The Countess Elizabeth Bathory (b.1560 A.D. ; d.1614 A.D.), also known as Erzsébet Báthory in her native tongue, is one of the most infamous figures in Romanian history. Her heinous crimes, the collective murders of some 612 young servant girls (most of Slovak descent) over a several year span, caused her to become a legendary and feared figure for which, much as the actions of Prince Vlad Dracula III of Wallachia (b.1431 A.D. ; d.1476 A.D.) earned the nickname “Vlad the Impaler,” her actions earned her the nickname “The Blood Countess.” Even after the legends have been lifted her crimes still seem unimaginable.

Elizabeth lived the comfortable, wealthy life of a dignified Countess. Unlike most females of the time, Bathory had the benefit and privilege of being well educated and her intelligence surpassed even many of the men of her era and lifetime. Elizabeth was exceptional and quick in her learning and studies, becoming “fluent in Hungarian, Latin, and German... when most Hungarian nobles could not even spell or write. Even the ruling Prince of Transylvania at the time was barely literate” (20). Some modern-day scholars and contemporaries of hers postulated that she may have been insane, thus accounting for her seemingly inconceivable atrocities, but even a cursory glance into her past reveals a person fully in control of her faculties, mentally and otherwise.

A mother, a Countess, a brilliant woman, a wife, polyglot, bisexual, Pagan, Christian, Muslim as the occasion demanded, political, beautiful, shrewd, ruthless, engaging — and the murderer of hundreds by her own hand. It is astounding, fearsome, and perplexing to be part of the same species as this woman. I do find it perplexing, however, that four centuries later, ethnic groups hold blood grudges. These people are long dead, and even their ghosts are probably tired. But they make good opera. That a historian must find intriguing, which is why something of a libretto reads as it does (see at left).

Elizabeth Bathory was born in 1560 into one of the oldest and noblest families in Transylvania. Her family had many powerful relatives — the Kings of Transylvania and Poland, a cardinal, princes, and a cousin who was prime minister of Hungary are among these relatives. The most famous relative was Istvan Bathory (b.1533 ; d.1586). Istvan was Prince of Transylvania and King of Poland from 1575 to 1586. It has been said that around the age of four or five, Elizabeth had suffered violent seizures. These mysterious episodes may have been caused by epilepsy or another neurological disorder undiagnosable at the time and may have had something to do with her “psychotic” behavior later in life.

She was married off for political reasons to Count Ferencz Nadasdy in 1575, the Count 26 years of age at the time. Before the marriage took place she became pregnant with a child from a peasant. She was taken away to a family castle under the excuse that she was sick. She had a daughter, which was given away. Her husband took Elizabeth’s surname so that she could keep her more-revered name. They lived together in Transylvania’s Castle Cséjthe (in Slovak this Castle is named Cachtice). Through the twenty-first century there is rivalry between the Hungarians and the Slovak’s and one will get a blank expression if one refers to the “wrong” name. The Count spent a great deal of time away from home fighting in wars and for this he was nicknamed “The Black Hero of Hungary.” While her husband was away at battle Elizabeth’s manservant Thorko introduced her to the occult. She thence began a practice of torturing servants. The fascination with torture began for her as she saw her family deal with political enemies. For a brief time Elizabeth eloped with a “dark stranger.” Upon her return to Castle Cséjthe, the Count did forgive her for her leave. Back at the castle, Elizabeth couldn’t tolerate her rather domineering mother-in-law. With the help of her old nurse Ilona Joo, she began to torture the servant girls. Her other accomplices included the major-domo János Ujvary, Thorko, a forest witch named Darvula and a witch Dorottya Szentes. The first ten years of their marriage, Elizabeth bore no children because she and Ferencz shared so precious little time together as he pursued his “career.” Then around 1585, Elizabeth bore a girl whom she named Anna, and over the following nine years gave birth to two more girls, Ursula and Katherina, and then in 1598 bore her first and only son, Paul. Judging from letters she wrote to relatives, she was a good wife and protective mother, which was not surprising since nobles usually treated immediate family very differently from the lower servants and peasant classes.

