Most people don’t know this but Bram Stoker’s famous vampire, Dracula was named after a real person: Vlad III Drăculea, one of the most ferocious rulers the world has ever known.
Vlad III was a brutal, blood thirsty ruler of Walachia (present-day Romania) who lived between 1431 and 1476. During his ruling, he committed numerous atrocities with the most famous being the impaling of his enemies on stakes in the ground which he then, let to die. This earned him the nickname Vlad the Impaler.
Vlad’s brutality was Stoker’s inspiration behind the naming of the notorious vampire, Dracula.