The Blood Countess Part II: The Cellars | History Told Like a Horror Story

Last time, we did not show you a single murder.

We built a machine instead.

We started with a name so old it stood level with kings. A family that had put one of its own on the throne of Poland. A girl born inside that name in 1560, clever, sickly, taught Latin and German and account books, and taught something else besides: that the world divides into people who matter and people who do not, and that God arranged it that way, and that she had been born on the correct side of the line.

We gave her a husband. Ferenc Nádasdy. The Black Bey. A man the Ottomans named across a battlefield because he had made himself unforgettable to them. A man who impaled prisoners and left them for days. A man who is said to have taught his young wife how to discipline an idle servant girl by setting oiled paper between her toes and lighting it. And who then, on principle, drew a line short of killing her. That was the voice of moderation in that house.

We gave her a country. Thirteen years of war, a frontier where whole towns were roped together and marched south into slavery, where a burned village stopped being a horror and became a fact.

We gave her a law. A legal code that handed a noblewoman near-total authority over the bodies of the people bound to her land, and handed those people no door to knock on. No magistrate. No charge they could bring. Nothing written down.

And then, on the fourth of January, 1604, we took the husband away. Illness in the legs. It spread. He died in his bed.

Elizabeth Báthory was forty-three years old, at the head of more land than the Habsburg king himself, and answerable to no living person.

That is where we left her. Alone at the controls.

Tonight, we watch the machine run.

It is the winter of 1609. A cart is coming up the hill toward Csejte.

There is a girl in it. She is well born. Her family is not great, but it is good, and it is ambitious, and it has spent money on the clothes she is wearing. She has been sent here to be finished. To learn how a lady speaks and stands and writes a letter. To learn how to run a house of her own one day. Her mother packed her bag. Her mother stood in the road and watched the cart go.

The castle at the top of the hill is old stone, a horseshoe tower, seventeen villages spread below it. The woman who owns it is the most powerful woman in the kingdom, and she has agreed to take the girl in.

This is a good day for the family. This is the day the ladder finally lowered itself.

The girl’s name is Zsuzska. Her mother’s name is Anna Zelesthey.

And in a little over a year, Anna Zelesthey will stand in front of a royal notary and describe what was done to her daughter inside that house.

Here is the thing that broke the case open. It is not what you think.

It was not conscience. It was not a witness with a spine. It was not some brave servant slipping down the hill in the dark with a story to tell.

It was class.

For years, by the account of the testimony, girls had been going up to that castle and not coming back down. Peasant girls. Servant girls. Daughters of the seventeen villages and the villages beyond them. And nothing happened. No inquiry. No visit from a magistrate. Because nobody in Hungary was going to open a file on the death of a servant, and everybody involved knew it, including the servant.

And then Elizabeth Báthory started taking in the daughters of the gentry.

That is the hinge this entire story turns on. Not a change in what she did. A change in who she did it to. The moment the dead girls had families who could write to the King, the King wrote back.

Tonight we go up the hill. We go into the gynaeceum, the finishing school she opened in the winter of 1609, and we look at the young women whose names actually survive, because their names are the only names that anybody bothered to write down. Then we go to the arrest, on the last days of 1610, and to the four servants who were taken with her, and to what was done to those servants in order to make them talk. Then we go to the three hundred voices. The great mass of testimony that has hanged her in every book written since. And I am going to show you exactly what is inside that testimony, because when you actually open it, it is not what four hundred years of retelling has promised you.

And at the end, we will find the blood. Not in the cellars. In a book, printed in 1729, one hundred and fifteen years after she was dead.

Start with a practical problem.

By 1609, the rumors had done their work. The stories about what happened to girls who went up to Csejte had traveled down into the villages, the way stories do, and the peasant families had stopped sending their daughters. There was no proclamation about it. Nobody defied anyone. The supply simply dried up, quietly, the way water goes out of a well, and by the winter of that year the great house on the hill was having trouble filling its rooms with young women.

So she opened a school.

We touched on the gynaeceum last time, the old arrangement where lesser families sent their daughters into a great household to be polished. What she built in the winter of 1609 was that, formally. A finishing school, at Csejte, for high-born young women. Manners. Languages. Needlework. Music. How to carry yourself in a room where the men have titles.

And the noble families came running.