In 1600, at age 51, Count Ferencz Nadasdy died in battle... and thus began Elizabeth’s period of unabated atrocities. First, she sent her hated mother-in-law away from the Castle. By this time it is thought that she had dabbled into some forms of sorcery, attending rituals that included the sacrificing of horses and other animals. After her husband’s death her fears of growing old began to grow more and more. When striking a servant girl for combing her hair too hard some of her blood fell on her hand. Elizabeth, now 40 years old, grew increasingly vain and she feared the thought of aging as she may lose her beauty. The servant girl’s blood made her think that her skin took on the freshness of the young maid from which it had been spilled. She believed that she had found the secret of eternal youth. Elizabeth had her major-domo and Thorko strip the maid and then cut her and drain her blood into a huge vat. Elizabeth bathed in the blood of the maid to, in her mind, beautify her entire body. She thought the blood made her skin look younger and become convinced that blood was the secret to eternal youth, if not life everlasting. She was also convinced that blood from virgin girls specifically would be the most effective. From here, her most notorious deeds began. The tortures the young girls would be put through would last for weeks, months. They were then cut in several different ways to provide blood for Bathory to wash herself with. More than six hundred women died because of Elizabeth. These women ranged from peasants to members of the nobility, though the age range seemed kept close to youth.

In the decade of 1600 - 1610, Elizabeth’s henchmen at Castle Cséjthe continued to provide Elizabeth with new “servant” girls for the blood-draining ritual and her blood baths. Interestingly, Elizabeth posthumously went out of her way to see to it that the murdered girls were given proper Christian burials by the local Protestant pastor, at least initially. As the body count rose, the pastor refused to perform his duties in this respect... because there were too many girls coming to him from Elizabeth who had died of “unknown and mysterious causes.” She then threatened him in order to keep him from spreading the news of her “hobby” and continued to have the bodies buried secretly. Near the end, many bodies were disposed of in haphazard and dangerously conspicuous fashions and locations (like nearby fields, wheat silos, the stream running behind the castle, the kitchen vegetable garden, etc.). Finally, it was one of her later intended victims that escaped and told the authorities about what was happening at Castle Cséjthe that word got out. King Matthias II of Hungary ordered Elizabeth’s own cousin, Count György Thurzo, governor of the province to carry out a raid on Castle Cséjthe. On December 30th, 1610 they raided the castle and they were horrified by the terrible sights they were met with. One dead girl in the main room, drained of blood and another alive whose body had been pierced with holes. In the dungeon they discovered several living girls, some of whose bodies had been pierced several times. Below the castle, they exhumed the bodies of some 50 girls.

Two trials brought by Thurzo were held in 1611, one in Hungarian and one in Latin. Promptly enough, the witches Helena Jo and Dorottya Szentes were tortured and burned at the stake that year. Janos Ujvary was beheaded. Katalin Beneczky was spared death, and her fate is unknown. A later tribunal, held at Bitcse, with more than two hundred witnesses was convened by King Matthias II. Erzsébet and her servants were found guilty and had their punishments set by the judge. Elizabeth had refused to plead either guilty or innocent, and never appeared in the trial. At this trial Johannes Ujvary, major-domo, testified that about thirty-seven unwed girls has been killed, six of whom he had personally recruited to work at the castle. The trial revealed that most of the girls were tortured for weeks or even months. They were cut with scissors, pricked with pins, even prodded with burning irons onto short spikes in a cage hung from the ceiling to provide Bathory with a “blood shower.” Sometimes the two witches tortured these girls, or the Countess did it herself. Elizabeth’s old nurse testified that about forty-some girls had been tortured and killed. In fact, Elizabeth killed 612 women — and in her diary, she documented their deaths. A complete transcript of the trial was made at the time and it surfaces in the present day in Hungary. Of the people involved in these killings, all but Countess Bathory and the two witches were beheaded and cremated. Due to her nobility, Elizabeth was by law not allowed to be executed. The tow accomplices, however, had their fingers torn out and were burned alive. The court never convicted Countess Elizabeth of any crime, though this was under the caveat that she was to be put under house arrest. She was sentenced to indefinite life imprisonment in her torture chamber and stonemasons were brought to wall up the windows and doors of the chamber with the Countess inside. They left a small hole through which food could be passed. A vindictive King Matthias II demanded the death penalty for Elizabeth but because of her cousin, the prime minister, he agreed to an indefinitely delayed sentence, which really meant solitary confinement for life.

