A little known fact

[Xavious]

Theres a little known fact about Dracula. He really did exist. He was a tyrannical king in Translyvania. He wore a gold medallion around his neck and said that it gave him the power of the devil. He killed most prisoners by dropping them from the top of one of the castle towers and they would land on a ten foot tall spike. He would then drink the blood from the person just killed. When he eventually died he was sealed in a tomb. A few years later his tomb was to be unsealed because of a mysterious death. The monks who unsealed the tomb claimed that his skeleton was not there. Instead of it they found the skeleton of a giant dog in the tomb with his gold medallion around it's neck. When Dracula was buried the walls of the tomb were solid stone and he was buried alone. The skeleton they found was something they could not explain.
This is not meant to be judgemental against vampires so don't take it the wrong way. I like to tell others the truth about what is considered false. And this is the true story of Dtracula. He wasn't a creature that was not seen much. He was a king. He did not wear a cape. He wore a suit of maille armor (I think that's the correct spelling) Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction. This is just another example.

[purinpuff]

Did it have the clothes in which he was buried?

[Xavious]

Did it have the clothes in which he was buried?
I think when they found the skeleton in his tomb there was torn peices of cloth that was his clothes.

[Ender]

Where did you get that information from?

[Spectre]

Where did you get that information from?

Look up Vlad the Impaler. It's pretty much the same guy.This site (http://www.royalty.nu/Europe/Balkan/Dracula.html) turned up in a quick Google search, and it's pretty good for background information. Not much specific, from what I can see - but I'm just skimming over it.

[Ahroun]

Well, i have eard of it, and he was known as Vladimir Dracula. Was a king in Romenia. In the original city of his castle, government have planes to make a sort of <Dracula park theme>. I know the castle still exists, and visits are open to public.

About the rest... no idea.

Ahroun

[Xavious]

Yeah Vlad the Impaler. I couldn't remember his name when I put this here. And when I said he droped people on the spike that was impaling. I know a lot about that sort of stuff but it's hard to remember it all sometimes. I get my information from some of the least likly places. I'll say that much about.

[Wolffy13]

Oh yeah, interesting fellow. Romania regards him highly because he was able to fend off the Turks, which I hear is really, really hard. Although, I heard from a high school teacher of mine (and this teacher has my utmost respect, for reasons I won't delve into in this thread) he used the whole blood drinking and impaling as a scare tactic. Think about it, if you were a Turkish soldier, back in the superstitious day, marching up the path to his castle and you kept passing your peers who were impaled in spikes, placed every here and there, wouldn't that work on your nerves. I am sure it would take the cake though, to find him in his castle, dipping his bread in the blood of your fellow soldiers and eating it. Psychological damage anyone? Makes sense to me :shrug:

[Moonlight]

Ah, Vlad Dracul...A bit of the wall, wouldn't you say? Fascinating character. I would have LOVED to met him in real life...in a secured and padded room, mind you ;) oh, and NO sharp objects

[LV426]

My posts have been called spam and crap so if you find this to be a spammy piece of crap I apologize in advance.



Yes, there was a real Dracula, and he was a true prince of darkness. He was Prince Vlad III Dracula, also known as Vlad Tepes, meaning "Vlad the Impaler." The Turks called him Kaziglu Bey, or "the Impaler Prince." He was the prince of Walachia, but, as legend suggests, he was born in Transylvania, which at that time was ruled by Hungary.

According to legend, Walachia was founded in 1290 by a Transylvanian named Radu Negru, or Rudolph the Black. Dracula's grandfather, Prince Mircea the Old, reigned from 1386 to 1418. He fought to keep Walachia independent from the Turks but was forced to pay tribute to them. He and his descendants continued to rule Walachia, but under the suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire (Turkey).

The throne of Walachia was not necessarily passed from father to son. The prince, or voivode, was elected by the country's boyars, or land-owning nobles. This caused fighting among family members, assassinations, and other unpleasantness. Eventually the royal House of Basarab was split into two factions -- Mircea's descendants, and the descendants of another prince named Dan II. Dan's descendants were called the Danesti.

