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| - Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' is brought to life in this walk-through attraction - a series of 10 scenes using sounds and new electronic special effects, eerie life-size models and live actors. A cape weighing 56 kilos and worn by Christopher Lee in his 2nd 'Dracula' film is on show. They say it is an educational and historical tour, ideal for school partiesI think more of an old fashioned fun house thing.
Dracula and Whitby were thrown together in a most dramatic manner, to say the least. A terrifying storm lashed the coastline and the Russian schooner, Demeter, somehow managed to gain the safety of the harbour. The Dailygraph newspaper summed up the strange event thus:
The searchlight followed her, and a shudder ran through all who saw her, for lashed to the helm was a corpse, with a drooping head, which swung horribly to and fro at each motion of the ship. No other form could be seen on deck at all. A great awe came on all as they realized that the ship, as if by a miracle, had found the harbour, unsteered save by the hand of a dead man! However, all took place more quickly than it takes to write these words. The schooner paused not, but rushing across the harbour, pitched herself on that accumulation of sand and gravel washed by many tides and many storms into the south-east corner of the pier jutting under the East Cliff, known locally as Tate Hill Pier. But, strangest of all, the very instant the shore was touched, an immense dog sprang up on deck from below, as if shot up by the concussion, and running forward, jumped from the bow on the sand. Making straight for the steep cliff, where the churchyard hangs over the laneway to the East Pier so steeply that some of the flat tombstones - 'thruff-steans' or 'throughstones,' as they call them in the Whitby vernacular - actually project over where the sustaining cliff has fallen away, it disappeared in the darkness, which seemed intensified just beyond the focus of the searchlight.
Bram Stoker found some of his inspiration for Dracula after staying in the town. He stayed in a house on the West Cliff (the Crescent).
Stoker found a general history book at the Whitby Library (which was near the Quayside originally). He tells us so at the top of a sheet of his notes taken from William Wilkinson's 'An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia' (1820).
These notes contain the only reference to Dracula (the historical figure) in all of Stoker's papers. There seems to be little doubt that Whitby is where he discovered the name.
Prices
Adult £1.95
Child £1.50
Concession £1.50
Family £6.00 (2 adults & 2 children)
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