In 1614 on July the 31th, Elizabeth, now age 54, dictated her last will and testament to two cathedral priests from the Esztergom bishopric. She wished that what remained of her family holdings be divided up equally among her children, her son Paul and his descendants being the essential inheritors. Late in August of the year 1614 one of the most curious of the Countess’s jailers wanted to get a good look at her, since she was still reputedly one of the most beautiful women in Hungary. Peeking through the small aperture in her walled-up cell, he saw her lying face down on the floor. The regal Countess Elizabeth Bathory, whose crimes had already immortalized her in myth and history alike, was dead.

The body of the Countess was intended to be buried in the church in the town of Cséjthe, but the grumbling of local inhabitants in consensus found abhorrent any thought of having the “infamous Lady” placed in their town, on what was to be hallowed ground, no less. Considering this, and the fact that she was “one of the last of the descendants of the Ecsed line of the Bathory family,” her body was interred instead to the northeastern Hungarian town of Ecsed, the original Bathory family seat.

Sometimes it is easy for one to concentrate on the crimes themselves and ignore Elizabeth herself. She was very beautiful, it is true, but also very intelligent. In fact, she used her intelligence and charisma as a tool to get more victims as she lured noble girls to her castle under the promise of an education (she may have held power, but to suggest that all 612 girls came to her totally unwillingly and against their will is a bit hard to swallow). It is also interesting to look at the political actions involved in this tale. There are several interests involved in the prosecution of Elizabeth Bathory, most involving the family fortune she had control over and people wanting an excuse to take it. She had the potential as being remembered as one of the best members of the Bathory family, but she would also wind up becoming the most infamous.

After her death in 1614, all records of the Countess Elizabeth Bathory were sealed for more than a century. Her name was forbidden to be spoken in Hungarian society.

Now, if you would like to draw the line at what is history and what is the stuff of legends/myths, whether plausible or not, stop reading here. Otherwise, read on...

What is said (more from the undeniable uncanny similarities in name and the notorious daughter each produced, not of any real historical fact) to be one of the Bathory family’s ancestors, also of the Ecsed line, was the noble Bartley family. Residing within the walls of Castle Bartley in England, the Bartley family seemed a wealthy, peaceful one, their exploits seeming to have been one that kept them out of battle’s way.

In on or about the year 1413, the then-only child of the Romanian Prince of Wallachia Vlad “The Great” Dracul II, Mircea Dracula, arranged the marriage of his only daughter, Elizabeth Dracul (b.1393 A.D. ; d.1421) to the Count Bartley of England, perhaps in an effort to win greater numbers for the Wallachian armies’ efforts against their sworn Ottoman Turk enemies.

Little is known about the life of Countess Elizabeth Bartley, future “The Vampire Countess,” prior to 1413. Nothing substantial available to note about her upbringing or life with her father, Mircea, in Romania, a life that would likely have carried her back and forth between the lands of Wallachia and Transylvania, though it could be speculated as a turbulent lifestyle that would likely force her to witness, perhaps up close, the true face of war, violence, and death. It is not until her marriage in 1413 that more is known, at least within legend. Living in what would seem to be a happy or least tolerable enough marriage in the elusively located Castle Bartley following the wedding, equally little is known about her activities until the year 1421. What happened between those years is the key to understanding the Countess’ mystery, but all that conclusively remains known (as far as the Legend of CastleVania goes) is that two things happened : 1) All contact was lost between Count Bartley — any approaching guests, visitors, or couriers were turned away at the gate by the castle guards. 2) The Countess Elizabeth Bartley became a vampire. If one were to cross-reference when contact was lost with the Count with Bartley’s vampirism and subsequent murderous actions, one could conjecture a date of late 1414 as the time of Bartley’s vampirism. How it happened, from what passing vampire she was made such from, and whether or not it was a willing transformation are all questions that remain unanswered.

