Which is like at least the original scary story passes the Beck Dull Test. Welcome to You're Wrong About. I'm Sarah Marshall and this is your Election Day distraction episode, aka me and Princess Weekes and some questions I have had since the sixth grade about Elizabeth Báthory. If you grew up watching History Channel Specials or other dubious historical content, specifically with titles about real life vampires, then you've probably heard of Elizabeth Báthory.
She is still alleged by apparently credible sources at times to be the world's most prolific serial killer. And I first met her and what I can only assume was a History Channel Special about the Countess who bathed in blood in order to preserve her youth and beauty. So how much of that is true? Dixie Torkshire and Kill Hundreds of People. Was it a modern day witch trial? And how much can we ever really know about a person once legend has taken over?
This is the kind of Election Day distraction episode that I would want if I were asking for somebody to make one for me and it might be that for you too and if it is, I'm very grateful. We talk about some pretty gratuitous hammer horror type scenarios that in our estimation are a little bit difficult to believe, but this episode also does get into the very real and very painful life of serfs and of actual torture allegations of the time as well.
So if that's not something that's going to work for you today or in your distraction episode, it works for me. That's why four years ago I was watching all the saw movies in a row, but we are all very different from each other. Then that happens about minute 22 to minute 42 and you can just skip ahead to the historical analysis, which of course in my opinion is the best part. We are joined today by the incredible writer, YouTuber and friend of the show Princess Weeks.
I just loved having this conversation and Princess has joined us for a couple of previous episodes if you like this one and you want to hear more. She was on this year to talk about Rosa Parks and also in the past to talk about Lizzie Borden. There might be a trend. She is our Liz correspondent and I wouldn't have it any other way. And that's it for me. Take care of yourself. Thank you for taking care of yourselves in each other.
I think that's what Jerry Springer used to say and now I'm saying it to you. Thank you for being here. We love you. Here's your episode. Welcome to Irang about the podcast where we look at maligned women of today and yesterday and really, really yesterday and say, did she even do anything? And sometimes we say, well, maybe she did do something, but perhaps not at the scale. Black like she did and with me today is Princess Weeks who is here to discuss Elizabeth. Elizabeth?
Yeah. Elizabeth, the big battery. The big battery. Thank you so much for being here. This is a dream episode for me. I'm so excited. This has been one of the most trying episodes to research from a purely like I want to find primary sources account. I bet. So what came out of it?
I'm both very proud of and I think it leaves enough room for our beautiful listeners to then go on their own Elizabeth battery journeys to figure out how many people could she have realistically killed in a 10 year period? And that's just a fun question, you know, for us all to think about of an automnal evening or beautiful spring evening in the Southern hemisphere. Exactly. So I guess I'll set what Sarah, what do you know about Elizabeth battery?
Okay. So the genesis of this topic is that as you and I may have talked about before, I was the kind of kid who grew up watching any kind of creepy one hour special on basic cable in the late 90s. Did you also watch these things? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I feel like I must have seen something along the lines of real vampires on the history channel in like 1999 with like a little flat, the impaler and then a little Elizabeth battery.
And that it got into what I think of as the sort of archetypal myth, which was that she was this woman who I couldn't tell you remotely where she lived, exceptionally in Eastern Europe or in what century, except, you know, kind of maybe around the 1500s question mark is something like that. Okay. Your instincts are strong. It's a great century.
And the story is presented by the history channel, I think in a very straight face like, yeah, this is what happened kind of a way as far as I remember was that she felt the need to murder hundreds of peasants in order to bathe in their blood and preserve her youth. Yep. As women are want to do. You know, women, women be killing for the blood of virgins. But yeah, that just the story was that she had killed hundreds of people to try and preserve her youth.
I don't know where she got the idea and they would have the role of like a hot woman shot in sort of blurry closeups bathing in something red. Um, so if you look at the Guinness Book of Roll records, a quite reliable source, wink, wink. Yeah. They list Elizabeth's battery as the most prolific serial killer. You know, sisters are doing it for themselves. Ladies is pimps too. They even say like even in the records that it's called into question, how many people that she actually killed.
And despite the fact that most modern historians definitely virgin, either the amount of people possible to kill her, she even did it to begin with. She has remained in the public eye like a virgin killing bloodbath, having vampire slash wear wolf hybrid, depending on the incarnation. Carbic picking field goal kicking phenomenon. It's a feminine on.
Um, and I think one of the most challenging things about doing any research about her is that over the years that lie between fiction and fact has been so blurred to a degree that even books that are cited as sources about things dealing with her do not have any direct evidence or primary sources backing that up. So I read a few well-sided sources, I researched himself about hungry and its witch trials, and I just added what I hope is a reasonable dash of common sense.
And through that, I asked myself the question, what is the truth? Well, as far as you can get, was something happened hundreds and hundreds of years ago? Yeah. But I do think it's, yeah, maybe that worth using this as an example of pointing out that history is always an attempt. Yeah, which is nice, you know, because if there was just like a single version of history to learn, then we would all learn the same thing. And it wouldn't be the, I don't know, the strange adventure that it always is.
So what I found is that like post-communism, this group of historians, folklorists, and archivists came together at the department of folk beliefs and customs at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest. And what are their projects, was to create a database of early Hungarian modern witch trials.
And they found 2000 witch trials and what they call 20,000 bewitchedment narratives, which are basically like, you know, the beginnings of certain witch trials, depending on where they were located. And they found at the time of their publication of this evidence, documented proof of 848 executions for witchcraft before 1800. This is 848 people in a population of either 3.5 or 5.3 million depending on how the borders change.
And they see this as the absolute minimum, because they definitely agree that records have been lost and the border of Hungary kept changing. And within those changing borders, you had a bunch of different political machinations that were going on. So at the time that Elizabeth Bathory is here, the Ottomans had occupied Buda, which was the capital of the city in 1541. And so Hungary was divided into three different parts.
There was upper Hungary, which was ruled by the Habsburgs, in bread, western European influence, big chins. You had the Ottomans who ruled central Hungary, and then you had the eastern part, which at that point included Transylvania, which was its own principality. But then all these Hungarian noble dynasties would rule that latter piece of it. And that would also include the Bathories, who were among some of the richest landowners in the area.