Mircea had an illegitimate son, Vlad, born around 1390. He grew up in the court of King Sigismund of Hungary, first probably as a hostage and later as a page. Sigismund, who became the Holy Roman Emperor in 1410, founded a secret fraternal order of knights called the Order of the Dragon to uphold Catholicism and defend the empire against Turkey. Vlad was admitted to the Order, probably in 1431. The boyars of Walachia started to call him Dracul, meaning "dragon." Vlad's second son would be known as Dracula, or "son of the dragon." Dracul also meant "devil." So some of Dracula's enemies called him "son of the devil."

Sigismund made Vlad the military governor of Transylvania, a post he held from 1431 to 1435. During that time he lived in the town of Sighisoara or Schassburg. You can still visit the citadel there and even the house where Vlad's son Dracula was born. Today there's a restaurant on the second floor. There's also a mural in the house that may depict Vlad Dracul.

Young Dracula
Dracula was born in November or December of 1431. His given name was Vlad. He had an older brother, Mircea, and a younger brother, Radu the Handsome. Their mother may have been a Moldavian princess or a Tranyslvanian noble. It is said that she educated Dracula in his early years. Later he was trained for knighthood by an old boyar who had fought the Turks.

Dracula's father was not content to remain a mere governor forever. During his years in Transyvlania, he gathered supporters for his plan to seize Walachia's throne from its current occupant, a Danesti prince named Alexandru I. In late 1436 or early 1437 Vlad Dracul killed Alexandru and became Prince Vlad II.

Vlad was a vassal of Hungary and also had to pay tribute to Hungary's enemy, Turkey. In 1442 Turkey invaded Transylvania. Vlad tried to stay neutral, but Hungary's rulers blamed him and drove him and his family out of Walachia. A Hungarian general, Janos Hunyadi (who may have been the illegitimate son of Emperor Sigismund) made a Danesti named Basarab II the prince of Walachia.

The following year Vlad regained the throne with the help of the sultan of Turkey. In 1444 he sent his two younger sons to Turkey to prove his loyalty. Dracula was about 13. He spent the next four years in Adrianople, Turkey as a hostage.

In 1444 Hungary went to war with Turkey and demanded that Vlad join the crusade. As a member of the Order of the Dragon, Vlad was sworn to obey this summons. But he didn't want to anger the Turks, so he sent his eldest son, Mircea, in his place. The Christian army was demolished at the Battle of Varna, and Vlad and Mircea blamed Janos Hunyadi.

In 1447 Vlad and Mircea were murdered. Mircea was killed by the boyars and merchants of the Walachian city Tirgoviste. There are different stories about how he died - he may have been tortured and burned, or buried alive. Apparently his father died at the same time. Some say that the assassinations were organized by Hunyadi.

Since Vlad and Mircea were dead, and Dracula and Radu were still in Turkey, Hunyadi was able to put a member of the Danesti clan, Vladislav II, on the Walachian throne. The Turks didn't like having a Hungarian puppet in charge of Walachia, so in 1448 they freed Dracula and gave him an army. He was seventeen years old.

It seems that Dracula's little brother Radu chose to remain in Turkey. He had grown up there, and apparently remained loyal to the sultan.

[LV426]

Part II


Dracula's Reign
With the help of his Turkish army, Dracula seized the Walachian throne. However, he only ruled for two months before Hunyadi forced him into exile in Moldavia. Again Vladislav II became Walachia's prince.

Three years later Prince Bogdan of Moldavia was assassinated and Dracula fled the country. By now Vladislav II had become a supporter of Turkey, and Hunyadi was sorry he had put him on the throne. Everyone switched sides - Dracula became Hunyadi's vassal, and Hunyadi now supported Dracula's attempt to regain his throne. In 1456 Hunyadi invaded Turkish Serbia while Dracula invaded Walachia. Hunyadi was killed, but Dracula killed Vladislav II and took back his throne.