This is where the similarities between Countess Elizabeth Bathory (b.1560 ; d.1614) and Countess Elizabeth Bartley are seen. Either by some kind of trance or otherwise being clever enough to never let them know of the Count’s absence, Bartley was able to order Castle Bartley’s guardsmen to secure the castle from any guests. Additionally, these same guardsmen, from 1414 all the way through 1421, did the Countess’ bidding and brought before her hundreds of young girls from nearby towns in England that would become quickly inducted as servant girls. It could be suggested that in order to keep the guardsmen’s loyalty, Bartley either permitted or otherwise turned a blind eye and allowed the men (who she had to leave unvampirised for need of their protection during the day) to have their way sexually with the girls, a theory that would support their knowledge of the Count’s absence if not a theory that would support them actually having a hand in his absence. Now unlike Bathory, Bartley thrived off the blood of these girls to sate her otherwise unquenchable vampiric thirst, not beautify herself (and through her unaging, virtually immortal vampiric state, Bartley truly had found the secret to eternal youth and life everlasting in the girls’ blood where Bathory had only been wasting her time).

What is interesting to note (in legend) is that there was evidently a kind of lesbian community among the constant gathering of young girls within Castle Bartley’s walls. These girls lived together, were treated as honored guests for their lives (though never allowed to leave, and locked in their bedchambers by the guardsmen before sunrise — their curfew), were fed well, and allowed full roam of the castle’s library and courtyard. As years passed and the pubescent girls aged (some not aging, being vampirized) into their teenaged years they had no parental figure to guide them save for their reclusive Countess hostess and no males to speak of save for the guardsmen who remained out of sight amongst the battlements (if the Countess did allow them to have their way with the girls to keep their loyalty, it would have to suggest whatever girls they wanted were kept apart and away from the rest of the servant girls — if these raped girls were allowed to reintegrate with the others it would jeopardize the fragile community that had become established, and the Countess must have known that), they became involved with each other, in friendship as well as closely-knit lesbian intimacy. In these dark years it was as if Castle Bartley had become the playpen for an entire teenaged community of lesbian hedonism.

Bartley maintained her community as one might carefully tend to a garden. As became the ritual in the earlier years following the establishment of the castle’ hedonistic community, one evening every week the Countess would summon a single servant girl to her bedchambers in the deepest, darkest bowels of Castle Bartley. The girls were not frightened by this — no, they anticipated it. It was a great honor and privilege to be chosen and summoned by the Countess, their hostess, benefactor, and overall matriarchal mother figure. Chosen girls were quickly prepared — they were cleansed, bathed in fine, sweet-smelling oils and lotions, and clothed in the finest gowns they sewn by their hands by fellow servant girls who jealousy looked forward to their own time with the Countess. What ensued upon a girl’s summoning to the Countess’s bedchamber was night-long sexual encounters, teaching whatever girl she various summoned sexual acts, acts she would perform between herself and the girl before the girl would be sent back to the others, eager to share her secrets with her fellow servant girls. It is during these sexual encounter with the “girl of the week” that Bartley, in the midst of intimate passion, that the Countess would bite the girl in question, sating her vampiric thirst just enough to last her until the following week and the next girl.

