Tue May 27, 2003 08:12 AM ET

By Dina Kyriakidou

SIGHISOARA, Romania (Reuters) - Bloodied fangs painted on their T-shirts and silver bats dangling from their ears, they swoop to the heart of Transylvania to feed their hunger for the occult.

The guise of academia is swiftly dropped. Ghost stories dominate the dinner table, passionate debate swirls around which character actor played the best Count Dracula and midnight strolls usually head straight to the nearby cemetery.

Folklorists, historians and scientists seeking the origins of the legend of Dracula joined amateur vampirologists from around the globe during the third World Dracula Congress, held this month in Romania's medieval town of Sighisoara.

"Romania can almost be described as a spiritual home for people who enjoy stories of ghosts, witches, werewolves, vampires and the supernatural in general," said Sir Alan Murdie, chairman of England's Ghost Club.

Among the creatures of the dark side, Dracula is king. Few characters in the history of world fiction have attracted a cult following, launched a movie genre or created an entire sub-culture. Bram Stoker's vampire has done all three.

The origins of the blood-sucking count have been shrouded in mystery. Was Romania's 15th century hero Vlad Tepes the Impaler the inspiration? How much did Stoker know about him? Did the superstitions of rural Transylvania dictate the story?

In the diary-form novel, which had mixed reviews when published in 1897, Count Dracula leaves his castle for the rich feeding grounds of bustling London only to return home and be destroyed, hunted down by his cross-bearing foes.

Hundreds of vampire films -- including scores of cheap B-movies, comedies and classics such as Francis Ford Coppola's "Bram Stoker's Dracula" -- followed Hollywood's first silver screen Dracula, starring Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi, in 1931.

BEHIND THE IRON CURTAIN

Hidden behind the Iron Curtain for decades, most Romanians know nothing about the count and his gory exploits. The gothic novel was translated into Romanian only after the 1989 overthrow of communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.

"Everyone in Romania knows Vlad Tepes. Nobody knows Count Dracula," said folklore professor Silviu Angelescu.

He said Vlad was attributed horror characteristics by his enemies, the same way many Romanians believed Ceausescu used the blood of orphaned children to stay young or to sell abroad.

For this and other reasons, communist comrades barely tolerated the count. Few foreigners ventured to a remote 1970s hotel where the count's castle was supposedly located, in the Borgo Pass near the northern town of Bistrita.

The Wallachian Prince Vlad, who defended his realm against invading Ottoman armies and brought order by swiftly killing criminals, had never ventured this far north in the Carpathians.

He was notorious for his cruelty but he was no vampire and vampires are not part of Romania's superstitions, which include the belief that garlic protects from evil.

"Interestingly, a Romanian scholar presented a medieval paper instructing Transylvanian priests how to handle widespread rumors the dead were rising from their graves," Murdie said.

Vlad Tepes is believed to have been born in Sighisoara around 1431 to Vlad Dracul or Dragon. The young Vlad was named Dracula -- meaning son of Dracul -- by his father but in Romanian the word also means the devil.

Popular culture has long associated Vlad, who liked to dine while watching impaled Turkish prisoners writhe on wooden stakes, with Count Dracula, who feeds on human blood and can die only if a wooden stake strikes his heart.

"BUNCH OF NONSENSE"

The connection has been picked up by academia, with some writers trying to link Transylvania's superstitions with the book, to the dismay of some congress participants.

"It's basically a bunch of nonsense," said retired American professor Elisabeth Miller, a Dracula scholar long infatuated with the subject. "Stoker borrowed the name Dracula for his vampire but knew very little about the real Dracula."

The Anglo-Irish writer, a London theater manager who penned his novels in his spare time, never set foot in Transylvania. He got most of his information from contemporary travel and occult writers.

A box of Stoker's notes shows one of his sources was the 1885 article "Transylvanian Superstitions" by Scottish author Emily Gerard, who also wrote the Transylvanian travel book "Land beyond the Forest."

Miller said Stoker did not even know that Vlad impaled his victims. His count is not Romanian but Hungarian, not uncommon in Transylvania, once part of the Austro-Hungarian empire.