Americans and Brits of a certain age\u2014those who spent much, if not all, of their childhoods in a pre-digital world\u2014once held a certain reverence for the Guinness Book of World Records<\/em>. At once a compendium of gross-out factoids (the photo accompanying \u201clongest fingernails\u201d is seared in my brain) and historical details, it was the authoritative source of things to make you go \u201cwhoaaaa\u201d in the school library. But if you\u2019ve reflected on it for even a moment as an adult, it\u2019s impossible not to question its factual authority. Were that guy\u2019s nails really<\/em> the longest of all time? And, now that we\u2019re looking closely, did Elizabeth Bathory, a Hungarian countess born in 1560, actually kill more than 600 virgins, making her the world\u2019s most prolific female serial killer? For that question at least, author Shelley Puhak has an answer: almost certainly not.<\/p>\n Different versions of the Bathory legend have floated through Western culture, but the tale generally goes something like this: She killed hundreds of peasant girls from across the lands her family controlled so that she could drain their blood and bathe in it in order to maintain her youthful beauty. She has become nearly as synonymous with the vampire trope as Count Dracula, with dozens of films<\/a> based on the story, including a brand-new one, Die Blutgr\u00e4fin<\/em> (The Blood Countess<\/em>), in which Isabelle Huppert\u2019s Bathory swans around Vienna in a crimson cloak and massive jewels, sucking the blood of young women.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n Americans and Brits of a certain age\u2014those who spent much, if not all, of their childhoods in a pre-digital world\u2014once held a certain reverence for the Guinness Book of World Records<\/em>. At once a compendium of gross-out factoids (the photo accompanying \u201clongest fingernails\u201d is seared in my brain) and historical details, it was the authoritative source of things to make you go \u201cwhoaaaa\u201d in the school library. But if you\u2019ve reflected on it for even a moment as an adult, it\u2019s impossible not to question its factual authority. Were that guy\u2019s nails really<\/em> the longest of all time? And, now that we\u2019re looking closely, did Elizabeth Bathory, a Hungarian countess born in 1560, actually kill more than 600 virgins, making her the world\u2019s most prolific female serial killer? For that question at least, author Shelley Puhak has an answer: almost certainly not.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The Blood Countess: Murder, Betrayal, and the Making of a Monster<\/a>,<\/i><\/b> Shelley Puhak, Bloomsbury Publishing, 304 pp., $32.99, February 2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Different versions of the Bathory legend have floated through Western culture, but the tale generally goes something like this: She killed hundreds of peasant girls from across the lands her family controlled so that she could drain their blood and bathe in it in order to maintain her youthful beauty. She has become nearly as synonymous with the vampire trope as Count Dracula, with dozens of films<\/a> based on the story, including a brand-new one, Die Blutgr\u00e4fin<\/em> (The Blood Countess<\/em>), in which Isabelle Huppert\u2019s Bathory swans around Vienna in a crimson cloak and massive jewels, sucking the blood of young women.<\/p>\n The dramatizations get at least that part right: Bathory\u2019s collection of jewelry and sumptuous clothing was extensive and fitting of her position. After her husband died in 1604, followed by her brother in 1605, she controlled at least 17 castles and estates (with access through her family to much more) and over 500 miles of land. \u201c[T]heir combined acreage overshadowed entire kingdoms,\u201d Puhak writes. However, she notes in her new book, The Blood Countess<\/em><\/a>, Bathory was \u201cwithout the protection of any male relative,\u201d which made her \u201ca very attractive target.\u201d<\/p>\n If not for this book, the actual story behind Bathory\u2019s status as a stock vampiric character could have continued collecting dust in the archives across the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. As the host of the podcast You\u2019re Wrong About<\/em> asked on a 2024 Bathory-focused episode, \u201cHow much can we ever really know about a person once legend has taken over?\u201d The answer, it turns out, is actually quite a lot.