| The Bloody Countess |
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 Young Elisabeth Báthory was without a doubt a beautiful woman from this and other portraits made of her. Did she, as legend has it, sadistically torture and kill her maids? Recent news stories of human trafficking and foreign maids being held prisoner pale in comparison to the horrific legend of a sixteenth century noblewoman who not only enslaved her servants, but brutally and sadistically tortured him. But how much of the bloody tale of "Countess Dracula" is historically accurate? In Laval, Québec, Canada, a couple were arrested for human trafficking after neighbours took notice that their Ethiopian maid rarely ever left the home where she worked. The couple had reportedly confiscated her personal documents and they threatened to deport her if she left their home. "She was essentially a prisoner," the Canadian Press quoted RCMP Const. Magdala Turpin as saying. Not far to the south, in the Long Island community of Central Islip, New York, another couple were arrested for forcing their two Indonesian maids from leaving the house except to take trash to the curb. The Associated Press reported that "prosecutors said the women were subject to beatings, had scalding water thrown on them and were forced to repeatedly climb stairs and take as many as 30 showers in three hours as punishment for misdeeds." The enslavement was uncovered when one of the women escaped and "was found wandering outside a doughnut shop wearing nothing more than pants and a towel." There are some parallels between the horrific legend of Báthory and the Wallachian prince Vlad Tepes. Although they lived two hundred years apart, both are reputed to have influenced Bram Stoker in writing his famed novel, Dracula, however there is no evidence from the writer's notes to support these theories. Báthory nonetheless, just like Vlad, continues to have her image connected to utterly bloody and horrifying behaviour, glorified in popular culture for instance in the 1971 Hammer film Countess Dracula starring Ingrid Pitt, and even in waxwork museums. These two cases of strange enslavement over the past week harken back to a far darker case of a noblewoman from what is now the Hungarian, Austrian and Romanian borderlands. Not only did Erzsébet (Elisabeth) Báthory keep her maids prisoner, she brutally and sadistically tortured and murdered them. Báthory remains infamous as the "Bloody Countess" who obsessively would lure and then brutally murder young women who she hired as her servants, especially in her older years.  Journalist Sean Thomas wrote of the controversy surrounding Báthory in the latest Fortean Times which celebrates 50 years of Britain's Hammer horror films (think of Peter Cushing playing The Mummy, Christopher Lee as Dracula, and even sexploitation cinema such as Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C.). Countess Dracula was certainly the kind of bloody tale that the studio relished. It is hard to determine how true these claims are. Hungarian scholars have long suspected that Báthory was the victim of the politics of the time, and feminist historians theorized that Báthory was actually a "smart and spirited woman condemned by a misogynist patriarchy," Thomas wrote. This view is being put forth in an upcoming dramatization of Báthory's life by Slovakian filmmaker Juro Jakubisko. Website by Dennis Báthory-Kitsz, an ancestor of Erzsébet Báthory who composed an opera about her life: http://bathory.org/ |