Monthly Archives: April 2025

Bistritz. Be careful of my guest--his safety is most precious to me. Should aught happen to him, or if he be missed, spare nothing to find him and ensure his safety. He is English and therefore adventurous. There are often dangers from snow and wolves and night. Lose not a moment if you suspect harm to him. I answer your zeal with my fortune. --Dracula. As I held the telegram in my hand, the room seemed to whirl around me, and if the attentive maitre d'hotel had not caught me, I think I should have fallen. There was something so strange in all this, something so weird and impossible to imagine, that there grew on me a sense of my being in some way the sport of opposite forces--the mere vague idea of which seemed in a way to paralyze me. I was certainly under some form of mysterious protection. From a distant country had come, in the very nick of time, a message that took me out of the danger of the snow sleep and the jaws of the wolf.

A few months before my husband's unfortunate death - I might even say when the shadow of death was over him - he planned three series of short stories for publication, and the present volume is one of them. To his original list of stories in this book, I have added an unpublished Dracula episode. It was originally deleted because of the length of the book, and may be of interest to the many readers of what is considered my husband's most notable work.

This Walpurgis Night, explore a little gem from Bram Stoker's universe that is unfortunately often overshadowed by the attention typically accorded to "Dracula": "Dracula's Guest." This tale, published posthumously, was an oddly interesting find and is thought to have actually been the first chapter of the now-famous novel "Dracula." This eery short story takes place in Germany, wherein it chronicles Jonathan Harker's eerie encounter on Walpurgis Night, a night when witches are said to meet. It is a chilling prelude that foreshadows the horrors to come in the main novel. So why not take this opportunity to revisit that eerie tale when the witches wander tonight?