The little known shipwreck that inspired Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’

Not exactly a haunting, but a little history behind one of the most famous horror stories ever written, no not Twilight that is horrific for other reasons.

In the summer of 1890, Irish novelist Bram Stoker was on holiday in the seaside town of Whitby. Despite spending barely a month there it left a deep impression on him and his later novel Dracula was heavily influenced by it. Perhaps already researching his famours novel Stoker visited the Whitby Museum, the local library and the harbor. He was particularly interested in shipwrecks in the area, especially the Dmitry, a ship that had been shipwrecked five years earlier.

The Dmitry was a cargo vessel that had set sail from Narva, modern-day Estonia, in 1885. On October 24, the Dmitry was one of two ships run ashore at Whitby by a violent storm that came out of nowhere, according to newspaper reports at the time. The crew of the Dmitry remained onboard the ship hoping for an opportunity to dock. Onlookers watched from the shore as “the sea beat savagely against the vessel. Her masts gave way and fell with a crash over her side, and the vessel herself began to break up.”'

There is no account of how but all seven crew members of the Dmitry were saved. The Dmitry would later serve as the inspiration for The Demeter, the ship in Stoker’s Dracula that brings the titular character to the shores of England.
In the novel the Demeter originated in Varna (an anagram for Narva, where the Dmitry originated), and similarly carried “ballast of silver sand, with only a small amount of cargo—a number of great wooden boxes filled with mould.”

Stoker interviewed fishermen in Whitby harbor, where he was told of mysterious and not so mysterious deaths at sea. From the fishermen and gravestones in the local cemetery Stoker reportedly made note of some 90 names to use in his story, including the surname “Swales.” In the novel Dracula Stoker writes “Mr. Swales was found dead… his neck being broken.”

Photo: The wreck of the Dmitry at Tate Hill Beach in Whitby in 1885, by Frank Meadow Sutcliffe.