Vampires Through the Ages (12 page)

Rising from an overstuffed chair, the richly clad visage of Countess Erzsébet Báthory came into view, cast by the hellish glow of the fireplace behind her. Momentarily startled by the intrusion, the aging countess, once famed for her haunting beauty, now stood amazed at the sight of the Palatine of Hungary himself standing in her chamber door with his sword drawn.

Twisting her face into an arrogant rage, the countess screamed, “How dare you enter my chambers in such a manner!”

Fueled by what he had seen that night, Thurzó grabbed the countess by the hair and dragged her out into the hallway kicking and screaming. Pulling her up short with a hard yank, Thurzó looked into her cold, hate-filled eyes and from behind clenched teeth exclaimed, “Madam, in the name of the king, you are under arrest.”

If not for the arrest of the Countess Erzsébet Báthory that fateful night of December 29, 1610, the world may never have known of the extraordinary crimes committed by what is perhaps one of history's most prolific female serial killers. Báthory was accused of the torture and murder of as many as six hundred young girls during her life, and later historians alleged that she also practiced black magic against her political enemies, engaged in lesbian activities with her aunt, and worst of all, drank and bathed in the blood of her victims.

Born on August 7, 1560, at Ecsed Castle in what is now the eastern part of Hungary, Erzsébet Báthory was a precocious child known for uncontrollable fits of rage and violent seizures. Brought up in the privilege and wealth of an influential family of Hungarian nobles, she enjoyed all of the advantages her station afforded, including the best tutors in Eastern Europe and a small company of obedient servants who catered to her every whim.

By the age of fifteen Báthory was wed to an older man named Count Ferenc Nadasdy in a union that promised mutual advantage to both families. Nadasdy was a national hero to the Hungarian people through service against the Turks, but as captain of the Hungarian army he was also an absent husband. During what became known as the Fifteen Years' War, from 1593 to 1606, Nadasdy is listed as participating in every battle until his death on January 4, 1604, possibly from appendicitis. Besides his reputation as a Hungarian patriot, Ferenc Nadasdy was also known as a cruel and vicious opponent whom the Turks called “The Black Knight of Hungary.” One report even mentions that Nadasdy reveled in entertaining his fellow knights by mockingly dancing with the corpses of his enemies or playing catch and kickball with the heads of executed prisoners.

Many historians believe that it was the bloodthirsty Nadasdy who first introduced the countess to the finer arts of torture during the brief periods when he was home. The two often severely punished their household servants for even the smallest infractions. One penalty Nadasdy particularly relished was to strip an offending servant girl of her clothes, cover her in honey, and force her to stand in the hot summer sun to be tormented by insects. Another favorite punishment was to insert pieces of oiled paper between the toes of servants who had passed out from overwork and light the pieces of paper on fire.

In this manner the couple reigned over their servants with terror and violence, and some have surmised that the young countess may even have periodically suffered the same treatment at the hands of her brutal husband when she did not comply with his wishes. Regardless of where Báthory first developed her taste for cruelty, her husband also acted to restrain her sadism from resulting in murder. For the “Hero of Hungary,” murder brought suspicion and unwanted scrutiny, and in numerous recorded instances he hurried home from the front to cajole local officials into turning a blind eye to his wife's savage excesses.

With the death of her husband in 1604, however, there was suddenly nothing standing in the way of the countess, and it was from this period on that she developed her legendary taste for blood. Perhaps of one of the best known claims against the countess is that she regularly bathed in the blood of adolescent girls, whom she tortured and killed in the belief that their virginal blood would forever keep her young and beautiful. She is said to have stumbled upon the practice after striking a servant girl one day for some minor infraction. As the countess was wiping the servant's blood from her face and hands, she noticed that it left her skin looking fresher and rosier. Following the recommendation of a local witch named Anna Darvolya, whom she befriended, the countess immediately had the girl killed and drained of her blood, in which the countess bathed. The horrid act soon became a routine that she regularly performed with the aid of Darvolya in the dark hours of the night deep within her protective castle. Over time the countess enlisted the aid of four others to help her lure, with the promise of employment, local village girls to her castle, where they were tortured and killed. The first helper was a deformed boy named Janos Ujvary; the next was an old washer woman named Katalin Beneczky; and the final two were old servants named Ilona Jo Nagy and Dorottya Szentes.

