By James Aitchison

Meet Elizabeth Báthory, the Hungarian noblewoman who is said to have tortured and murdered 650 female victims and bathed in their blood.  Her motivation?  The search for eternal youth.  But was she really a serial killer in sixteenth century Transylvania or was she unjustly accused for political reasons? 

More significantly, did she inspire Bram Stoker’s Dracula? 

And could she have also inspired the story of Snow White?

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Called “the worst woman who ever lived”, Countess Elizabeth Báthory was born into Hungarian nobility in 1560.  From the family castle in Ecséd, her family controlled vast swathes of Transylvania.  Tragically, her family believed that close relatives should intermarry to preserve the purity of their blood.  Today, of course, we know such practices produce congenital malformations, severe personality disorders and recessive diseases.  Elizabeth suffered epileptic seizures, uncontrollable rages and acts of cruelty.  Arguably, her psychopathic tendencies were not of her own making.3

As was common at the time, the nobility treated servants and peasants as less than human.  Elizabeth would have witnessed bloodthirsty torture and executions at the castle.  Such brutality was accepted as the norm; peasants were the playthings of the ruling class.  

In 1575, when she was just fifteen, she married Hungarian Count Ferencz Nádasdy.  Her husband’s powerful family gave her Castle Čachtice, also known as Csejte, in the Little Carpathians, part of present-day Slovakia.  After the wedding, the couple lived in Nádasdy’s castle at Sárvár.  In 1578, three years into their marriage, Nádasdy became the chief commander of Hungarian troops, leading them in a war against the bordering Ottoman Empire.  He died in 1604, at the age of 48, from a mysterious debilitating disease which paralysed his legs. 

Báthory managed the family’s multiple estates.  Rumours spread that she had tortured and killed peasants for years.  While the disappearance of peasant girls raised no alarm, when Báthory began killing daughters of the lesser noble families that was another matter entirely.  Some of these girls had been placed in her care in order to gain a high-ranking connection.

Between 1602 and 1604, rumours of Báthory’s atrocities had spread throughout the kingdom.  Eventually the authorities commenced investigating the countess.  More than 300 people came forward as witnesses. 

On New Year’s Eve, 1610, Báthory was arrested along with four of her servants, who were accused of being her accomplices.  According to one lurid legend, Báthory was caught in the act of torture, covered in blood, whereas she was actually having dinner.  During the trial, it was stated that her victims numbered 650.

Two of her accomplices had their fingers torn out with red-hot pincers and then burned alive.  Another was beheaded.  Báthory was placed under house arrest in Csejte Castle until her death in 1614 at the age of 54.  Some say she was “bricked up” in a room with only a small gap for food and water to be passed through.  This has never been substantiated.

Many scholars have questioned the accusations against Báthory, arguing that her enormous wealth and ownership of large areas of land in Hungary made her a political target of the Austrian and Hungarian ruling houses; also, the Austrian Habsburgs were Catholic while Báthory was a Calvinist.  Ironically, one mystery remains: the precise location of Elizabeth’s final resting place.  Because her family crypt was full, it is believed her body was buried very deeply near the castle chapel.

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The question is, did Elizabeth Báthory inspire Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula?

We know for a fact that Bram Stoker never visited Transylvania.  He gleaned the myths and historical accounts of vampires from a variety of published sources, as well as in person from scholars and writers who had been there. 

Stories of Báthory bathing in virgin victims’ blood appeared in print for the first time in 1729, in the Jesuit scholar László Turóczi’s Tragica Historia.  Witness accounts were first published in 1765.  John Paget’s book Hungary and Transylvania, first published in 1839, described Báthory’s blood-bathing in great detail; as Paget wrote, her story was “so celebrated in the history of the horrible”.  But in all accounts of her atrocities, she was not a vampire; she did not drink her victims’ blood.

