A Hungarian noblewoman who killed more than 600 people also drank the blood of her victims to retain her youth, according to legend.
Countess Elizabeth Bathory was born into a rich family of landowners in 1560 and is regarded as the most prolific female serial killer of all time.
She led a privileged life eventually inside Cachtice Castle - in modern-day Slovakia - surrounded by hoards of servants.
Her high status enabled her to carry out horrific murders against the peasant girls she would lure away from their families before imprisoning them.
The young women were promised work but instead found themselves being brutally beaten and starved to death.
Bathory's sadistic habits did not stop there and she would force pins under the victims' nails as well as biting chunks from their breasts or scalding them with red-hot irons.
Other heinous torture methods included covering the girls' bodies with honey and leaving them exposed to bees, plus leaving them to freeze to death and chopping off fingers and genitals.
She married aged 13 - but not before allegedly giving birth to a child that was fathered by a peasant boy.
Her wealthy husband Count Ferenc II Nadasdy gave Cachtice Castle to her as a wedding gift.
Nadasdy died of an unknown illness in 1604 and it is thought that only after then she started her most appalling acts of murder.
Perhaps the most legendary footnote Bathory's acts of savagery, though, is the belief that she would bathe in the blood of her victims as well as drink it.
In carrying out this bizarre act, she thought her young victims' blood would help her remain youthful as by then she in her thirties and considered an older person.
As well as peasant girls, she began to killing in the young daughters of the gentry as well as local girls who believed they were going to her castle to receive an education.
With these legendary vampiric tendencies, it is said that she is the part inspiration behind the 1897 horror novel Dracula by Bram Stoker.
This earned her the infamous nickname 'Countess Dracula' and 'Countess Blood'.
Sadly because of her wealth and power she remained untouchable in the area for many years, despite many public rumours about her, and could carry on freely committing murders for two decades between 1590 and 1610.
However, justice finally caught up with Bathory and she was arrested in December, 1610 along with four of her most-trusted servants
The Hungarian King Matthias II had tasked an influential magnate called Gyorgy Thurzo to investigate the countess.
He collected dozens of witness statements that rose to 300 by 1611 and heard how Bathory would use needles on her victims and throw them in freezing cold water before mutilating and murdering them.
She was accused of being a vampire and even of having sex with the Devil himself.
In the end, Bathory was charged with the murder of 80 girls although one witness said she saw the countess's diary with 650 victims named in them - a number that appears to have stuck through the centuries.
Astonishingly, Bathory was sentenced to spend the rest of her days under house arrest in her own castle until her death aged 54 in 1614
Her accomplices were were all burned at the stake.
The whereabouts of Bathory's buried remains are unknown but it is thought she is probably somewhere beneath the castle grounds.
Recent historians argue she could have been treated unfairly and be completely innocent of her alleged crimes.
One theory follows the idea that the king was in heavy debt to Bathory's late husband, and subsequently her, which could have motivated a 'witch hunt' against her.