Like her husband, the countess also had favorite forms of torture she indulged in, one of which included stripping a girl of her clothes and forcing her to stand in the freezing cold until she died of exposure. If the process seemed to be taking too long, she would douse her victim with buckets of cold water to speed things up. In other cases she stuck pins under the nails of some girls and cut their fingers off if they dared to try and remove the pins. Some she starved to death, others she cut or strangled, and many were beaten with an iron bar until they died from their wounds. When she was too weak or sick to do the job herself, she had the servants brought to her in bed, where she bit them viciously about the face and shoulders.

Many of the crimes the countess and her accomplices committed took place at Csejthe Castle, which she used as her base of power. Witnesses to many of the events testified afterwards that the countess maintained a series of inner rooms deep within the fortress that she kept under lock and guard and from which late at night the sounds of screams could be heard. When the bodies of her victims began piling up, disposing of them posed a major problem. At first they were secretly buried in the local cemetery at night, but as the cemetery filled up, Báthory's accomplices began stacking the bodies in the closets and under the beds of the castle. When her conspirators grew too lazy, they brazenly flung bodies over the battlements to be devoured by wolves.

As the years passed and the countess's deeds continued to go unpunished, she grew bold enough to make the one mistake that would bring her under the scrutiny of the royal court. Until now the countess had chosen her victims from the common peasant stock that resided within her holdings. Having depleted that source, she turned to young girls of noble families, whom she lured into her service with promises of advancement through the ranks of society.

When these girls started disappearing, the ruler of Hungary, King Matthias, began keeping an eye on the countess and her activities. The Hungarian court was after all indebted to the Báthory family for an extraordinary sum of money, which it had previously borrowed to help finance its wars against the Turks. If the countess were to be found guilty of some crime, then not only could the debt be erased but the king might have a claim to her vast estates. With continued complaints filtering in to the king from worried nobles over the mysterious deaths of their daughters, the court ordered the Lord Palatine (a high-level official) Count György Thurzó, coincidentally Báthory's own cousin, to arrest her in 1610.

On January 2, 1611, a trial ensued against the countess's four accomplices, who, after being tortured, confessed their crimes as well as the complicity of the countess herself. The four were quickly found guilty and sentenced to public execution while the countess, who was never officially tried, was sentenced to
perpetuis carceribus
, or perpetual life imprisonment. The punishment was meted out by bricking her in the tower room of her castle with only a small space to allow food to be passed inside. Three years into her sentence, on August 21, 1614, the countess was found dead of natural causes at the then ripe old age of fifty-four.

Despite her many protests of innocence there were few who believed her and even fewer who would support her against the crown. While the king failed to seize her lands, in the end he did manage to wipe out the sizable debt he owed. While the final body count was said to number as many as 650 young girls, this figure had one source: an unknown servant girl who based her claims on hearsay. More realistic estimates report that over the course of two decades it was probably closer to fifty. While none of the three hundred witnesses who gave testimony to her crimes actually saw her commit them with their own eyes, the accusations alone were enough to condemn her.

Indeed, legends of her bloody bathing rituals did not even surface until a hundred years after her death, when a Jesuit priest named László Turóczi collected stories from the villages surrounding Csejthe Castle during the height of the vampire mania that swept Eastern Europe in the 1700s. Though Erzsébet Báthory failed to find the immortality legend claims she sought in the blood of others, she may have finally achieved it in the gruesome legacy she left behind.

Bluebeard

… Lord de Rais and his followers, his accomplices, conveyed away a certain number of small children, or other persons, and had them snatched, whom they struck down and killed, to have their blood, heart, liver, or other such parts, to make them a sacrifice to the devil, or to do other sorceries with, on which subject there are numerous complaints.

