Scary People: Elizabeth Bethory

Scary People
The Blood Countess
Elizabeth Bethory

Warning: What you're about to read is real and may be too scary for those of young or weak at heart. You have been warned.

She bathed in the blood of virgins to keep her young look and according to records killed an estimate of 650 women. She's Elizabeth Bethory, the Blood Countess of Hungary, and one of the most frightening figures in history. Can anyone be born evil or perhaps was she taught to treat others harmfully? Her early years may be the cause of why she turned out the way she did.

She was born on August 7th, 1560 to a wealthy and powerful Hungarian family. Her family history provides that black hearts run in her family: her aunt, Klara, used to enjoy torturing female servants. At a young age, Elizabeth eye-witnessed the execution of a gypsy who was sewn in the stomach of a live horse and left there to die. At the age of eleven, her family arranged her to be married to Ferenc Nadasdy. They would then wed when she was fifteen in 1575. You'd think she would just settle down in a nice castle in the mountains. Yeah, so did Vlad Dracula (the real one), and look what he did. She didn't settle down and in all honesty compared to Dracula, he was a savior saint.

Elizabeth loved to punish the servants, if she was to hit you with a large club, that was her on a good day. Most of the time, if you were a servant in her kingdom of blood and misery, she would stick needles in your upper and lower lips, flesh, and under the fingernails. She would also have her servants dragged out during a cold day, left in the snow, while she poured cold water onto them until they froze to death.

She also had an entourage of disciples, who took no pain or pity in the victims they punished. One such member, Anna Darvulia, a mysterious woman who had Elizabeth wrapped around her finger, taught the countess new torturing techniques. But after Darvulia died when Elizabeth was in her 40's, it made her even more reckless. One night, she had a servant drag a woman into her room while she was in bed. She then proceeded to bite her cheek, and then she took a chunk off the woman's shoulder off, and other parts that I will keep PG.

The beginning of the end for Bethory was in 1611 when allies of her harm doings were convicted. There trials stated that they "only" killed between fifty or sixty people. But that proved to be false when a fifth eyewitness, pleading for mercy of one of her friend's, gave forth a journal found that was handwritten by Elizabeth herself. All known killings were on this journal and the total came to an astonishing 650 poor souls. The prosecutors didn't feel so compelling. Here's how the five were executed: the first two accomplices had their fingers cut off one by one, their bodies thrown into a blaze to burn; another younger accomplice was too young and had fewer crimes against him, so he was quickly beheaded; another one was executed but it is no specified how.

Elizabeth, though the cruelest of her blood craving followers, was only convicted to "Castle Arrest." On 1614, at the age of fifty four, she was discovered face down, and dead. I guess that's where that old saying is true, "What goes around, comes around" and death came to the one who thought she was death herself. Her so called bloodlust didn't keep her alive, because like other cruel dictators before and after her, they were only born to fail.

Sources:

http://www.whataslacker.com/backdoor/elizabeth_bathory/ - I am no slacker, but this website had a lot of useful information on our bloodlust Scary People candidate.