Happy Halloween - The tales of trick or treat

23. Countess Dracula

Countess Dracula was a real vampire named Elizabeth Bathory who lived in Hungary in the 1500s. She murdered young girls and took baths in their blood because she believed it would keep her looking young.

Her terrible deeds earned her the nickname “Countess Dracula” or “The Blood Countess”.

Countess Elisabeth Bathory had always been a strange and profoundly nasty person. Her initial victims were local peasant girls, many of whom were lured to the castle by offers of well-paid work as servants in the castle.

Later she is said to have begun to kill daughters of lower gentry, who were sent to her by their parents to learn courtly etiquette.

Elizabeth was horrified that she was aging badly and wanted to stay young. She believed taking baths in the blood of young girls would make her beautiful again. At the height of her madness, she needed more and more blood so she ordered her guards to kidnap girls and bring them to the castle.

Eventually after a murderous spree spanning half a dozen years, Elisabeth Bathory’s baths of blood finally came to an end. She had run out of space in her castle to store the dead bodies and started throwing them over the castle walls.

Villagers and passers-by would discover their loved ones, festering and rotting away in heaps outside the castle walls. Elisabeth was arrested and put on a public trial. The court evidence listed 650 victims in total.

The court found her guilty of murder but they could not execute the Countess because of her noble birth. Her punishment was to be solitary confinement in a walled room where she would never see the sun again nor hear any sound. This dungeon would be built within her own castle.

Three years into her sentence some curious jailers found her lying face down on the floor. Countess Bathory at the age of 54 was dead. A gruesome, dark chapter in Transylvanian history had mercifully come to an end.
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