Understand why. A Báthory was offering to take your daughter into her household. That was not a service. That was a favor. That was a door opening onto a floor of the world your family had been looking up at for three generations. The girl would come home speaking better Latin and knowing which fork, yes, but more than that, she would come home connected. A name like that, attached to your name, in a letter, in a marriage negotiation. People do a great deal for less.

So they packed the bags. And they paid the fees, which is the other half of it, because the school also brought in money, and money was a thing the estate needed.

Look at what she had just built.

The peasant girls had dried up because the peasants had learned. So she opened a door for a class of people who had not learned, who could not learn, because the rumor did not circulate at their level. Rumor moves through the servants’ quarters. It does not move through a manor house drawing room, where the conversation is about advancement and where the Báthory name is a prize, not a warning.

She had replaced a food supply that had grown wary with one that was eager.

I want to be careful here, because there is a version of this that overreaches. We do not have a document in which Elizabeth Báthory says, in her own hand, that she founded the school in order to obtain victims. What we have is the timing, and the record of who arrived, and the record of what happened to them. Draw the line yourself. I only want you to see how neatly the pieces fit, and to notice that nothing in the fitting required anything supernatural. It required an unmet need, a solvent institution, and a great many parents who wanted to move up.

Now. The names.

This is the part I want you to sit with, because this is the part the vampire films never get near.

The historical record preserves the names of roughly a dozen young noblewomen who went into that school and died there or vanished there. About a dozen. That is what four hundred years leaves us.

Erzsébet Bardy. Katalin Berényi. Zsuzsuka Zelesthey. A girl the records call Miss Barbel.

Say them slowly, because there is a reason they survive and thousands of others do not. They survive because their families had standing. Their families had money, and literate relatives, and the nerve to make an inquiry, and the inquiry had to be answered, and the answer had to be written down. The name in the ledger is not a measure of who suffered. It is a measure of who had someone able to ask a question.

Everyone else in that castle is a number.

The mothers testified. That is the detail that will not leave me alone.

Anna Zelesthey, a noblewoman out of Milhalifalva, told the notaries that her daughter Zsuzska had been accepted into the gynaeceum, and that she was tortured there, and that she was killed there.

Dorottya Jezernyczky sent her daughter Erzsébet to the school. Her daughter was killed.

Janós Deseö, the warden of Castle Keresztúr, testified about his niece. Her name was Kata Berényi. She was accepted into the countess’s court, and she was mistreated, and she died.

These are not distant witnesses. These are the people who packed the bag. Who stood in the road. Who, for a season, told their neighbors where their daughter had gone, with some pride in the telling.

And then there is Anna Köszeghy, who did not lose a daughter, and who therefore had nothing to gain, and whose testimony is in some ways the coldest thing in the whole file.

She said she had been inside the gynaeceum. She said she saw the girls there. Not dead. Alive.

[QUOTE] She described young women in a tortured state, with broken fingers and scorched hands, who told her that the countess had burned them with red-hot irons.

Read that again in your head, slowly.

They were still there. They were still working. They were being finished. Their fingers were broken and their hands were burned and they were still expected to lace her into her clothes in the morning, and a visiting noblewoman walked among them and looked at them and they told her, plainly, who had done it.

They told her. Which means there was no secret. Which means the household ran on the open understanding that this was what happened here and that nothing followed from it.

That is not a dungeon. A dungeon has a door you can close. This is worse, because there was no door. There was no need for one.

Michael Horvath was the castellan of Csejte. The man who ran the castle. He said he knew of at least seven girls who had died at the school.

He said they were buried in the castle garden. Improperly. Without rites, without a churchyard, in the ground of the house, which is where you put a thing you are disposing of rather than a person you are burying.

Seven, from one man, in one house, that he happened to know about.

He was the castellan. He knew about the garden. He knew where the bodies were. And for as long as the girls were peasants and the girls were servants, that knowledge sat in him and went nowhere, because there was nowhere for it to go.

It only became evidence when it became a scandal. And it only became a scandal when the girls had names.

By December of 1610, the complaints from Hungarian nobles were arriving at the King’s court and the Palatine’s court by the dozen. Not rumors from the villages. Formal complaints, from families with standing, accusing the Countess Báthory of torturing and murdering their daughters.

Those could not be ignored.

Not because a noble girl’s death is worth more than a servant girl’s death. Because in the Kingdom of Hungary in 1610, it functionally was, and everyone from the King down to the girl herself understood the exchange rate.

The machine we built last week ran for years without a single official taking notice.

It only jammed when it swallowed the wrong kind of girl.

