This serial killer known as the ‘Vampire Countess’ killed 650 servant girls and ‘bathed in their blood’
HUNGARIAN aristocrat lured peasant girls to her castle where she tortured them and drank their blood
COUNT Dracula may be a fictional character but his female counterpart – a notorious ‘Vampire Countess’ – was more monstrous than any Gothic novel.
Countess Elizabeth Bathory went down in history as the worst female serial killer of all time – after torturing and murdering 650 peasant girls at her Transylvanian castle.
Born in Hungary, in 1560, the renowned beauty believed that drinking the blood of teenaged girls would preserve her youthfulness.
After offering well-paid work as servant, she lured young girls away from their families and locked them up in the castle, where she would subject them to sadistic torture before beating of starving them to death.
Witnesses told of her stabbing victims or biting their breasts, hands, faces and arms, cutting them with scissors, sticking needles into their lips or burning them with red-hot irons.
It was later said that she also bathed in their blood.
Born into the Bathory family, who ruled the Hungarian principality of Transylvania, she was betrothed to fellow aristocrat Ferenc Nádasdy at the age of 11. Before marrying him, at 14, she had an illegitimate child by another man – who was then castrated and thrown to the dogs by Ferenc.
The couple lived in Nádasdy's castle in Hungary and Elizabeth had four more children, but while her soldier hubby was away Elizabeth took many lovers.
But after Ferenc’s death in 1604, rumours of her sadistic death cells began to spread.
When she ran out of peasant girls to murder she persuaded wealthier families to sent their daughters to the castle to learn good manners – but they never returned.
In 1610, a suspicious priest went to the Hungarian authorities, who began an investigation.
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The Countess and four of her favourite servants and friends were arrested but while three of them were tried and executed, and the fourth sentenced to life, Elizabeth never faced a court, because of her family’s social position.
Instead she was quietly imprisoned in Csetje Castle, in a room with bricked up windows until she died four years later, at the age of 54.