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1560: at the foot of the Carpathians gets born Elizabeth Bathory (Erzsébet in Hungarian) from one of the oldest and important families of Transylvania. The Bathory family could count on a large and powerful relationship between the members that included a cardinal, several princes and even a Prime Minister. The key element of the family was István (1533-1586), Prince of Transylvania and even King of Poland (1575-1586). At the age of 4-5 years, Elizabeth had already violent crisis caused by attacks of epilepsy and other neurological disorders that caused, in the adulthood, psychopathic behavior that made her infamous both to contemporaries and to posterities.
Count Ferenc Nadasdy
In 1575 Elizabeth Bathory, at that time 15 years old, married Count Ferenc Nadasdy and began their married life in the castle of Cachtice. While the count Ferenc spent most of the year in several military campaigns, Elizabeth was introduced into the occult world by his servant Thorko. During the absence of her husband, Elizabeth escaped with a stranger and then returned to the Castle thanks to the forgiveness of her husband. Thanks to the complicity of Thorko, of her old nanny Ilona Joo and of other persons like the butler János Ujvary, of another figure like Darvula and of the wizard Dorottya Szentes, Elizabeth began torturing and killing several young female servants. Ten years after the wedding, with a greater presence of the husband at the castle, Elizabeth gave birth in 1585 to her first daughter named Anna and then followed two other daughters, Ursula and Katherina, until 1598 when she gave birtht her only son, Paul
Castle Cachtice
With the death of her husband, count Ference died at the age of 51 in a battle, began more vigorously the atrocities in the Castle. Elizabeth threw out her mother-in-law and then began a succession of Satanic rituals that included the sacrifice of horses and other animals. Elizabeth, reached the age of forty, began to be terrified by the advance of time and the loss of beauty becomes a real fear. The story tells how one day, while Elisabeth was combining, she was accidentally thrusted by a servant which slapped so hard that she bleeded. The servant's blood poured into Elizabeth's hand which thought of the benefits of rejuvenescence on his skin. Then she thought she had found the elixir of eternal youth. The personal butler Thorko took care to drain all the blood of the unfortunate in a jar, in order to allow the Countess to rejuvenescence her entire body!
In the following years the diligent Thorko continued to procure the Countess new sacrificial victims for her blood baths. But the Countess Bathory didn’t miss the religious piety, wanting to bury the victims according to the Christians canons, asking the local protestant pastor to take care of this aspect. The pastor, as a result, did not want to fulfill the wishes of the countess, cause of the high number of deaths without a precise cause to bury in secret the unfortunate girls.
In 1610 one of the girls captured by the Countess managed to escape and tell all about the events that happened in the castle of Cachtice, to the local authority. King Mátyás ordered to the Governor of the province to carry out investigations in the castle on the murders of young women. Everywhere were founded buried bodies. (50 corpses), tortured bodies and maidens still alive but in poor conditions. The process took place in the village of Bitcse. Countess Bathory didn’t recognise her guilt, while his butler and the servants were found guilty and sentenced to death. The total number of tortured girls (sometimes for months) and killed, according to what wrote the countess Bathory in her diary was 610.
The Countess was never officially condemned for the crimes but in fact was sentenced forever in her torture room where she died in August 1914 at the age of 54. The body of the bloody Countess wasn’t buried in the village because the locals refused that, but in Ecsed town, ancient residence of the Bathory family