But we're going to put a little pin in that, and we're going to go back to this whole witch trials thing, because I think this is really important context for what we're going to see later. So they found in their research that a minimum of 4,592 accused witches were bought to trial in the Kingdom of Hungary between 1213 and 1800.
And these witch trials tended to kind of ebb and flow, like whenever there was a moment of peace between warfare, there was usually some kind of plague or something bad happening that would create all this tensions, and then people would start accusing each other. And the three central patterns of witchcraft accusations were accusations from above, where you had someone of like a higher ranking trying to accuse a lesser noble of something, or someone of lesser mark of having done something.
You had accusations from below, which were like lower nobility, usually collaborating with a lot of other noble, like lower nobles trying to overtake someone higher, or you had the intra class conflict between people within the same social status, trying to essentially use hysteria or supernatural TM to essentially say like this person has been possessed by the devil, and they need to have their stuff taken from them.
Wow. And it becomes kind of like a means of civil assets for a picture in a way where you're like, that guy's possessed, someone needs his stuff, and perhaps I'm next in line, maybe. Yeah. It's like, why should we let someone possess by the devil have things when I could have things? I mean, that's a great question. I ask it all the time.
But it is in that context that we have Elizabeth Batherees, the accusations against her coming up, the kind of accusations they build up against her, and why her as a bathroom and as a landowner was a good person to accuse of certain things. But before then, I'm going to play you a ridiculous movie trailer from one of the many movies about our dear Miss Batherees. Excuse me, Countess. Not only the look, but the feel of my skin is incredibly different. It has to be careful what you wish for.
What is happening? You are giving me something beautiful. The Countess wants fresh blood. Bring me a virgin. You are mad. I like the blood before it is wasted. The pile of frutting corpses dismembered children. Lies. One witness saw her copulating with the devil himself. Everything has its price. Why are you shaking my love? Do you know how long I've been waiting for you? Almost lost my mind. I found this trailer.
There are so many weird movies, but this one I found was especially entertaining because it focuses on this idea that she did it for a man, which I got to tell you, the absolute untrue. Which is like at least the original scary story passes the backdelt test. Just at least we have that. These alternatives, I think, especially what was interesting as we go forward, but she was already like, she would have been married since she was like 14 years old.
She had like plenty of like legitimate children. She had like absolutely no reason to need nor want male attention. And so the idea that like her big hang up was like, I just want to be beautiful. I'm like, I think she was okay. Right. It's also like, I don't know. TikTok didn't exist yet. It was a different time with regards to aging. I'm here four or five years ago. Exactly. Dating is hard. Guys, we had to all remember dating is hard. Dating is hard. You know, with and are so resilient.
Yeah. That trailer is hilarious to me for like a myriad of reasons, but just the biggest idea that like, oh, because she couldn't have a young boyfriend, that's why she went. I was like, guys, we have to do better. Our serial, our alleged serial killers deserve better than that. It's true.
One of the things I love to point out is a trend about female serial killers historically to the extent that it's possible to observe trends is that it often in the past seems to have been motivated by money where you just like in a society that deprives you of the ability to work or have full citizenship, the only access to money is through men, you know. So like, men around you sometimes just have to start having bad luck if that's the case. Right.
Well, that's the thing about it too is like for her, that was not her motivation because she was so wealthy, but we didn't get into that. So like, you know, I think that like, there's this idea, this preoccupation with like the two different archetypes of like female danger. And I think even to a degree that there's this idea of like the most prolific serial killer of all time was a woman is like a thing that plays within the gender norms of as a woman you're supposed to be delicate and safe.
And even the way in which her crimes are enacted, like the Saddle Massacism of it all is there to tell us and tell the people who were the testimony against to tell them that like she has betrayed her sex by being this, this violent and that is, it's a lot. Yeah. There's like the stew. I guess like a new YA book out as we're recording this about Lady Macbeth. That's like, oh yeah. I've heard it. Lady Macbeth teen girl boss.
Yeah. And you're, there is a degree of like, it is like we're never going to stop taking these sort of like female character slash archetypes out of history and sort of trying out new interiorities on them because we don't have anything left in a lot of these cases that has been passed down to us. But yeah, I do, it is so interesting.
I agree how like the sort of femme fatal like very feminized idea of violence and the female is deadlier than the male like does fit within gender norms really nicely and really in the end within, you know, Christian patriarchal norms. But I guess what we will probably be exploring that as we go forward. Absolutely. All right. So Arleo icon of this is Elizabeth Bathrey was born on August 17th, 15th, 60 to a very wealthy family of what was then the kingdom of Hungary.
And her family tree consisted of like a lot of dukes, leaders, noble people. But the most important family member she had for this time period was that she was the niece of the king of Poland, Stephen Bathrey. Oh, Steve. And her nephew, Gabor Bathrey was ruled the principality of Transylvania. So she was already from her birth like a very influential noble figure and her family was very rich. And they married her to a man named Count. And I apologize to all the Hungarian listeners for this.
So then, Nash Day, as I saw some of it was it or Nash D. I think Nash D is probably the most correct. We're doing our best, but no guarantees. You guys can yell at me and I definitely apologize. And he was a very well respected soldier and came from the basically next highest up wealthy land-owning family. And he made himself very well known and bows against the Turks. And they were married when he was 19 and she was 14, standard noble marriage.
She went to go live with his mother so she could get the, you know, acumated to that kind of lifestyle. They had several children. But because he was always a way due to his military excursions, this left Elizabeth alone as the ruler of their massive estate. Kind of ideal. Yeah. So it's in from what we know that there are letters between them that are like, they're not overly romantic, but they're very like civil, just her being like, yeah, one of our kids is sick. Now I'm feeling better.
I just have a headache like very much how you like just actually lay, hey babe, hope the front's going well. The kids are sick or whatever, but you know, life goes on. So it's very like basic. And that's how their relationship went. He was injured and then had to return home and then eventually died January 4th, 1604 and he left all of his money and land to his widow. Alrighty. Which you know is great.
Like this seems like a lot of time to be a way, waging military campaigns is a sort of like, is it fair to say that there's like very frequent skirmishing over who owns what in this region? Absolutely. About who owns what? Who's supposed to have control of it?
