Bram Stoker first stayed at the Kilmarnock Arms Hotel in 1894. A favourite book written by him during his stay at the hotel was "The Watter's Mou". A strange melodrama about Cruden Bay in the heyday of smuggling in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Bram Stoker told people of how he got his ideas for his stories when he was on holiday in Cruden Bay, walking on the sands to Whinnyfold or scrambling over the rocks north to the castle and the Bullers. Slains Castle, now a ruin, but then the home of the Earl and Countess of Erroll, is a strange, storm scarred building, hanging on the edge of the cliff, looking like the original Castle Dracula, as indeed it might well be.
"When I first saw the place I fell in love with it. Had it been possible, I should have spent my summer there in a house of my own, but the want of any place in which to live forbade such an opportunity. So I stayed in the little hotel. The Kilmarnock Arms".
Thus wrote Bram Stoker, author of Dracular, about his first visit to Cruden Bay in 1894. His entry in the visitors book a the time: "Delighted with everything and everybody and hope to come again". And come again he did, year after year, until Cruden Bay and later, the little village of Whinnyfold became a second home for him and his family.
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