Most of you have at least heard of the Hungarian Son of Dracul, Vlad Tzepes. He was, of course, the historical figure from which Bram Stoker drew his fabulous vampire. Lesser known, but also a source of inspiration to Stoker, was Erzsabet “The Bloody Countess” Baithori (aka Elizabeth Bathory), whose practices were more vampiric than Vlad the Impaler. Both of these Hungarian nobles were murderers who racked up unbelievable death counts with their lust for blood and mayhem.

Vlad Dracula (1431-1476) committed many of his inhuman atrocities from political and/or revenge motives, but there is no doubt he also took great pleasure from his murdering. During one period while he was imprisoned, he amused himself by capturing birds and little furry animals and torturing them – even impaling many of them on tiny spears. Impaling people was Dracula’s specialty; while he was in power, impalings took place by the thousands. Usually the victim had a sharpened stake forced through the rectum all the way through the body and out the mouth. In the case of women he deemed “sluts”, the entrance point was the vagina, often with a red-hot stake.

Victims were then sometimes skinned alive or mutilated by having their breasts cut off or their genitals maimed. The victim took hours or even days to die and the rotting corpse was then left as a grisly package at the top of the raised stake for months. There were at times as many as twenty thousand of these stakes arranged in geometric patterns, with the height of the stake representing the impaled person’s former social status.

Dracula was also known to save the blood of his victims in jars. He ate lavish meals in the midst of their bodies, dipping his bread in the jars of blood as one might the juice of a steak. A German woodcut from the era depicts Vlad feasting away among of a sea of staked bodies while a torturer dismembers one in the background.

While much of his mayhem was wrought in either recapturing the throne of Wallachia and Transylvania or maintaining it, a great deal of it was also meant to instill his brand of morality into the populace. Yet more of it was intended as genocide.Dracula was cleansing his domain of the former rulers, the Boyars, who were quite oppressive during their reign. He was even viewed as some kind of savior in certain quarters for this activity. More blood was sought as revenge against those who had killed his brother and father or against former captors. Then again, a lot of it was just because he liked to kill. There are many historical accounts of armies of Turkish invaders turning back in horror after encountering thousands of staked bodies either circling a city or along the banks of a river. And these were Vlad Dracula’s own people!

There are several accounts of Dracula’s death in battle, by “accident” at the hand of his own men, by the Turkish enemies, or by Boyars in his army. In any event, his head was removed by the Turks and kept on display at the end of a stake to assure them that their great enemy, The Impaler, was indeed finally dead.

When the tomb which supposedly held his remains was opened in the 20th century, there was nothing in it but animal bones. Who knows, perhaps he really was a shape-shifting supernatural blood-sucker who just happened to be a human king. The reported number of his ghastly murders varies from about 50,000 into the hundreds of thousands, depending on the source.

Erzsabet Baithori (1560-1614), also of the nobility, descended from Prince Stephen Bathory; a leader who was among those who helped Vlad Tzepes during a 1476 campaign to regain his throne. Erzsabet had many family members in powerful positions among the royalty of Hungary, including a cousin who was the prime minister. She married at 15 to the 26 year old Count Ferencz Nasdasdy, known as “the black hero of Hungary”, who was usually away at war.

Erzsabet had a man-servant named Thorko who was deeply into the occult. She began dabbling in the black arts at an early age. She soon gathered several accomplices in her dark activities, which sometimes included torturing the servant girls. These partners-in-crime included her nurse, Iloona Joo, her castle major-domo, Johannes Ujvary, a witch named Dorottya Szentes, another witch (this one a “forest witch”) named Darvula, and Thorko, her mentor in “the arts”.

In 1600, Erzsabet’s husband died, and she was free to pursue her own ends exclusively. One day the countess was annoyed with the way a servant girl was brushing her hair. She slapped the girl’s hand away while holding a pair of scissors. The scissors cut the girl’s hand which gushed blood onto the hand of Erzsabet, who believed she noticed an amazing cosmetic effect. The young girl’s pristine blood seemed to impart something of its vitality and youth to the skin of the countess, who was a vain woman obsessed with retaining her beauty. She had her cohorts bind and strip the girl and drain her blood so she could bathe in it! Thus began a decade of unbridled bloodletting which led to the upwards of 600 murders of servant girls for the exclusive purpose of obtaining their blood.

A number of devices were constructed which facilitated this activity, among them a sort of “Iron Maiden” contraption in which girls were enclosed and then pierced by spikes. Their blood drained out through an orifice in the bottom, right into the bathtub. The countess was also known to bite the servant girls and drink their blood from the wound, true vampire style.

In 1610, one of the intended victims made her escape and notified the authorities concerning the grim bloodfeasts at Castle Csejthe. In December, the castle was raided right in the middle of a bloodletting. Those carrying out the raid were aghast at their findings: a dead girl, drained of blood in the main room, another girl, alive but mostly drained and pierced with holes, in an adjoining room. In the vaults below the castle were a number of other young girls, in various stages of draining. Over fifty bodies were also exhumed from beneath the dirt floor of the lower chambers.

At the trial in 1611, the Bloody Countess herself did not even attend. No verdict was ever pronounced against her. The two witches, however, had their fingers pulled out and were then burned alive. The other accomplices were beheaded and then cremated. Erzsabet Baithori was walled up in a bedchamber of her castle, leaving only a small aperture through which she could receive food. She was kept under constant guard. In 1614 the guard discovered her body lying face down on the floor of her chamber, dead.

Both these accounts of real-life vampires were culled from a number of wildly varying accounts, so the facts are debatable ad infinitum. But the basic outline of these histories as well as salient details are, for the most part, accurate. It is my opinion that these two were what would be termed serial-killers in this day and age, but they were born in a position and at a time which allowed them full vent to their curious passion for blood. Some authorities claim the notorious “Jack the Ripper” was of this same general ilk, only British royalty rather than Hungarian.