Elizabeth Bathory - "The Blood Countess"

(1560-1614)

By: Shyan Burrell 04-15-2002

Elizabeth Bathory was born in 1560 in a castle in Northwest Hungary. Her parents, George  &  Anna Bathory were part of a very powerful and rich family. Her family tree was full of well-known sexual deviates, sadists, and masochists.

At the age of 13 Elizabeth became pregnant by a peasant boy. She had four children between May 1574, 1585 & 1595.

She married after her 15th Birthday to a man named Ferencz Nadasdy. As one of her wedding gifts, she got to choose any home she wanted because of her wealth and family power, but she chose a dank, gloomy Csejthe castle in a thick forest full of wolves. Her husband left for war and she was often home alone. While her husband was away she had a lot of affairs with men and found pleasure in inflicting pain on servant girls especially if they had a big chest and were under 18 years of age.

On one instance Elizabeth struck a servant girl causing blood to get on her. She wiped the blood off her skin and noticed that her skin seemed to be smoother and whiter. She began bathing in human blood and even drinking it, in hopes that she would stay young and beautiful forever. She searched for potions to make her always look young. She even started to get picky with the type of human blood she wanted. She craved the "Blue Blood" of women of noble birth. She began to murder young women with the forced help from a few of her selected servants. In fear that they would be murdered they did as they were told. They would strip a young woman and hang her by a chain tied to her leg from the ceiling and burn her with red-hot pokers. The tortured girl would flail and swing about trying to get away from the pokers. She would be near spiked walls or in a spiked cage, so when she flailed about, she would hit the spikes and impale herself. Elizabeth would stand under the bleeding girl and shower in her blood.

Elizabeth did not just murder women she made it a game, torturing them for hours upon hours - enjoying every minute of it in cruelty, making their deaths painfully slow.

Her husband would return for brief periods of time. Upon his return he learned what his wife did while he was gone. Instead of getting enraged and turning her in, he joined in and taught her new ways of torturing her victims. He showed her how they would torture the enemies in war and together they would watch and order unspeakable deaths.

For example, during a bitter-cold winter night, Elizabeth and Ferencz ordered a young woman to strip naked and walk in the deep snow behind their castle. Elizabeth and Ferencz watched from the castle as two other servants threw buckets upon buckets of ice cold water on the naked girl until she froze to death and ice formed on her body.

Elizabeth was taught pressure points and where all the most sensitive spots on the body was. For no reason at all except to satisfy her addiction on feeling pleasure through other's pain, she would stick hatpins underneath her servants' fingernails.

Elizabeth's husband passed away in the winter of 1604. After his death she grew even madder and murdered even more people. More and more people were coming up missing and she requested new servants so often that people started to get suspicious and wonder what was going on. But Elizabeth was so powerful and she was known in that area for her bad temper, that everyone was too afraid to ask or investigate. A few of the town people could no longer take the rumors and they wanted to find out the truth at any cost. So they went to Elizabeth's cousin who lived in a castle in a near by village. He grew angry and went to visit Elizabeth and he confronted her. She admitted to him what she had done and he talked her into giving up and turning herself in.

Elizabeth Bathory had a trial and she confessed to all the murders. Officials searched her home and found a list of all the names of every one of her victims. The list of names was no fewer than 650 people. As punishment for her crimes she was bricked up in her bedroom in her castle and could never get out or see sunlight. They left a small, un-patched hole in the wall where they could pass her food during mealtime and nothing more. On August 21, 1614 Elizabeth Bathory died in her bedroom.

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