Elizabeth Báthory

Countess Elizabeth Báthory of Ecsed (Hungarian: Báthory Erzsébet, pronounced [ˈbaːtori ˈɛrʒeːbɛt]; Slovak: Alžbeta Bátoriová; 7 August 1560 – 21 August 1614) was a Swabian-descended Hungarian noblewoman, aristocrat, and alleged serial killer from the powerful House of Báthory, who owned land in the Kingdom of Hungary. Báthory and four of her servants were accused of torturing and killing hundreds of girls and women from 1590 to 1610. Bathory and her cohorts were charged for 80 counts of murder and were convicted. Her servants were put on trial and executed, whereas Báthory was imprisoned within the Castle of Csejte (now Čachtice, Slovakia) until she died in her sleep in 1614.

According to scholars such as Michael Farin, the accusations against Báthory were supported by testimony from more than 300 individuals, some of whom described physical evidence and the presence of mutilated dead, dying and imprisoned girls found at the time of her arrest. Other scholars suggest that the accusations were a spectacle to destroy her family's influence in the region, which was considered a threat to the political interests of her neighbours, including the Habsburg empire.

Stories about Báthory quickly became part of national folklore. Legends describing her vampiric tendencies, such as the tale that she bathed in the blood of virgins to retain her youth, were based on rumours and only recorded as supposedly factual over a century after her death. Although these stories were repeated by at least three historians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they are considered unreliable by modern historians. Some insist that Elizabeth's story inspired Bram Stoker's novel Dracula (1897), although Stoker's notes on the novel provided no direct evidence to support this hypothesis.