Almost three hundred years before Bram Stoker ever dreamed up Dracula there was a countess living in a castle in the mountains who was so rich and so beautiful and so completely untouchable that she spent the better part of a decade murdering young girls without anybody lifting a finger to stop her. What she supposedly did with their blood is the reason she’s still the most famous female serial killer who ever lived.
By the time she turned forty she was a widow with a mountain castle and a fortune and a face that hadn’t aged a day since her wedding. Men lined up for her. Princes rode across half of Europe for one sweaty night in her bed and went home bragging about it to their friends. Not one of them ever wondered why the most beautiful woman in Hungary always smelled a little bit like a butcher shop.
Legend says she found her secret by accident. A servant girl tugged a knot too hard while she was brushing out the countess’s hair and Elizabeth smacked her so hard that the girl’s blood splattered across her wrist. She rubbed at the spot and the skin underneath looked brand new like she had peeled ten years off in one swipe. Most people would have washed their hands but Elizabeth went looking for more.
There was plenty more down in the villages below her castle where dirt poor families were thrilled to send a daughter up the mountain to scrub floors for a countess in exchange for a hot meal and a bed that wasn’t made of straw.
She liked them young and she liked them pretty and she always needed new ones. The excuses got lazier every year (a fever, a fall, a runaway who was probably off with some boy) while the village priests kept getting sealed coffins from the castle with orders to bury them fast and skip the questions. They asked anyway and kept asking for years and the rich men they asked kept ignoring them. That tells you pretty much everything about what a poor girl’s life was worth in the year 1600. And yeah I’m looking at you, every lord in Hungary who heard those priests out and decided dinner was more important.
Underneath the castle she kept a bathing room cut into the rock with a big copper and brass tub in the middle of the floor and iron hooks hanging from the ceiling right above it. Her three most loyal servants would bring a new girl down there in the middle of the night and string her up by the wrists over the empty tub. One quick cut across the throat was all it took.
The countess would slip into the tub as it started to fill and tip her head back under the dripping and lie there in the warm dark until the girl above her stopped moving.
Not every girl got the mercy of a quick cut either. When the case finally went to court more than three hundred witnesses described what happened to the girls who weren’t needed for the bath. It reads like a serial killer’s diary. She bit hunks of flesh out of their cheeks and shoulders and burned them with branding irons and jammed sewing needles under their fingernails. In the winter she had them marched out into the snow and drenched with bucket after bucket of freezing water until they turned blue and stopped shaking for good while she watched from a warm doorway.
Her mistake was getting greedy. Once the villages wised up and quit sending their daughters she started taking in the girls of lesser noble families with a promise to teach them how to behave at court. Noble girls come with noble fathers who notice when their kids stop writing home. Right after Christmas in 1610 the most powerful lord in Hungary showed up at her gate with soldiers and found a dead girl just inside the door and more girls locked in the dungeon with puncture wounds all over their bodies where she’d been slowly tapping them like maple trees. One servant told investigators she’d seen the countess’s own private list of victims and it had more than 650 names on it.
Her helpers went first and they went screaming. The executioner took the two old women who had held those girls up over the tub and tore their fingers off one at a time with tongs pulled glowing out of a fire. Then he tied what was left of them to a stake and burned them alive in front of a crowd that cheered the whole way through. The man who did most of the cutting got his head chopped off and tossed onto the same fire (which was the closest thing to mercy anybody got that day).
Nobody would dare put a Báthory in front of a judge so they marched her up into a tower room in her own castle and had masons brick up the doorway while she stood on the other side shrieking at them. They left one narrow slit for air and one little gap down at the floor where a guard could shove in scraps of food and that was it. No light and no visitors and no more baths. Day after day she sat alone in the dark feeling her own skin go loose and dry and wrinkled under her fingertips with nothing to feed it.
The villagers below swore that every single night they heard her howling I’LL HAVE MY REVENGE out of that slit into the wind. Three and a half years later a guard peeked through the gap and found her face down on the stone floor at fifty four years old, and legend says she looked about a hundred when she finally died…
Now picture a mansion up in the hills above Los Angeles with a big iron gate and cameras on every corner and a long winding driveway that leads to a woman who has been famous since the 1970s. She’s well past seventy and she still has the face and the body of a forty year old. The magazines call it timeless and her plastic surgeon swears he’s never touched her and her publicist says it’s pilates and green juice. Every time she walks a red carpet the flashbulbs go off and the whole world asks how she does it. Nobody ever gets a real answer.
Every year thousands of pretty young girls step off a bus in Hollywood with a suitcase and a headshot and a head full of dreams about being a star. A few of them make it and most of them go home. And every year some of them get invited up to a party at a big house in the hills and are never heard from again. Nobody important ever seems to notice because they were just pretty nobodies from small towns whose lives were worth about as much to the rich and famous as a peasant girl’s was to a countess in 1610.
So the next time some seventy five year old movie star shows up on a talk show grinning with skin like a teenager ask yourself what’s in the basement of that house in the hills. Ask yourself if there’s a copper tub down there and a row of iron hooks in the ceiling and a drain in the floor that’s never quite clean.
Maybe the Blood Countess never really died in that tower. Maybe she just found a town where pretty girls disappear every day and nobody even bothers to look for them.
Go Watch the Countess
Wise Wolf here. If you want to see this story told by somebody wearing a costume elaborate enough to make the countess herself jealous, go watch our new Blood Countess video on The Wise Wolf Club YouTube channel. It’s hosted by ‘Kitty Wolf’ (obviously, this is not her real name) an actress I hired last week who does dinner theater off Broadway seven nights a week to make rent and still films every one of our Shorts in costume (her boyfriend is a costume designer with THOUSANDS of them). I can only pay her 20 bucks a video and Lily isn’t getting what she deserves either because we keep losing subscribers for telling people to think for themselves. Every view and every subscribe on that channel gets us closer to paying them both what they’re worth, so take three seconds and hit the button. The link is right there waiting for you to click it.
This was so unsettling and so much truth here…
What a chilling tale! The lengths some will go to for eternal youth is truly unsettling.
Great article. The rich have always had total disdain for the poor and perpetually considered them as expendable as stockyard animals. Both then (as far back as you want to go) and now. Power concedes nothing to the powerless. Take a close look at those pictures of Cher, especially the one on the right. I see a very obvious male to female, transsexual androgyne. Cher is a tranny/drag-man, one of the more famous of "her" perverted ilk.