She was the real life Dracula who tortured and murdered hundreds of young women and drank their blood.
‘Vampire Countess’ Elizabeth Bathory went down in history as the worst female serial killer of all time – after torturing and murdering 650 peasant girls at her Transylvanian castle.
She is believed to have inspired Bram Stoker's Dracula as she drank the blood of her young victims.
Born in Hungary, in 1560, the renowned beauty believed that drinking the blood of teenage girls would preserve her youthfulness.
She used to offer well-paid work as a servant where she then lured girls away from their families and locked them up in her castle.
Bathory would then subject them to sadistic torture before beating or starving them to death.
She was known to jam pins under the nails of her servant girls. She also smeared them with honey and tied them down near bee and ant nests.
Horrified witnesses claimed she would stab her victims or bite their breasts, hands, faces and arms, cutting them with scissors, sticking needles into their lips or burning them with red-hot irons.
It was later said that she also bathed in their blood after murdering her doomed victims.
Bathory believed that human blood would keep her young and was, perhaps, one of history’s first vampires.
Her actions were infamous in the area, but her title and relatives made her untouchable.
She was born into the Bathory family, who ruled the Hungarian principality of Transylvania, she was wedded to fellow aristocrat Ferenc Nádasdy at the age of 11.
Before marrying him, at 14, she had an illegitimate child by another man – who was then castrated and thrown to the dogs by Ferenc.
After they married when she was 15 he built her a torture chamber to her specifications.
The couple lived in Nádasdy's castle in Hungary and Elizabeth had four more children, but while her soldier hubby was away Elizabeth took many lovers.
But after Ferenc’s death in 1604, rumours of her sadistic death cells began to spread.
When she ran out of peasant girls to murder she persuaded wealthier families to send their daughters to the castle to learn good manners – but they never returned.
In 1610, she was rumbled due to a suspicious priest who reported her to the Hungarian authorities, who began an investigation.
The Countess and four of her favourite servants and friends were arrested but while three of them were tried and executed, and the fourth sentenced to life, Elizabeth never faced a court, because of her family’s social position.
Instead she was quietly imprisoned in Csetje Castle, in a room with bricked up windows. Her room only had slits for air and food and she died three years later, at the age of 54.
The life and crimes of Elizabeth Bathory have been portrayed in film in the 1971 movie Countess Dracula where Ingrid Pitt played serial killer Bathory.
She also inspired the film called Immoral Tales released in 1973 and Anna Friel also portrayed the evil countess in the 2008 film Bathory.
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