Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - History's Deadliest Women: The Blood Countess

Episode Date: August 28, 2026

Elizabeth Bathory was a fabulously wealthy Noblewoman accused of torturing and killing some 600 women in the 16th century.Her story is popularly spoken about as one of history's deadliest women... but is it true? And if it isn't, why has it stuck?Helping us get to the bottom of these questions is Shelley Puhak, author of The Blood Countess: Murder, Betrayal and the Making of a Monster, to talk through her new findings on Elizabeth Báthory.This episode was edited by Hannah Feodorov. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Freddy Chick.Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards. Click to place your vote on the Spotify mobile app: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DX74ZgzrlyH29Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast.Betwixt the Sheets is a History Hit podcast.History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, everybody. This is just a quick word ahead of the episode, because we need to ask you to vote for us, once again, in the Listeners Choice Awards at this year's British Podcast Awards. And thank you to everyone who's voted so far. You've managed to get us into the top 20. However, we've now had a lot of messages and a lot of emails from people say that they're trying to vote, but they can't. And we didn't understand why. But now we do. They've only gotten flipping changed the way that you can vote. I know. Nobody told us that was going to happen. We didn't sign on for this. Now, only people in the UK and Ireland can vote. So if you're not in the UK and Ireland, you are out. And you can only vote in the Spotify app, insanity.

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But it's all on you now, guys. You're the only ones that can do this. The whole Betwixt the Sheets family is counting on you. Godspeed, soldiers. You can do it. Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. Welcome back once again to but twigs the sheets. Was this the one that you wanted to listen to?

Have you got the right podcast? Because if you haven't, this is your time to get out now, before we're all embarrassed, quite frankly. But if you're choosing to stay, I do have to tell you that this is an adult podcast, spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adult way, covering a range of adults, subjects, and you should be an adult too.

Oh, God, I'd just feel so good saying that, knowing that we're all going to be safer from here on out. Right, on with the show. This is awkward. to have walked in on the Countess Elizabeth Bathery preparing herself for a bath. Her candles are lit, the servants are scurrying about, enormous tubs of water are ready to go.

Oh, it sounds lovely. Except, instead of hot water and a nice lavender oil, legend has it that her servants are fill in the bath with the blood of virgins. I'm all for a good tip to knock out a few wrinkles, but I think that might be a stretch even for me. Apparently, Elizabeth believes that this, rather extreme skincare regime will keep her forever young.

I'm going to stick with the retinal. But before we brand Hungary's infamous blood countess as one of history's most deadly women, there's a problem, there's a big problem, this almost certainly never happened. So where did the story come from? How did the legend get born? Was Elizabeth really a monster at all? And is any of it true? Any of it at all? Well, I'm ready to find out if you are.

Hello and welcome back to Betwixta Sheets' History of Sex Scandal and Society with me, Kate Lister. Given that we are now streaming a little mini-series on history's deadliest women, it made sense that somebody who's known in the history books as the Blood Countess, the most infamous serial killer of all time, would be included. The stories about this 16th century countess include some really shocking details, like that she killed over 600 victims, many years. of them young girls, even children, that she bathed in their blood, that she was a sadist, that she loved torturing the weak and the innocent and was only stopped because she made

the mistake of picking on rich victims. But was she as deadly as they say, or is the whole thing a set up? Joining me today to tell us more about this extraordinary case of this fascinating woman is the fabulous, the wonderful author and historian Shelley Poohack to help us get to the bottom of all. of this. So without further ado, everyone, let's crack on. Well, hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's our only Shelley Pahack. How are you doing? I'm well. How are you? Oh, I'm so relieved that you are here. And I'm so relieved that you've written this book, The Blood Countess, Murder, betrayal and the Making of a Monster about Bopopopom, Countess Elizabeth Bathory, about bloody time. We'll get into exactly who she is. There'll be people listening. Maybe.

never heard of her, but like she's like such an infamous character in history. But when you actually try and like find actual biographies of her, they're pretty, like, there's not a whole lot of them. There's like a lot of internet blogs and there's a lot of like online stuff and there's like stuff on YouTube, but like an actual like serious study of her, not so many. So what made you want to write one? And thank God you have. Well, thank you. I became familiar with this legend. because I have extended family in Slovakia who live in the area of some of her former estates. So it was always kind of on the back burner.

It's a hugely popular story in Slovakia. There's kind of a sort of cottage tourism industry right around a lot of her castles. So this was a fascinating cold case, and I became aware that there were more and more Central European scholars who were questioning, you know, whether or not she had actually done all of these vile and disgusting things

that she was accused of. It's a hell of a story. It is. And a lot of that scholarship had never made it into, you know, English, never been translated. That's why. So it is there. It's just I can't read the language that it's in. Right.

Well, some of it was misfiled. So I was really lucky to, you know, kind of stumble across some documents that, you know, some new documents and, you know, work with new sources, but also work with new translations of old sources that were really revealing. Yeah. Okay. All right. So like I said, there will be people listening who don't know who the Countess Elizabeth Bathory is. So could you give us the headline story? Sure. Elizabeth Bathory or Batri Ershabet, as you might know her in Hungarian, she's long been known as one of the world's most prolific serial killers, the most prolific female serial killer. She was accused of torturing and killing over 600 young women. It's an especially salacious story. because over time there's, you know, become this sort of S&M, gruesome element transposed over the original legend.