He established his capital at Tirgoviste - you can still see the ruins of his palace there. And nearby a statue of Vlad Tepes still stands. He is considered an important figure in Romanian history because he unified Walachia and resisted the influence of foreigners.

But it's Dracula's cruelty that most non-Romanians remember. After becoming prince, Dracula supposedly invited many beggars and other old, sick and poor people to a banquet at his castle. When his guests had finished eating their meal and drinking a toast to him, Dracula asked them, "Would you like to be without cares, lacking nothing in this world?"

Yes, they said enthusiastically.

So Dracula had the castle boarded up and set it on fire. Nobody made it out alive - and that was the end of their problems, as he had promised. "I did this so that no one will be poor in my realm," he said.

According to another story, he invited 500 boyars to a banquet and asked them how many princes had ruled in their lifetimes. They said they had lived through many reigns. Shouting that this was their fault because of their plotting, Dracula had them all arrested on the spot. The older ones were impaled; the others were marched 50 miles to Poenari where they were forced to build a mountaintop fortress. They worked a long time; when their clothes fell off, they worked naked. Most of them died, of course. And of course Dracula seized the boyars' property and passed it out to his supporters. In that way he created a new nobility, loyal to him.

(The ruins of the Poenari fortress can still be seen. You have to climb nearly 1,500 steps and cross a little bridge to reach it. It's now called Castle Dracula, but several places are called that. Another "Castle Dracula" is Bran Castle, near the town of Brasov. Although Dracula may have stayed there occasionally, it certainly wasn't his home.)

Dracula liked to set up a banquet table and dine while he watched people die. His favorite form of execution was impalement. It was slow; people could take days to die. He liked to impale many people at once, arranging the stakes in fancy designs. Nothing was too brutal for Dracula - he enjoyed having people skinned, boiled alive, etc. He prided himself on making the punishment (supposedly) fit the crime.

By 1462, when he was deposed, he had killed between 40,000 and 100,000 people, possibly more. He always thought up some excuse for these executions. He killed merchants who cheated their customers. He killed women who had affairs. Supposedly he had one woman impaled because her husband's shirt was too short. He didn't mind impaling children, either. Afterwards he would display the corpses in public so everyone would learn a lesson. It's said that there were over 20,000 bodies hanging outside his capital city. Of course, the stories about Dracula's cruelty might have been exaggerated by his enemies.

Despite all this, Dracula's subjects respected him for fighting the Turks and being a strong ruler. He's remembered today as a patriotic hero who stood up to Turkey and Hungary. He was the last Walachian prince to remain independent from the Ottoman Empire. He was so scornful of other nations that when two foreign ambassadors refused to doff their hats to him, he had the hats nailed to their heads. He was opposed to the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches because he thought foreigners, operating through the churches, had too much power in Walachia. He tried to prevent foreign merchants from taking business away from his citizens. If merchants disobeyed his trade laws, they were, of course, impaled.

Dracula created a very severe moral code for the citizens of Walachia. You can guess what happened to anyone who broke the code. Thieves were impaled, even liars were impaled. Naturally there wasn't a lot of crime in Walachia during his reign.

To prove how well his laws worked, Dracula had a gold cup placed in a public square. Anyone who wanted to could drink from the cup, but no one was allowed to take it out of the square. No one did.

A visiting merchant once left his money outside all night, thinking that it would be safe because of Dracula's strict policies. To his surprise, some of his coins were stolen. He complained to Dracula, who promptly issued a proclamation that the money must be returned or the city would be destroyed. That night Dracula secretly had the missing money, plus one extra coin, returned to the merchant. The next morning the merchant counted the money and found it had been returned. He told Dracula about this, and mentioned the extra coin. Dracula replied that the thief had been caught and would be impaled. And if the merchant hadn't mentioned the extra coin, he would have been impaled, too.