The investigation did not begin in 1610. It began in a pulpit.

Between 1602 and 1604, a Lutheran minister named István Magyari was already making complaints against her. Publicly, from the pulpit, and at the court in Vienna. Which tells you the rumors were circulating among the elite while Ferenc Nádasdy was still alive.

Hold on to Magyari. We will need him at the end, when people start telling you this was all a Habsburg land grab.

Nothing came of it. For six more years, nothing came of it.

Then, in March of 1610, King Matthias the Second assigned the matter to György Thurzó, the Palatine of Hungary, the highest officer in the kingdom under the crown. And Thurzó, in turn, put two notaries on it. András Keresztúry. Mózes Cziráky.

Two men with paper and ink, sent out into the villages to ask questions.

By October of 1610, they had fifty-two statements.

By the following year, they had over three hundred.

On the twenty-ninth of December, 1610, Thurzó rode up the hill to Csejte and arrested her.

You will hear this told as a raid. You will see the painting in your head. The doors thrown open, the torches, the Palatine’s men bursting into a cellar to find the countess standing over a body with a blade in her hand, caught in the act, blood to the wrist.

That is not what happened. That is a scene from a novel that got promoted to a fact.

She was at dinner.

Sit with the flatness of it. The most notorious woman in European history was arrested while eating her supper, in her own hall, in a house where the castellan knew about the garden and the girls in the corridor had scorched hands. There was no need for a cellar. There was no need for a mask. There was no need for anything to be hidden, because for twenty years nothing had needed to be hidden.

The records do say that Thurzó’s men found a dead girl in the castle. And another girl, alive, and injured. There is no evidence the living one ever testified. She is in the record for a single line and then she is gone from it forever, and we do not know her name, and no one asked.

Four servants were arrested with her.

Ilona Jó.

Dorottya Szentes.

János Újváry, whom everybody called Ficzkó. He was young.

Katarína Benická.

We know almost nothing about them as people. They are servants, so they arrive in history already flattened, defined entirely by what they are accused of doing. Ilona Jó and Dorottya Szentes were older women in the household. Ficzkó was a young man, a manservant. Benická was there, and her role is the one that gets complicated later.

Two trials were held. The second of January, 1611. The seventh of January.

And here is the fact that has to sit at the center of everything that follows, because everything that follows is built on top of it.

They were tortured before the proceedings.

Not during. Before. The confessions that convicted Elizabeth Báthory, the confessions that have supplied every lurid detail in every retelling for four centuries, were extracted from four people who had already been put to torture by the men who wanted the answers.

I am not telling you that to exonerate anyone. I am telling you because you cannot evaluate a word of what comes next without holding that fact in your other hand.

So. What did they say.

They said they had acted on her orders.

Dorottya Szentes described the needles. The countess would push a sewing needle into a girl’s fingers. And if the girl pulled the needle out, the countess would take a knife and remove the finger.

Ficzkó described the beatings. He said girls were beaten until, in his words, the body was opened up. He said it sometimes took as many as five hundred blows to kill one.

Ficzkó and Ilona Jó both described the irons. Iron rods, keys, coins, heated until they glowed, and then pressed to a girl’s mouth. Her nose. Her lips. Her genitals.

Ficzkó described a girl taken out into a creek in the deep of winter, stripped, dunked in the water, and left there.

Ilona Jó confirmed the freezing.

Dorottya Szentes said the countess tore at the flesh herself. With tongs. And, she said, with her teeth.

Now, a hard question, and I want to answer it honestly rather than comfortably.

Do those methods hold up?

Physiologically, yes. Every one of them works. Five hundred blows will open a body and kill it. A red-hot key on the face will burn to the bone and the burn will go septic and the sepsis will finish what the iron started. Needles under the nails are a torture that has been reinvented independently by cruel people in every century, because the nail bed is dense with nerves and the pain is enormous and the injury is small. A naked body in freezing water in a Carpathian winter will go hypothermic and confused and quiet and then it will die. Human bites become infected because human mouths are filthy.

None of it is fantasy. None of it requires a demon, or a curse, or a woman who is anything other than a woman with absolute power and a great deal of time.

That is the uncomfortable part. Everything the accomplices describe is entirely, mundanely possible.

It is also exactly what four people would say after being tortured by men who already knew what they wanted to hear.

Both of those things are true. Hold them both. The next segment is going to make you choose what to do with them.

The court did not hold them both.