She's been cast as this lesbian vampire. And, you know, just to kind of situate listeners, if we want to think about, like, where and when we are. When Elizabeth is born, Elizabeth I first is the brand new Queen of England. The Protestant Reformation is not even 50 years old. She's going to be a contemporary of people like Bacon and Marlowe. and Shakespeare. And the canonical legend, the legend that, you know, you hear, or if you look something up, if you Google her, you'll see some version of this idea that she has this finishing school.

She's this fabulously wealthy countess from this depraved old aristocratic family who runs a finishing school and she is torturing and murdering young women in her care because she's become convinced that if she bathes in their virgin blood, she will stay eternal. young. And eventually there's such an outcry. So many families are complaining about their missing daughters that the king is forced to launch an investigation. When they go to her house, they catch her red-handed. And because of her aristocratic privilege spared the indignity of a trial. And instead, she is walled up in a tower with just a little slit for food where she will live out her days. The problem with that legend is almost every bit of it is completely wrong.

Oh no. I had a feeling that you were going to say that, you know. It's like one of those historical stories that you hear that it's, you listen to it. Like, you've got this sense that this, it's not a good story, but it's too good to be true. Like, do I mean, like it's too much somehow. And then when these stories are this exciting and it is, it's a very racy story that people can project all kinds of stuff onto from lesbianism to S&M to vampires to the blood countess, is that people almost don't, they don't want the truth anymore. They want the story.

That's what they want. But you have managed to push past this. So let's start dismantling the story. Who was Elizabeth Bathory? Did she even exist? She certainly existed. She was born in, you know, 1560. And she is born into a great time to be born.

And she's born into this, you know, really, really old. her family has been in the aristocracy for about 500 years, and she's related to, you know, all of these very important people. So she's the niece of the king of Poland. She's related to some cardinals in Rome. A lot of princes of Transylvania are in her family tree, and her brother is the chief justice of Royal Hungary. So, you know, her people go way, way, way back. And she's a very big deal. And she's extraordinarily wealthy. So that's true. She was definitely born, definitely existed. She was definitely very, very rich and very, very privileged. And where is this, by the way? Where is she born? So she is born in what is, I guess this is, this area is changing

hands between Transylvania and Royal Hungary, but we would know it as, you know, was once the kingdom of Hungary. And an important thing for people to know, I get into kind of the nitty gritty and the book with maps, etc. But you just need to know that this area is divided and it has been invaded by the Ottoman Turks, and then there's also a civil war essentially going on at the same time. So we have this formerly great kingdom that's been divided into three, and a lot of things are changing hands. You know, it's an active war zone. So that's also going to kind of complicate the story. So it's turbulent. I think that might be an understatement, yes. Okay, fair enough. So she is rich. She is from now.

The other part of the legend is that she was spectacularly well educated and that she was super, super, super clever. Is that true? She seems to certainly have been intelligent. Some of the information that you'll see online, like, for example, that she somehow spoke Greek. No one can really track down where that's from or where that originated. There doesn't seem to be anything for that. However, for the time period, she's very well educated. She certainly can write and read Latin, Hungarian, German.

And she leaves behind quite a bit of, you know, correspondence. We know that her mother is extraordinarily well educated and like a really interesting figure too. So she does have this sort of really strong-willed, intelligent mother. And there's a really long tradition of, I guess, we'd say really independent-minded women and a very like kind of tolerant family. Right. So she is from a background where it's expected that, you know, she can hold her own and that she is being prepared for the eventuality that she might need to step in temporarily or permanently in some capacity. An important thing, too, to keep in mind because this is a war zone, is a lot of things that we would consider not traditional in other parts of the world at this time. It's kind of like in World War II where we are like, Rosie the Riveter, women get to work, go to the factories.

Like normally, not acceptable, but because of the circumstances, people are saying, you know, the men have to go off to fight. You need to be prepared to take the reins should something happen to your father, brother, husband. And we see this across all social classes, not just the aristocracy, but, you know, women having to step in and run printing crosses or brew beer or run the farm. And even some women stepping in as soldiers. So there's such a man shortage that there's a little bit. bit of an opening for women to perhaps take on more responsibility than they might ordinarily. As a historian, what sources are you working with to try and track this woman? Because like from Hungarian sources from the 16th century in a war zone, it seems like where did you find the

sources? Where are they held? So four different countries. These documents are split between the archives of Austria, you know, modern day Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, and a few in Romania. Okay. So that's the other, I think, issue is because the Bathory family has since died out, there's no family archive in the way that there are for some other ancient families, right? So little bits and pieces have been subsumed into other families archives or other collections, but you have to piece it together. So you might go one place and you might say this is all that exists for 1610, let's say. This is all that we know. But you might not be aware that there's other bits of information. bits and pieces that you can glean from the other archives and put together to get like a fuller picture. And obviously, a lot of this scholarship and work was complicated by, you know, virtue of the Iron Curtain. And then afterwards, this idea that territories are changing hands, documents are changing hands, archives are kind of coming and going. So this sense that there isn't in the way there is, for example, in, you know, Britain or France, like a central depository of these

documents for hundreds of years. As a historian researching this, that must have been so difficult for you. I think the hardest part is the Hungarian. It's one thing to look at old Latin documents and you can piece together, right? Like, what's going on? And I was fortunate to work with some really outstanding translators and experts in old handwriting. But, you know, there's time when you look at a document, like, this is a will.

