Did Anonymously Written Story Inspire Bram Stoker’s Dracula?

Long before Bram Stoker’s legendary novel Dracula (1897) there was The Mysterious Stranger, a short story penned by an anonymous author. This vampire tale was translated from German to English and published in Odd and Ends magazine in 1860 – over thirty years before the famed Dracula. Why is this worth noting? Because the two…