his realm. Apparently, having learned absolutely nothing from his first come dine with me bloodbath, They all turned up, ready to eat. It's literally the red wedding. Yeah.

And when they arrived at this dinner party, they were shown into a grand wooden banqueting hall and given roast meats and fine wine. Then Vlad's soldiers sealed the doors and windows and set the whole room on fire. All the people inside perished in their hundreds. But in case that sounds heartless, here's Vlad's explanation.

I did this so no one will be poor in my realm. Is that how that work? I mean, if you do kill all the poor people, you don't have poor people. Yes, famously so. Yes. Then, high up in Castle Dracula, he set out his new plans, which was to fuck up the Ottomans because he hated them. But the Ottomans had an army three times the size of flats.

However, he was fearless and war-hungry, and he was not afraid to play dirty. When Sultan Mehmed II sent some envoys to see a family, Vlad would pledge his allegiance. This is really making me want to watch 300. Vlad had those envoys impaled on spikes and displayed as a warning. Spiking the messenger. Mm-hmm. And then he set his men out to poison wells and burn crops. He even paid diseased Velakian men to infiltrate and infect the enemy. After battle, Vlad's enemies were often disemboweled, beheaded, skinned, or

boiled alive. And another favorite method from the son of the dragon was foot. flaying, which is fun. So basically what happens is skin is slowly removed from a victim's feet, and then the skinless feet would be rubbed in salt. And then goats would be brought

up to the victim to lick at their salty feet with their rough goate tongues. The last bit's almost whimsical if isn't so horrible. More reports from the time talk of children being roasted alive and then force fed to their mothers, before their mother's breasts were cut off and fed to their husbands.

But Vlad's absolute fave was impalement. And here's how he would do it. A wooden or a metal pole would be impaled into the living victim usually through their genitals and come out through their mouth, shoulders or their neck. Maybe they were aiming for the mouth and maybe they didn't get it quite there all the time. Maybe it's easier said than done.

Especially when somebody's writhing around. Right, when they're alive, yes. Once impaled, the victim would squirm and writhe in pain until they finally died. it would take hours or even days. And so, Dracula earned himself a new nickname. Vlad Tespish, which means in my flawless Romanian, Vlad the Impala.

As his power grew, so did Vlad's brutality. In 1459, Vlad's armies attacked the Transylvanian city of Brashov. Whoa, whoa. Yeah, we went there. Hold tight. It was great. And it also in the Cold War was called. Stalin.

Oh yes, yes, yes, yes. And once there, Vlad's armies ransacked the town, burning buildings and pillaging as they went. And when they were done, they impaled, again, hundreds of men, women and children on the hill. Never one to miss a dinner party. According to some accounts, Dracula requested that a table be set up outside.

And there, he had a little picnic among the forest of writhing bodies. and this picnic gets even worse because reportedly he even dipped a little bread in the fresh blood that trickled down from one victim. And then there was the battle of Turcovistay. Things between the Sultan Mehmed II and Vlad Dracula the Impalor had been rocky for quite some time. And when the Sultan found out that Vlad had been buddying up to the King of Hungary

behind his back he was not a happy bunny. They began a series of battles across the area, but none of them were conclusive. And then, one day in 1462, the sultan led his army out of the city. He wanted to cut the Valkian army down once and for all, but he didn't even reach the battlefield. Because on their way,

the army was stopped in their tracks by an unimaginably gruesome sight. A sick forest of stakes stretched out as far as the eye could see, and almost 24,000 Ottoman men, women and children hung lifeless from these stakes. Babies had been impaled with their mothers. Some had had their limbs cut off before they were skewed, and birds were said to have made nests in spilled entrails. And all 24,000 of them had been killed by Vlad in his invasion of Bulgaria

and left there as a warning. understandably it worked Mehmet and his men were horrified and quickly retreated to Constantinople I bloody would A little while later a group of Ottoman envoys was sent to check in on relations Vlad asked them to remove their turbans

this bit so gross and when they said that it was custom for them to actually keep their turbans on so no thank you Vlad nailed the turbans to their heads with three spikes. Lovely. He just really knows how to treat his guess.

So after years of this merciless brutality, it eventually got a bit much for everyone. And finally, Vlad was forced into exile. He was imprisoned by the Ottomans, escaped and captured again by the Hungarians. When he got out, he actually had one final go at reclaiming the Valkian throne.

