Elizabeth Bathory was born in 1560 to a wealthy and prominent family. She was the daughter of Baron and Baroness George and Anna Bathory. She had many powerful relatives: a cardinal, princes, and a cousin who was prime minister of Hungary. Though frequently cited as Hungarian, Elizabeth is more likely to belong to the Slovak Republic (During this time, her land shifted hands between the armies of Europe.) Most of her adult life was spent at Castle Cachtice, near the intersection of Austria, Hungary, and the Slovak Republic. Bathory was born during a time of war between the Turks and Austria-Hungary armies. In 1571, her cousin Stephen (1575-86) became Prince of Transylvania and additionally assumed the throne of Poland. He was a very effective ruler, but his plans of uniting Europe against the Ottoman Empire were foiled by the invading armies of Ivan the Terrible.
Prince Steven Bathory of Transylvania participated in an expedition led by Vlad Dracula in Wallachia in 1546 to recover his throne .
At fourteen Elizabeth gave birth to an illegitimate child fathered by a peasant boy and conceived at the chateau for her intended mother-in-law, Countess Ursula Nadasdy. Elizabeth and Count Ferencz Nadasdy had been betrothed since she was eleven years old. Erzsebet married Count Ferencz Nadasady on May 8th, 1575 when Elizabeth was fifteen and Ferencz twenty-six. Elizabeth retained her own surname, while the Count changed his to Ferencz Bathory. She took over household affairs at Castle Sarvar, the Nadasdy family estate while Ferencz headed for the battlefields and began scoring victories against the Turks as early as 1578. He eventually earned the nickname "Black Knight of Hungary". He also lent the Hungarian Crown a great deal of money to finance the war against the Turks.
Elizabeth Bathory was a woman of exceptional beauty. Her long raven hair was contrasted with her milky complexion. Her amber eyes were almost catlike, her figure voluptuous. She was excessively vain and her narcissism drove her to new depths of perversion. The Countess would spend days in front of her large dark mirror she had designed herself. It was so comfortable that it even had supports on which to lean one's arms, so as to be able to stand for many hours in front of it without feeling tired.
Erzsebet gave birth to another three daughters, Anna in 1585, Orsika (Ursula), Kato (Katherina) and eventually one son, Paul in 1598.
While Ferencz was away on one of his military campaigns, the Countess began to visit her lesbian aunt, Countess Karla Bathory. Klara was a sort on nymphomaniac who also enjoyed killing people in the Roman way. Her four husbands died (the first two perished by her hand) and she was finally raped by an entire Turkish garnison before being stabbed to death.
Elizabeth became acquainted with the art of inflicting pain and death, in the same time she was also developing an interest in Black Magic. Thorko, a servant in her castle, instructed her in the ways of witchcraft, at the same time encouraging her sadistic tendencies. Elizabeth wrote one day to Ferencz:
“Thorko has taught me a lovely new one. Catch a black hen and beat it to death with a white cane. Keep the blood and smear a little of it on your enemy. If you get no chance to smear it on his body, obtain one of his garments and smear it’. Her husband, when he was home, also took part in torturing the servants, giving her lessons from his own experience of torturing war prisoners.
Ferencz Nadasdy died on January 4th, 1604 (apparently of poisoning although his death was also ascribed to witchcraft). Erzsebet moved to Vienna only four weeks after his death, shocking the royal court. She also began to spend time at estates at Blindoc (Beckov) and Csejthe (Cachtice). According to the terms of Ferencz's will, Paul was placed under the guardianship of Imre Megyery. The witch, Anna Darvulia, began serving Erzsebet sometime during this year; with her arrival, the torture and killings escalated. Darvulia was exactly like the classical forest witch that appears in Children’s tales: very old, irascible, and always surrounded by black cats.
The Countess began to experience financial problems, as the Crown would not repay the debt owed to Ferencz. She was obliged to sell her castle at Theben and refuge into Csejthe Castle, a massive mountaintop fortress overlooking the village of Csejthe. There she began experimented in depravity with the help of Thorko, Ilona Joo (Elizabeth's former nurse), the witches Dorottya Szentes and Darvulia, and the dwarf major-domo Johannes Ujvary, who would soon become chief torturer. A mysterious woman dressed as man, referred to as "Stephan" (and probably a member of the Hapsburg royal family), used to often visit Erzsebet and join in the tortures.
With the help of this crew, Elizabeth captured servant girls at the castle, taking them to an underground room known as 'her Ladyship's torture chamber' and subjected them to the worst cruelties she could imagine. Under the pretext of punishing the girls for failing to perform certain trivial tasks, Elizabeth used branding irons, molten wax and knives to shed their blood. To the one who had stolen a coin she would repay with the same coin red-hot, which the girl had to hold tight in her hand. To the one who had talked during working hours, the Countess herself would sew her mouth shut, or otherwise would open her mouth and stretch it until the lips tore. Bathory beat her victims routinely and mutilated them as well. Reportedly she froze some in the snows of winter near Castle Csejthe, dumping ice water on them in freezing weather. Soon, the Countess began attacking her bound victims with her teeth, biting chunks of bloody flesh from their necks, cheeks and shoulders. Blood became more of an obsession with Elizabeth as she continued her tortures with razors, torches, and her own custom made silver pincers.
She even managed to bring into the castle the worst instruments of torture. A famous automaton known as the Iron Maiden and initially devised in Nuremberg was placed in the torture chamber. This clockwork doll was of the size and colour of a human creature. Naked, painted, covered in jewels, with blond hair that reached down to the ground, it had a mechanical device that allowed it to curve its lips into a smile, and to move its eyes. For the Maiden to spring into action it is necessary to touch some of the precious stones in its necklace.
