Don't forget the garlic

YOU don't have to buy a castle to enjoy sites with bite, writes Jason Nahrung, as he visits Bran Castle - on sale for $99 million - and other vampire hotspots.

Eerie ... a cemetery and ruined clifftop abbey in the Yorkshire town of Whitby, in England, inspired Bram Stoker's horror story Dracula / AAP

WANT to sleep inside the same walls as Romanian hero Vlad Tepes, the 15th-century prince famed for impaling enemies of the state and inspiring Bram Stoker's Dracula?

According to media reports, for $100 million minus change, you can own the historic Bran Castle near the Romanian town of Brasov.

The castle anchors the country's Dracula tourism trade, even though its association with Vlad the Impaler is somewhat disputed – the prince was perhaps a guest of the chambers or the dungeons, legend has it.

Never let facts get in the way of a good story could be the motto when comes the time for dinner parties in the dungeon or taking the air with guests on the battlements.

The castle, dating to the 14th century, has operated as a museum since the communists seized it in 1956, but now has been returned to the original owners. Dominic von Habsburg, based in the US following the family's expulsion from Romania, has put the castle on the market for pound stg. 40 million.

For Dracula aficionados, there is something special about standing on cobblestones under a Brasov sign that says Vlad Tepes Street, but Romania's Dracula trail – celebrating both Jonathan Harker's literary travels in Romania as well as Vlad's landmarks – is just one way to rub shoulders with famous vampires. Here are some others, all costing quite a bit less than buying Bran.

Melbourne played host to the 2002 movie Queen of the Damned, starring Stuart Townsend as Anne Rice's Lestat and singer Aaliyah as the titular vampire queen. Rosati Restaurant, King's Domain and Montsalvat in Eltham all featured. A quarry at Werribee was a stand-in for California's Death Valley, scene of Lestat's climactic rock concert. Montsalvat's Gothic edifice also played backdrop to the Aussie vampire movie Thirst. The artists' colony is a venue for hire, with its art gallery and cafe open to the public.

Anne Rice rejuvenated the market for vampire stories with her novel Interview with the Vampire, the first of her Vampire Chronicles. Rice is an attraction in her own right in her former home town of New Orleans, with walking tours of the grand, leafy Garden District still visiting the houses she owned before she sold up, moved interstate and started writing about the life of Jesus. New Orleans locations from the film version of Interview also feature on walking tours of the city's venerable French Quarter.

Just outside New Orleans, Oak Alley plantation home, with its impressive 300-year-old oak trees making an avenue to the Mississippi, was also used in the movie (as well as several other, non-vampire ones). It served as the home for Lestat and his vampiric progeny, Louis. Oak Alley is relatively small and simple as plantation homes go. It welcomes tourists, with its rooms set up in period style. It has a cafe and gift shop, and offers B&B accommodation in outbuildings.

Bela Lugosi, star of the 1931 release of Dracula, was buried with one of his famous capes in the Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California. A simple plaque bears his name and the epithet, "Beloved Father". Visitors welcome, at least in daylight hours.

Children of the night from around the world make an annual pilgrimage to the Yorkshire town of Whitby for one of two weekend gatherings – in April and October. The Gothic Weekends are all about concerts, markets and fraternising. The charming town, also a popular port of call for James Cook, is overlooked by a cliffside cemetery and ruined abbey, and was made famous by its inclusion as a setting in Stoker's classic novel, Dracula. The town has a Dracula walk with relevant sites marked, a Dracula walking tour and a museum of sorts – the Dracula Experience – dedicated to the novel.

Irishman Stoker is the subject of the Bram Stoker Dracula Experience, a Dublin museum dedicated to the lives of the writer and his most famous character. For those who want to pay their respects, Stoker's remains are housed at Golders Green Crematorium in London.