Clearly it has to do with these people, you know, maybe have to pull in. some experts to help me out. But there were some times when you're like, I have, I have no idea what this document even is. Like, I don't even know. Is it important? Is it not? It's the worst thing in it when like you can understand the language, maybe, like you

can translate the language, but the handwriting is insane. And you're just like, that just feels so unfair when you're like, but I should be able to understand this and now I can't. Right. So the next part of the legend with Bathory is she's aristocratic, she's rich, she's privileged, she's like running things and very, very clever, is that she gets married to another high flyer. And the story that I've heard is that he was the one with a taste for sadism and he introduced his young wife to it. Yes, there's that or there's the older aunt, you know, who entices her to this, like, you know, violent underworld. Okay, with the husband, like some things just to clarify.

First of all, as far as marriages go for this time period for an aristocrat, this is a pretty decent one. And the reason I say that is there's only a five-year age difference. Okay. They're both orphans and they get to live together for a period before they're actually married. You know, obviously they're being chaperone. She's learning the reins of the estate. And he had a very, he was raised by his mom, you know, she's essentially single mom for quite a, you know, of his life and she's a very strong woman and also very tolerant. So he seems to have, you know,

inherited a lot of that. So she's moving from one very liberal, we might say household into another. Okay. And we have this idea that there aren't people said, well, maybe they have a terrible marriage because there aren't a lot of letters between the two of them. And a lot of, you know, historians have pushed back on that and said, no, the reason we don't have so many letters is because they're spending all their time together. You know, when people are traveling, there's no need to. And so he's always coming home whenever he can, even when he's away at war, to spend Christmas with her.

When she's sick, he writes to people and says, I can't come. My wife's sick. I have to take care of her. And he doesn't have to do this. I mean, there are servants. There's enough money. So we do get the sense that, you know, he takes her along when he goes to parliament, that they spend quite a bit of time together.

we can't know what was happening, you know, behind closed doors. Like we don't have a diary that's like, you know, I love my husband. He's amazing. Or, oh, my God, he's such a bore. But as far as for the time period, they seem to have had at least a very good working partnership. And they, you know, are affectionate. Another thing that I think is very telling is we have a lot of existing surviving letters between other couples. And we can kind of compare what we have between these two with what we have from others.

And so for a lot of other women, we have these very effusive and kind of simpering tones towards their husband, right? Like, oh, you are the light of my life and you provide for me and you're amazing. And, you know, it's very like, she writes to him as an equal. It's like, hi, beloved, we have an issue over here, you know, see you in two days. Interesting. And some people take that as a sign of coldness. I think a lot of us could take it as almost a contemporary text message. You know, she doesn't need to beg for his approval. She doesn't need to build up his ego. And when he leaves, he trusts her to maintain everything. I think where we get this idea that he was a sadist is he is a warrior. Right? I mean, he's a bloody war. He's off fighting. And there are a couple instances where, you know, he's beheading people in battle. He's injured himself. And he does have some Turkish officers impaled. See, now that's not nice. No.

But I will say he doesn't do it himself. It's ordered and it's ordered as retribution. I'm not trying to excuse it, but because they've done that to his people, it's pretty horrific. But I was going to say, I think... Within the context of lots of horrific things. Most men in this time period have had to do things that are absolutely vile. Yeah. And it's very difficult there to say that.

But it's not like no to... It's not like exceptionally vile. They were all being vile. Yes. And in particular, he didn't have that reputation as a landlord, right? Or as, you know, among his people. Yeah. I mean, it's very hard.

People are compartmentalizing. We're not defending impalus here. No, no, no. We're not. Don't do that, please. They're terrible. It's terrible. It's absolutely terrible.

But he also has this reputation among the Ottomans where, you know, they think that he is a badass. Like he's, you know, like one of the best and brightest and he's well respected. He's a target. You know, like they will if they are raiding go for him because they know he is a big shot if they can take him out. So I think we have to say that he's got blood in his hands like any other prominent general of this time period. But we have no evidence that he has done anything out of the ordinary. And in fact, like an interesting little if you'll indulge me here, tidbit is when he's very, very young, but he's taken over. He has some overseers who are tasked with overseeing, I guess, the serfs in a particular area. These serfs are so upset with how they're being treated by these particular overseers that they all band together. They petition the king. They say, we don't like, this guy's beating us too much. She's working us too hard. There's a set procedure to file complaints. And, you know, this case, it's respected. They say like cease and desist, you can't touch these people. We have to look into the

working conditions. It's investigated and it's improved. So we know at least as a young man, he's learned. You have to be careful that people aren't abusing your serfs. And we don't have any other complaints from that point on. But we know that were there issues, there is a venue, you know, to voice those without fear of retribution for a lot of these serfs. And they're not making complaints. like that. In fact, they seem quite pleased with him. Okay. What's his name? What's the husband's name? It would be Francis if we anglicize it. I don't stay. Okay, Francis. So a badass on the battlefield, definitely somebody you'd want on your side, not somebody that you want to cross, it sounds like, but not noted for unusual cruelty. Absolutely. Okay. It does kind of sound from what you're saying

that they had a reasonably happy marriage because you don't get a lot of those in the aristocracy. They're worthy of note. Yeah, no, you don't. And also, if you think more about Francis, is like, when they have children who die, he's brokenhearted.

