Boromir's guess the famous game #187 [Elizabeth Báthory is the (in)famous person, Carrot wins!]

That part isn't considered historically accurate, it's an embellishment of later legend. I mean it's possible she did, she was certainly crazy enough, but there's no source for it during her lifetime.

Just found a link that I had read a year or so ago and forgotten about, in which a historian talks about the reality and myth of Báthory. The bathing in blood thing is certainly false, originating in local Hungarian and Slovakian peasant folklore in the decades after Báthory's death; she had left a dark enough impression on the people of the regions in which she committed her crimes that she gave birth to exaggerated legend that outlived her. This myth was picked up by a Jesuit priest who listened to the folklore among peasants in the vicinity of Báthory's home castle a hundred years later, and from there it made its way into German and then English literature, which gladly ate it up for its salaciousness and misogynist undertones (the first English writer to record the legend talks about "that worst of woman's weaknesses, vanity" as being why Báthory supposedly bathed in blood). But the testimony of Báthory's accomplices about the things she did and they did with her is grisly enough without the exaggeration.

It seems also that in recent years right-wing Hungarian nationalists have been trying to whitewash Báthory in order to remove the stain on Hungarian history and the name of the aristocratic family she was part of. I notice that her Wikipedia page now is significantly different from what it was a year or two ago; there seems to be a sort of editing war between historical revisionists trying to whitewash her and people trying to keep the article faithful to the evidence. The evidence itself seems pretty clear, with Báthory's servants independently corroborating each other's testimony, other aristocratic families testifying that they had sent daughters to be educated or work on Báthory estates only to never hear from them again, and local peasants reporting witnessing a constant stream of coffins leaving Báthory's castles.

The main reason she was able to get away with it for so long was because her victims were initially peasants and nobody gave a damn about them in Hungary's elitist feudal society. But once she started killing noble-born girls, that was when an investigation was finally started.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/eb4un2/floating_feature_travel_through_time_to_share_the/fcvnyij/

Halloween state of mind, I think.

Asperger's powers, activate!