Ilona Jó and Dorottya Szentes had their fingers torn out with red-hot pincers, and then they were burned alive.

Ficzkó, on account of his youth, and because the court decided he was the least culpable, was given the mercy of a beheading. Then his body was thrown onto the same fire as the two women.

Read that sentence again and notice what counts as mercy in this story.

Katarína Benická was not executed. She was given life imprisonment instead, because evidence came out during the proceedings that she had been abused by the other accomplices. That she had been coerced. That she was, in some measure, another victim of that household who happened to have survived it.

And a fifth servant, Erzsi Majorova, who was not taken in the first arrest, was caught later. She was burned alive too.

Elizabeth Báthory was never tried.

Not once. There was no trial of the countess. There was a trial of her servants, and she was never made to stand in front of it, because putting a Báthory in a courtroom raised questions about the property of a Báthory, and about the King’s debts to a Báthory, and nobody with power wanted those questions asked out loud.

She did say one thing.

She said it to a pastor named Barosius, and this is important, because as far as we can tell she was not under torture when she said it. This is not a confession squeezed out of a broken body. This is a woman talking.

[QUOTE] “I did it ... Because even I myself was afraid of them.”

I did it.

And then, immediately, in the same breath, the blame goes sideways onto the servants. She was afraid of them. They made her. The four people who had no power at all in that house, who could be beaten or burned or dismissed on her word alone, had somehow frightened the most powerful woman in Hungary into torturing children.

She was fifty years old. She had run an empire from a writing desk. And when the door finally closed on her, her first instinct was to point at the help.

Three hundred witnesses.

That is the number that does the work. That is the number that appears in every book and every documentary and every list of history’s worst monsters. Three hundred people testified against her. How could three hundred people be wrong.

I want to open that number up.

The count itself is soft. Depending on which account you read, it is two hundred and eighty-nine, or three hundred and three, or simply “over three hundred.” Fine. That is normal for a corpus of this age. Not a problem.

The problem is what is inside it.

The overwhelming majority of those three hundred statements are not accounts of things people saw. They are accounts of things people had heard. Rumor. Village talk. My neighbor’s cousin served up at the castle and she says. The scribes were collecting testimony from an entire countryside that had been marinating in this story for a decade, and the countryside gave them back the story it had been telling itself.

And here is the detail that stopped me cold when I found it, and it is the reason I wanted to make this episode at all.

The most famous number in the entire Báthory legend, the six hundred and fifty victims, the number on the covers of the paperbacks, comes from one witness.

A servant woman named Susanna.

She said that there was a book. A private ledger, kept by the countess, and in it was a running count of the dead, and the count came to six hundred and fifty. She said the court official Jakab Szilvássy had seen it.

That is the origin of the number. That is all of it.

The book was never found. Szilvássy, who was interviewed, who gave his own testimony, who described plenty of other horrors, never mentioned it.

And the scribe who took Susanna’s statement, sitting there in 1611, with his pen in his hand, wrote next to her words that she knew this from hearsay.

He flagged it. At the time. In the room.

A seventeenth-century notary, working for a Palatine who had every political reason to want the worst possible number on the page, looked at the six hundred and fifty and wrote, in effect, she did not see this.

And four hundred years later that is still the number on the cover.

Everyone who repeats it has stepped over the note. The note has been sitting there the entire time.

So what happens to the count if you take the hearsay out.

The accomplices, the four who were tortured, gave numbers of their own. Ficzkó said thirty-seven. Ilona Jó said fifty or more. They did not agree with each other, which is itself a mark against the reliability of testimony taken under duress, and also a mark against the theory that they were reciting a script.

The formal charges brought in the case were eighty counts of murder.

Eighty.

Now, I want to be very clear about what I am doing here, and what I am not doing.

I am not making her smaller. Eighty is not smaller. Eighty is a number that should sit in your chest like a stone. Eighty girls, most of them without names, most of them buried in a garden.

What I am doing is telling you that the legend is not the crime. The legend is a monument built on top of the crime, and it is much larger than the thing it is standing on, and it has been standing there so long that we have stopped being able to see what is underneath.

Because there is something underneath. That is the part the skeptics sometimes lose.

Strip out the hearsay. Strip out the phantom ledger. Strip out everything extracted with pincers. What is left?

Firsthand testimony. Not much of it, but it exists, and it is specific, and it is terrible.

