Robert Pattinson and Dracula go way back

Robert Pattinson shot to fame playing vampire Edward Cullen in the popular Twilight series. Swooning girls around the world would die to receive a love bite from this particular British actor.

Now genealogists at Ancestry.com say the 24-year-old actually does descend from vampires. Research into the Twilight star’s family tree revealed he is related to Vlad the Impaler, widely thought to be the inspiration for Count Dracula in Bram Stoker’s 1897 classic.

Anastasia Tyler is a genealogist at Ancestry.com, the world’s largest online family history resource. She says: "Tracing Pattinson’s family back to Vlad was difficult research, but the pieces that unravelled created the perfect accompaniment to the Twilight Saga. Without any myth or magic, we find royalty and vampires lurking in Pattinson’s life – making his story just as supernatural as the one he’s playing on screen."

The royalty referred to is none other than British Princes William and Harry. It seems Pattinson is a distant cousin of the princes on their father’s side.

Proving fact can really be stranger than fiction, the website even found another Twilight-Dracula connection. Twilight author Stephenie Meyer is also a distant cousin of the British royals and so can claim this blood-curdling connection as well.

Twilight: Eclipse hits theatres on June 30.