Dracula's Guest

"Dracula's Guest" is a short horror story by the Irish author Bram Stoker. It was first published in 1914, some two years after Stoker's death, as part of the book Dracula's Guest and Other Weird Stories, an anthology of Bram Stoker's short stories selected by his widow Florence.

It is widely believed that "Dracula's Guest" was originally intended to be the first chapter of Dracula and was removed from the novel because either Stoker or his publisher believed it to be superfluous to the novel. Analysis of the manuscript of Dracula indicates that a first chapter was removed from it. It is likely, however, that Stoker rewrote that excised first chapter before it was published as "Dracula's Guest".

The story's narrator and protagonist is an unnamed Englishman who is spending some time in Munich, Germany before travelling on to Transylvania as the guest of Count Dracula. Ignoring the warnings of a German coachman, the Englishman decides to go off on his own in the direction of a long-deserted village. The coachman says that the place is "unholy" and that it was abandoned because the dead did not stay truly dead there.