Like, we have him writing. Oh, they have kids today. They have kids. And, you know, we have that horrific 50% child mortality rate. You know, even, like, the best medical care doesn't get you out of that. And we see him absolutely, like, brokenhearted and at his wife's side. So we don't get the sense that he's, you know, kind of cold and arrogant and you deal with the children that they are both equally

devastated each and every time that this happens. Okay. So we can kind of put that myth to bed then. There's no evidence at all that he was the sadist and he introduced her to torturing people, torturing the servants. Absolutely. Absolutely not. Right. That's gone. That one is out of the window. All right. What else have you heard? I heard that he died young. today, yes. Like young for the time you're in. So he dies in his 40s. I, you know, it's 1604. And he catches some sort of illness in the army camps. He's headed home to see his wife for the holidays. And, you know, it's a sudden illness. And he's dead pretty quickly. It could have been anything, couldn't it, really? There's typhus going around. It seems to have been that. They talk about the camp. camp fever and how many other people have died at the time. So it could be anything, but it seems like, you know, he's caught up in this epidemic of which there are so many different ones

circulating at the time. It's so grim. Do we have any records that tell us how Elizabeth took this that he died? She is devastated, we might say. Absolutely devastating. Not the happy widow. No, I mean, right away, she has to project power and preserve the family jump in, make sure There's this fabulous funeral and no one dares question her authority. But we also see that she's withdrawing from a lot of public life, that she's writing to people, you know, things like, I can't handle this. I don't want to go. She's declining invitations.

People are concerned. So she seems to have, you know, been upset or at least convinced enough people that she was, you know, genuinely upset. So the next piece of the story, and it's interesting that they had. because that's not mentioned anywhere in the myths that surround this. hugely important to the story because there's a lot of things too when you see the lens of, you know, I think some like horror fans are very upset because like this research does not confirm this like bloody, sexy story they want it.

But it's even more chilly. If you imagine that you are a woman who's good at your job, you're in a reasonably decent marriage, you've lived through a whole bunch of trauma, right? And you are trying to do the best for your kids. Like, you are like, okay, I'm in a bad spot. I will do anything to secure the future of my children. People still take you down. Fine.

It happens all the time in this time period. But then imagine that generations and generations and generations and 400 years later, people are still conspiring with your enemies unwittingly. You know, so you never rest in peace. Like, you're a cartoon villain. You were just... Are you so angry, wouldn't you? No. Like, it's kind of like, if you're...

we imagine, I don't know, some of the, not to bring Hillary Clinton into this, but some of the things she was accused of, right, like with doing with like baby skins with her aid, like these like very bizarre, right? Yeah, the weirdest of the weird stuff. And then we imagine like 500 years later, people are dressing up like, you know, Hillary Clinton for Halloween and making horror films about this and everybody's talking about like the dead baby stuff. Yeah. And like, oh my gosh, like, how did this happen? I'll be back with Shelley and Elizabeth after this short break. All right, so let's get into the accusations then, because that's where this story just starts to just go,

whoo-w-you-up. So the legend, and I say this legend, this is what the internet will tell you happened, is that the husband dies and she loses it completely, and then she just goes on on a killing bonanza and that she's got a couple of loyal servants and that one day she hits a servant girl and the blood goes on her face

and she goes, oh, that's knocked out, a few wrinkles. And then she decides to go on a killing rampage, murdering virgins to bathe in their blood. That's the story, right? I mean, is there anything in this at all that you've found that's true? Even a beauty tip from Countess Elizabeth Barthysheed. Oh, I wish, right? Like a vampire facial.

Unfortunately, though, no. Clean is tone and moisturize. That's all we need to do. And that's completely invented over 100 years after her death by a priest. Nonsense. By a priest who's trying to sell a travel guide. And vampires are really hot at that time. So he's kind of recycling this vampire lore.