And it's going to come up a little bit later, but because of Elizabeth's family connections, she kind of gets embroiled in some kind of political anxiety happening in Transylvania, because her nephew and the Palatine, which is like basically the prime minister of Hungary are in a massive conflict later on.
So essentially all of that stuff and all of the, you know, loss in every changes of like the constant battles with the Ottomans does leave it for like, there's a lot of political openings and changing up going on in the area, especially because the borders keep changing. So that becomes an aspect of anxiety. But unlike a lot of other women with the death of her husband, she essentially became the owner of the largest estates in all of Hungary.
And her fortress has basically stretched all the way from the east to the southwest of the Hungarian Empire. So she essentially got left this huge track of land that she had and she already had sons and daughters. And I think at this point, her children were all married, living other places. So she's just the ideal woman in her forties. So like her husband just died, who knows, you know, and now she's rich and she's being left alone. So of course, something has to happen.
But even though she has all this, because she is still a woman, the overseeing and protection of her and overall this property was left to Gregory Thurzo, who was the Palatin of Hungary. A Palatin was essentially like the highest ranking office in Hungary. They kind of act as representatives of the monarchs and eventually like that role would become replaced with the prime minister. So that's pretty much the length that we are talking about.
Yeah. Wow. And then, I think that's why Gregory Thurzo had the luck of being one until like the wealthiest noble house in Upper Hungary, which as we said before in the in the diagram, Upper Hungary was the one that was ruled by the Habsburgs. So he again, very military renowned. He defended Hungary from the Ottomans, was loyal to Habsburg and that's how he became the Palatin.
And it was going to be him who, when the rumors started coming around about Elizabeth doing things, was set up to investigate those allegations. But there's a historian, her name is Dr. Irma Kardo. She basically is like a legal scholar from Hungary who has done a lot of work on the battery case. And she wrote this quote that I think was really interesting.
Shortly after assuming power, Thurzo became involved in a failed conspiracy attempt on the life of Prince Gabor Bathory, remarkably three important events occurred around the same time. Gabor Bathory's assassination attempt in Transylvania, sigmund Bathory's imprisonment in Prague, and Elizabeth Bathory's trial in Hungary.
So essentially within a very short period of time of him becoming this ruler, you have three members of the Bathory family all having some sort of political upheaval in their lives. It's a coup de Bathory, arguably. Exactly. Because I think now because her name has become so synonymous with like this mythology, it's hard to kind of see her as being like this massive power player in the world because there's so little we know about her outside of this very key part.
Yeah. Well, it's also when you're in that kind of a story. It's like you don't think of the scary castle as existing inside of a government or like a political system, you just think of it as a scary location lost in time. So I don't know. Yeah, there's something about situating things with that history that makes them maybe less creepy but more scary in this case.
Yeah. And it's all this context that I think is why when historians now go look at the case, they're like, okay, it's weird that this case happened and all these other members for family are being like either attempted killed or like removed from power all at the same time. Yeah. It's just, you know, if nothing else, it's a, it could be kind of a coincidence. Yeah, it is interesting.
Yeah. So now I want to pause to discuss a few things that Elizabeth Bathory is alleged to have had happened to her in her youth that we have little to no evidence for. So these were things that when I was doing like preliminary research, I saw said by a few places, but when I went to go look about what they were sourcing, it was people who either didn't know Elizabeth or it was written like 100 plus years after she died. Love it. The Gospels. A perk.
There's a rumor that she suffered from epilepsy. I didn't see any sources listed for this and the source that's listed on the Wikipedia, which you know, like the first place everyone looks is a time life magazine article. So like, and you know, that like not to shit on time life, but like they don't always have a bunch of citations for their stuff. Right.
They provide hours of entertainment, but it's more of a like, you know, you send away for it and you, your family keeps getting it until your dad has a fit and cancels it basically kind of a thing. Right. Very profit oriented. Yeah. And because I think things like this are treated like pulp, I think there's also just like a lower tier of what people expect. So like they're like, okay, that sounds great. Who cares?
There's another rumor that at 13 years old, she had a secret baby with a peasant boy. Hmm. Not peasants. Those those peasant boys. The source for this is listed as a book by Leslie Carroll called Royal Pains, A Rogue's Gallery of Bratz, Brutes and Bad Seats. Alrighty. So basically she lists in her book, she doesn't have citations, but she does have like a listed bibliography at the back. And of it, she lists Valentin Penrose's biography, The Bloody Countess is one of her sources.
This isn't an I've seen. I was going to listen to a bunch of other places. The thing about it is that the author of this was like a surrealist poet. And so. And so like her work with the biography kind of skirts, novel and actual fact. And it's only 104 pages. And I don't really see it as like a really rigorous biography. It is worth reading because it is written in like a very surrealist way, but it's definitely not like a primary document.
Right. It's like using Steven Sondheim's assassins for like biographical material. Yeah. Exactly. It's like something people don't maybe necessarily expect because we venerate books so much is that that same kind of game of telephone happens like in history and academia and in publishing where it's like someone creates the illusion of a fact and then it gets spread around so much that it becomes, you know, feels real. Exactly.
And so what it says in the Carol book is that it was rumored that in 1574 she gave birth to an illegitimate daughter, fathered by a peasant boy. The child, if there was one, was purportedly smuggled away by a trustworthy local woman who was paid hamsonly to take the baby to Wallachia, which is in Transylvania. Mm. Purportedly. Exactly. This came about centuries after her death. Again, no citation for this.
No. Yeah. And the other thing they try to do is say that Elizabeth witnessed a lot of torture already growing up that she witnessed like serfs, servants and Romani people being tortured by her family. And again, the source listed for this is Carol and their book. And she says in the book, a story about a Romani person being basically tortured until they die by being essentially sewn into the body of a horse. So that both, like both the horse, like I don't want the horse has to suffer.
I don't understand. It's a waste of a horse. You know, you know, it's like in human and racist towards the Romani person. The horses don't grow on trees. And also it's in human and racist, but yeah. But also it's like when you have like these store, and I don't know, it's hard to judge sometimes, right? Because a lot of examples of human evil are like extremely flamboyant and over the top and unnecessary and the cruelty is the point. And it isn't about, you know, any kind of pragmatism.
