Countess Dracula

Did you think Myra Hindley or Ilse Koch the ultimate in female psychopathic murderers?

Try again.

Back in the sixteenth century, in Hungary, there was a CountessElizabeth Báthory. She lived in a castle at Čachtice, Hungary, and in the years between 1585 and her arrest at the end of December 1610 is thought to have murdered from “several hundred” up to 650 young girls and women, whom she enticed into her castle on the excuse of employment. Some of the methods she used to kill them were, according to witnesses,

• severe beatings over extended periods of time, often leading to death.
• burning or mutilation of hands, sometimes also of faces and genitalia.
• biting the flesh off the faces, arms and other bodily parts.
• freezing to death.
• starving of victims.

Why did she do all this? She wasn’t stupid or dumb – she ran the castle and its estates in the stead of her husband, who was off fighting the Turks, and she was literate in four languages. She wasn’t casually venting her boredom by killing young women for fun, either. So why?

Apart from simple sadism, she was rumoured to have bathed in the blood of her victims to renew her youth – virgin’s blood being a rejuvenator par excellence, it appears. So listen to me, boys and girls – it’s not wise to be cherry. Pay heed.

After her arrest, which followed years of accusations and rumours, she was never brought to trial – although three of her accomplices were tortured to death and one was sentenced to life imprisonment. She spent the rest of her life, four years, in her castle under house arrest. It's said she was walled up in a single room with no access to the world but a slit for food or water, but I somehow doubt that. Given what she was allowed to get away with, I'm sure the circumstances of her imprisonment would have been somewhat less uncomfortable.

I guess it’s always paid to be stinking rich. Even more then than now.