Thursday, March 12, 2009

Elizabeth Bathory the real Vampire

In the last post, we had seen the popular belief and image of Vlad the impaler.

In this post we will have a brief look on the life and story of Elizabeth Bathory. She was born on 7th August, 1560 and died in the year 1614 on August 21. She was the countess of a kingdom in Hungary. She is considered as one of the most sadist Mass murderer with an account of 650 murders of Young girls.

Again our character did not had a very happy childhood, she suffered from fits and exhibited uncontrolled rages, which proved that she had some brain disorder with a lot of aggression. There are stories of her being Promiscuous, she became pregnant at the age of 14 by a peasant and had to be secluded to avoid scandal during her Betrothal.

She was married to a great warrior Count Ferencz Nadasdy, who spent most of his days away from the family. Thus their marriage united the two strong family whose bloodline is stained with stories of cruelty. The Bathory’s aunt was infamous for being a lesbian(Elizabeth herself was one) and a witch (a crime in those days) and her uncle was an alchemist and a Devil worshipper (crime by some standards) and Bathory’s brother was a reprobate with whom no female or girl child was considered safe. To add more to this the nurse of the Elizabeth was Ilona jone one of those who were captured in 1610 for practicing black magick, her rituals required sacrifices of children.

After moving with her husband she started indulging herself more into torturing people, it is also believed that her husband also taught her few methods of torture and encouraged her activities. There are accounts of Elizabeth writing letter to Nadasdy when he is out for war explaining her new rituals. Since both of them shared similar ideals, her life became easy, this is evident by the mail she sent to her husband. The mail has reference to one of the Mentors of Elizabeth, who taught her rituals , it says "Thurko has taught me a lovely new one. Catch a black hen and beat it to death with a white cane. Keep the blood and smear some on your enemy. If you get no chance to smear it on his body, obtain one of his garments and smear it.". Nadasdy died in 1604, some even say that she poisoned him.

This all happened when accidentally Elizabeth had a smear of blood on her skin, she found that the particular part of skin, which has been covered by blood, seemed to be cosmeticized. She then summoned her witch, and asked her to explain the effect. The witch fearing execution or might be for some other reason made up a theory that the blood of young women is an elixir for skin and increases the youthfulness. This made the queen to get young girls from the country and kill them and take bath in their blood. It seems that she found immense pleasure in torturing these young girls. She used to torture them in many ways most of them cannot be explained here, people interested in it can google it and you will find them easily. Elizqabeth started with the girls from the Aristocrat families then turned towards the poor.

The story came to an end when once one of the aristocratic girls had gone missing from Elizabeth’s castle and later she tried to project it as a suicide. There were already rumors about her going high in the country. So the king who was indebted to her as he had borrowed some money, so he would have considered the option to get rid of that problem. The trial began and all evidences were collected, she was found guilty, but because of her royal background her sentence was postponed indefinitely, meanwhile she has been kept under house arrest. The officials who searched her castle said tht there were lots of bones of human parts all around in the her castle. There dogs were running with human parts in their mouth. Many of the bodies din’t had arms, eyes. Some of the bodies were left half burned, some left half buried.

The workers who helped Elizabeth also came forward and accused her of torturing them and using them for her weird pleasure activities.

Now you may think, why have I written about these two people, Vlad III the impaler and Queen Elizabeth Bathory. The reason is they are the actual character who later became the famous Dracula and Vampires. Vlad’s another name was Dracula, the reason being his father was one of the people who was in the order of dragon. And his father was called Dracul and his son the Dracula. The famous author Bram stoker combined this two characters in his novel Dracula and created the most famous myth of Europe. Many people still believe that Dracula actually exists and there are lots of priests who claim to have seen vampires and killed few. So the vampires and Dracula as we have heard of it never existed except for this two people who framed the image of our present Dracula and Vampires.