When she entered her forties, Countess Elizabeth Bathory of Hungry felt that her looks were fading. She had been a beautiful woman in her early years. She had been so beautiful multiple suitors throughout Central Europe competed for her hand in marriage. Elizabeth searched frantically for a way to preserve her youthful looks. Her efforts would win her the eternal name “Blood Countess” or “Countess Dracula”.
One day, in a fit of rage, she struck a servant girl. When she hit the young girl she drew blood. The spot on which the blood landed seemed to have improved her skin tone. The noblewoman then consulted alchemists and other mystics who concurred that blood improved beauty. Countess Bathory then resolved that she would improve her image by bathing in the blood of young virgins to regain and maintain the beauty of her youth.
She started by stalking out into the night and, with a few trusted servants, kidnapped local peasant girls. Elizabeth Bathory would then flay them, stab them, and bit them in effort to draw their blood. She would hang them suspended from the ceiling and bath in the falling blood. For five years she continued with this practice for almost five years.
When she began to tire of the blood of peasant girls. Countess Bathory also began to doubt the effectiveness of blood from the lower classes. The Blood Countess conceived of the idea that she would only bath in the blood of young girls from the nobility. Elizabeth believed that not only would she maintain her beauty, but she would grow even more good looking.
Countess Dracula created a school in her castle for girls from noble families to learn courtly etiquette. The leading families of Hungry sent their daughters to her school to be educated. These girls would meet the same grisly fate of the peasant girls that Elizabeth Bathory had tortured to death before them. She basked in there blood with a relish.
It was the torture and murder of daughters of the aristocracy that lead to Elizabeth Bathory’s undoing. Rumors of her atrocities started to spread and a formal complaint was made to the Hungarian emperor Matthias II, who assigned investigators to look into the accusations. Between the years of 1610 and 1611 almost 300 witnesses were interviewed. The witnesses described everything from mutilation, to sexual abuse, to biting the flesh off of victims.
The Blood Countess was captured and brought to trial. She was estimated to have tortured and killed as many as 650 young women. However, the exact number was never proven. She was sentenced to spend the remainder of her life walled up in a small set of rooms in her castle under guard. She died in 1615 never having expressed any remorse over her actions.