<\/p>\n First of all, there\u2019s simple logistics at hand. The initial Guinness entry contains the claim that Bathory killed more than 600 girls, citing the testimony of a servant girl named Susanna. But Susanna didn\u2019t come up with that number herself; \u201cthe scribe recording this tale marked it as something only \u2018know[n] from hearsay,\u2019\u201d Puhak writes. That number also adds up to \u201caccusing the Countess of killing enough girls to fill four entire villages\u201d given population statistics at the time. Historically, wiping out villages is something largely in the skill set of imperial armies (or diseases such as smallpox), not middle-aged women.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n There are other complicating factors to this claim. While \u201cthe confusion of the war years\u201d\u2014first between the Ottomans and the Hungarians, then the Transylvanian-Hungarians and the Habsburgs\u2014\u201cmight have provided some cover for such crimes,\u201d after the Peace of Vienna in 1606, visiting administrators recorded every household and death in Bathory\u2019s region. \u201c[S]erfs and commoners, for once, had some degree of choice,\u201d Puhak writes. \u201cThat they chose to return to the Countess\u2019s villages and towns strongly suggests that \u2026 there were not yet widespread concerns that she was a murderer.\u201d<\/p>\n Though the vampiric lore surrounding Bathory did not emerge until well after her death, a handful of contemporaneous writings have bolstered the accusations against her. One major source stems from the Protestant fights sweeping Europe at the time, and Puhak does a laudable job succinctly explaining how differences in Calvinist and Lutheran practices may have played into misunderstandings that demonized Bathory. (Though the Habsburgs remained firmly Catholic, Puhak notes that as much as 80 percent to 90 percent of Hungary was Protestant by the mid-1500s.)<\/p>\n First, there was the matter of Lent. In 1602, the head pastor at Bathory\u2019s court at S\u00e1rv\u00e1r, Lutheran Stephen Magyari, wrote to two other pastors, seeking advice on how to deal with a \u201ccertain wicked woman\u201d and whether she should be able to receive communion. The letters call the woman, who was an employee of Bathory\u2019s, a carnifex, which translates literally from the Latin as \u201cbutcher.\u201d The more bloodthirsty interpretations of these letters have inferred the connotative meaning of \u201cexecutioner\u201d and \u201ctorturer\u201d and view the exchange as the first mention of Bathory\u2019s alleged violent streak, naming this woman as her accomplice. But Puhak draws a more banal conclusion: Eating meat was forbidden during Lent, and \u201c[w]hen a monk in a nearby city ate meat on a fast day, he was publicly punished and similarly berated as a carnifex sanguinarius<\/em>, \u2018a bloodthirsty butcher.\u2019\u201d In reality, Puhak contends, Magyari was accusing Bathory of \u201charboring heretical, Calvinist views for tolerating one of her servants ignoring the Lenten fast,\u201d because while \u201cLutherans had maintained many of the Catholic traditions surrounding fasting, the more radical Calvinists had advocated for defying them altogether.\u201d<\/p>\n There is a third possible interpretation of carnifex: \u201cThe pastors\u2019 letters are worded in such a way that the \u2018butchery\u2019 might not be a reference to the woman\u2019s sin, but to her profession.\u201d The woman in question was an \u201cherbalist\u201d who attended to medical issues at Bathory\u2019s court and likely performed healing practices usually left to male \u201cbarber-surgeons\u201d (boil lancing, wound cauterization). Puhak makes the compelling point that, to many of the people who required painful but necessary treatment at her hands, \u201ctorturer\u201d or \u201cbutcher\u201d may have felt apt.<\/p>\n Bathory\u2019s main adversary was George Thurzo. Heritage Art\/Heritage Images\/Getty Images<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/div>\n But when it came down to it, distrust of Bathory had more to do with her fellow nobles\u2019 designs on her power and property than actual fears that she was tormenting local girls. Her main adversary was George Thurzo, an \u201cambitious new-money aristocrat\u201d who had ingratiated himself with the Habsburgs and become palatine, \u201cthe highest-ranking Hungarian in the kingdom.\u201d He opened an investigation into Bathory in March 1610, citing \u201ccredible and serious allegations\u201d that she had \u201ccruelly murdered one-knows-not-how-many girls and virgins and other women,\u201d without stipulating where these accusations had come from.<\/p>\n In August, Bathory sought to nip the matter in the bud, going to court with one of her ladies-in-waiting, whose daughter had died under Bathory\u2019s care. Lady Helen testified against rumors that Bathory had beaten her daughter to death, \u201cfully and publicly\u201d exonerating the countess. But even as she went on the offensive, Thurzo was collecting depositions across nine counties; dozens of villagers testified against her, many of whom had conflicts of interest.