molebeing

Finally, the crop of peasant girls had run out. Erzsébet, ever daring, turned her blood thirst to lesser aristocrats. She had done so much thus far without being stopped, and like many serial killers after her, arrogance made her bold and stupid. She was eager to extend her reach for the thrill of seeing what she could get away with. She also appeared to be so caught up with the pleasures of what she was doing that she could not stop.

Sabine Baring-Gould, an English author and folklorist of considerable status during the 19th Century, used the tale of Erzsébet as an example of his own view of a certain psychological phenomenon. "I have seen an accomplished young woman of considerable refinement and of a highly strung nervous temperament string flies with her needle on a piece of thread, and watch complacently their flutterings," he wrote in 1865. "Cruelty may remain latent till, by some accident, it is aroused, and then it will break forth in a devouring flame." He says that the passion for blood follows the same pattern. "We have no conception of the violence with which they can rage till circumstances occur which call them into action... passion blazes forth, and the serenity of the quiet breast is shattered for ever. A word, a glance, a touch, are sufficient to fire the magazine of passion in the heart, and to desolate for ever an existence."

Blood thirst, too, may lurk inside a person, even those we love, and we may never even spot it. "It may smolder in the bosom which is most cherished by us, and we may be perfectly unconscious of its existence there. Perhaps circumstances will not cause its development; perhaps moral principle may have bound it down with fetters it can never break."

To replenish her diminishing "stable," Erzsébet offered to teach "social graces" to young women from noble families, and when they arrived at the castle she had her pick. After the murder of one of such young lady in 1609, which Erzsébet tried to stage as a suicide, the authorities finally decided to act. This suspicious incident, coupled with the many other rumors over the years, required action. The king supported it, because Erzsébet had been asking him to repay funds he had borrowed from her husband, and if the rumors proved true and she was arrested, he would be free of his debt. In other words, everyone would win... except the lady in question.

The rumors indeed proved true, and much that was far worse, so Erzs�bet's gory tyranny was brought to an end. On the night of the raid, Thurzo locked Erzs�bet in her fortress and left some men in charge. In his letters, he mentioned finding only one corpse in the castle---that of a young woman accused of stealing a pear. Her hands were burned and her breasts were bitten. He later claimed he saw no orgies, but being Erzs�bet's relative, he had reason to protect the family reputation. Others reported a more dramatic evening, especially in the aftermath.

As Erzs�bet awaited a hearing, officials searched her castle for evidence. They discovered bones and other human remains, along with the clothing and personal effects of missing girls. Codrescu quotes from a memoir of one of Thurzo's lieutenants who wrote that as they searched the castle, they came upon the dead bodies of young girls everywhere they looked. Many had no arms or eyes. One blackened body was in the fireplace, not fully burned, and quite a few were buried in shallow graves around the castle. "We watched in horror as the dogs ran about with parts of the girls in their mouths."

They learned much from the victims who had survived, as well as detailed stories from a crew of accomplices. The men and women who had assisted B�thory in her bloody deeds jostled one another to be first to win clemency through cooperation—or to avoid further torture. Erzs�bet herself did not attend the trial and did not testify. Instead she remained in her castle, maintaining her innocence. Everitt claims that her high-born relatives persuaded the court to keep her under house arrest and delay a sentence indefinitely.

Twenty-one judges were on hand on January 2, 1611, when the proceedings of the special tribunal began, with Judge Theodosius de Szulo of the Royal Supreme Court presiding. They called numerous witnesses, sometimes 35 a day, including the families from which girls had gone missing and victims who had survived. One mother had lost her 10-year-old daughter.

The principal testimony against Erzs�bet was offered by her servants and by people who had assisted her in her bloody campaign. According to Penrose, each of her cohorts was asked the same 11 questions about how long he or she had been at the castle and what things had been done there related to the crimes. In particular, they were all asked whom they had murdered, how many, where the victims were from, and who had brought them to the castle. They were also pressed to describe any tortures they had used and what had happened to those girls who had died. More to the point, they were to describe fully the countess's involvement. What they had to say revealed a practice so vile that Erzs�bet is still known to this day as one of the cruelest monsters in history.