And it's also like there are certain stories, especially kind of in history or sort of, you know, when something is kind of in an urban legend part of the storytelling spectrum where you're like sewn into the body of a horse. Like who's got the time? Like you can be 100% evil and dehumanizing with half the effort and, you know, I still have the horse, you know, like, and still have a horse.
And I just, I remember reading that and I was just like, this just sounds like, you know, like when Snow White, the stepmother has to like dance with like the evil shoes at the end of the fairy tale. It just has this element of like a grim narrative to it. The magical punishment is true. And we love our fairy tales. We always have. One thing issue is that because of everything going on, like what's surf done, surfdom was horrible and nobles definitely and absolutely abused.
And I believe to a certain degree tortured their, their, I can only imagine the amount of like rape and sexual assault that would have been open to them. So it's definitely, it is definitely possible for any noble person that engage in surfdom as a practice to have abused their, their, their people. However, it would not be something that would get you thrown in jail for. Unless it was super severe. And then I have a quote I want, I'm going to send to you.
It's from John Paget's Hungary and Transylvania. It was written in 1839 and it's basically one of the, one of the well-known descriptions of Hungary that was published in English later. And I'm going to send that to you right now. Okay. I apologize in advance for anything I may be about to read. To the Hungarian people and their children and their children's children. Elizabeth was of a severe and cruel disposition and her handmaidens led no joyous life.
Slight faults are said to have been punished by most merciless tortures. Da, da, da. As she washed from her hand the stain she fancied that the part which the blood had touched grew wider, softer and as it were more young, imbued with the dreams of the age she believed that accident had revealed to her what so many philosophers had wasted years to discover that in a maiden's blood she possessed the elixir vitai, the source of never failing youth and beauty.
If only she knew about K Beauty and retinal cream. I know. On the lives that could have been saved. You just needed to have snails crawl all over her face. Like covering this I almost feel like it's hard to like take it seriously. Not because it's not like horrible things being depicted. But because it just at a certain point it's like someone had to have made this up. It reminds me of reading a little life. Or at a certain point you're like, I've watched this little boy suffer for so long.
I guess I better start enjoying it because there's 400 more pages to go. And so it's definitely a lot of that. Yeah, completely. All right. So now we're going to get to the accusations. But I didn't want to make this too tedious and keep repeating allegation after allegation. So I'll have some summaries of like what the witnesses said. And if you need more expansions, Sarah, I have them all highlighted so we can get to them. Love it. Look at his split.
So in 1610 after years of alleged rumors and I'm putting in air quotes for those who can't, this is not a visual medium. But because I just also want to reiterate this, her husband definitely came home. And the idea that she could just be walking around like covered in like young virgin blood from like 1590 onward, I'm like, well, who was taking care of the household like this? It doesn't all make sense. And is it like a leaving conditioner?
You know, you want to leave it on for a while kind of a thing. It's also, you know, we don't. The idea of bathing is actually in a way seems like kind of a modern concept because like how big of a tab are we feeling? Not anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. Right. It just, I just feel like it's so, it's so an agronistic and how it's, and how it's concepted. But basically Gregory, there's a, the Palpatine, when I'll just call him that I want to say Palpatine all every time I say it. I know.
I feel like Palpatine. I love that. Palpatine somehow Palpatine has returned. Exactly. He went to Elizabeth's home, her castle at New Year's Eve. And he claimed that he surprised the Countess in the middle of killing another servant girl, which people think this has definitely been embellished because it was dramatized later on in a way that doesn't actually make sense. But they said the first site to greet him was Elizabeth's battery herself.
Her face and arms with rolled up sleeves were covered in blood. Blood stains darkened her clothing. Her outrageous screeching against a backdrop of demonic laughter curled his blood. It had to be demonic laughter. It's like, isn't it enough with the servant girls and everything? But also my first question is like, isn't it hard to sneak up on somebody in a castle? Like, really she has a designated area for doing this that isn't like the entryway. It's truly outrageous.
And it's, and it's this idea that he like cleverly snuck up on her. When people pretty much say that he probably was doing this investigation in multiple steps and had already prepared an entrance for her. But he basically announced to all the members of her court that he had found her trying to kill another girl. And he like brought civilians to the castle. It's like, come one, come all. Let me tell you about the crazy bitch that lives in this house.
And he brought the allegations against her and four of her servants, three of which were elderly women, which you know at that time, who knows what that means. But they were older women and one younger male helper. And they were all tortured and threatened. And when they were asked about like how long that they work with her or how long everything happened, the young man basically said he worked there for 16 years and he saw 37 girls killed.
And then two other women, Helena and Catherine said 50. So at the very beginning of these allegations being held against her, the range of dead girls was from around 3637 to 50, which I will say for a lack of a better word seems reasonable. Like if you told me that within like two decades, like a super powered noble killed like 50 serves, I would be like, you know what? I can see that.
You know, like, but like that's a lot of people, but it's like thinkable as an amount that if someone were to want to do that kind of thing, they end up if they were in a position of power that like that feels like the number you can get away with without risking like a whole uprising in rebellion.
Exactly. Yeah. And that's kind of the problem is that the girls that were a part of this like these alleged sacrifices were both noble and poor girls because noble girls get sent to the courts of other high brown ladies to learn their arts and they become members of the household. So even if you are a noble or you're a regular girl like going to Elizabeth Batheree's castle would be considered like a massive accomplishment. And at the time, she apparently had like a very small court.
She had like maybe 20 to 30 people who worked for her inside and then there were about 40 tending to the to the vineyards and fields and all the actual documentations we have of like her running the estate so that it was very well managed like everything was very organized like the records were being held properly. She wasn't in any debt.
And I know that this kind of maybe sounds a little silly, but I just feel like if she's this you know severely sick, mega-lomaniac, blood soaking woman, then like how could she be this good at her at her at her bookkeeping? Well yeah, because it is reckless behavior you know to put it lightly.
Because the image of her like crackling maniacally covered in blood at new years eve or like just without any idea of anyone coming to see her is just in very stark contrast to the woman that we see written in like her own letters or the bookkeeping that we know of her estates.
