#while we're all waiting for the next Dracula Daily entry to drop

[see-arcane]

Barking Harker Cast Snapshot 2: A White ‘Lady’ of Whitby Abbey

“Accursed misbirth of hell! I understand your hatred of the food of mankind. You get your sustenance out of the burying-ground, damnable creature that you are!”

As soon as those words had passed his lips, the Countess flew at him, uttering a sound between a snarl and a howl, and bit him on the breast with the fury of a hyena. He dashed her from him on to the ground, raving fiercely as she was, and she gave up the ghost in the most terrible convulsions. —“Aurelia; or, The Tale of a Ghoul”

Right over the town is the ruin of Whitby Abbey, which was sacked by the Danes, and which is the scene of part of "Marmion," where the girl was built up in the wall. It is a most noble ruin, of immense size, and full of beautiful and romantic bits; there is a legend that a white lady is seen in one of the windows. Between it and the town there is another church, the parish one, round which is a big graveyard, all full of tombstones. […] They have a legend here that when a ship is lost bells are heard out at sea. I must ask the old man about this; he is coming this way.... […]

He is, I am afraid, a very skeptical person, for when I asked him about the bells at sea and the White Lady at the abbey he said very brusquely:—

"I wouldn't fash masel' about them, miss. Them things be all wore out.” —Mina Harker, Mr. Swales, Dracula

She is not the Lady, whoever that pale wraith is meant to be. She is neither a walled-in maiden nor a dead holy woman stalking the ruins. Frankly, she’s not even at the Abbey the whole of her year. Merely visiting with all the other tourists. She comes for the view and the cuisine alike.

The only trouble with the place of late was that mess following the Demeter. Some uniquely dead codgers and their unhappy spirits, which was fine. A dead dog, which was not. A certain Black Dog roaming, which was worse. And a dog that was not a dog, but one of those cheating dead; the walking, talking, blood-burgling sorts who went around mucking up the natural order of things. ‘Natural’ here meaning ‘supper stays in its damn dirt box.’ So she tells him. He informs her in turn that she doesn’t know who she speaks to.

On the contrary, Count Cadaver. She can smell the dead legions on him. The screaming innocents who died in toil or twitching on pikes. The babes. The sailors. The codgers. Yes, he’s positively rancid with death and power and et cetera. Duly impressed, she is. But not as much as she is annoyed at this new grisly wrinkle in her routine. And she is not even half as annoyed as she is hungry. For she is of the living that consumes the dead. It should be said that her bite lasts on a corpse, no matter how puffed up or well-dressed he is. He might kill her if he’s quick about it, true. But he will have to get close.

And she imagines he’ll have a hell of a time enjoying England with a necrotized hole where his face should be.

Count Cadaver makes his exit and she doesn’t see those fair maidens in their nighties at the Abbey again—bittersweet, that—and time marches. Other cemeteries call. She digs and dines. Until one night she lets herself into a fine tomb in the Hampstead area. Westenra is engraved on the stone and a familiar fair face waits inside.

(Not the one in the coffin; too staked and sliced and delectably decayed for that. But the face of the fair maiden in the corner, neither resting nor at peace…)

Barking Harker details here.