While Stoker must have been aware of her story, his real source of Dracula was Vlad Dracul, dubbed Vlad the Impaler, because he skewered his victims on poles.  Vlad III, or in Romanian, Vlad Drăculea, was Voivode (Governor) of Wallachia three times between 1448 and his death in 1476.  “Dracul” translates as Dragon.  Over time in Romania, “drac” evolved to mean devil!

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Stoker’s Dracula was also clearly influenced by one of the pioneers of early Gothic mystery and horror novels, Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu.  In 1872, the Irish author published a collection of stories titled In a Glass Darkly.  One of the stories, Carmilla, is clearly the foundational work of vampire fiction and, specifically, the lesbian vampire tradition.  The story begins with the vampire’s childhood in a “picturesque and solitary” castle.  Was Elizabeth Bárothy Le Fanu’s inspiration for Carmilla?  Like the countess, his literary character selected only female victims and uttered such statements as: “You are mine, you shall be mine, and you and I are one for ever.”

Later, Carmilla became a major antagonist in the Castlevania animated series

Another source Stoker likely used was a treatise of 1751, describing magic, vampires and apparitions of spirits by Dom Augustin Calmet.  In it, Calmet discusses a report from a priest who learned about a town being tormented by a vampire identity three years earlier.

Sabine Baring-Gould, the Anglican priest who wrote the hymn Onward Christian Soldiers also authored The Book of Were-wolves in 1863.  It included a few short paragraphs about a woman bathing her body in human blood.

Likewise, Captain Basil Hall’s Schloss Hainfeld, or a Winter in Lower Styria, 1836, offered a countess who was a model for Carmilla.

Ármin Vámbéry was a renowned Hungarian scholar and traveller.  During a stay in London, Stoker consulted him about Balkan folklore.  Some scholars believe he later served as the character Professor Van Helsing in Stoker’s novel.  (In chapters 18 and 23, Van Helsing refers to his friend “Arminius of Buda-Pesth University”.)

Stoker also befriended and consulted with Scottish author Emily Gerard.  Her seminal work, The Land Beyond the Forest: Facts, Figures and Fancies from Transylvania, published in 1890, is widely credited for inspiring Stoker’s Dracula, published seven years later.   A notable passage from her book Transylvania Superstitions read: “More decidedly evil is the nosferatu, or vampire, in which every Roumanian peasant believes as he does in heaven or hell.  There are two sorts of vampires, living and dead … every person killed by a nosferatu becomes likewise a vampire after death, and will continue to suck the blood of other innocent persons till the spirit has been exorcised by opening the grave of the suspected person, and either driving a stake through the corpse, or else firing a pistol-shot into the coffin …” 

Whether the “Blood Countess” helped fuel Stoker’s imagination we will never know.  Clearly,

he was influenced to choose Transylvania as Dracula’s homeland and had many sources on which to draw for additional atmosphere and colour.

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And so, to Snow White.

The concept of an evil queen preying on an innocent “snow white” maiden could well have been inspired by Elizabeth Báthory’s life.  Legends and myths about her activities abounded throughout Europe.  It is widely argued that the Brothers Grimm would have been aware of her when they published their first version of Snow White in 1812.  Certainly, the evil queen shares Elizabeth Báthory’s narcissistic quest for eternal beauty.

In John Paget’s book Hungary and Transylvania, he provides a detailed account of Elizabeth Bárothy including a passage where the countess sits at a mirror and studies her “waning beauty”.

Could this have inspired the iconic scene where the evil queen asks: “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?”   

But did the Grimms specifically weave her into their tale?  The jury is out.

However, other scholars argue that Snow White had its genesis in The Young Slave, an Italian literary fairy tale penned by Giambattista Basile in 1634.

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The national folklore of Transylvania quickly claimed Elizabeth Bárothy.  Over the years her atrocities became the stuff of exaggerated legend.  And while fact is often stranger than fiction, we need always to be sceptical of tabloid-style history.