She wasn't and also like to have killed 650 girls to a certain extent means that you had to find some pretense of hiring them, which means that you would have like salary records for some of these girls, especially the noble women. And I think the idea that she killed these noble women is especially what makes people question it because she was according to some of the names in the victim testimony either related to them by blood or by marriage.
So these weren't just random girls that she like plucked from nowhere. These were like her relatives. And was she accused of killing noble women who actually went missing or like were their disappearances to account for? Well that's the thing is that is that when they went to the time to do witnesses some of the people that they alleged like oh it was this girls you know this daughter or so and so that parent never came to trial.
But I think that if your child gets murdered by a blood drinking contest you're going to show up for the trial. And also like they'll say that some of the bodies were burned. But like there is not the kind of body trail you would expect for that amount of young women going missing. Also like where the declined birth rates. Like that's a lot of women who then never married, never had children. Like these are all things that have very quantifiable results too.
But they're very quantifiable that what happened in response to this kind of thing. And there really isn't a lot of conversation about that. It does feel like the more we talk about it like kind of a modern idea because it's like it's in the modern you know relatively modern you know 19th century world that we start to have.
Well I mean of course there were big urban centers in the 16th century but I imagine Elizabeth Bathory's castle being in a place where the disappearance of 650 people are so over 20 years. Like you would notice that there aren't that many people around. Right. I know. Exactly. And it's not that long of period of time because what they alleged is that she started doing it again in like 1590 and then it stopped in 1610.
Like if you kill that many young girls and that should have been a time no matter where you brought them fun. That is like decimating to like your population. Yeah. It's interesting too because it's like if you're accused of killing that many people it's interesting that we need there to be a functional motive for her because surely it's just about killing you know.
So why has this become such a folk like in based on the idea that she was doing it for youth and beauty because that's what women do anyway. Exactly. So from this earlier testimony it was just like her four servants they kind of agreed on a few things. So all of them agreed about certain methods of the ill treatment. There's a lot of beating piercing with like little knives and needles and stuff like that burning.
They said that all girls had been buried some with or without proper ceremony which I would say then you would probably want to excavate those grounds but what do I know. There's a story about a young girl being forced to suck on a log while being beaten. Another one who was smeared with honey and left for days and nights on the grounds to be bitten by like ants and wasps and fleas. Girls being tied to poles while like cold water was thrown on them while they were being locked at the cold.
So like all of the sort of like and all the girls are usually naked are in some state of undress. Not at all a sexy thing to have a long trial about. Right. Like you have these young girls being cut up, brutalized, penetrated and I kind of like you know, say domestic. Tell me about the bees part, Magistrate. Exactly. So you said honey was smeared all over her and then she was left out in the cold and she was naked. Was she naked? Yes naked. Sounds horrible.
I can't believe someone would do such a thing. And it's very is very distressing to like read about it but then also realize that there's a quick escalation in how it starts off as just like piercing and beating to like left them outside. It gets me with honey because that has nothing to do with blood. You're not even doing the thing. It's like well that's just a waste of the. I mean you're supposed to run a tight ship here. Right.
It also that makes me think of how like you know this is not something I've researched recently. So this is sort of a casual cold sack. But my understanding is that a lot of our modern ideas of you know scary historical tortures and scary ways to die.
I did an episode about this with Dana Schwartz a couple years ago is kind of based on people in history reconstructing previous periods of history in order to make certain people look barbaric or to make themselves feel better about living in an age of reason. You know like the Iron Maiden. Yeah, as I believe kind of a Victorian concept of what those dumb middle ages were up to. And this feels kind of like that as well. I mean I realize we're talking about a contemporary source in this case.
But it's also it feels very interesting that like yeah that escalation in torture where you imagine that if you were a surf that like you would be familiar with beatings and you would be familiar with life being very cheap in many ways. But it does remind me of the satanic panic in the sense that like you could be sort of an American woman in the 80s talking about a history of sexual abuse in the home or sexual assault and people would be like yeah who cares.
But if Satan was involved then suddenly it's like a big important story. And this feels similar to where it's like the everyday trauma gets escalated to something that's worth hearing about suddenly. And I think that and we'll and I'll have you quote what the torture was actually like for some of the people who gave this testimony. But I definitely think there's an element of and this is just my theory.
I think a lot of what they end up doing during torture is like taking their own experiences and elevating them because what is happening when you're being tortured. You're being pierced. You're being beaten. You're being you know whipped and you're usually in a state of undress.
And other element I think that is happening is I think a lot of what they assign, especially like the honey and stuff like that, feels like things that they took from like propaganda against the Ottomans and kind of reapplied. Because I think about with like Vlad the Impaler. It's like there's a lot of stuff that they're like he learned how to do this. There's a lot of like sort of like anti-automated Turkish things that you'll see get regurgitated in like the torture segment.
So you love how when we like go off to the movie theater to see whatever vampire thing comes out this season will be like you know partaking in the trickle-down effect of anti-automated empire propaganda. Like that's what I love about culture. I tell you my boyfriend is obsessed with the Ottoman Empire and it's so funny because it comes up all the time. And you think how often can the Ottoman Empire come up and the answer is quite a lot. I bet a lot. They were very very impactful.
So like even in researching this and like knowing just even a little bit about Vlad the Impaler, you do get this idea of, and this is my theory that these people in the state of torture are like taking what they've heard from like people coming back from like fighting the Ottomans
and firing the Turks which is already going to have its own propagandizing to it and finding a way to like take what they know is barbarity from other places and superimposing it into like well now we have to like make it really extreme so that us being complicit in it can be forgivable. Right. And I guess one of the key questions here is like did something happen? Did she kill people? Did they kill people?
And then did they emerge this thing of yeah as a as a helper or someone accused alongside her as a servant like yeah do you have to escalate things to sort of squirm out of it if you did help with something?
Because I think at a certain point you can't say no because I think if there's one thing I've learned from knowing stuff about Ambulin is that if the king wants you dead you can't say no I did not have incest with my sister it's like I did not have incest with that woman yeah who is also my sister it's like no I have to say that you know it just there's no way if the people in charge want you to be guilty for you not to be guilty. Right. And that's how it's the unfortunate reality of this.