Ficzko, a dwarf who had worked for Erzsébet for 16 years, claimed he had been taken there forcibly. He was not sure about how many women he helped to kill, but he did know the count of the girls: 37. Five were buried in holes, two in a garden, two at night in a church, and so on. They had been lured from the country with the promise of employment in the castle, and women in some of the villages actually conspired to provide girls for money or small gifts. If the girls did not come willingly, they were beaten into unconsciousness and carried off. At the castle, they were bound and stabbed with needles and scissors, among other cruelties. They had been chosen for the softness of their skin—even of their tongues—and for their youth and beauty.

When asked about the type of torture used, he said (as recorded by Penrose), "They tied the hands and arms very tightly with Viennese cord, they were beaten to death until the whole body was black as charcoal and their skin was rent and torn. One girl suffered more than two hundred blows before dying. Dorko [another accomplice and procurer] cut their fingers one by one with shears and then slit the veins with scissors."

Erzsébet's childhood nurse, Ilona Joo, admitting that she had killed about 50, said that she had applied red-hot pokers from the fire, shoving them into the mouth of some hapless girl, or up her nose. The mistress herself, she testified, had placed her fingers into the mouth of one girl and pulled hard until the sides split open. She had also stabbed them all over with needles, making them bleed, or had torn open their flesh with sharp pincers. She liked to slit open the skin between their fingers.

Erzsébet, it was said, administered many cruel and arbitrary beatings and was soon torturing and butchering the girls. She might cut off someone's fingers, or beat her about the face until the bones broke. Even when Erzsébet was ill, she didn't stop. Instead, she'd have girls brought to her bed so she could slap and bite them. Sometimes she bit them until they died, and she made her male servants consume their flesh. According to Ilona Joo, the countess might place oiled paper between a girl's legs and set it on fire, or used candles to burn them. There was often so much blood from cutting the girls in strategic spots that cinders were place around the countess's bed to absorb it. When they buried the bodies in secret places, they chanted over them.

The third accused accomplice added that the countess liked to apply a red-hot iron to the soles of the girls' feet, and another witness said that she had seen four girls bound in shrouds, barely alive but unable to move. Yet another claimed she had seen the devil himself sitting on Countess Báthory's lap, and that she had sexual relations with him, completely under his spell. That was due, in part, to his impressive male organ. Only one servant refused to testify against her mistress, and for that, says Codrescu, her eyes were put out and her breasts removed before she was ultimately burned at the stake.

Testimony also revealed that the kidnapped girls had been chained to walls in the dungeons and fattened up, because the Countess believed this increased the blood in their bodies—and blood was critical to her moonlit sorcery. They were also forced into deviant sexual activities with her. If they reacted with displeasure, they received torture and possibly death. Yet, even those who did well eventually bored her and they, too, were dispatched. Sometimes, depending on the countess's whim, her favorite girls got the worst treatment. One had been forced to strip a piece of flesh off her own arm. A few were shoved into small cages full of spikes.

Even during an age when torture was commonplace, the judges who listened to these accounts were appalled, especially when survivors recounted their own stories. They told how they had been pierced, pinched, beaten, and burned by the mistress of the castle. Many were disfigured for life.

The hearing grew more gruesome by the day, as more people added their own tales of horror and how many dead bodies they had witnessed. Finally, it was over. Based on the skeletons and cadaver parts found, as well as witness reports, Countess Báthory and her cronies were convicted on 80 counts of murder. In a second part of the trial, a newly discovered register was entered as evidence that included in Erzsébet's handwriting the names of, and small details about, more than 650 females, according to some accounts. The suggestion, which could not be proven, was that she had kept track of her victims and had actually killed that many. The formal charges remained at 80, although Penrose says that King Mathias indicated in a letter to Thurzo during the hearing that he knew of at least 300 victims.

