Countess Bathory

Countess Erzebet (Elizabeth) Bathory is one of the most infamous tyrants to ever have walked the earth. In 1611 she was bricked into one of the rooms in her castle for the supposed killing of over 650 young girls. According to legend she murdered them in the pursuit of young blood, which she believed would restore her beauty. The Countess was very vain, and feared growing old. Her eminent good looks had made her the talk of Europe, and she had no desire to lose them. It all started when one of her serving girls had the misfortune to cross her. She lashed out at the girl with a pair of scissors, and blood gushed from the wound all over her face and hands. Erzebet was admant that the blood had made her skin more youthful, and decided to bathe her whole body in it. Consequently, the unfortunate girl was killed and her blood drained into a tub, which was then warmed. Over the years that followed, Erzebet is said to have murdered hundreds of girls; luring them to her castle with promises of money or employment, then locking them up and torturing them, until she was ready to bathe in their blood. The kinds of tortures the girls were subjected to during their imprisonment included being cut with scissors, being pricked with pins, and being impaled on sharp spikes in a cage that hung from the ceiling so that the countess could shower in their blood. Such is the reputation that Countess Bathory has acquired.

Erzebet was born in Hungary in 1540. Her family were very powerful (her cousin Stephen would go onto be prince of Transylvania and King of Poland) and held lands all over the country .She was by all accounts an intelligent and well-educated woman, and at first, although she was given to the occasional temper tantrum, exhibited no suggestion of the homicidal tendencies she was to become infamous for. The change seems to have come shortly after the death of her husband, Count Nadasdy. It is tempting to conclude from this that the death of her husband triggered some kind of psychotic breakdown in her, centring around a dawning realisation of her own mortality, but there is no evidence to support this theory (or indeed any other). Following the death of her husband, Erzebet moved to her family residence in Vienna, where she is reputed to have begun to dabble in scorcery and attend rituals ijnvolving animal sacrifices.

Erzebet's catalogue of lurid crimes reads like some kind of grotesque fairy-tale, and give the impression that she was a person who was evil purely for the sake of being evil. Woe betide any servant who was caught committing some petty misdemeanour, as the resulting confrontation with the mistress of the house would frequently escalate into blood letting. Erzebet was aided in her mistreatment of her servants by a host of sadistic crones. Moreover, one such old woman, Erzsi Majorova, the widow of a local tenant farmer, has long been believed to be both the instigator and the brains behind the procuring and the disposal of the murdered girls.

Victims of Erzebet's bloodlust were usually beaten beyond recognition, often had their fingers cut off with scissors, and were even known to have been hauled out naked into the snow to be drenched with buckets of cold water until they froze to death. Even illness did not deter her murderous gustom, as we see in her 1611 trial transcript, which states that peasants were brought to her as she lay on her sickbed, so she could bite flesh from their faces and shoulders. In spite of all of this, it is interesting to note that there is no documentary evidence to suggest that Countess Bathory believed virgin blood would rejuvenate her or ever actually bathed in it. In fact, it would seem that it was not until the 19th century that this idea began to circulate. One of the stange things about Erzebet is that she kept her sadistic cruelty entirely separate from the rest of her life. He letters suggest that she was devoutly religious, and yet she never seems to have applied any sense of right or wrong to her bloody rituals.

Not even a noblewoman, can get away with the kind of things Erzebet had done indefinitely. The year 1610 marked the beginning of the investigation into her crimes. It is said that this was prompted by the careless dumping of four bloodless corpses, outside her castle. By December, she had been put on trial. It is rumoured that this was as much to allow the government to confiscate her lands, as it was to bring swift justice for the murdered girls. Many of her accomplices were also tried and found guilty. Each of these accomplices was put to death in a way that was determined by the part they had played in the murders. Erzebet herself, could not be put to death because she was of noble blood. It was for this reason that she was walled up in her castle, with only a small opening in the wall to allow food to be passed through. Erzebet Bathory died in that room in August of 1614.