—georges bataille, the trial of gilles de rais

Once upon a time, in the Duchy of Brittany, there lived a wealthy and powerful nobleman known as Bluebeard, because he sported a large blue beard that lent him a rather frightening appearance. One day Bluebeard desired the young daughter of a neighboring lord, and after a period of courtship convinced her to marry him despite his fearsome countenance and the fact that his previous wives had all disappeared mysteriously.

As soon as the two were wed, they settled down in one of Bluebeard's many fine castles and lived peacefully until one day he abruptly told his new wife that he must leave on a long journey immediately. Saddling his steed in haste, Bluebeard turned and handed his wife a heavy ring of keys, stating, “On this ring are the keys that unlock every door within this great castle. As my wife you are free to roam about its halls and chambers as you see fit, but the small room deep within the castle's keep you must never enter, for the day you do you shall feel the wrath of my deadly anger.” Taken aback by the fiery look in her husband's eyes, the young wife dutifully agreed to his command and waved goodbye as he spurred his horse through the postern gate.

Days went by, turning into weeks, as the young wife filled her time waiting for her husband to return by exploring the many twisting corridors and lofty staircases of the castle's interior. In time, however, she grew bored with these and found herself returning again and again to the very door that Bluebeard had forbidden her to enter. Finally one day her curiosity got the best of her, and wondering what great mysteries lay within, she slipped a key inside the door's worn lock face and heaved it open.

Adjusting her eyes to the stygian darkness, the young wife gasped in horror at the charnel house she beheld. From floor to ceiling the room was splashed in putrid-smelling blood as the badly mutilated bodies of Bluebeard's former wives hung from the walls like gruesome trophies. Reeling from the shock of it, the wife slammed the door shut remembering the words her husband spoke to her before leaving:
But the small room deep within the castle's keep you must never enter, for the day you do you shall feel the wrath of my deadly anger
.

That same evening Bluebeard unexpectedly returned from his travels, and after washing the dust from his massive blue beard demanded that his wife return the keys he had left in her safekeeping. Noticing how she trembled before him, Bluebeard's eyes narrowed into angry slits as he hissed, “So, now you know my secret, do you not, my love?”

Falling to her knees, the frightened wife cried out, “Please, my lord, I did not mean to disobey your wishes.”

But Bluebeard's cold heart would show no pity. As he slowly drew his sword, he exclaimed, “Now, good wife, you will finally join my other wives and make a fine addition to my wall.”

Before Bluebeard could deliver the deadly blow, however, a loud crash sounded at the chamber door, and in burst the wife's two brothers with their swords drawn—she having sent word to her family of the danger she was in. In order to save himself, Bluebeard turned to run, but the brothers were quicker and ran him through with their blades, ending his life and saving their sister from the horrifying fate that awaited her in that bloody room deep within the confines of the castle's keep.

The bloody tale of Bluebeard was known to exist long before Charles Perrault first published it in his 1697 collection of French folktales entitled
Histoires ou contes du temps passé
. Some even speculate that it was created as a veiled warning by the peasantry of Brittany to caution children to steer clear of real-life Bluebeards and their castles in a time when accusing the French nobility of any crime could mean the loss of one's own head.

Who, then, was this French nobleman who so terrorized the countryside of Brittany to the extent that he was immortalized in the folktales of the French people? While several candidates have been put forward by scholars over the years, many attribute the origin of the tale to one of the country's greatest knights, Gilles de Rais, who fought his way through the ranks to become Marshal of France.

He was born in 1404 to Guy de Laval-Montmorency and Marie de Craon at the family's castle at Machecoul. Both his parents died while Gilles was still very young, and he afterwards found himself under the tutelage of his scheming grandfather, Jean de Craon. Left to his own devices as a child, few if any restraints were placed upon him—and while some education was afforded him, most of his time was spent preparing for his introduction to the battlefields of France. During the frequent and violent clashes that later became known as the Hundred Years' War, Gilles distinguished himself as a courageous and reckless warrior earning many honors upon the field. In 1420, Gilles inherited his father's estates and increased his fortune by marrying Catherine de Thouars.