Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio and Grim and Myelt from Aaron

Manky.

Listener discretion is advised.

In the more than two years since I've been putting Noble Blood out into the world,

by far the most frequently requested subject for me to cover is the Hungarian Countess

Elizabeth Bathory.

Chances are if you're a fan of historical trivia or true crime corners of the internet,

you at least have a passing familiarity with Bathory.

She's often positioned, including by the Guinness Book of World Records as the most prolific

female serial killer of all time.

In the centuries since Elizabeth Bathory's life, her story has traveled as folklore and

word of mouth horror story as pop history and now spooky internet irreverence.

The basic version of the narrative is that Elizabeth Bathory was a wealthy and powerful

Countess in 16th and 17th century Hungary, and that her states became nightmare dens

of sadistic torture that she inflicted first on her servant girls and then eventually

as time went on on the daughters of Noble Mntu, young girls who had been sent to her palaces

to learn basic, courtly etiquette.

Stories of Elizabeth Bathory often include gruesome details of her torture that she would

take a girl and strip her naked before covering her with honey and tending her out into the

fields to be devoured by insects.

She would stick needles beneath fingernails, cut off flesh, whip servants with stinging

nettles or force girls naked into freezing ice baths.

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