The aforementioned account would seem to suggest Bartley had a genuine enough affection, if not love for the servant girls of her castle — she went out of her way to not only not kill them, but keep them happy, content, and safe. Several young women among the castle’s community, however, when approaching the threshold of adulthood at ages 17 or 18, never returned to the others after their visits with the Countess. Their disappearance and ensuing mystery amongst the ignorant servant girls only heightened the notoriety and mystique surrounding one’s summoning to the Countess’s side, false stories told between the girls beginning to spread of these disappeared girls, enviously most speaking of their lost brethren “becoming one with the Countess” or “they’ve proved worthy enough to be kept at the Countess’ side... always.” In truth, these disappearing girls were of two kinds : 1) Any girls that caught her fancy that reached the 17-18 age range, at which time Bartley would halt their aging by vampirising them by encouraging them to drink her own blood in the midst of their intimate encounter and keeping them at her side in an adjacent bedchamber lined with coffins made by the guardsmen — these girls likely did not object, and considered this an insurmountable honor. 2a) Either girls that Bartley tired of (perhaps not meeting her expectations for “performance” in the weekly meetings, or not learning from their summonings) or any girls that there seemed to be any detectable early signs of rebelliousness or teenage defiance were, in the middle of their chosen summoning of the week, fatally drained dry of blood, their bodies disposed of by the guardsmen in a quiet fashion (probably cremated in the castle’s crematorium). 2b) These same defiant/rebellious girls, if not drained to death of their blood, could have been simply turned over to the guardsmen to have their way. If this was the case (and this would explain the separation of the guardsmen’s girls from the main community) the guardsmen were likely instructed to either kill and dispose of whatever girls the Countess turned over to them after they were through with them or otherwise they could do with the girls as they would for as long as they would but to simply make sure these girls she turned over to them were kept out of sight and earshot of her precious community.

Everything would fall apart late in the year of 1421. Just as it had been one of Elizabeth Bathory’s intended victims that had escaped to tell their story and alert the resident Romanian authorities in 1610, one of the girls Elizabeth Bartley had either turned over to the guardsmen or whose unspoken defiance went unnoticed by the Countess escaped Castle Bartley. When local authorities became promptly alerted, word and stories of what went on within Castle Bartley quickly spread to the King of England. Already puzzled by Count Bartley’s lack of correspondence and otherwise disappearance off the face of the Earth (from 1414 to 1421 it was assumed by the general public Count Bartley decided to live as a recluse in wedded bliss with his wife, Bartley), a raid of Castle Bartley was ordered. The raiding party of the King arrived just in time to find Countess Bartley in the middle of one of her weekly erotic encounters with one of her servant girls, naked and kneeling over the young girl with blood dripping from her exposed fangs.

In short order, Countess Elizabeth Bartley, having no high-ranking relatives to vouch for her or her family (unlike Bathory, for whom her luck in this regard spared her an execution in the 1611 trial) aside from her father, Mircea (who was neither in any kind of power in Romania, currently still under his own father’s rule, or looked upon by the England court as a man whose word amounted for much, was tried as a “vampire witch” and burned at the stake only two days following the raid in the winter of 1421. While no bodies of any victims were found — save for one, the body of the murdered Count Bartley (kept in a state of substantial preservation in the dry cellars of his castle) his neck bitten and throat evidently slit — what she was and what she’d done to the girls she’d had kidnapped and brought to her was enough to seal her fate.

If this truly happened it has surely been concealed from his subjects, but further accounts seem to indicate that the King of England immediately ordered that the entire populace of young women within Castle Bartley — at least a handful of them having to have been found, to their horror, as vampires, like Bartley; the ones she’d made such to prevent their adulthood — be not returned to the parents from which they’d been taken by Bartley’s guardsmen and long believed missing or dead, but systematically massacred by the King’s men to be sure the vampire menace of England was truly rid of, beheaded, and burnt to bone and ash, permitted not even the sanctity of Christian burials. No word was ever sent to these girls’ parents or family. Just as England histories seem to bury this account, the existence of Castle Bartley and the Bartley Family, and the life and fate of Countess Elizabeth Bartley, the former Elizabeth Dracul, Romanian histories (whether conscious effort behind it or not) bury the existence of there ever being a daughter named Elizabeth from its Mircea Dracula.

It was as if Countess Bartley never existed... but the Legend of CastleVania begs the differ. In fact, the Legend of CastleVania indicates she walked the Earth a second time. While the following account is just as much a chapter in the Legend of CastleVania as the above account of Bartley, the budding historian should take the following with a grain of salt.