Dracula Overthrown
In 1462 Dracula attacked the Turks to drive them out of the Danube River valley. Sultan Mehmed II retaliated by invading Walachia with an army three times larger than Dracula's. Dracula was forced to retreat to his capital, Tirgoviste. He burned his own villages and poisoned wells on the way so that the Turkish army wouldn't have any food or water.

When the sultan reached Tirgoviste, he saw a terrifying scene, remembered in history as "the Forest of the Impaled." There, outside the city, were 20,000 Turkish prisoners, all impaled. The sultan's officers were too scared to go on - Dracula had won again.

Although the sultan retreated, Dracula's little brother Radu did not. The Turks had provided him with an army in hopes that he could seize Dracula's throne. Many of Dracula's boyars abandoned him to join Radu. Radu's army pursued Dracula to his fortress at Poenari. Dracula's wife was so frightened that she threw herself from the upper battlements. The Turks seized the castle, but Dracula managed to escape through a secret tunnel. There were still some peasants around he hadn't impaled, and they helped him flee from Walachia.

He went to the new king of Hungary, Matthias Corvinus, for help. Instead the king had him imprisoned in a tower. Dracula remained in Hungary while Radu ruled Walachia as a puppet for the Turks. After the first four years he was allowed to move into a house. He became a Catholic to please the Catholic Hungarians. He ingratiated himself with the Hungarian royal family, and even married one of its members (possibly the king's cousin).

But he was still the same old Dracula. He impaled rats and birds for fun. Once a thief broke into his house and a Hungarian captain followed him to arrest him. Dracula didn't kill the thief - he killed the officer. Why? Because the officer was a gentleman, and should have known not to enter a house uninvited.

The Death of Dracula
In 1473, Dracula's brother Radu lost the Walachian throne to a member of the Danesti clan, Basarab the Old. Radu died of syphilis in January of 1475, and in 1476 Dracula invaded Walachia with the help of Moldavia and Transylvania. They drove Basarab out of the country, and Dracula again became Walachia's prince. Most of Dracula's army then went home to Transylvania.

The Turks attacked a few months later. Dracula was killed while fighting near Bucharest in December 1476. Some say he died at the hands of a Turkish assassin posing as a servant, or that he was accidentally killed on the battlefield by his own men because he had disguised himself as a Turk to confuse the enemy. The sultan displayed Dracula's head on a pike in Constantinople to prove that he was dead. His body was buried at the island monastery of Snagov, which he had patronized. But excavations in 1931 failed to turn up any sign of his coffin!

And that is the story of the real Prince Dracula.

[LV426]

Alongsided Vlad Tepes, was another child of noble birth that was supposedly a vampire. The Countess Elizabeth Bathory.


Countess Elizabeth Bathory Nadasdy

Elizabeth was born in 1560 to George and Anna Bathory at Ecsed Castle. Now known as Chakhtice castle. Elizabeth was also the member of a highly intermarriageable family. The Bathory family was "one of the richest and most powerful Protestant families in all Hungary. Inbreeding was very common amoung Hungarian noble families. It was mainly to keep the families very valuable treasures inside the family. Elizabeth's relatives included - An uncle who was supposedly a Satan worshipper, her aunt Klara was a well-known bi-sexual and lesbian who enjoyed torturing servants, and Elizabeth's brother, Stephan, was a drunkard.

It is also stated that the Bathory family was also related to Vlad the Impaler, or Vlad Dracule, Bram Stokers inspiration for Dracula. There was one incident in her life could have some explaination for events that would later happen to hundreds of innocent people.Occurring sometime after she turned six and before eleven, a band of gypsies were invited to Ecsed Castle to provide entertainment at the court. During their stay, one of them was accused of selling his children to the Turks. He was found guilty and the court sentenced him to death. "Elizabeth recalled his long cries in the night, crying and begging to be spared, which evidently made a lasting impression on her. At dawn, Elizabeth escaped from the surveillance of her governess and ran outside the castle to witness the punishment. There was a horse held fast to the ground as some soldiers slit open its belly. Three of the soldiers then grabbed the guilty gypsy and shoved him inside the horse's belly until only his head stuck out of the dying animal. Another soldier armed with a huge, long needle and coarse ropelike thread sewed up the culprit in the belly of the horse"

