The Real Origin of the World’s Most Famous Female Serial Killer
A new book explores the geopolitical scheming that created the blood countess legend.
Foreign Policy
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11 min čtení
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Americans and Brits of a certain age—those who spent much, if not all, of their childhoods in a pre-digital world—once held a certain reverence for the Guinness Book of World Records. At once a compendium of gross-out factoids (the photo accompanying “longest fingernails” is seared in my brain) and historical details, it was the authoritative source of things to make you go “whoaaaa” in the school library. But if you’ve reflected on it for even a moment as an adult, it’s impossible not to question its factual authority. Were that guy’s nails really the longest of all time? And, now that we’re looking closely, did Elizabeth Bathory, a Hungarian countess born in 1560, actually kill more than 600 virgins, making her the world’s most prolific female serial killer? For that question at least, author Shelley Puhak has an answer: almost certainly not.
Different versions of the Bathory legend have floated through Western culture, but the tale generally goes something like this: She killed hundreds of peasant girls from across the lands her family controlled so that she could drain their blood and bathe in it in order to maintain her youthful beauty. She has become nearly as synonymous with the vampire trope as Count Dracula, with dozens of films based on the story, including a brand-new one, Die Blutgräfin (The Blood Countess), in which Isabelle Huppert’s Bathory swans around Vienna in a crimson cloak and massive jewels, sucking the blood of young women.
Americans and Brits of a certain age—those who spent much, if not all, of their childhoods in a pre-digital world—once held a certain reverence for the Guinness Book of World Records. At once a compendium of gross-out factoids (the photo accompanying “longest fingernails” is seared in my brain) and historical details, it was the authoritative source of things to make you go “whoaaaa” in the school library. But if you’ve reflected on it for even a moment as an adult, it’s impossible not to question its factual authority. Were that guy’s nails really the longest of all time? And, now that we’re looking closely, did Elizabeth Bathory, a Hungarian countess born in 1560, actually kill more than 600 virgins, making her the world’s most prolific female serial killer? For that question at least, author Shelley Puhak has an answer: almost certainly not.
Different versions of the Bathory legend have floated through Western culture, but the tale generally goes something like this: She killed hundreds of peasant girls from across the lands her family controlled so that she could drain their blood and bathe in it in order to maintain her youthful beauty. She has become nearly as synonymous with the vampire trope as Count Dracula, with dozens of films based on the story, including a brand-new one, Die Blutgräfin (The Blood Countess), in which Isabelle Huppert’s Bathory swans around Vienna in a crimson cloak and massive jewels, sucking the blood of young women.
The dramatizations get at least that part right: Bathory’s collection of jewelry and sumptuous clothing was extensive and fitting of her position. After her husband died in 1604, followed by her brother in 1605, she controlled at least 17 castles and estates (with access through her family to much more) and over 500 miles of land. “[T]heir combined acreage overshadowed entire kingdoms,” Puhak writes. However, she notes in her new book, The Blood Countess, Bathory was “without the protection of any male relative,” which made her “a very attractive target.”
If not for this book, the actual story behind Bathory’s status as a stock vampiric character could have continued collecting dust in the archives across the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. As the host of the podcast You’re Wrong About asked on a 2024 Bathory-focused episode, “How much can we ever really know about a person once legend has taken over?” The answer, it turns out, is actually quite a lot.
First of all, there’s simple logistics at hand. The initial Guinness entry contains the claim that Bathory killed more than 600 girls, citing the testimony of a servant girl named Susanna. But Susanna didn’t come up with that number herself; “the scribe recording this tale marked it as something only ‘know[n] from hearsay,’” Puhak writes. That number also adds up to “accusing the Countess of killing enough girls to fill four entire villages” given population statistics at the time. Historically, wiping out villages is something largely in the skill set of imperial armies (or diseases such as smallpox), not middle-aged women.
There are other complicating factors to this claim. While “the confusion of the war years”—first between the Ottomans and the Hungarians, then the Transylvanian-Hungarians and the Habsburgs—“might have provided some cover for such crimes,” after the Peace of Vienna in 1606, visiting administrators recorded every household and death in Bathory’s region. “[S]erfs and commoners, for once, had some degree of choice,” Puhak writes. “That they chose to return to the Countess’s villages and towns strongly suggests that … there were not yet widespread concerns that she was a murderer.”
Though the vampiric lore surrounding Bathory did not emerge until well after her death, a handful of contemporaneous writings have bolstered the accusations against her. One major source stems from the Protestant fights sweeping Europe at the time, and Puhak does a laudable job succinctly explaining how differences in Calvinist and Lutheran practices may have played into misunderstandings that demonized Bathory. (Though the Habsburgs remained firmly Catholic, Puhak notes that as much as 80 percent to 90 percent of Hungary was Protestant by the mid-1500s.)
First, there was the matter of Lent. In 1602, the head pastor at Bathory’s court at Sárvár, Lutheran Stephen Magyari, wrote to two other pastors, seeking advice on how to deal with a “certain wicked woman” and whether she should be able to receive communion. The letters call the woman, who was an employee of Bathory’s, a carnifex, which translates literally from the Latin as “butcher.” The more bloodthirsty interpretations of these letters have inferred the connotative meaning of “executioner” and “torturer” and view the exchange as the first mention of Bathory’s alleged violent streak, naming this woman as her accomplice. But Puhak draws a more banal conclusion: Eating meat was forbidden during Lent, and “[w]hen a monk in a nearby city ate meat on a fast day, he was publicly punished and similarly berated as a carnifex sanguinarius, ‘a bloodthirsty butcher.’” In reality, Puhak contends, Magyari was accusing Bathory of “harboring heretical, Calvinist views for tolerating one of her servants ignoring the Lenten fast,” because while “Lutherans had maintained many of the Catholic traditions surrounding fasting, the more radical Calvinists had advocated for defying them altogether.”
