As perfectly sinister as Bran Castle looks from a distance, its spires spiking up from the bedrock, the interior shows an unmistakable woman's touch, left over from the 1920s, when Romania's Queen Marie kept Bran as her summer home. Yet Bran Castle is now the epicenter of much of Romania's kitschy Dracula tourism trade, outside the southern Transylvania city of Brasov.

False-fanged tourists come from all over the world to climb up the hillside to Bran and absorb some of the Dracula legend in a genuine 14th-century castle. Although some tour books deny that either Vlad II ("Drac") or his son Vlad ("Dracul") the Impaler, had any connection to Bran, Romanian guide Mihal Dimofti contends that Drac manned the castle with his troop for 12 years. His son visited at least once before he was imprisoned there later for two weeks.

"Vlad was very paranoid, and he preferred a tent in the military camps. But of all the castles associated with Vlad, this is the best-preserved."

It's also hard to market a tent site, although the entrepreneurs down the road are doing a good job of it with Vampire Camping, not far from Bran's Dracula disco show.

Vlad was destined to rule Wallochia, a region of the future Romania, just as his father Vlad had. The elder was nicknamed Drac, "the Devil," for an Order of the Dragon Knights emblem he wore around his neck.

Dracul was a fierce warrior who literally took no prisoners. After just a year on the Wallochia throne, the Impaler abdicated in deference to a stronger family. When he mustered enough support to retake the throne, he invited his opponents to a lavish reconciliation feast. His finale? Impaling all 500 of them.

"From that point on he didn't have any rivals, actually," Dimofti said. "Impaling was quite a normal form of execution in the Dark Ages, but Vlad overdid it."

Vlad the Impaler went on to fight the Turks, the Hungarians and the Germans, some of whom sent home accounts of his deeds. It was these reports, illustrated with gruesome woodcuts, that writer Bram Stoker found in the British Museum. His Hungarian friend, Armin Vambery, filled him in on Transylvanian terrain, and that was the closest Stoker got to Romania.

After nearly 600 years, nothing in the tale is too precise, but that hasn't kept Bran Castle from emerging as the vortex of Romania's vampire marketing. Stall holders cling to the foot of the castle rock, selling "Somebody in Transylvania Loves Me" T-shirts without dropping a stitch in their lightning knitting.

The vampire village's bar has created a homespun Haunted Castle, with animated figures and real people jumping out to scare suckers shambling through the dark. To calm your nerves, the bartender in the witch's hat is more than ready to pour a $1 beer or a glass of fiery tuica, plum brandy that's the local emblem of hospitality.

Dracula devotees are now widening their travels in the legendary Land of the Undead, going to Vlad the Impaler's Transylvanian birthplace in Sigisoara, now a restaurant. Some finish by hiring a boat and rowing out to the Snagov Monastery outside Bucharest, where Vlad's bones were discovered in the 20th century.

Vlad's enemies ensnared him in a conspiracy that ended in his death about 1477. Under secrecy of nightfall, the monks of Snagov retrieved his body and buried it within the chapel walls. But they couldn't help Vlad the Impaler with his head, which had been shipped off as a trophy to Sultan Mohamed II in Istanbul.