You know, one thing, though, that makes me really angry is this guy, right? He's this, like, essentially religious extremist. It has such an outsized, I think, impact not just on. you know, Elizabeth Bathory's story, but it impacts all of us because this battery legend gets used not just by this priest to sell his travel guide, right? But by then it's adopted by social scientists and really early psychiatrists to explain the inner workings of the female brain and that we are completely motivated by vanity, right? Like when women commit crimes or do something violent or a lady, like it's not because they have their own

ambitions or because they want to protect their children or, you know, their friends or family, but because they are vain and they are motivated, you know, solely by sexual competition, right? Like, they want to be young and hot and women will do anything. And that really is like embedded in early psychiatry. And it's so much of the ways we think about women. So I think it's such a story of one woman, but it's also how so many of us have been kind of categorized. and dismissed. And it feeds right into a very old fairy tale trope that you have that gets recycled. I mean, if you think like Sleeping Beauty or Snow White in particular, that, again, it's an older

woman who's jealous of the younger woman's beauty and that she goes on this killing rampage because of it and this demonizing of older women and having them motivated only by their perceived value within a patriarchal society. It's just, it's a nasty story that reinforces all of that. So who's this priest? Who the hell's he? I'm going to put him on my list. His name is Laslo Teroxie.

And he lived in the area. And I think it's about 1729. I believe his book comes out. But he, you know, just embellished it. And it really took off, especially because when he's writing, it's at the height of this great vampire panic. One thing I think it's really, really, really important highlight is that. that, you know, one of the things I explore in my book is how the Elizabeth Bathory case is intertwined with the European witch trials and the Protestant Reformation.

Of course it is. But by the time the priest is writing, everybody's sick of the witch trials, right? Like, they've burned everybody they can. No one wants to talk about it. We're done. We're doing vampires now. Like, get with the program. So everybody's very eager to say, yes, vampire.

Had nothing to do with, you know, all of that nasty witch business. Yeah. Wow. And it is. It's like right in there just as the witch trials are starting to bubble up around Europe with the Protestant Reformation. Jeez. So but what is, so there's this priest in the 18th century. At least it wasn't the Victorians. Most of the time it's the Victorians who mess up history for people. I mean, they add to it, right? Like they totally like they totally like, you know, find it and they're going running with it. And you know why I think there's this element where as far as if we look at it as a legend. a crime. Like there's so many of these elements, right? Like we have the right kind of aggressor. You know, she's like hot and wealthy, even if she maybe is like menopausal and crazy. Who knows? Slightly on the turn. Right. We have the right victims, right? They're young, white, dead women, right? Virginal. Everybody loves that. And now we don't just have one. We have like 600 of them. And we also have this excuse them for all of these priests and all of these early social scientists and all of these Victorians to talk about, to sketch, to paint all of these naked, dead white women

under the auspices of being really, really concerned about crime. So it's an easy way for this priest who has no other access really to, like, naked bodies also, right? Foe concern. Yeah, I'm imagining. And I have to maybe write about it and maybe sketched it. Unfortunately, I have to imagine them all naked to be this. concerned and I am very concerned. Yeah, we've seen that trick before. So, all right, so there's a priest in the 18th century who embellishes something, but in the historical records themselves,

is there anything about an arrest or a trial or, like, her hurting anybody? Is there anything that this is based on? Absolutely. So, it's important to know that she is arrested. She's investigated and she's going to be arrested in 1610. There will be no trial. She will have some servants who work for her who will be put on trial and they will be executed. She will also have a good friend of hers who will be burned at the stake as a witch. They don't mess about, do they? No, they don't. And I think some other contexts, though, where everyone goes, okay, so she's accused of these awful things.

There's 300, I think it's 304 people who testify supposedly against her. It's quite a lot. This is bad, right? I mean, would you... Oh, that is bad. Look at the legend. And I think when I first started my research, I assumed what I think most people assume is there's no smoke without fire, right? Like this has got to be widely exaggerated. There's no way there's 600 bodies. But, you know, obviously this woman was cruel to her servants and something happened. But I think we've got to really, really, really, really look at the context and look at what's happening. Right? So first, I think we have to look at what's happening. Like go back to witchcraft. So it's important to know that Elizabeth Bathory, like her mother-in-law, like her niece, like a lot of her cousins, like a lot of other noble women at this time period, is accused of witchcraft.

So not just that she's, you know, the accusations aren't just that she's torturing and killing girls. And it's important to know, too, that these accusations are not that these are hot virgins, but that these are prepubescent children. Okay, so she's got a satanic child trafficking ring going on. But also... Oh, the pitch is changing a bit now. Yeah, right? It's not very sexy. Okay, so...

And then she's hosting this ring that other noble women are aiding and assisting her with. And they're sometimes donating their daughters to be sacrificed, et cetera. So we have this whole, this whole take. We also have in the record accusations of cannibal feasts, right? Like they're eating people. Oh, my God. starving people to other people. She's got this army of invisible cats and dogs that she can, you know, stick on her enemies to annoy them.

She's using charms and incantations to, like, try to kill her enemies. She's got these, like, supernatural spying devices. So it's interesting that we set aside all of these, like, witchcraft accusations, right? And then we, like, kind of cherry pick out some of these other accusations and say, well, they must be true. because I think if we look at, for example, it's much later, but if we look at like, when Americans look at Salem, there's no way we would, you know, do movie portrayals of these these poor men and women like flying around on broomsticks and speared with blood and, you know, like hanging out with the devil, right?

