Elizabeth Bathory - A Historical Look at the Famous Blood Countess

Born Elizabeth Bathory in 1560, she was the youngest daughter of George and Anna Bathory. Although seen as Hungarian, she was in fact born in what is now the Slovak republic. She spent the majority of her adult life at Castle Cachtice near a town that is north east of present day Bratislava, where Austria, Hungary and the Slovak republic's boundaries come together.

George Bathory was said to have suffered from memory loss and bouts of paralysis. He spent the last 10 years of his life being cared for by servants who brought him to the table, carrying him in his favorite chair; which he had confined himself to. He slept upright in his chair and only bathed upon insistence and even then put up a fight.

Her brother Stephen was a drunkard that had appeared naked in a variety of marketplaces in strange towns, only to have the remainder of his senses beaten out of him. An expedition he led in Wallachia included Vlad Dracul thus connecting Elizabeth Bathory to Dracula. An Uncle Gabor was often seen at night, wearing his armor, fighting invisible attackers and shouting in unknown languages.

Elizabeth had an aunt Klara, whose homosexual tendencies managed to have her ostracized. She was the talk of the town because she kept beautiful young girls to pamper her. At the young age of 10, Elizabeth was promised to Ferencz Nadasdy, to wed when she turned 15. But Elizabeth's sexual atrocities were just beginning. When she was 14, she gave birth, secretly, to an illegitimate child and arranged for the child to be adopted. She paid a considerable sum in hush money to anyone who might have known of her pregnancy. She married Count Nadasdy in May of 1575 and took on the womanly duties of both wife and Countess.

It was during her marriage to the Count that her path of evil tortures and cruel hobbies really flourished. The Count Nadasdy was quite cruel himself. When he was on one of his very few vacations at home, he tortured his servants for petty misdemeanors. At one point he had a "lazy" servant stripped and doused with honey. She was made to stand outside that way for an entire day.

Although the times were cruel and the people needed no justification for their torturous punishments, Elizabeth's mean streak was notably more sadistic than those of her contemporaries. She learned, from her husband, new techniques that only served to increase her passion for pain. It was actually the count that taught her his honey-dousing trick. Because Elizabeth had taken to biting her victims while torturing them she was accused of werewolfism. During that time the popular belief was that werewolf in life, vampire in death.

However, her accusers did not claim this to be the case. It was because she drained the blood of her victims and bathed in it to keep herself from aging, but did this really mean she was a vampire?

For as long as man has been on the face of this earth, blood has symbolized life and death, eternity and salvation. The fact that Elizabeth Bathory drained her victims does not constitute the vampirism charges she was convicted of. According to Webster's Dictionary the literal definition of a vampire is: 1.) A corpse, animated by an undeparted soul that disturbs the living. 2.) a being that sucks the blood of sleeping persons at night. 3.) A woman who seduces and exploits men. Elizabeth was none of these. She was never a dead corpse, else she would not have died alone in her castle after 3 years of confinement. Obviously through the accounts of those that knew her, she didn't have a whole lot to do with men with the exception of those she needed. She was never reported to have drunk the blood from her victims; rather she bathed in it. Perhaps she was persecuted because of her involvement with black magic, or her appalling sexual preferences; but she was more feared for her methods of torture and obsession for blood than she was for being a killer. In spite of the fact that she took over 600 lives, it was Vampirism that spurred the people to try and convict her. Countess Bathory was sentenced to life imprisonment in solitary confinement but indignantly enough, it was really her land the crown wanted.

Was she really a vampire that drank the blood of virgin maidens? We'll probably never know. Maybe she sat in that tub of blood sipping her victim's life force from large silver goblets in the candlelight. And maybe she was just so vain about her impending age that everyone just started a lot of bad rumors.