Nusrat Jahan Progga
Most of us have heard of the famous Spiderman quote “With great power come great responsibility”. However, most of us often tend to forget about the responsibilities and even worse, take advantage of our powers.
Now imagine, what if there is a woman with great power and no responsibilities, but she is a psychotic, sadistic, sex-addicted, serial killer? Scary? Guess what! She exists erm…existed!
Four hundred years back, in the month of August 1614, the infamous royal widow, Elizabeth Bathory, died under house arrest in Čachtice Castle (located at what we now call Slovakia), and had also been indicted for the murder of about 700 peasant girls and servants.
Bthory was born in 1560 into one of the wealthiest Protestant families in Europe. When Bathory was young, she often used to throw fits and tantrums which possibly occurred due to years of inbreeding, and some research showed that there is a history of mental illness in her family. She got engaged at the age of 11.
Báthory used to torture and kill peasant girls by luring them into her castle with the hope of employment, with the help from some of her maids and dwarf male servant Fickzo.
Apparently, Báthory’s victims were tormented with lashes, knives, irons and club;some were even drenched in cold water and left to freeze to death in the snow, while some others had pointy needles pushed up their fingernails and their fingers would be chopped off if they tried to remove them.
The killing and torture of the peasants were carried out for Bathory’s pleasure but some psychologists believe that there might have been a sexual aspect to it.
Some of the rituals involved genital mutilation and biting off the girls’ face and shoulders.
For years, Bathory and her servants kept on murdering innocent girls without the slightest bit of suspicious eye, but it was not until the Royal Highness’s bloodthirst climbed up the social ladder, and the nobles’ daughters started going missing that people started believing all the crazy rumors surrounding her.
Recently, some people have dug up some materials which are leading them to believe that Bathory might have been set up by her relatives in order to dethrone her and seize her power.