These articles were published in the Spectacular Slovakia travel guide, published annually by The Slovak Spectator since 1996. The latest editions can be obtained from our online shop.

Čachtice

Home of the Bloody Countess

By Chris Togneri

She was a savage torturer of virgins. She was a twisted lesbian who drained girls of their blood and then bathed in it. She was known as the 'Bloody Countess' and the 'Beast', and she was one of the most dreaded mass murderers in European history.

Erzsébet Báthory was born to one of the oldest aristocratic families in Europe in the mid-16th century, but due to centuries of intermarriage, this sadistic beauty was left with feral and psychotic desires. Although she was said to have tortured and murdered wherever she travelled, she performed most of her wickedest deeds in Čachtice castle, in modern-day western Slovakia.

"One of the girls died in the coach [Báthory was travelling in]," said accomplice to the Bloody Countess Kateline Beniezky January 2, 1611, during Báthory's trial for multiple murder. "When this happened, Erzsébet had her held upright by servants, although she was already dead, and continued to beat her."

The charges against Báthory are numerous and grotesque. According to the graphic book The Bloody Countess by Valentine Penrose, she murdered some 650 virgins lured to her castle by the promise of well-paying jobs and prestige. When they arrived, however, they were tortured and killed by the countess and her slew of cohorts, including evil confidante Dorkó, the dwarf manservant Ficzkó, and the sorceress Anna Darvulia.

	photo: Ján Svrček

Once dead, the victims' "veins were cut with scissors" and their virgin bodies completely drained of blood. The blood was collected in a tub, which Báthory bathed in to preserve her beauty.

The Beast was indeed ruthless. She cut off body parts and fed them back to her victims. She put the girls out in the castle courtyard naked in the snow, then doused them with water and watched as they froze to death. She used "pokers red hot, and applied them to the face and noses [of her victims], opening the mouth and shoving the red iron inside," the dwarf testified during the trial. "One day, the mistress placed her fingers in the mouth of one and pulled until the corners of her mouth split."

Another accomplice, Jó Ilona, added that she had seen Báthory "burn the vagina of certain girls with the flame of a candle," and that tortures were so messy that afterwards "it was always necessary to wash the walls and floors." Dorkó reported that the mistress was fond of "ironing the soles of [the girls'] feet with a red hot iron."

The massacres persisted for untold years, as local peasants' pleas for help were ignored because of Báthory's lofty social status - from a time when families 'won' their surnames, hers was derived from the Hungarian word bájor, meaning brave. During the Blood Countess' reign of terror, the name was so distinguished that two of her cousins were kings, one of Poland and one of Transylvania.

But perhaps blinded by her unquenchable blood thirst, she grew sloppy, burying the numerous bodies in shallow graves and, when peasant girls could not be found, killing the daughters of fellow nobility.

It all came to a head December 29, 1610, when a distant cousin of the countess raided the castle and caught her in the act of torturing a girl. She was arrested, tried, and sentenced to "perpetual imprisonment" in her own castle.

Her accessories did not get off so easily. Jó Ilana and Dorkó both had their fingers "ripped off... because they have by means of these fingers committed crimes against the female sex," read the conviction, and were then thrown alive into a burning pit. The dwarf was given "a more lenient punishment": he was first beheaded, then thrown into the fire.

The Blood Countess was not sentenced to death - her name saved her from that fate. Instead, she was shut off in a room at Čachtice, where visitors today can walk among the stone ruins and ponder the unthinkable crimes committed on that very ground.

"Some stone-masons came [and] one after the other they walled up with stone and mortar the windows of the room in which Erzsébet was imprisoned," wrote Penrose. "And so she saw the light, little by little, progressively diminish. The prison rose up around her. They left only a narrow band of daylight very high up, through which she was able to see the sky. The workers then built a thick wall in front of the door of the room, leaving only a slit to permit passage of food and water."

The Blood Countess lived sealed in the tomb for three and a half years, accompanied only by her victims' ghosts and the bats which would fly in through the lone hole high up on the wall to sleep hanging from the curtains. On August 21, 1614, she died at the age of 54.

"Dead suddenly, without crucifix and without light," wrote Krapinai István in one of two surviving testimonies of her death. "It was bad weather that day. There was a furious wind; it seemed as though witches had died.

"Without a crucifix and without light... The ruins of [Čachtice] are still haunted by her. The day of the shrieks and groans is not yet over."

To get to Čachtice from Bratislava, take the main train line to Košice and get off at Nové Mesto nad Váhom (about an hour). Then take a local train 15 minutes to the village of Višňové, from where the ruins are clearly visible.

Make your comment to the article... (6 reactions already made)