Right. We've got to do an Ann Bolin episode Ann Bolin how many fingers and more. I mean that's me and Mary Tudor I remember when I found out that I was like I was like she killed like 7000 people and they're like it's like 275 and I'm like that's still not great but that's not what I was told. It is so weird yeah a good strategy as a historical figure is to like have a really inflated number make you look good in comparison and you're like look at me with my 275.
I know it's also I think like especially like Mary Tudor aka bloody Mary and Elizabeth Bathory have the same almost the same thing of like we have evidence that shows that they were definitely more nuanced people than what we get on the tin but there is just more investment in the myth that it doesn't actually matter what the truth is. But now what I have sent you is this lovely description of what a Hungarian torture tools would be like so if you would please tell the lovely people at home.
Oh boy and these are like things that we we know were actually used in reality to clear. Yes. Yes these are confirmed things and you can tell like because they're all very painful but also very able to do quickly. I think that like you know the thing about the rack is that it takes a long time to happen and the damage of it is so severe it makes the torture worse so it's better if you just you know you pull out their fingernails because you know the people can forgive that.
Stretching out your limbs till they pop is you know a little bit more intense just a bit much. Yeah. Okay. Alright so yeah here's already this here's our our little our torture section so yeah skip ahead a couple minutes if you don't want to hear this part. The chief torture would begin by displaying the instruments of torture to the subject who would have been stripped naked and restrained. This in itself might prompt a first confession.
The standard panoply included wooden wall and floor stocks iron vices serving as finger screws iron collars spiked on the inside the boot a wooden or metal cylinder with studs on the inside that could be tightened by the driving in of watches. There were also two-foot long metal pincers and flails consisting of slender barbed chains attached to a wooden handle. Next some of the array of torture devices would be placed on the victim's body.
The mere touch of the thumb screws or the iron boot would concentrate the subject's mind. But if this was not enough the various tools were put to work starting with the agonies of crushed fingers and legs and proceeding if necessary through lighted matches under the finger intonials.
The rack, either an upright bench or ladder on which the suspect was stretched with the aid of weights or rectangular frame from which the subject was suspended and the stropado to scourging burning, branding, boiling and whatever local refinements were in vogue. Yeah and that's the kind of thing where like not that I was there but where you're like right this makes sense as things that human beings have figured out how to do to each other.
You don't need a lot of equipment, you can do it in a room, you can do it without a lot of effort on your part. You're trying to get information or to get someone to confirm a certain story as the case may be. There's some kind of an alleged purpose to it and I don't know that I guess the history of people doing awful things to each other predictably overlaps a lot more with the thinkable than would be gothically unthinkable. Right.
I think if you're already in a situation where this is happening to you, your brain can go to even darker places because why wouldn't it if you're already halfway through there? Heck yeah. Yeah. This is where a lot of the preliminary information came from and then eventually they collected local sources, many of them were people who had never actually seen anything but either heard something from a friend of a friend.
So usually what would happen is like one person would come say a piece of information. There is one of the witnesses, his name was Gregory Palace, so that he had carried the girl's bodies on a cart from one place to another but he did not know what manner of death they had suffered. One of the first witnesses, his name was Benedict declared that 175 girls and women were taken out dead from the house but he did not know the nature of their death.
One of the other witnesses, another Benedict said he had no business in the house, knew nothing but had heard rumors. So again, it's like everyone would be like, I came in, I saw like two or three bodies come out in a coffin and it was bad and that was it. There was a night his name was Francisco Toro.
He said that he had never seen her do anything before his eyes but he knew when she was traveling after the death of her brother that she carried with her the corpses of three girls who died after torture and that he claimed that he heard that she inserted hot rods into their genitals. And when that happened someone said to him, so Francis the girl you saw being tortured was strangled in the Turkish way.
But she again, hearkens back to my theory that a lot of what they're talking about is like also just stuff that they've heard from like people who were dealing with the Ottomans and like making a shit up to be weird and racist. Right. And like the anxieties of a place that feels encroached upon. Exactly.
There were allegations that she had been given a gray cake that was you know given to her by sorcerers and that she would recite the words against different figures while eating the cake which I gotta say if that's what cake can do local sorcerers I will accept your magic death note case. Right. I think that's reasonable. I mean it's interesting and that she's effectively being accused of witchcraft but just by another name in a way.
You know these are all classic witch accusation things to be up to. Yes. And there was a repeated story about a German servant girl who was being publicly forced to suckle on a log but even that like people kept giving days that differed by almost a decade so like it may have happened someone may have publicly been forced to do that. Again how does this help us with the blood thing? Exactly. What's the point? It doesn't. I hate to tell you.
And I think what's the saddest part I guess this is a spoiler alert but there is never any testimony that she ever bathed in the blood of any of these people. That's the only part that's fun. Yeah. It didn't happen until like 100's when some scholar wrote like the first written account of the battery case and then mentioned the blood baths. Oh I love that. Up until then there is like no testimony that that she actually did that which I think is proof that storytelling is collaborative.
Who owns what copy right? I kept going like okay when is the blood bathing going to happen? Yeah. And it's like never. It's just a bunch of other horrible things and I'm just like well that's not what I came here for. Right. Because it's like you don't have legs as a cultural figure if you just killed and tortured everyone. You need to have done something kind of whimsical. You need something unique. I know. I'm sorry to disappoint you. There are no alleged reports of blood bathing. No I do.
I love it though. Because like it for her. It means that there's just a whole other person behind this fabulous history channel story we got to grow up with and I often suspect that that's the case that the bigger the leg and the more the real person can hide behind it in the end. It's interesting and what I heard as well is that like because of the whole like was she a female Dracula kind of thing also is what made that entire story come up as well.
And so from all I saw like there is just there's just when she is bathing it's like she's either dunking other women in ice water. But there is no real report of her doing anything like that. Those are the first time it's ever put into print is in 1729. And she died. In like 1614. So like over 100 years later they're like and you know she did it. I love that.
So it's interesting that then they're really just accusing her of being just you know a very prolific but like garden variety murderer really she just wants to kill everyone out of malice I guess although only girls is she accused of killing men. No no it's mostly women it's all girls it's all very culty witchcrafty. Which is why I even brought up the whole witchcraft up in the beginning because there are people who believe that this was essentially just her getting caught up in a witch hunt.