Elizabeth was surprisingly well educated, as many of the men at that time were not. Elizabeth was fluent in Hungarian, Latin and German when many Nobles were illiterate. This tells us that she was responsible for all her actions to come. At age eleven, Elizabeth was betrothed to Fernc Nadasdy, the young son of Ursula Nadasdy whose family was rich but not quite as much as Elizabeths. At twelve she was sent to live with the family were, as a tomboy enjoyed playing with the male servents. At thirteen she was pregnant by one. Her mother sent her to a remote Bathory castle were the baby was later spirited away. When Elizabeth was fifteen, in May 1575, Ferenc married her in "a lavish, gala event" to which even the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II was invited but did not attend. The marriage, which joined two prominent Protestant families, was held at Varanno Castle where the "bearded young Count Ferenc Nadasdy henceforth added her last name to his.

But Elizabeth, fully emancipated chose to remain a Bathory, rather than take his name, since she considered that her name was much older and more illustrious than his" Ferenc chose war as his career and so was not often around, leaving Elizabeth at Castle Sarvar , managing the family seat. Not seeing her husbands for months on end gave Elizabeth alot of time on her hands. Thus she started a rather distasteful hobby of 'disciplining the servents'. Beating the girl servants with a heavy club was the least of her punishments. Often she would stick "pins into the upper and lower lips, flesh and under their fingernails" One particularly harsh "punishment" would be to drag girls out into the snow where she or her women servants poured cold water on them until they froze to death. She would also take a naked girl, smear her with honey and she was then left outside for twenty-four hours as to be bit by fleas, bees and other insects.


The first ten years of their marriage, Elizabeth bore no children because she and Ferenc shared so little time together as he pursued his job out fighting the Turks. Then around 1585, Elizabeth had a girl whom she named Anna, and over the following nine years gave birth to two more girls, Ursula and Katherina, and in 1598 bore her first and only son, Paul. Judging from letters she wrote to relatives, she was a good wife and protective mother, which was not surprising since nobles usually treated immediate family very differently from the lower servants and peasant classes. By 1598, Ferenc was a "well-known war hero: he was one of five sharp-sabred heroes known as 'the unholy quintet' who inspired fear in the Turks. The Turks even dubbed him with a popular nickname to indicate their fear of him.The name was the 'Black Knight of Hungary'". Near the close of 1603, "Ferenc suddenly became very ill, and died on the morning of January 4, 1604, as a heavy snow fell on his castle at Sarvar".

Surprisingly there is no actual proof that Elizabeth bathed in the blood of pure virgins, she in fact certainly did drink it.This practice started when a maid accidentally pulled the countess's hair while combing it; Countess Elizabeth Bathory instinctively slapped the girl on the ear, but so hard that she drew blood. The servant girl's blood spurted onto Elizabeth's hands. At first the countess was enraged at this and reached for a towel to wipe off the blood. But suddenly the countess noticed that as the blood dried, her own skin seemed to take on the whiteness and youthful quality of the young girl's skin. Sometimes she was so soaked with the blood of her victims that she had to change her clothes before continuing onward. She could have continued in this fashion,torturing servant girls to death at her whim, indefinitely because even the clergy at the time felt that the nobles could treat their servants however cruelly and the servants would have absolutely nothing to say about it because it was legal.

The Countess's helpers included her manservant referred to only as Ficzko (which means "lad " in Hungarian), Helena Jo the wet nurse, Dorothea Szentes (also called "Dorka"),and Katarina Beneczky a washerwoman who came into the Countess's employ late in her bloody career. Also, between the years of 1604 and 1610 a mysterious woman named Anna Darvulia, taught her many new torturing techniques and was "one of the most active sadists in Elizabeth's entourage". After a severe stroke that left her blind, Darvulia left her work to Elizabeth, Helena Jo, and Dorka, content that she had taught them well.