There is a third possible interpretation of carnifex: “The pastors’ letters are worded in such a way that the ‘butchery’ might not be a reference to the woman’s sin, but to her profession.” The woman in question was an “herbalist” who attended to medical issues at Bathory’s court and likely performed healing practices usually left to male “barber-surgeons” (boil lancing, wound cauterization). Puhak makes the compelling point that, to many of the people who required painful but necessary treatment at her hands, “torturer” or “butcher” may have felt apt.
A sketch of Thurzo with a beard and fur cap.
Bathory’s main adversary was George Thurzo. Heritage Art/Heritage Images/Getty Images
But when it came down to it, distrust of Bathory had more to do with her fellow nobles’ designs on her power and property than actual fears that she was tormenting local girls. Her main adversary was George Thurzo, an “ambitious new-money aristocrat” who had ingratiated himself with the Habsburgs and become palatine, “the highest-ranking Hungarian in the kingdom.” He opened an investigation into Bathory in March 1610, citing “credible and serious allegations” that she had “cruelly murdered one-knows-not-how-many girls and virgins and other women,” without stipulating where these accusations had come from.
In August, Bathory sought to nip the matter in the bud, going to court with one of her ladies-in-waiting, whose daughter had died under Bathory’s care. Lady Helen testified against rumors that Bathory had beaten her daughter to death, “fully and publicly” exonerating the countess. But even as she went on the offensive, Thurzo was collecting depositions across nine counties; dozens of villagers testified against her, many of whom had conflicts of interest.
Thurzo himself broke laws and behaved badly while conducting his investigation. Bathory was arrested on Dec. 29, 1610, and in the preceding weeks, Thurzo met with two other nobles with designs on her lands—her son-in-law George Drugeth and Red Megyery—to decide “how to best divvy up her property.”
Bathory never confessed and eagerly awaited her trial, which she was convinced would prove her innocence. But various other developments—political, military, and otherwise—slowed the process, and she never got her day in court. After complaining of ill health, she died overnight of natural causes in August 1614. Despite the accusations, Puhak writes, Bathory received a proper funeral: “[H]er coffin was draped with an expensive black silk cover and brought into the church where she was once denounced.”
In a dark room with a red hue, an actor portraying Elizabeth Bathory appears before a bathtub and a portrait of Bathory.
An actor portrays Countess Elizabeth Bathory at “Killers: A Nightmare Haunted House”—an exhibit of drawings, artifacts, and recreations associated with notorious serial killers—at Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural Center in New York on Oct. 5, 2012.TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/Getty Images
In the years following Bathory’s death, it seems that she was scarcely mentioned. Though “the seventeenth-century public adored sensational ‘true crime’ … there were no poems narrating Elizabeth Bathory’s crimes, no broadsides illustrating her cruelties,” Puhak writes. She suggests that some who’d been involved in smearing Bathory’s reputation may have been ashamed—or perhaps those who shaped the historical narrative simply had too much else going on: Four years after Bathory’s death, a group of Protestant nobles threw two Catholic officials and their secretary from the windows of Prague Castle, sparking the Thirty Years’ War.
If Puhak’s telling has a flaw, it’s a tendency to err on the side of fully rehabilitating Bathory’s image. She frequently notes instances of Bathory’s noblesse oblige, including that she paid for the weddings of the daughters of her children’s nannies and “gifted the girls ‘beautiful skirts’ for their trousseau.” When Bathory behaves haughtily or coldly, it’s explained away as merely being a good administrator of her lands. Yet while the bureaucratic demands of a 17th-century aristocrat’s time were certainly complicated, correcting the historic record need not require absolving a noblewoman of every slight against her.
Though Puhak herself never explicitly calls it a feminist project, The Blood Countess goes a long way in reminding readers of the historical relevance and narrative power of misogyny. Bathory’s extensive material resources insulated her from the quick punishments that often accompanied accusations of witchcraft and wickedness—but the defamatory claims against her were only able to fester to such intensity because she lacked a male protector.
And the Bathory known by the world today is an entirely sexist creation of yet another man: While writing a 1719 travel guide of Hungary, a Jesuit priest stumbled across records about her case and decided an embellished version of her story would fit nicely into his book. He assumed she had been born Catholic and said she became “unnaturally vain and obsessed with her appearance” after her conversion to Lutheranism. When one of her servants “pulled her hair, the Countess slapped her,” the priest wrote. “The girl’s blood splattered across one side of her face. After she wiped her face, the Countess became convinced that this blood—virgin blood—had made her face look younger. So the Countess had her trusted servants supply her with a steady stream of virgins.”
Whether the priest’s timing was fortuitous or intentional, by the 18th century, European culture had moved on from its pathological fear of witchcraft and, as Puhak writes, “was in thrall to a new boogeyman: vampires.”
In the centuries since, the cultural relevance of vampire lore has ebbed and flowed, but facets of it have become indelibly baked into the conspiracy theories that attend contemporary politics. Though I doubt Puhak’s book will be enough to penetrate the conversations of those who believe in “adrenochrome harvesting,” it offers a strong, well-researched corrective to a story that is about the type of power-hungry, deadly scheming best left in the annals of history.
