“Shhhhhh… They’re ‘Secret Stairs’”…

This made me laugh. There’s a set of stairs inside Bran that is clearly now marked with this plaque. I’m sure that they didn’t have it up during “functional times” as they would have wanted it to remain “secret”, but what I thought was funny about it is the elaborate railing, stair-work and banister that led up to the door. “Oh yeah,” I thought, “no one would EVER guess that there’s a stairway there!” Can’t you just picture some invading Turk who had chased a Romanian soldier into this room and then emerged to find them “suddenly gone”? “Hey, where did they go?! I know they went into this room! Maybe I’ll just sit here on these steps that lead into the wall and think about where they might have gone! I’m sure there’s a secret passage in here somewhere!” :- ):

The next couple of pictures here are what it looks like “inside the secret stairs” (again, I had to turn sideways to walk up them – can’t imagine what it would have been like if I would have been wearing full armor), and then what it looks like on the other side. I think that the exit would have been covered a little more discretely behind one of the bookcases, and so maybe only the exit was deemed necessary to be “secret”, I don’t know. Either way, though, not exactly your standard “pull the false book to reveal the secret passage” kind of mechanism that you see in movies, eh? For those of you who are Young Frankenstein fans like we are, I kept expecting to hear Terri Garr’s voice saying from somewhere, “Put... zee candle…BACK!”