Atlas Of Cursed Places

We're not supposed to be here.

You ever have those moments when you step back and you wonder,

Who convinced you that this was going to be a good time?

Well, in this case, it was me.

I convinced myself that we should go to romania and

Look at the curse of vlad the impaler.

I thought it could be hilarious,

You know, booze it up in bucharest,

You know, hit the clubs, have a few laughs,

Hear a scary story, but then.

You end up freezing in an ancient transylvanian forest

And no, I didn't get a groupon for a romania folk dance experience.

These are real witches,

Wielding black magic in the

Same place vlad the impaler,

Supposedly, had his head chopped off.

That's cool, it's all good.

I'm sure everything will be just fine.

As a writer and explorer, as a citizen of the world,

I've seen things that defy understanding and sometimes,

When there's no good explanation,

We blame the supernatural, but the truth is,

I believe in science.

Taking off.

So, what happens if you bring the full light of

Modern science onto ancient curses?

You wind up at a seance in the woods with romanian witches

And follow a vampire hunter to his place of business.

That's what happens.

They said, "please, help us."

So he's not afraid of.

No, he's not.

Good luck.

You're gonna need it.

Transylvania, the name conjures it all,

Dense pine, impassable craggy cliffs,

Thick ground fog.

This is the mythic forest of your childhood nightmare.

Bran castle, billed as the last standing relic of

A man some call, dracula.

The story goes that romania's bottomless well of tyranny,

Catastrophe and overall human misery,

Can all be traced back to one terrifying ruler and

His supernatural evil.

Ah. Okay.

So, have you ever heard of the curse of vlad tepes?

Yeah.

He lost his wife, he lost his dynasty,

He lost his family and he signed a document in order to

Bring a curse down against his enemy,

And he promised that he will return,

That was his curse and I will take revenge against those

That they betrayed me.

He was killed and his body was buried in the monastery nearby bucharest.

Later on, when they opened the coffin,

They never found his body, which is quite creepy.

Yeah, right.

You do start to wonder what if he's coming back again?

So you'd be worried if you were his enemy?

You might be a little nervous.

- Oh yeah, yeah. - Yeah, yeah.

Vlad spent much of his life constructing a fearsome persona.

In some ways, his reputation was so extreme that it haunts

The entire world.

Gross.

Oh my god, three days?

Yeah. Yeah.

What are some of the other ways he would do it?

Wow.

He sounds like a really nice guy.

Yeah, fascists always say that.

Once he took power in 1448, vlad began a lifelong battle

To protect his country from invaders,

From all sides; hungarians, rival nobles but,

Most of all, the ever expanding,

Ruthless ottoman empire, vlad's mortal enemy.

The other kings and rulers of his time had surrendered and

They all paid tribute, but vlad fought on,

With a sheer hatred that defies description.

Perhaps because the ottoman's had kidnapped as a child and,

By the time his father and brother were killed,

His hatred had grown so virulent that we still make

Tv shows about him, 600 years later.

Vlad, himself, he was right here.

Yeah, right here.

Amazing.

Wow.

You know, 600 years ago, there was a real person in here.

Vlad the impaler, looked out his little window,

Thought about revenge.

Now this little beauty here can be yours for $7.

No one ever lets a curse stand in the way of profit.

There you go.

But the truth is, we're all here because vlad's fearsome

Reputation so inflamed imaginations,

Including an irish writer named, bram stoker.

Bram never even visited romania,

But he used vlad's name and legend as the basis for one of

The most potent horror symbols of all time.

There's no escaping the vampire in pop culture,

But the question I have is pretty simple,

Is the curse of vlad real?

Tell me about this letter from vlad tepes.

Kind of a cool way of punctuating requests, you know,

"hey man, give me a beer, or I'm gonna lay your kingdom to waste and

Your kids are gonna rot in hell for eternity."

There you go.

Do you think vlad's curse has affected bucharest?

Caradja's plague, that was the prince who came

After vlad tepes, was killed.

Yes.

Bucharest is already on edge after the mythic

Vlad the impaler has cursed them for all eternity.

And then, after years of devastating fires,

Earthquakes, wars, a ruler appointed by his sworn enemy,

The ottoman empire, assumes power.

And, guess what happens next?

The palace and the center of bucharest burns to the ground.

That could be a coincidence, or,

More likely a parting gift from the outgoing administration.

But then people start getting sick.

450 years after the black death,

Bucharest plunges into an outbreak that must have felt

Like the zombie apocalypse.

What did they think caused the plague?

God was punishing them, kind of like a curse.

During the plague, where did they put the bodies?

Can we visit those mass graves now?

Can you go see where those bodies are buried?

Is there a memorial or anything to look at?

It's totally normal.

There's absolutely nothing strange or symbolic about

Building your parliament on top of a mass grave,

But seriously, we should go down there, right?

You know, just wanted to see for myself these tunnels

That were stuffed with bodies during the plague outbreak.

Yeah, we're not supposed to be here.

Vlad the impaler put a written curse on his land.

Years after his death, when an ottoman appointed prince

Showed up to claim the throne, all hell broke loose,

And it must have felt like the ultimate confirmation of the curse.

With coronavirus, people around the world have gotten a

Glimpse of what a scary outbreak can be like,

But statistically, the majority of patients who

Contract the coronavirus survive.

Caradja's plague was totally different,

The death rate was more than 50%.

It's got to have felt like the world is ending.

The psychic wound, you know,

On a city, on a people, on a nation.

It's something that you would never get over and you would

Pass that fear along to your children.

It's almost like the sheer terror of living through that

Particular plague left a scar that's been passed down.

Many modern romanians see this outbreak as proof of vlad's curse,

But I wonder, can we find a point where

Myth and science intersect?

Was there something truly anomalous about caradja's plague?

This is the mathematical model. Okay.

That's widely used in disease ecology.

So, we took historical data from the black death,

The bubonic plague.

Sure.

- Would you like to see? - Yeah, please, by all means.

These are spatial representations of people

Dying all across the city.

Wow.

And then, it, it burns itself out,

As epidemics do, and it starts to plateau.

Okay.

So, my husband and I have been working on your

Mathematical model of caradja's plague,

This was a really terrifying plague.

Wow.

Much more aggressive epidemic,

Once it happens it just,

You know, wipes through the city super quickly.

Wow.

But something else is going wrong too.

Okay.

Some people have looked at these epidemic curves and said,

"okay, well there must be, what we call, pneumonic plagues."

And that's when the disease is deep in your lungs,

Can spread it directly, person to person.

Wow.

Then quarantine is established,

So, you're walking around the city where they had

Piles of human bodies.

There's stories about them raping, stealing,

Even killing plague victims;

Complete societal breakdown.

So all these things may have combined to make this

Into just a complete hellish nightmare.

It's a hellish, sort of, end of days...

Scenario. Scenario.

- Right. - It killed half the city,

Maybe more, but there hadn't been a plague epidemic

Anywhere else.

As an ecologist you say, "how could that be?"

"what was it?"