Like we're like, that's insane. That's just put an entirely different lens on this. That's a completely different. As soon as you said that, I'd never thought about it like that before. Why would I have done? But if this was a witchcraft accusation, suddenly the 600 victims and flying around on magic charms and satanic cannibalism, now that's fitting within a wider context of, well, of course it's nonsense. Like you look at the witch trials all over the place and they're accusing people of doing things like this, sometimes in vast numbers. Yes, absolutely. And I think that even helps explain the large number of witnesses. So, you know, in the book I dig into all the nitty gritty if people are really interested in, like, the specific, you know, numbers and who's saying what, but just to kind of do like an overview.

You know, essentially the number of witnesses, there, you know, there's 300 of four people who give testimony is not unusual for a couple of reasons. First is you take any witch trial in the area at the exact same time. So I looked at some of common women like healers that are just, you know, 10 miles south of here happening at exactly the same time. And they're able to turn out over 100 people, you know, right away just for this one woman. Then you have to say for Elizabeth Bathory, we have this, you know, very famous woman. And we have five rounds of testimony given over two years. So they keep going back out in the community and pulling more people in, pulling more people in, pulling more people in. So the fact that you could out of 10,000 or so people get 300 people, to say something isn't so ludicrous.

So this isn't 300 people going, she killed my daughter, I know who she killed. This isn't 300 victims. This is 300 people testifying to random stuff, like involved in a witch trial, which as we've seen in other trials, can be anything from I saw them out at night and then they looked at me, that kind of stuff.

Yeah, I mean, well, the next thing I would say is of those 304, it's roughly about 80% who say, I don't know anything or yes, I heard a rumor. You know, most of these people who testify have never met her, have never set foot on our property. They may have seen her at a distance as her carriage was going through town. But a lot of them have no, no knowledge, right?

And there's even people who say things, for example, that we can prove that are demonstrably false. I'll give you like just one example. There's this priest that testifies. He's absolutely certain he was a witness that she tried to poison the king when he He was eating at her house, right? The thing is, it's a Habsburg king. The Habsburgs keep, like, ridiculous documentation, right? We know for a fact that the king never, ever set foot on any one of her properties.

He never dined with her, ever. She had met him, but, you know, that's in, like, we're talking in Vienna or Bratislava elsewhere. So this, you know, this couldn't have happened. He could not have witnessed, you know, her trying to use some sort of, like, supernatural magic to poison the king at dinner because the king was never at dinner. So there are some things like this that you can kind of go through one at a time and say, well, this couldn't have happened because, you know, there's numerous examples of this. We also have examples of some of the people testifying who owe money to the prosecutor or who have other sorts of very clear conflicts of interest,

the prosecutor himself. So I think as you start to look at this, you go, okay, what are we left with? We're left with a handful of people making some accusations. And in most cases, they're sure she's a murderer, but they're not sure who she's murdered. No one can really come up with like a first name, last name. And when they say, I know she must have murdered this noble girl, no one ever goes to that family and says, are you missing a girl? Like, did your girl die? Oh, this wouldn't stand up in court today, would it? This isn't 300 accusations.

This is mostly people going, I don't know, and then other people making stuff up. up. Absolutely. Or people saying, I've heard a rumor. I mean, imagine if... I heard something. You know, I don't know. You're involved in some sort of, you know, I don't. Somebody says they've seen you out with Brad Pitt, let's say. And, you know, it gets splashed all over a tabloid. And then they just start interviewing people saying, have you heard this rumor? Have you heard this rumor? And they said, yeah, heard the rumor. And the next thing we know, you're guilty because people say they've heard this rumor. They're reporting on the rumors. Yeah. Is there anything in the documents that you've looked at? I mean, it's sounding less and less and less credible, but was there ever a body found in the castle? Because that's the other thing that you hear is that the police

or the equivalent of the police turned up at her castle and there was just bodies everywhere. They're just like dying people. So what we do have, what it seems to be rooted in is, you know, actual illness-oriented epidemic. And so the only thing we have in this case is we have a single body of a maid and we have an injured girl. And what's interesting about this maid is we have, you know, a group of pastors who visit her

castle right before this girl dies. And they report there's a group of girls who are all very, very ill and they're sick. So they say, you know, some of them are on the verge of death. And then one of these girls dies. But the fact that people have seen her the days prior, they don't mention any, you know, signs of torture, murder. but the fact that she's quarantined with these other sick girls and then she dies. That's not the same.

Right. And then we also have a girl who's injured. And now it does sound like some of the treatment that this poor girl underwent was probably pretty horrific and traumatic because they talk about how people use scissors to cut necrotic black flesh off of, you know, an infected wound. And it seems like she was attacked by a wild animal or something horrific has happened. People are fascinated with this woman because she has these two gashes on her back and she's got this really mangled hand. And people come to visit and are like, oh, her hand is super mangled. You know, it's really gross. And they ask her, you know, how did your hand get like this?

And she says, a woman working for the countess, you know, used scissors to cut the black flesh from. my wound. Right. But it doesn't seem to be a description of torture. It seems to be a description of attempted medical treatment. And then the interesting thing about this girl is that everybody visits her. They're obsessed with her hand. She's entered into evidence as, you know, a torture victim. But then the, you know, essentially like the judges in the county government pay her off with the farm. She never testifies again. Her and her family get land for the first time. And she, you know, she kind of quietly disappears. I'll be back with Shelley and Elizabeth after this short break.