Elizabeth would instruct a servant girl to fix the jewels on the Iron Maiden, and when a certain jewel was moved, the Maiden would grab the girl, spikes would come out of the breasts, and the girl would quickly bleed to death. Once the sacrifice is over another stone in the necklace is touched: the arms drop, the smile and the eyes fall shut, and the murderess becomes once again the Maiden, motionless in its coffin.
A cage, too short to stand in, but too narrow to sit in, was one of Elizabeth’s favorite toy. It was on a pulley, and had dozens of spikes jutting into the cage. The cage would be swung back and forth so that the girl inside would be torn to pieces on the spikes.
As Elizabeth aged and her beauty began to wane, she tried to conceal the decline through cosmetics and the most expensive of clothes. The story says that one day a servant girl accidentally pulled her hair while combing it and Elizabeth slapped the girl's hand so hard she drew blood, which fell onto her own hand. She immediately though her skin took on the freshness of that of her young maid. She thought she found the secret of eternal youth.
Following the witch's instructions, Elizabeth had her evil henchmen kidnap beautiful young virgins, slash them with knives and collect their blood in a large vat. Then the Countess proceeded to bath in the virgin's blood. When she emerged from the blood she had seemingly regained her youth and radiance.
Elizabeth's minions procured more virgins from the neighboring villages on the pretext of hiring them as servants. As the body count grew, Bathory's servants dumped the corpses outside the castle. When local peasants found the dead bodies, drained of blood, rumors quickly spread that vampires inhabited the old fortress.
When Darvulia died or disappeared, Elizabeth almost fifty found herself aging even more, complained to her new witch about the uselessness of the blood baths. In fact, more than complain, she threatened to kill her if she did not stop at once the encroaching and execrable signs of old age. The sorceress named Erzsi Majorova argued that Darvulia's method had not worked because plebeian blood had been used. She assured that changing the colour of the blood, using blue blood instead of red, would ensure the fast retreat of old age. She managed to attract twenty-five impoverished noblewomen in 1909 who in exchange for happy company, would receive lessons in fine manners and learn how to behave exquisitely in society. A fortnight later, only two were left. Erzsebet accused one of them of killing others for jewelry and then committing suicide. But even though Elizabeth tortured young noblewomen and accompanied the blood baths with witchcraft rites, she could not retrieve her lost youth. For over a decade she perpetrated her acts of vampirism, mutilating and bleeding dry 650 maidens.
Reverend Andras Berthoni, a Lutheran pastor of Csejthe, realized the truth when Elizabeth commanded him to bury secretly the bloodless corpses. He set down his suspicions regarding Elizabeth in a note before he died. The Countess was becoming so notorious that her crimes could no longer be concealed. The Bathory family secretly decided to spirit the Countess off to a convent for the rest of her days, but before this could be accomplished, Megyery deposed a formal complaint against her before the Hungarian Parliament. Inquiry into Erzsebet's crimes began late in the year by the Lord Palatine, Count Gyorgy Thurzo, and one of the members of the Bathory family who had planned to have her retired to a convent.
Prime Minister Thurzo of Hungary who was a cousin of the Countess stormed the castle with soldiers to arrest the Countess and her associates on December 30th. At the head of a contingent of armed men, Thurzo arrived unannounced at the castle. In the cellar, cluttered with the remains of the previous night's bloody ceremony, he found a beautiful mangled corpse and two young girls who lay dying. But that was not all. He smelt the smell of the dead; he saw the walls splattered with blood; he saw the Iron Maiden, the cage, the instruments of torture, bowls of dried blood, the cells - and in one of them a group of girls who were waiting their turn to die and who told him that after many days of fasting they had been served roast flesh that had once belonged to the bodies of their companions.
The Countess, without denying Thurzo's accusations, declared that these acts were all within her rights as a noble woman of ancient lineage. To which the Count Palatine replied: 'Countess, I condemn you to life imprisonment within your castle walls.'
For political reason, Elizabeth never attended her trial. Her powerful family managed to convince King Matthias II of Hungary to indefinitely delay the sentence against probably the extinction of the debt the Crown owed her. She remained confined in her castle while she and her sadistic accomplices were tried for their crimes. Elizabeth was tried purely on a criminal basis, while her cohorts were charged with vampirism, witchcraft and practicing pagan rituals. All of the torturers were beheaded, except for Ilona Joo and Dorottya Szentes, whose fingers were pulled off before they were burned alive. The Countess was found to be criminally insane and was walled up within a room of Csejthe Castle. Stonemasons were brought to Castle Csejthe to wall up the windows and doors of the bedchamber with the Countess inside. They only left a small hole through which food could be passed. When everything was ready, four gallows were erected on the four corners of the castle to indicate that within those walls lived a creature condemned to death.
In this way she lived for three years, almost wasting away with cold and hunger without showing the slightest sign of repentance. Countess Bathory writes her last will and testament on July 31st 1614. Later in the year, she was found face-down on the floor, dead, by one of her guards. The date is reported as either August 14th or the 21st. The local folklore says that she is one of the legendary ghosts that still haunt certain areas in the Carpathians.
Elizebeth Bathory's story demonstrates how the myth of vampirism can be supported by the misinterpretation of the true-life actions of a deranged criminal and feed the ignorance of believers.
