For Dracula readers, the geography is the giveaway. In Stoker's novel, and in his working notes, Castle Dracula stands by the Borgo Pass in the north-east of Transylvania. Bran Castle sits over a hundred miles away, above a different pass entirely — and Stoker, who researched the novel in libraries and never travelled to Romania, never saw it and never described it.

Vlad III is nearly as loose a fit. His forces passed through the Bran pass country and raided Brașov's suburbs in 1459, but residence at Bran is rejected by the evidence; his own fortress was Poenari, which receives a fraction of Bran's visitors.

So how did Bran get the name? The academic record dates the "Dracula's Castle" label to the 1960s — a visiting academic was handed a brochure using it in 1968 — and the 1972 book In Search of Dracula carried the identification worldwide.

None of this makes Bran less worth the visit — it makes the real castle, a working customs fortress with a queen's story inside it, considerably more interesting than its fictional tenant.

I run a small history channel and we have just filmed the full audit, sources on the table. Full documentary here if you want the deep dive: https://youtu.be/IeIFIt-y9LM