While her accomplices were tortured and put to death in a variety of ghastly ways --- some had their fingers pulled off, some were buried alive, some were beheaded --- the judges considered what to do with the mistress. King Mathias favored execution, but that meant enacting a special statute to strip her of her royal immunity. They'd already had to instigate such a statute just to prosecute her. Prime Minister Thurzo, her relative, intervened on her behalf to insist that she was unable to appreciate what she had done. Yet the court report indicated that the number of torture devices found in her residence belied her inability to control her anger. Clearly, she had taken pleasure in her deviant acts.

Nevertheless, pressure was on to keep her fortune in the family, so in the end Erzsébet Báthory was imprisoned for life, with no formal sentencing, locked in a small set of rooms in her own castle at Cahtice. Her son—and sole heir—wrote a letter on her behalf asking for mercy, but her daughter Anna vowed never to speak to her mother again, or allow her children to do so. Erzsébet claimed that she was innocent of all charges. She said the peasant girls died of many different things, from contagious disease to blood poisoning, and she should not be held responsible for the whims of nature.

She was confined to her rooms, with the entrances and windows walled up, save for tiny slits for food and air. Penrose says she was heartbroken that she no longer had her magic incantation. After only three and a half years, during the summer of 1614 (or 1613) when she was 54 (or 53), she died. The evidence of this was her untouched dinner plates. Someone who looked through the slit in the door, says Glut, saw her lying face down on the floor.

When they tore down the walls to retrieve her body, legend has it that they found a brief document to the effect that before her imprisonment she had invoked a darker power to send 99 cats to tear out the hearts of her accusers and judges. The priest, who read it, recalled the cats they had seen that night when they entered the castle.

What's notable about Countess Báthory is that she is one of the extremely rare females throughout history who have displayed vampiric or cannibalistic appetites. After her death, rumors spread about how she'd actually bathed in the blood of her young victims. Everitt states quite emphatically, but without substantiation, that she had girls butchered so she could try out her beauty treatment. He attributed it to a preoccupation with eternal youth, and other authors have followed suit.

Yet, when Dracula scholar Raymond McNally traveled to Slovakia to examine court records, none mentioned bathing in blood, although some noted her frenzy for biting pieces of flesh off her victims. Father Laslo Turáczi had written about her in his historical account of Hungary, published in 1744, more than a century after she had died. He relied on official records, as well as on legend and lore, to piece together her tale. Yet, because the Catholic Church benefited from dramatic tales of werewolves, witches, and vampires, because it helped with their doctrines about God and Satan, his account during an era when werewolves and witches were being "discovered" and executed, must be suspect.

One enduring legend is that Erzsébet had slapped a servant girl one day, got blood on her hand, and after washing it off found that it made her skin look younger. Alchemists apparently assured her that this was a sign of her nobility, so to restore her waning beauty, she made a practice of bathing in virginal blood. These ideas were suggested in 1795 by Wagener, when he (as translated by Sabine Baring-Gould) wrote: "Elizabeth was wont to dress well in order to please her husband, and she spent half the day over her toilet. On one occasion, a lady's-maid saw something wrong in her head-dress, and as a recompense for observing it, received such a severe box on the ears that the blood gushed from her nose, and spurted on to her mistress's face. When the blood drops were washed off her face, her skin appeared much more beautiful—whiter and more transparent on the spots where the blood had been."

Apparently, "Elizabeth formed the resolution to bathe her face and her whole body in human blood so as to enhance her beauty." Her accomplices, he said, would catch the blood in a tub so that Erzsébet could "bathe at the hour of four in the morning. After the bath she appeared more beautiful than before."

No official account mentions this bizarre behavior or fetish, and it's more likely that she simply experienced a sexual thrill from seeing blood and/or used the blood for her rituals and ceremonies. Nevertheless, if the ledger with 650 names is what many believe it is, then no single person in the centuries to come surpassed her victim toll. Her reputation remains as one of the most bloodthirsty killers on record, in part because her noble status made her untouchable in a society that protected its aristocrats. (END)

Well I thought that was interesting idk about you people lol and oh ignore the PT 1 in the post title and credit for this article goes to Crimelibrary.com

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