So if we're looking at this through the lens of the witch trials, which it's now sounding, I think that you've just flipped this entire thing on its head. The one constant that you have in the witch trials, to matter where they are or what they're happening or who has been, accused is someone somewhere is on the make. Someone, there's somebody in the background that has a reason for doing this, whether it's that they are trying to make a name for themselves, that they are a religious zealot trying to rid the world of the devil and trying to prove themselves. Or a lot of the time, it's people accusing other people, they just happen to end up with their farm

now. Oh, look how that worked out. So what's, whoopsa, daisy, witches can't be having farms. I'll just have that. Thank you very much. What is the motivation? for doing this, for launching an accusation of this magnitude against this woman? If you approach this case as a who done it as in a who framed her, there are almost too many suspects for all of the motivations you outlined. So, you know, for example, we have the political angle where she is related to, you know, she's the aunt of the Prince of Transylvania. Transylvania, Royal Hungary are in the middle of these very contentious land negotiations. They're kind of on the verge of war, right?

And she happens to be investigated and arrested at the same time as other members of her family and an assassination attempt on her nephew, the prince. Oh, look at that. That happens to be organized by the prosecutor. So it is that idea of, is she being held as a pawn? Okay, that's one option. Option two is we definitely have these religious zealots that are involved. like these men who legitimately believe, you know, they call her Jezebel.

They really, really, really think because she's not doing Christianity the right way, the way they would like to. She's Calvinist. They're Lutheran. Therefore, devil. So we definitely have the religious celets. And then we have a lot of more just kind of ordinary greed and ambition, you know, certain nobles who want her land, who are in kind of court battles with her.

And we have a prosecutor whose son is a direct. rival for the same positions that her son is, you know, and also has, like, a dozen other reasons, like, not to like her and to want to push her to the side. So it's almost like who didn't want her out of the way. A powerful single woman, a powerful widowed woman in 15th century, 16th century Hungary. Yeah, she's going to have a lot of enemies. Absolutely. And she controls, you know, a vast amount of land. I think we think of a castle or, you know, two castles, but she's got 17 castles and like kind of 500 miles of land.

Like the land she commands is bigger than a lot of kingdoms and nations at this time. It stretches in an arc across the country. So if you wanted to invade, say your nephew, you know, was interested in doing that, there's like these little sort of stopping points right across. So it's not just that. she's wealthy and that she's powerful, but it's also the strategic importance of the particular fortresses and castles that she commands. So this will be, this will be one of the smoking guns. What happens to her land and possessions after she's accused and convicted of witchcraft?

Well, she's never convicted. So that's the thing. They keep putting off. They just imprison her. They just say, well, we're just going to put you under house arrest. And she's pushing for a trial. She wants a trial. And we actually even have the Habsper King say, well, let's look. have a trial and they prepare for a trial and the prosecutor's always like, you know what, I just can't get around to it. The diary's not good that week. Yeah, like, oh, the paper. It just didn't arrive and now Parliament left for the holidays can't do it.

Now he's delaying, delaying, delaying until she's dead. And then a good portion of her property ends up being technically given to her minor son, but he's being controlled by men who are loyal to the prosecutor, right? And the rest of it is split up between like an ambitious scheming son-in-law and other people. So if we follow the money trail, follow what happens to that land. It's pretty obvious. There's even a point where she has her daughter go back to her house, break in and get all of her jewels because she's like, they're going to take those from you too. And we have these complaints in the courts.

Her daughter visits her and she's like, you need to start securing all of this. They're going to. They're going to go in and get the copper out the roof this lot, aren't they? Yeah. What happens to the kids, by the way? And also, like, you mentioned there that she dies. So presumably she dies young-ish. Yeah, I mean, it's four years from the time she is accused to the time she's dead.

Do we know how she died? Is that suspicious? Is that a... It could be, but we don't have any evidence. And there is some evidence that she may have had some sort of chronic illness. That might have been what initiated the proceedings is that she seemed maybe vulnerable or a little run down. and they were like, this is the time to go. Which, right?

So, but, you know, it seems that she, she, we know that she goes to her jailers and she says, my hands are really cold. They say, don't worry about it. She goes to bed. She's singing him. She thinks she's going to die and she's dead in the morning. Could it have been poison? I mean, yes, but also very, very likely, you know, it could have been a result of some sort of chronic disease cancer.

You'd think that if she was a witch or the devil that she would have done something about that particular situation. That's the thing that always baffles me about the witch trials is like, well, all right, if they've made a pack with the devil and if they have the backing of Satan himself, why are they pissing around making cows milk sour? Like they have a big enough budget to do something better than this, surely. Right? Like all they do is annoy their neighbors. Yeah, like, why? I don't understand that. At least if you're murdering 600 innocent servant girls, at least that is, you know, an impressive. use of satanic power, but that's absolutely not what happened to him in this case. What happened to her kids?