Benedek Deseő was the head of the Lord’s staff at Csejte. He ran the operation of the house. He was not a peasant repeating a rumor. He was inside it, every day, and he described what he had seen.

He described the countess with a knife. He described flogging. He described skin burned with candles. He described her pushing sewing needles into the arms of the girls who served her.

And he gave a name. Illonka. A shoemaker’s daughter. He described what was done to her, over time, until she died of it.

Gergely Paztory was a court judge at Sárvár. He testified about a young woman named Modl, from Bratislava. She was married. She had a child. And at Csejte she was made to dress like a young girl, and to behave like one, and when she resisted that, she was mutilated.

Jakab Szivassy, the same Szivassy who never mentioned any ledger, corroborated Paztory’s account of Modl. And he added a detail I am not going to dress up, because it does not need my help. He said her flesh was cut out. And roasted.

These men were collected by Mózes Cziráky and published in his report to King Matthias on the fourteenth of December, 1611.

That is the floor. That is what is left when you take everything questionable away.

A woman named Illonka, whose father made shoes.

A young mother named Modl, who was made to play a child, and who said no.

You do not need six hundred and fifty. You never needed six hundred and fifty. The six hundred and fifty is a comfort, in a strange way. It makes her a phenomenon. It makes her a force of nature, an aberration, a thing that could not possibly stand next to you in a room.

Eighty makes her a person. Two makes her unbearable.

And now watch the file start to rot in real time.

Because sitting in that same corpus, mixed in with Deseő and Paztory and the mothers, are the other testimonies. The witnesses who told the notaries that the countess kept demonic cats and dogs. The witnesses who said she had schemed to assassinate the King.

And then there is the priest.

János Pónikenusz was the pastor of Čachtice. The village at the foot of the hill. And he wrote to his superior to report that the countess was practicing the black arts. He said she had help. A Slovak forest witch, called the Mistress of Miava, whose name was Erzsi Majorova, the same Erzsi Majorova who would eventually be burned alive. And another woman, called Torkoss.

And he described the ritual he had been told about. You take a black cat, or a black hen. You kill it with a white stick. You collect the blood. And you smear the blood on your enemy, or on your enemy’s clothes, and harm comes to them.

Blood. Smeared. To get something you want.

There it is. Four years before her death, a hundred and eighteen years before the myth appears in print, a village priest is already writing letters about the countess and blood and magic.

I do not think Pónikenusz was lying. I think Pónikenusz was a frightened man in a frightened village, hearing what everybody in that village was saying, and passing it up the chain in good faith, and in doing so, feeding it.

That is how it works. That is how it has always worked. It does not require a conspiracy. It requires a story that people want to be true, and a hundred mouths, and time.

The mothers were telling the truth. And the man with the black cat was telling the truth as he understood it. And they are in the same file, on the same paper, in the same handwriting, and four hundred years later we cannot fully pull them apart.

That is the real horror of the Báthory archive. Not that it is false. That it is contaminated. That somewhere in there is a real girl named Illonka, and we have to go looking for her through the cats and the ledgers and the smeared hens.

Allow me a moment of self promotion.

Because what I have just described, a village telling itself a story until the story becomes a truth, and then becomes a hunger, is the exact thing that has been eating at me for the last year. And it is the thing I wrote a book about.

It is called A Procession of Ashes.

It is a medieval horror novella, and it begins in Piacenza, in northern Italy, in the year 1349. The plague has come through. Father Matteo has buried most of his flock. He has shepherded them through the dying and the lime and the pits, and he is hollow, and he is holding on.

And then the flagellants arrive.

They call themselves the Brotherhood of Broken Flesh. A ragged procession that has walked out of the sickness and into his town, whipping itself, singing, turning its own suffering into scripture. Their leader is a man named Fra Aureliano. And what Aureliano is raising is not a hymn. It is a living Psalm. And the faithful of Piacenza begin to speak its geometry. In their flesh.

Beside Matteo stands Tommaso Bellini, an empiric physician, a man of observation in an age that does not want any, and he is trying to trace the pattern hiding underneath all of it. The place where faith and decay stop being two different things.

It is a book about devotion as contagion. About a crowd that catches a belief the way a body catches a fever, and about the men who have to stand in the road while the procession comes on.

If tonight’s episode has any hold on you at all, if the idea of a story spreading through a countryside until it eats a woman alive is the kind of thing that keeps you up, then that is the country I was writing in.