But this time, Dracula's seeming invincibility had finally faded. Vlad and his soldiers were ambushed and killed in battle. His corpse was cut into pieces and paraded around Constantinople and his head was delivered on a spike directly to Sultan Mehmet II. Later Vlad's army was said to have gathered his remains and buried them, but the location of where they buried them faded from memory. And rumours even spread that he had escaped death once again.

Was it Jinkas Khan where when he was buried, all of the people who buried him were killed? Were killed, so nobody would know. Yeah. So to this day, we don't know where Jenghis Khan was buried. Thank you, real dictators. But still, that's the end of Vlad, Dracula, the impaler, Prince of Velakia. So let's get to the bit we've all been waiting for vampires. The first vampire was Judas Ascariot.

Oh, yes, yes, yes, for all the silver and whatnot. So apparently the first ever vampire legends come from Bulgaria about a thousand years ago. They were originally much more ghost-like, lacking a physical body and drifted around villages spreading disease. As the Holy Roman Empire took over, it spread the legend across Europe, and the mythology grew, and picked up some new features. In the 17th century, there was a well-meaning but mostly way off base stepped towards science and reason. and people's grasp of anatomy was still pretty shaky. Throughout Europe, people believed that blood was the essence of life itself and many were consuming it for its supposed medicinal properties.

Some even considered vampirism to be real, but a curable disease. So, the vampire gained the attributes of being an undead, risen corpse who needed to feed on blood to survive. Have you watched what we do in the shadows, not the film the TV series? Not the TV series. It's so good. I know. I don't know what I haven't watched it.

To be perfectly honest with you. Incredible. I will watch it. And the guy who, I God, I can't remember his name, but the guy who, he's a British guy, it's got like a little goatee. You've recognised. Yeah, anyway, yeah. I'm his celebrity crush.

Oh. What? Tell, explain. It was an article. Someone tagged me in it on Twitter. Oh. And he was like, yeah, like redhead of podcasts with big boobs. Beautiful.

So I'm famous now. Excellent. Wonderful news. Okay, so let's go back to vampires. In the UK, in the early 19th century, the whole vampire business got a new Gothic glow up. Victorians absolutely loved vampire shit. They loved dead shit.

They really did. Watch out for an episode coming up in November all about Victorians. Oh, yeah. They are fascinating. They are fascinating. Now, Victorians probably loved vampires, not just because they loved dead shit like Hannah correctly identified, but probably because they were also super xenophobic.

And the story of a sinister, foreign leech feeding on the healthy, prosperous natives, was just music to their ears. Gothic literature was all the rage, with stories set in dark, foreign lands, in castles and caves, featuring all kinds of sinister beasts. The writer and physician and Lord Byron's personal doctor, John Pollydory was the first Britain to really make a name for vampires in his 1819 book

The Vampire, Belt with the Y. It was actually written in the same ghost story competition that produced Frankenstein. That's so fucking cool. Isn't that cool? If you don't know the story, Lord Byron, Mary Shelley and presumably this doctor and some other people are all like

hold up in some stately home somewhere and there's a massive storm. Yeah. So they can't go outside and Lord Byron's like, why don't we? just write ghost stories. And then Mary Shelley's just like, bam, Frankenstein. I know, it's just perfect, perfect gothic book porn. It is.

It truly is book porn. And who is Lord Byron's daughter? Um, I thought like I knew. Who is Lord Byron's daughter? Ada Lovelace. Oh, yes. The mother of coding. Yes, yes, yes.

Look out for that. It's coming in November. Her mum's not Byron's sister, is she? No. He was very briefly married to the, I believe, Duchess of Lovelace. but obviously it didn't last very long because he was more of the little boy persuasion. And also his sister. Yes.

So yeah, vampires had become a bit of a gothic staple in Victorian times, even before being immortalised, pun very heavily intended, in their most famous guys of all. Bram Stoker's Dracula. So what does this blood-sucking incubus have to do with an ancient Romanian warlord? Well, that depends who you ask. Whitby is a quaint seaside town in Yorkshire, and Stoker was working on his third book about an Austrian count he called Count of Whampier, and he took a very much-needed beach break. While there, he checked out the library and found a book written by a British diplomat in Bucharest, and it was all about this diplomat's visit to the Principality of Volaccia.

And there Stoker read about Vlad III, his violent nature, the name Dracula, and the false etymology that the name, meant devil, well of course it means dragon. And Stoker thought the name was perfect. So he moved his whole story to Romania, and the rest is history. And quick sidebar, Whitby has recently become an unlikely designation for Goths. There's a Whitby Goths, there's a Whitby Goth weekend every summer.