So it's like a mixed bag. She has a daughter who dies right after her. So, you know, her son, her poor son, like, just never can get out from under the thumb of these, like, really powerful men. And then he's going to, like, fall from a horse and have a traumatic brain injury and then have epilepsy. Like, he's just basically going to be. Not good. She's going to have one daughter. who is going to kind of fight, right?

She's going to like marshal her resources, try to get troops to get the land back that her mother had, and she's going to, you know, have a son who also similarly fights. There's going to be a long line of Habsburg rebels that continue in this family until the last one is caught, tried, and beheaded in like spectacular, you know, fashion in the late 17th century. So there's this pattern of this particular family,

the Bathory family, being involved in political intrigue, political plots, rebellions in particular against the Habsburgs that you see throughout the generations. And it's weird how we think, oh, she wasn't a part of that. You know, she was just, she was a witch. That's what she was accused of, witchcraft specifically. A lot of the accusations are specifically of witchcraft. They never mention that, do they? They say that it's very skilled in magic and sorcerer's crafts.

They say that she has spells and incantations, that she's, you know, know, all of these things. So there's definitely this dimension that I think is completely overlooked because the witch trials aren't nearly as sexy as vampires. No. No. That, Shelly, you have done the most incredible work with this. I mean, this episode is part of our history's deadliest women, but she's not at all, is she? She's a woman who's accused. No, don't be sorry. That's a phenomenal piece of research that you've done there overturning that. And the lens of that, no, she wasn't. She was a woman that was accused of witchcraft, and effectively we're still believing the witchcraft accusations 500, 600 years later. It's horrific, right? I mean. Yeah. Justice for Countess

Elizabeth Bathory. Yeah. And there's no evidence at all that she'd hurt anybody, really. Yeah. I mean, if we really pair this down, there seemed to have been five or six girls, noble girls. I mean, well, if we don't count this one made, but who died while under her care. The important thing to mention is that most of their parents believed that they died of natural causes and they died during circulating epidemics. These were young girls, you know, eight, nine, ten. One of the girls' mothers even went to court, you know, to exonerate Elizabeth Bathrae and said, no, I clenched the girl's body myself. I know she died. I was there while she was sick. It wasn't a murder. So we do have a couple girls, you know, who die. But there's certainly. not a serial killer, you know, at most, even if we want to believe the worst things about her, you're looking at just a few girls. And then we also have to say, these are, you know, the motive, because these particular girls are family friends. Like, these are the daughters of your friends. So you also have to think about why are you doing this and why are their parents allowing you to do

this? Because that's part of the accusations that her daughter, these other noble women, are giving her their daughters to sacrifice, right? I mean, like, that's... Do you think there's any truth in that that she was hurting a few girls, or do you think that's wildly out of proportion as well? I think that the medical treatments of the time period were absolutely painful. I think that throughout this period, there's all kinds of medical malpractice. It's so awful.

You know, I mean, there's people drilling people's heads open who are being sued going, that didn't work, and there's somebody who, you know, bleed somebody, and they bleed out. Could she have employed unskilled healers? I guess aggressive procedures? Absolutely. Could part of the problem have been that she had female healers who were doing things that were often the province of men, right? Like things like stitches, setting bones, etc. There's an instance where we have a description of cupping, which is, you know, we still do that today if you've ever had that done like an acupuncture treatment or massage where you use a candle and a, and a, and a, glass, right, and you create a vacuum and then you put it on the area. And we have a servant

whose claims that he spied at the keyhole, which first off, really shouldn't be looking at naked, nine-year-old girls, but that they're using glasses and candles and they're leaving a bruise. And you're like, well, that's what cupping does. Yeah, that's not torture. That's just a shit medical treatment. But there are a lot of shit medical treatments. I mean, there's descriptions, for example, people accuse her of beating girls with nettles. And you're like, but in the actual medical books of the day, that's a treatment, you know, and it was something the Romans did. You actually do that because, you know, there's, there's like a real reason to do that. Release, you know, particular histamines, try to try to get a particular like reaction on a paralyzed lind,

for example, or to cure certain diseases. So a lot of the things that are descriptions of torture are also indistinguishable from medical treatments of the time period. There's nothing in this, is there? She may have had a servant flogged. Like, that seems like that happened. That happened quite a lot, didn't it? Yeah. Not great by our standards,

but it's certainly not she tortured 600 girls to death personally. Absolutely not. Shelly, you have been a revelation. You've been phenomenal. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? I'm at Shelley Poohack.com. So it's S-E-E-L-L-E-Y-P-U-H-A-K. And the book is The Blood Countess. It's murder, betrayal, and the making of a monster.

And are you on social media at all? I am not. I am a ludic. Excellent. Good. Good. Don't do it. It's insane. But people should go and they should buy your book and read it for the new researching because this has been phenomenal. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. This is a delight. Thank you for listening. Thank you so much to Shelley for joining me. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like with you and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. Coming up, we have got episodes on the evils of Roman slavery and the Bayou tapestry sex scandal, all come in your way. And if you like us to explore a subject or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at betwixtat history at history hit.com.

This podcast was edited by Hannah Theodorov and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer is Freddie Chick. Join me again, Betwixte Sheets, History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.