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great hall. Immediately they found a young, partly-clothed girl lying on the floor. She was unnaturally pale, as if the blood had been drained out of her body. She was dead and another girl they found nearby was close to death. She, too, looked as if the blood had been sucked from her body and the many piercings that peppered her body seemed to confirm that fact. Further on, a woman was found chained to a post. She had been whipped and her body was lacerated and burnt. Like the others, her blood appeared to have been taken.
    As they descended into the dungeons, they could hear screams and moans from below and the smell of decomposition was terrible. They discovered cells filled with women and children who had been beaten and abused. They released them and escorted them from the castle, before returning to continue their grim search.
    No one wrote a description of that night’s discoveries, so horrific were they. In a large hall, illuminated by torches, they found all the signs of a drunken orgy having taken place. Implements of torture were scattered around. But there was no sign of the castle’s owner. She had fled.
    Born in either 1560 or 1561, she was the daughter of Gyrögy and Anna Báthory, who had embraced the new religion of Protestantism and she was raised on an estate in Transylvania. Her cousin Stephen, prince of Transylvania, who attempted to unite Europe against the Turks, was known for his savagery and many have claimed that he provides clear evidence of mental instability in the Báthory family, Erzsébet herself suffered from fits as a child, which, it has been suggested, indicate that she may have suffered from epilepsy. It is also said that she was very promiscuous and got pregnant at the age of fourteen by a peasant.
    Aged 15, she married Count Ferencz Nádasdy, whose family, while powerful, shared with her family a reputation for being dangerously unstable and ruthlessly cruel. Her husband was a warrior who was rarely at home, giving Erzsébet ample opportunity to indulge in unsavoury pastimes. That was not unusual in her family, though. Her aunt was reputed to be a witch, she had an uncle who was an alchemist and a devil-worshipper and her brother was a paedophile. Her nurse was said to be a practitioner of black magic and was reputed to have been involved in the sacrifice of children.
    As if that was not bad enough, her husband had a number of unsavoury habits, many of which he passed on to his young wife. He was partial to beating servant girls to within an inch of their lives or spreading honey on their naked bodies and tying them down in the open, leaving them to be bitten and stung by insects. When he was not doing that, he was freezing girls to death by pouring water over their naked bodies in the icy depths of winter and leaving them to die. His idea of a love token to his wife was a black magic spell brought back from whichever land he was fighting in.
    She had begun to practice witchcraft as she got older and is reputed to have carried everywhere with her a parchment made from the caul – the membrane surrounding the baby in the womb that sometimes covers a baby when it is born. The parchment is said to have carried an incantation that would protect Erzsébet.
    She moved into her husband’s castle and began her reign of terror over her servants. Beatings were commonplace and death was irrelevant to her when it was the death of someone of such lowly status. Her husband taught her the fine art of beating someone to the brink of death. She was vain, too and was known to have at least five changes of clothing a day and she demanded constant reassurance about how beautiful she was and how fine and pale her skin was.
    While he was gone, she maintained the regime of cruelty and torture, even sending him letters in which she described her latest grim escapades. In his absence, she also took countless lovers, both male and female. Her entourage was specially selected by her to include people adept at