And they all gather there in black lace and have a day out at the seaside, which is quite nice. It is. I am convinced, I can't remember if I told this before. I'll walk my dog in the cemetery near my house. I'm convinced there is a chapter of the Church of Satan that meet there. I'm convinced, because I see them all the time,

and they're all like very goffy, and they're just sort of sick and sit in a second. I'm like, are you doing Church of Satan? Can I come? You should ask. I should ask. I keep wanting to flash them the horns every time I walk past. It's hard to make friends in your 30s.

You just have to ask. It's so much easy. Now I've got a dog. Fuck me. I've got loads of friends. There you go. Just let Mabel run over to them. She's black.

That's true. A little black dog. They'll love it. So getting back to how Vlad and Dracula are related. Some say that Bramstoke. just found a cool name in a book, thought Transylvania, sounded creepy, and basically just made the rest up.

But there are other connections. There are records of Stoker talking to the historian, Herman Bamberger. Great name. That's made up. That's just not real. I'm sorry. Herman Bamberger.

Herman the German? Herman the German. Herman Bamberger. Berman Hamburger. Sorry, Heembourg. and you are a very important historian, and apparently, like we said, there are records of Stoker speaking to him,

and he is the one who is thought to have filled the author in on Dracula's atrocities, and his more savage acts. Some say that the legend of Vlad's disappearing remains also inspired Count Dracula's immortality. An other site, an apocryphal story from the battlefield. It said that during a siege, on a particularly misty night,

Vlad III had released an army of rabid bats on the Ottoman army. The mist was heavy and visibility was poor. And according to the legend, it seemed to the Ottomans, as though the entire army in front of them had transformed into a horde of bats. And perhaps that's what led to the belief that Dracula himself could shape-shift. So fucking cool. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Now, obviously, I'm here to shit on your brain,

because all of these links should be taken with a very large pinch of garlic salt. Mmm, delicious. It is delicious, isn't it? So is chicken salt. Any, just salt. Yeah. Just can't get enough. I also started buying these little yellow tubs from Tesco.

You can get them anywhere though. And it's just aromat and it just tastes like, it just tastes like chicken stock cubes. And it's delicious. And you just sprinkle it on everything. Makes everything taste better. Oh, that's a good tip. And it's like a pound. It's great.

Probably full of MSG, but whatever. All the best things are. Exactly. What is more likely is that once the name had been linked to the novel, people started to look for similarities between Count Dracula and Vlad the Impaler, and then they retrofitted the legacy onto the fictional count. And as for the bloody tales of Vlad the Impaler, they are kind of inflated as well.

Many accounts were written by enemies, and like the Bat Story, were probably subject to a lot of word-of-mouth infamy and gruesome legend. Lots of the more sensational stories come from Germany, and Russian pamphlets distributed after Vlad's death. And those 20-odd thousand impaled Ottomans, well, they were real. And the exact number is actually part of historical record. So I think that's enough.

The bats, whatever. So Vlad was an impaler, and he was very, very good at it as well. And he still hailed as a national hero in Romania. Yeah, we went on a walking tour, and they were like, yeah, we fucking love him. And they love him for his victories and his conquests, defending Jesus Christ and the baby donkey from the threat of Ottoman rule. But in reality, Vlad the Impala was a savage, unrelenting monster

of a kind that hasn't existed for hundreds of years. And as far as we're concerned, that's a lot more frightening than the ghost stories. Yeah, and look, I'm not here to do like revisionist history on Vlad The Impelor, but I have obviously read quite a lot about how he has perceived in that part of the world. And it is tricky because, like, it was an incredibly bloody time. Yeah. Like the Ottomans, the Christians, like we said at the start, everyone was tearing lumps out of each other.

And all of these kingdoms that existed, the innocent people that lived there were the ones getting absolutely trampled on by just warlord after warlord. And so if you did live at that time in a place like that, and then you had this man who, by today's standards, we're like disgusting, a violent monster. but he was there to defend your land, your people, and he did whatever he thought he needed to to keep you safe. You can't understand why they're like, we're just going to get murdered by the Ottomans or the other Christians. At least he's murdering them. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's complicated. It's complicated. But a fascinating connection between him and Dracula and how that happened, I think it's even more interesting that we don't actually know. Yeah, me too. Yeah. Good for you, Vlad. Yeah.

All right, we will see. you next time on Shorthand and Amazon Music Exclusive for something else next week don't know what it is because we're in November so I'll be depressed because it's dark.

You can check back next time and we'll see you then. Bye!