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The story of Count Dracula, the blood-sucking vampire of Bram Stoker's classic gothic horror novel and the subsequent star of a multitude of stage and film presentations, is well-known: a creature which comes alive at night when everyone else is asleep to feast on the warm blood of young maidens before returning to its coffin home at dawn; one which can be repelled by garlic and crosses but killed only by a stake through the heart. What is not so well known is that much of Stoker's original 1897 novel is set in Essex - in the Thameside village (as it was then) of Purfleet, near Grays.

Why should Bram Stoker have chosen such a seemingly insignificant settlement as the place where the Transylvanian vampire makes his English home? Could it be that the fiction of Dracula is based on some horrifying fact? Does Purfleet perhaps have a history of vampire associations? Are the characters and the locations in the novel drawn from actual people and places in the village? Or is there a more mundane reason for this Essex location being Stoker's choice?

This book sets out to answer all these questions and more to provide once and for all an answer to the mystery of why Bram Stoker should wish to set such a horrific blood-curdling story in a quiet Essex Thameside village...