Escape from the Castle Cachtice was not unheard of, though few if any actually succeeded in their attempts. One such escapee was punished as follows: ...a twelve year old girl named Pola somehow managed to escape from the castle. But Dorka, aided by Helena Jo, caught the frightened girl by surprise and brought her forcibly back to Cachtice Castle. Clad only in a long white robe, Countess Elizabeth greeted the girl upon her return. The countess was in another of her rages. She advanced on the twelve-year-old child and forced her into a kind of cage. This particular cage was built like a huge ball, too narrow to sit in, too low to stand in. Once the girl was inside, the cage was suddenly hauled up by a pulley and dozens of short spikes jutted into the cage. Pola tried to avoid being caught on the spikes, but Ficzko maneuvered the ropes so that the cage shifted from side to side. Pola's flesh was torn to pieces.

[LV426]

Part II

With the death of Elizabeth's Darvulia, when Elizabeth was in her forties, she became more reckless. It was Darvulia that made sure that the victims were only peasants and that no girl of noble birth was taken, but with her passing, and the fact that local peasants were getting wise to the wonders of Castle Cachtice, Elizabeth started picking girls from some of the surrounding lower nobility. Feeling lonely, the Countess turned to the widow of a tenant farmer from the nearby town of Miava. The woman's name was Erzsi Majorova. Apparently, it was Erszi Majorova who "encouraged Elizabeth to go after girls of noble birth as well as peasants" At first, Elizabeth went out of her way to see to it that the dead girls were given proper Christian burials by the local Protestant pastor. As the body count rose, the pastor refused to perform his duties in this respect, because there were too many girls coming to him from Elizabeth who had died of "unknown and mysterious causes." She then threatened him in order to keep him from spreading the news of her "hobby" and continued to have the bodies buried secretly.

Near the end, many bodies were disposed of in open places (like nearby fields, wheat silos, the stream running behind the castle, the kitchen vegetable garden, etc.). This started because first Elizabeth threw them around the castles walls....until there was no more room. So she began stuffing them under beds. As the stench grew the elder servents threw them into the fields. This frightened the villagers into saying a vampire lived in their town. In the winter of 1610 Elizabeth evidently still felt that her social position made her virtually untouchable before the law, since she had her servants toss four murdered girls from the ramparts of Castle Cachtice into the path of roaming wolves. This was done in full view of the Cachtice villagers, who reported this latest atrocity to the king's officials.

The king and the high church officials ordered Count Thurzo to act, and that he did, only he wanted to handle things the way that would best suit the Bathory family. He planned his raid to happen over the Christmas holiday, while the Hungarian Parliament was not in session. On December 29, 1610, Count Thurzo's raid on Cachtice Castle took place. When the raiding party arrived at Elizabeth's manorhouse in Cachtice, they found the beaten body of a servant girl was in front of the door. Elizabeth and her help had not yet bothered to bury the body. Inside the house the nobles found two other female victims. Count Thurzo took Elizabth into custody. The trials on January 2 and 7 of 1611 were basically for show and to make the occasion "official."

At the proceedings, the testimonies of her four accomplices, Ficzko, Dorka, Katarina Beneczky, and Helena Jo (Erzsi Majorova was tried much later because she could not be found) were taken and their sentences pronounced. It is somewhat important to mention here that the testimonies of the four placed the body count between thirty and sixty, but a fifth witness heard at the January 7th trial revealed the missing piece of the puzzle: The most surprising testimony came from a witness identified only as "the maiden Zusanna," no last name being mentioned. After describing the tortures by Helena Jo, Dorothea, and Ficzko...and after making a plea for mercy in the case of Katarina Beneczky, Zusanna then revealed the single most shocking piece of evidence in this trial... a list or register in the Countess's chest of drawers, which put the number of girls killed at 650 and that was in her Ladyship's own handwriting.

