Good Humor stakes its claim to the Dracula Bar


Something was off about the ice cream truck that October. All those faded pictures of ice cream sandwiches and Strawberry Shortcake bars looked a little dingy, a little dirty, a little…sinister. The music, a tinny, saccharine jingle, scraped across the bones of your ears like fingernails on a coffin lid. And when you got to the front of the line, the Good Humor man wasn't selling you a treat. He was selling you a pact.

He was selling you the Dracula Bar. 

It wasn't just another ice cream treat, not by a long shot. Oh, no. This wasn't some smiling, goofy character pop, all bright blues and yellows. The Dracula Bar, it whispered of something older, something hungrier. You’d tear open the crinkly wrapper, the plastic hissing a little, like a tiny gasp of cold air escaping a Transylvanian crypt. And then you’d see it.

Ostensibly a black cherry ice bar, the reality of the situation at hand would become apparent slowly and only after it was too late to turn back, much like Jonathan Harker's visit to Dracula's castle. You see, hiding within that black exterior was a gooey, blood-red cherry sauce center that would eventually ooze into view. It wasn’t just an ice pop; it was an edible horror story. Every bite was a plunge into darkness, followed by the sweet, shocking gush of something else.

Was this the Count's dastardly plan to turn people all over the world into vampires? Good Humor added to the intrigue by later renaming the bar as Vampire's Secret. And if that wasn't warning enough, the company eventually branded it as Vampire's Deadly Secret. 


One ice cream truck driver had been running his route for thirty years, and he’d never seen a bar like it. One day, he said, the new treats just appeared in his freezer. No invoice, no order, just…there. A stack of them, nestled betwixt the Chipwiches and the Rocket Pops, grinning. They looked like a bad tooth in a good mouth. And, as a good Christian man, he felt a shiver of dread run down his spine. But kids liked them, and a man’s gotta make a living, even if it means selling a little bit of the darkness, a little bit of the fear, to the innocent.

And that was the selling point, after all. The occult. The macabre. The esoteric. Something dangerous or forbidden. A "deadly secret?" Utterly irresistible! It wasn't just a frozen treat. It changed you. Or maybe it woke something up.

Good Humor stopped selling the Dracula Bar - along with many of its other most-beloved 80s treats, like Fat Frog and Bubble-O-Bill. Like the 80s themselves, good things had to come to an end. But for those who licked the darkness in the 1980s, the appetite for the return of the Dracula Bar is eternal.

Location: Transylvania, Romania

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