But I'm sure people are wondering where the number 650 comes from. Yeah. Someone's ass. Well the ass of an un of as a witness who didn't give her a real name but chose to be known as Susanna. She is the one that claimed that 650 girls were killed. It's like an auction say the highest number and we'll use your statistic forever. Yeah. It's really based off of nothing because the number just kept getting higher it was like we start off 38.
Now we're at 50 now we're at 175 and she's like the 650 and everyone's like that's the one we're going to pick. And it's just like the idea that she's like traveling with like two with three corpses just like hanging out with her.
Or a funeral and maybe even if she did travel with corpses maybe she was taking them to a church like it doesn't have to be like there are so many other explanations because one of the things that she kind of learned as well is that Elizabeth as like the head of her estate was essentially responsible for like the health and legal issues of the environment of the environment of the area.
So if there was like a thing or a dispute that had to be done you would go to Elizabeth's battery to then get it done. So she's like the shaggy of the area really. Exactly. So imagine when you look at some of the witnesses and then you see oh wow this person also went to go get something like legislated by Elizabeth's battery and she did not vote for them. What a coincidence. Wow. Oh my god did this paladin. Sorry palpateen. Oh my god Elizabeth battery. A little bit that's crazy.
So like one of the big theories is that while not every single witness with someone who either owed money or had some kind of legal tied to battery a significant amount were.
And so you basically have another reason why people are very quick nowadays not quick but people are extra skeptical because it's like so not only is there no real proof that any of this happened but there's also like proof that some of these people owed her money and that all of their debts were cleared very soon after this stuff happened. It's all very suspicious. That's fascinating. And this is also a class issue I would argue as well.
All of this stuff happened but she was actually never convicted of anything. Oh. What? Throughout all of this she was arrested and like basically kept in like house arrest the entire time and her servants were convicted and killed and executed for this of course. But she was never convicted of anything. Good lord.
I would also argue that it might have also just been using her as someone of a political chip because there is evidence of like you can be a noble person get called out for torture and then still get murdered. So there is this Russian noblewoman name and I apologize again. Daria, Nikolay Venya, Sultova, that sounded bad but that's all I got. I'm so sorry. You know, that sounded at least close enough. It sounded it was secure.
I deeply apologize but she was accused of torturing a bunch of her serfs. But we have records of the victims' parents going to Catherine the great to be like people keep dying at this household. We would like something to be done. So Catherine being Catherine was like, okay, we're going to make sure the investigation is done. Call Colombo. He's on the case.
And so they actively went to figure out how many people she killed and even though there was a high number, she was convicted of the deaths of 38 serfs. But at the time they had got rid of capital punishment in Russia in light in despot and Catherine didn't want to actually publicly kill a noble. But she did have her publicly chained on a platform in Moscow for an hour with a sight around her next thing that she was a murderer. Just an hour though. Yeah, just an hour.
So people could like heckle in gear. But you know, it's Moscow. It's a very big city, even then. So like that's a luck and happy one hour. That's true. Yeah, that could be it. And then she was in prison for the rest of her life in a cellar. And then you have Giles Derreys, who the Journal of Art girls in the room might know this one, but he was a knight in a lord and a commander during the Hundred Year War and like fought with Joan of Arc.
And he confessed to being a child murderer of around 140 children and he was hung and no, he was hanged and burned because that's, I remember how grammar works. He was hanged and burned. That's what's important in all this. I do my research and even with him, you know, because he is also knows like a very prolific occultist child killer. Even when they do modern day research about his trials, even the people who are like, yeah, there could have been some sus things happening, but he did.
There is records of him doing enough of the stuff to be guilty of it. So like there is an ability to actually apply a level of vigor to the allegations. Right. You can apply it to actual missing persons, whatever. And it's, I mean, that's the case. I don't know very much about it, although I feel like it also has popped up in a lot of like Barnes and Noble branded true crime stuff. I've gotten my mits on over the years.
And it's like, even if that figure is inflated, it's like, right, it starts with like a very documented, you know, something that exists on the record that was an invented sanctuary after the events that took place. So one. Yeah. So basically she was held in captivity until she died. She died of natural causes. She was buried in an unmarked grave at the castle that she lived in. And before she died, she was able to like, write her own will.
She was able to, you know, delineate all of her good and SS to her children and other people. So I think that that's also just in very heavy contrast to what she's accused of doing. Because even though she's a noble woman, I think that if you are successful, you're not really convicted, which again, she wasn't.
But I think if you, if you could be successfully convicted of killing 650 women, I don't think that they should just let you have a whale where you're allowed to just divvy that up to everyday people.
But all of those things, for me as someone looking outside who like cannot know absolute truth, all this says to me that she was put into a position where she could no longer be an enforcing member of the government of her society, which allowed the actual, the Palatine to become the head and use some of her territory, getting her out of the way also, you know, helped with getting rid of her nephew. It was just, it seems very politically and economically motivated versus actual occulting.
Well, yeah. I mean, and then you look at like, which of these things happens more often, you know, like, I don't know, like I can believe that somebody, I'm not going to say that she's like, that we stand a legend or anything here, right? Because it's like, it feels like what we can say is that she came into a lot of power that she seems to have known at least on some level how to use it and how to hold onto it because she did. And like, could she have killed some serfs? Yeah, why not?
Absolutely. I feel like everybody was back then, right? But it's because, yeah, it does seem like the story of like a very advantageous power grab that involved sort of creating, regardless of what the original, whether there was an original germ of truth, there creating a story that was sort of based on contemporary ideas of like, what's the worst thing we can imagine a woman doing? Right. To get those kind of numbers, you have to be part of a gang.
You have to be like an actual war criminal or have the full backing of like a really powerful institution. So like if she did kill people, I would say 50 to 75 is a reasonable quote unquote number. Very healthy number. Yeah. I could believe that. I could even believe that she was an abusive person towards her staff and that maybe some of them died from maltreatment. Oh, yeah. Like, that's absolutely possible. Like, eat the rich.
I just think that like, when you look at the numbers and also how it has evolved to just be this very sexist, satomasicistic and sometimes fun, sapphic, because you know, sometimes we reclaim it, we make it fun, we make it cute, Carmilla, et cetera. Exactly. The book House of Hunger, which was really good is very much based on Elizabeth Bathory.