The servants were then judged guilty and their punishments were as follows: ...first of all, Helena Jo and secondly Dorothea Szentes, were sentenced to having all their fingers on their hands torn out by the public executioner with a pair of red-hot pincers; and after that their bodies should be thrown alive on the fire. Because of his youthful age and complicity in fewer crimes, Ficzko was only to be decapitated. After that his body, drained of blood, was to be reunited with his two fellow accomplices and burned.Only Katarina Beneczky escaped the death sentence. Later on January 24, 1611,Erzsi Majorova, was also found guilty and executed. Only Elizabeth was not brought before a court and tried, thanks to a letter campaign led by her powerful family and by Count Thurzo. Sentence, however was passed on her, by Count Thurzo himself: " 'You, Elizabeth, are like a wild animal,' he told her, 'you are in the last months of your life. You do not deserve to breathe the air on earth, nor to see the light of the Lord. You shall disappear from this world and shall never reappear in it again. The shadows will envelope you and you will find time to repent your bestial life. I condemn you, Lady of Cachtice, to lifelong imprisonment in your own castle.''

This punishment was also decided by her children. This way they could keep the family belongings. Workers were called in to wall over the windows and the door of the room in Cachtice Castle where she would spend her remaining days with only a small opening for food to be passed to her, and some ventilation slits. On July 31, 1614, Elizabeth dictated her last will and testament to two cathedral priests from the Esztergom bishopric. She wished that what remained of her family holdings be divided up equally among her children. Her son Paul and his descendants were the basic inheritors though. Late in August of the year 1614 one of the countess's jailers wanted to get a good look at her, since she was still reputedly one of the most beautiful women in Hungary. Peeking through the small hole in her walled-up cell, he saw her lying face down on the floor. Countess Elizabeth Bathory was dead at the age of fifty-four. Her body was intended to be buried in the church in the town of Cachtice, but the grumbling of local inhabitants found the idea of having the "infamous Lady" placed in their town, on hallowed ground no less!

Considering this, and the fact that she was "one of the last of the descendants of the Ecsed line of the Bathory family" her body was placed to the northeastern Hungarian town of Ecsed, the original Bathory seat.

[punisher]

You beat me to it Lycan. Yes, the legend (and the reality) of Vlad Tepes is one of the most well-known legends in occult history. Lady Bathory is probably the second most famous "real life vampire". Thanks for providing the info Lycan. I don't know about the relationship between the two. It seems odd that a very devout Eastern Orthodox family would marry into a Protestant family. Although a relative of Vlad could have married a Roman Catholic in Hungary, who then married into Bathory's family. I don't know, I haven't studied Bathory all that much.

There was an ok made-for-tv movie out a couple years ago on the "true" history of Dracula. They did get many things right. If you are interested, it is worth the rental. Then you can read the history books and see where they went wrong.

[GarouX]

Dracula=Vlad Tepes...'nough said.

[LV426]

You beat me to it Lycan. Yes, the legend (and the reality) of Vlad Tepes is one of the most well-known legends in occult history. Lady Bathory is probably the second most famous "real life vampire". Thanks for providing the info Lycan. I don't know about the relationship between the two. It seems odd that a very devout Eastern Orthodox family would marry into a Protestant family. Although a relative of Vlad could have married a Roman Catholic in Hungary, who then married into Bathory's family. I don't know, I haven't studied Bathory all that much.

There was an ok made-for-tv movie out a couple years ago on the "true" history of Dracula. They did get many things right. If you are interested, it is worth the rental. Then you can read the history books and see where they went wrong.
I think the relation between them is possible due to the fact that many noble families liked to breed with each other. I believe it was a distant relation though and not like they were cousins.

[Xavious]

You know way more than I do. I am not worthy!
:notworthy :notworthy :notworthy :notworthy :notworthy
:notworthy :notworthy :notworthy :notworthy :notworthy