The Bloody Countess

Once upon a time, many, many years ago, before Ted Bundy, Charles Manson and Jake the Ripper, there was a woman, a woman named Elizabeth Bothàny.

Elizabeth Bothàny, the Countess of Bothàny was born in August of 1560. She was the daughter of the Baron George Bothàny and of the Baroness Anna Bothàny. Both were Bothàny by birth. Inbreeding was not rare in the 16th century. The family was a wealthy and powerful Hungarian family, having the King of Transylvania as a cousin.

Elizabeth started showing signs of what she would later be in life when she was a very young age. It is said that she suffered from seizures, loss of control and fits of rage, which could have been caused by epilepsy, possibly stemming from inbreeding.

She married in 1575, at fifteen, and kept her maiden name while her new husband, Count Ferenc Nadasky add it to his own, less distinguish one. She started abusing her staff early on and it is said that her husband even showed her more ways of punishing them.

But her husband being a warrior by nature, he was often gone. To pass time, she took many young lovers until she gave three children to her husband.

After the children arrival, and with the help of her accomplices, Helena Jo (her children wet nurse), Dorothea Szentes (known as a witch) and Johannes Ujvary (referred as Ficzko and described as a drawf-like cripple), Elizabeth violence escalated. The activities attributed to her at that time were the beatings of her staff with a barb lash and a heavy cudget and having them dragged into the snow and doused with cold water, while they were naked, until they died, frozen to death.

It is in 1604, when her husband died of an infected wound that Elizabeth moved in her castle at Cachtice. And it is there that the horrors really began.

It started when Elizabeth was striking a servant girl that had pulled her hair and she was accidentally sprayed with the poor girl blood. She then discovered that blood appeared to reduce the signs of ageing (by then, Elizabeth was 44 years old).

The urban legend says that Elizabeth started to drink and bath in the blood of young peasant girls (even though there is no description of these baths). She was convinced that she had made a brilliant discovery. A method to would allow her to restore and preserve her youth.