I think it just has to do with the ways in which when women do bad things or accused of doing bad things, even if they're not convicted, like just like Lizzy Borden, the story about how it's possible for like one woman to be that blood thirsty or be that, you know, dark is what captivates people and the truth ends up not mattering because it's not as entertaining.
Like if you say like, oh, she didn't kill 650 people or bathe in their blood, she was probably the victim, maybe the victim of like a big political coup. It's like, that's not sexy. We can't make Castlevania nocturne antagonist with that. But if you turn her into like this vampire, where wolf, you know, driven by beauty, that's something that people can understand, quote, unquote, you know, like, she can become like the evil stepmother from Snow White obsessed with beauty, obsessed with youth.
Like, we tell those narratives about women all the time. Yeah. There's just, there's no, there's no actual evidence that things are as intense as they wanted to be. And I mean, that's great because that means that, you know, 650 women never were killed. And I do like that. Yeah, I love that. And like, maybe she was just a sadist and that sucks.
But it is interesting to like research a character, a figure like this and realize how few sources actually exist that we have absorbed that are based on the truth. Yeah. And to realize that everything you recognize about somebody is invented and that like you kind of have this silhouette of somebody you thought you knew, but it's really like they're wearing a parka and you have no sense of the shape of them underneath it. If it comes to that, maybe.
And it also occurs to me that like this is a story that, you know, has persisted for a lot of reasons, partly because the imagery is great. But also because it's like, you know, the sort of useful folk legend, maybe because it's like a story of a woman who was in power and how did she wield that power badly, you know? Blood, drinking and sex in.
There's something really delightful to me about the fact that the part of the story I knew best is told is beyond a shadow of it out, totally fabricated because it's like a very sort of patriarchal idea that women will kill absolutely everyone just to like keep looking young. I feel like the reality of aging is that like you could acknowledge that it's hard and you cannot like it and you don't have to embrace it.
You can just sort of like, you know, give it kind of a breast pillow and pointedly not offer it a beverage when you let it in. But like it's so unlikely that you're going to just become an unhinged murderer because of it, you know? It's almost everybody just figures out a way to deal with it. And I think that's really nice. Exactly. And also, you know, you just kind of become more chill. Like I feel like at that time it's like, you know, here I am with all of my money. How am I just relax?
You know, like this getting older is so fun. Like I love being older. You know, I love being in my 30s. I love like talking to younger women and being like, oh my God, yes, you're going to have so much fun in your 30s despite everything because like you will. Like life is hard, but like there's just a lack of care that happened. The older you get. And I just think that's neat. I do too. Yeah. And maybe my kind of final thought is that I was, and I wonder if this resonates with you.
I was talking to Megan Burbank, who has done a couple episodes with us and is also a good friend of mine, not to brag.
And she was saying that like there's something interesting about being in your 30s where like the social targets that you're supposed to hit as a woman in America, like they do kind of stop around 30, like the goal is to sort of like speaking very generally according to sort of mass culture is to finish the supermarket suite by 30 and have like the man because you know, of course, it's always a man according to culture.
The very general kind I'm thinking of that just seems to get injected into our brains via TV and government. And that once you've finished accumulating stuff and collecting the complete set that makes up quote unquote, it all, but then the script just sort of runs out for you and you're supposed to get sort of like maintain it. And I guess you know around menopause, they're start being things for you to do according to sort of a cultural timeline.
But really it's like you just kind of go off the map and there's something kind of great about that because you're like, what should I be doing? I don't know. I haven't been given the assignment. Exactly. And I just feel like you sort of realize I'm tired. And if I am ever going to find peace, I have to stop caring so much about what other people think. Yeah. And that was exactly what Elizabeth Bathory was thinking when they came to arrest her.
If they caught her in the middle of torturing a girl, doesn't that great evidence to bring out like we're in the way we're in good point. We're in shape. Princess Weeks, you've done a couple of episodes with us in the past. We talked about Rosa Parks earlier this year and we talked about Lizzie Borden. So fun. Last year, I love it. And where else can people find you would have even up to all of that? Oh yeah. I've been on so many podcasts. But mostly I've been doing my YouTube.
I had a great video. I really enjoyed making called Tall Dark and Richly and Big E was talking about the ways which Tall Dark and Handsome and Olu Skin are used in literature in a way that's supposed to signify whiteness, but to most modern audiences or diverse audiences doesn't work that same way. So it was just really fun seeing people comment about like, this character is called Tar Dark and Handsome. Like I was I was literally just watching Beauty and the Beast for like the billion time.
And I forget that the Bimbetts call Gaston a Tall Dark Strong and Handsome Brute. And I was just like, oh, it's everywhere. It's everywhere. So that was a really fun one. And I think if I could pick anything I've done recently that I've really loved is that. I also am a co-host on the PBS Books Reader's Club which has been a lot of fun. You can check us out there on YouTube channel. And yeah, just live in my best life trying very hard to just make my cat happy.
Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah, let's just have that be the goal. You know, let's just make the cats happy. Yeah. Lola deserves it. She's a good girl. I'm gonna look at me. And that was our episode. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for learning. Thank you for being here with us. As always, we have bonus episodes. If you want to hear more, we just put out one on the two movie adaptations of the Stetford wives.
I got to talk to Sarah Archer about that and a whole bunch of other stuff about the speed at which we may or may not be replaced by robots. Always an interesting question. I had a great time. If you know me, you know I love the Stetford wives and I love talking about it with Sarah Archer. So check that out if you want to. And of course, I've mentioned before, we've got some live shows coming up. I'm gonna be doing a collaborative event with American hysteria.
My favorite moral panic debunking podcast. And with the little lies, Seattle's premier Fleetwood Mac tribute act. And we're gonna be in Portland in Seattle in December. And in San Francisco and LA in January, you can find a link with information in the show notes. If you can join, we would love to just make that experience together with you. And see if we can summon a ghost. And if not, then what else we can summon. Thank you for listening. Thank you for making the show possible.
Thank you just for continuing down the road with us. Thank you, Tynical Ortiz, for production assistance. Thank you to Miranda Zickler for editing. And thank you to Carolyn Kendrick for producing. We'll see you in two weeks.