Countess Elizabeth Bartley would be “accidentally” brought back to life in the spring of 1914 before the dawn of the Great War (WWI) by a novice sorcerer, Drolta Tzuentes (the name would suggest a direct connection to the Dorottya Szentes witch of the aforementioned Bathory account, executed in 1611), a practitioner of black magic. Gratitude from the Countess for her resurrection did not save Tzuentes from reprisal from the authorities. Upon Tzuentes’ return to her hometown of Veros in Romania (it isn’t clear if she directly served the Countess following her resurrection), the constabulary were already looking for her, as there were reports from the villagers that she was (rather foolishly) standing in the middle of the town square, slitting the throat of a rooster while in a pentagram made of palm ashes. According to Chief McGregor, she had been apprehended when she attempted to break into a local house. She was found holding an unholy sacrificial dagger, and was immediately put into custody upon her return from England.

After leaving the ruins of Castle Bartley behind her and appropriating the nearby formerly tourist-only Castle Prosperina of England for her work ahead, the Countess immediately set to work resurrecting the uncle she learned she had, the younger brother of her father, Mircea, “Count” Vlad Dracula III. The former voivode Prince and ruler of Wallachia in his life (1431-1476) had already been resurrected both naturally (his Centennial Resurrections) and by outside means/persons in 1476, 1576, 1691, 1788, 1792, 1844, and 1892 at the time of 1916, and the Count had been killed last in 1897 at his Castle Dracula (the enchanted/cursed The Demon Castle Dracula, CastleVania) in Transylvania by Quincey P. Morris, Jonathan Harker, John Seward, Arthur Holmwood, and Dr. Abraham Van Helsing.

Before she could begin, Bartley decided further preparations were in order : At the beginning of the Great War, on June 1914 at Sarajevo, the Crown Prince of Austria was assassinated. It was said that a strange beautiful woman was involved, within the shadows. It was indeed the Countess Elizabeth Bartley. In order to revive her uncle, Count Dracula, she conducted an unholy ceremony which caused the war, giving her possession of human souls from Europe.

Recognizing very quickly a threat to her mission in the form of two men : John Morris (b.12.12.1885) and Eric Lecarde (b.04.03.1892). Both men, childhood friends, had watched John’s father be killed by Dracula in 1897 and furthermore John’s bloodline at least had its roots in the same Belmont Clan of vampire hunters that had managed to slay her uncle so many times in history during her centuries-long slumber beyond death. She moved quickly — she knew the only way John could be stopped would be to kill him, but thinking she could discourage Eric from challenging her by destroying his morale, Bartley vampirised his new bride, Gwendolyn, in a bloody trip to Veros that left the Mayor and his five daughters either butchered or vampirised, but ultimately dead. When Eric was forced to kill his own bride to release her from her vampire state, the Countess’ efforts backfired — his morale, hoped to be crushed to perhaps suicidal levels, was only strengthened to equal or surpass John’s.

Not able to dissuade the vampire hunting duo, in 1917 Bartley led them on a violent romp throughout various European locales beginning with the ruins of Castle Dracula in Romania, then the Atlantis Shrine in Greece, the Leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy, a munitions factory in Germany, Versailles Palace in France, and climactically concluding in the Castle Prosperina of England. Though she was struck down by the duo and vanquished she succeeded in her goal — she succeeded in resurrecting Count Dracula within the walls of Prosperina. As fate would have it, however, her efforts were for naught as her uncle would be shortly following her in death during the vampire hunting duo’s subsequent confrontation with him. As John Morris and Eric Lecarde promptly made their escape, Castle Prosperina crumbled into the sea, fading from recorded history just as easily as Bartley’s entire life had.

Thus concludes the lives, times, and vampiric strigoi exploits of both the Countess Elizabeth Bathory (“The Blood Countess,” b.1560 ; d.1614) and the Countess Elizabeth Bartley (“The Vampire Countess,” b.1393 ; d.1421, 1917). What follows are the tales of Lea (one of Bartley’s chosen) in 1421, then John Morris and Eric Lecarde in the years 1916 and 1917, these tales only recently recovered from personal journals and diary entries, hopefully shedding some like on at least the Countess Bartley if not the Legend of CastleVania itself.