A Procession of Ashes is available now. It is the first book of The Black Hours, and it stands completely on its own. It is short. It is meant to be finished in one or two sittings, preferably late.

And as of right now, it is ninety-nine cents. Ninety-nine cents. That is less than the coffee you are probably holding.

Take it. Read it in the dark.

Now. Back to the hill, and to the wall they built around her.

They did not execute her. They did not try her.

They walled her in.

You will read that Elizabeth Báthory spent her final years in an iron cage. You will see the illustration. It is a wonderful image and it is not true. There was no cage.

The truth is quieter and, to my ear, considerably worse.

They took a room in Csejte Castle. And they bricked it up. They sealed the door and they sealed the windows and they left a slot for food, and they put her inside it, and they left her there.

She had run an empire from a writing desk. She had held more land than the King. She had been the terror of every girl in seventeen villages, a woman whose displeasure on a bad afternoon was, functionally, a death sentence with no appeal.

And they put her in a box in her own house and let her age in it.

She died in 1614. Four years in the dark. No trial. No verdict. No sentence, technically, because there was never a case. Just a wall, and a slot, and then nothing.

Now. The blood.

You have been waiting for it. Everybody waits for it. It is the only thing most people know about her.

She bathed in the blood of virgins to keep herself young.

Here is where that comes from.

It does not come from the three hundred witnesses. Not one of them said it. Not one. Not the mothers. Not Deseő, who described the needles and the candles and the knife. Not the accomplices, who under red-hot pincers gave up every method they could think of, including the tongs and the teeth and the creek in winter.

Three hundred statements. A corpus that had no problem accommodating demonic cats, a phantom ledger of six hundred and fifty, a plot against the King, and a forest witch with a white stick and a black hen.

And in all of that, from all of those mouths, in a countryside that would clearly believe anything about this woman, not one person mentioned a bath.

Because it had not been invented yet.

The blood-bath enters the record in 1729. In a book. A Jesuit named László Turóczi wrote a history called Tragica Historia, and in it he put down the story of the countess in the blood, as fact.

One hundred and fifteen years after she died.

Nobody who was alive when she was alive said it. It arrives more than a century late, in the era when Europe was discovering vampires, when the folklore of the Carpathians was becoming a genre, when the reading public had developed an appetite for exactly this and someone was going to feed it.

And it stuck. It stuck so hard that it outran the truth entirely. When the actual witness testimony was finally published, in 1817, and people could read for themselves what the record said and did not say, it did not matter. The bath had a two-hundred-year head start. The bath is a better story. The bath is a beautiful story.

That is what makes it useful. Because a woman who bathes in blood to stay young is a vampire. A supernatural aberration. Something outside the ordinary run of the world.

She was not outside anything.

She was a woman with total legal authority over the bodies of the powerless, on a frontier soaked in war, in a house where the servants had scorched hands and worked anyway, in a country that had built her a machine and handed her the controls and looked away for twenty years, and only looked back when the girls started having names.

The bath lets us off. The bath makes it about her.

It was never only about her.

Go back to the cart.

Winter of 1609, coming up the hill. The girl in her good clothes. Her mother in the road, watching it go, proud, because the ladder had finally come down.

Anna Zelesthey did not send her daughter into a legend. There was no legend. There was no blood countess, no vampire, no bath, no cage. There was a rich old woman with a school, and an opportunity, and a name that opened doors.

Everything we know, the whole shape of the thing, the six hundred and fifty, the ledger, the myth, all of it comes after. It comes from the notaries and the pincers and the pulpit and the printing press. It comes from us.

She only had what a mother has. A daughter, and a cart, and a hill.

Here is the question I cannot put down.

If the peasant girls had been enough. If she had never opened that school, never taken in a single daughter of the gentry, never let a name into the house that anyone would come looking for.

Would there have been an investigation at all?

Or would Elizabeth Báthory have died in her bed at eighty, wealthy, respected, a great Protestant lady of the frontier, buried with rites, and the girls in the garden with her, and no one, in four hundred years, would ever have written a single word.

I think we all know the answer. And I think the answer is the story.

Next time, we close it out.

We go to the money. To a King who owed her family a fortune he could not pay, and a Palatine who was her relative, and the question that will not die: whether the whole thing was a frame. We go to the historians who say she was innocent, and we take them seriously, and then we take them apart. And we go to what she became after she was dead, which is the only part of her that is still alive.

Part Three. The Countess and the Crown.

I am A.M. Blackmere. Thank you for listening.