<\/p>\n Thurzo himself broke laws and behaved badly while conducting his investigation. Bathory was arrested on Dec. 29, 1610, and in the preceding weeks, Thurzo met with two other nobles with designs on her lands\u2014her son-in-law George Drugeth and Red Megyery\u2014to decide \u201chow to best divvy up her property.\u201d<\/p>\n Bathory never confessed and eagerly awaited her trial, which she was convinced would prove her innocence. But various other developments\u2014political, military, and otherwise\u2014slowed the process, and she never got her day in court. After complaining of ill health, she died overnight of natural causes in August 1614. Despite the accusations, Puhak writes, Bathory received a proper funeral: \u201c[H]er coffin was draped with an expensive black silk cover and brought into the church where she was once denounced.\u201d<\/p>\n An actor portrays Countess Elizabeth Bathory at \u201cKillers: A Nightmare Haunted House\u201d\u2014an exhibit of drawings, artifacts, and recreations associated with notorious serial killers\u2014at Clemente Soto V\u00e9lez Cultural Center in New York on Oct. 5, 2012.TIMOTHY A. CLARY\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/div>\n In the years following Bathory\u2019s death, it seems that she was scarcely mentioned. Though \u201cthe seventeenth-century public adored sensational \u2018true crime\u2019 \u2026 there were no poems narrating Elizabeth Bathory\u2019s crimes, no broadsides illustrating her cruelties,\u201d Puhak writes. She suggests that some who\u2019d been involved in smearing Bathory\u2019s reputation may have been ashamed\u2014or perhaps those who shaped the historical narrative simply had too much else going on: Four years after Bathory\u2019s death, a group of Protestant nobles threw two Catholic officials and their secretary from the windows of Prague Castle, sparking the Thirty Years\u2019 War.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n If Puhak\u2019s telling has a flaw, it\u2019s a tendency to err on the side of fully rehabilitating Bathory\u2019s image. She frequently notes instances of Bathory\u2019s noblesse oblige, including that she paid for the weddings of the daughters of her children\u2019s nannies and \u201cgifted the girls \u2018beautiful skirts\u2019 for their trousseau.\u201d When Bathory behaves haughtily or coldly, it\u2019s explained away as merely being a good administrator of her lands. Yet while the bureaucratic demands of a 17th-century aristocrat\u2019s time were certainly complicated, correcting the historic record need not require absolving a noblewoman of every slight against her.<\/p>\n Though Puhak herself never explicitly calls it a feminist project, The Blood Countess<\/em> goes a long way in reminding readers of the historical relevance and narrative power of misogyny. Bathory\u2019s extensive material resources insulated her from the quick punishments that often accompanied accusations of witchcraft and wickedness\u2014but the defamatory claims against her were only able to fester to such intensity because she lacked a male protector.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n And the Bathory known by the world today is an entirely sexist creation of yet another man: While writing a 1719 travel guide of Hungary, a Jesuit priest stumbled across records about her case and decided an embellished version of her story would fit nicely into his book. He assumed she had been born Catholic and said she became \u201cunnaturally vain and obsessed with her appearance\u201d after her conversion to Lutheranism. When one of her servants \u201cpulled her hair, the Countess slapped her,\u201d the priest wrote. \u201cThe girl\u2019s blood splattered across one side of her face. After she wiped her face, the Countess became convinced that this blood\u2014virgin blood\u2014had made her face look younger. So the Countess had her trusted servants supply her with a steady stream of virgins.\u201d<\/p>\n Whether the priest\u2019s timing was fortuitous or intentional, by the 18th century, European culture had moved on from its pathological fear of witchcraft and, as Puhak writes, \u201cwas in thrall to a new boogeyman: vampires.\u201d<\/p>\n In the centuries since, the cultural relevance of vampire lore has ebbed and flowed, but facets of it have become indelibly baked into the conspiracy theories that attend contemporary politics. Though I doubt Puhak\u2019s book will be enough to penetrate the conversations of those who believe in \u201cadrenochrome harvesting<\/a>,\u201d it offers a strong, well-researched corrective to a story that is about the type of power-hungry, deadly scheming best left in the annals of history.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
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