00:01:22.160But why I say this is one of my favorite subjects or topics of the podcast is because this has become a thing that I like to do with a podcast is to take somebody where there's a common understanding of who they are and then kind of delve deeper to be like, but what actually is the story?
00:01:37.320Who wrote what about them and what was their motivation?
00:01:40.920And as we revealed several weeks ago, last month, I guess, when I had Shelly Puhak back
00:01:45.660on the podcast, she is working on a feminist sort of re-interrogation of all the charges
00:01:51.020against Elizabeth Bathory, going to all the sources and like who said what and when and
00:01:55.000figuring out what did she actually do and what did people say she did and why did they
00:02:01.100And I can't wait for that book to come out.
00:02:02.400It's going to be called The Blood Countess.
00:02:04.340I think it might be coming out maybe later this year.
00:02:06.440I mean, rest assured when this book exists, I will let you know.
00:02:09.800because I think that's like going to be a vulgar history book club pick for sure. Anyway,
00:02:16.820so here is the newly re-edited, better to listen to, better audio quality version of the original
00:02:22.480episode about Elizabeth Bathory. I recorded in 2019. So take it away, little baby Anne.
00:02:33.480This is Anne Foster, and you are listening to Vulgar History. And this is really exciting.
00:02:39.800this is the fourth episode and this is the first one that I've recorded since the podcast has been
00:02:45.120out there in the world not on iTunes yet but you know fingers crossed it's in it's in other places
00:02:51.260people have been listening and waving at you the listeners the the people who are there on day one
00:02:56.940I also thanks to the generosity of my gorgeous patrons on patreon I bought a thing a pop filter
00:03:06.160from a microphone. So hopefully the sound will be a bit more professional sounding. There won't be
00:03:13.220my S's won't be so sneaky or my P's won't pop quite as much or I'm not sure what this does,
00:03:20.660but super cute. I'll put a picture of it on Instagram. It's got a little dog face on it.
00:03:25.440Anyway, also from having recorded and edited the first three episodes, I realized how much I
00:03:31.380smack my lips. So I'm going to try and be mindful and not do that quite so much because this is not
00:03:37.220an ASMR podcast. This is Vulgar History, the feminist women's history comedy podcast hosted
00:03:45.580by me, Anne Foster. And this week we're getting into the first, so we've done some British women,
00:03:52.580we've done a French woman, and today we're doing a Hungarian woman. Renaissance Hungary is not
00:04:00.080a time or a place that I knew lots about to begin with, which is why it's been a while for me to
00:04:05.720read up on this and figure out what is going on just to sort of understand the time and the place.
00:04:10.400Because this podcast and this episode of this podcast is really about looking at this woman,
00:04:16.060what her life was like, not so much getting into the minutiae of the wars that were being fought
00:04:21.680around her because she wasn't fighting in the wars, but they had a profound effect on her life.
00:04:26.520The woman we are looking at today is a woman who we all, if you've heard of her, you've heard of her under her anglicized name, which is Elisabeth Bathory. Her name in Hungarian was Elisabeth Bathory. But as she's famous as Elisabeth Bathory. And since I'm talking in English, I'm going to refer to her as Elisabeth Bathory.
00:04:49.700because part of what this episode is doing, and I also just posted an essay about her on my website
00:04:56.800and fosterwriter.com as well, is just to try and do my little part to expand the conversation
00:05:03.740about this woman. Because when you look up information about Elizabeth Bathory, especially
00:05:09.960in the English version of the name, you just get a lot of information about the myth, the mythology
00:05:14.460of her as the prolific female serial killer etc and what I want to do in this episode is to sort
00:05:23.540of break down where that myth came from who she actually was what actually happened with her in
00:05:31.020her life and that is what we're going to do today at the end of the episode like at the end of every
00:05:36.540other episode we're going to break down her story onto our scale to see where she scores not that1.00
00:05:42.680the women whose stories we're sharing on this podcast are in competition against each other1.00
00:05:46.440but just so we can have a scale to sort of gauge where she fits in um in the general
00:05:52.000scandalousness sorts of categories so in researching this i was reading a bunch and
00:06:00.100i listened to a bunch of other podcasts about elizabeth bathory and more so than other things
00:06:06.120of research and just because i think there's so much more in existence about elizabeth bathory
00:06:11.200it's trickier to to look back and find what everybody's sources are that they're using
00:06:17.340because when you're telling her story like a folktale then you don't really need a source
00:06:21.540and side note i believe the grim brothers actually wrote her story as a folktale so
00:06:26.960trying to sort of like nudge away the levels of just storytelling and myth and pop culture to
00:06:35.080look at what the actual history was, is part of what made this research more interesting and more
00:06:42.120challenging than some of the other stories I've looked at. So Elizabeth Bathory, Hungarian name,
00:06:49.140Elizabeth Bathory, was born in Hungary in 1560. So I'm going to try and explain this in as concise
00:06:58.840a way as possible so you understand what will be helpful for you to get sort of the context of this
00:07:03.980entire saga. So, and I've been reading about the history of Hungary and it's super interesting
00:07:11.220and I recommend reading about it because it's all really interesting. But today we're talking
00:07:18.260about Elizabeth Bathory. So we're just going to look at what was up in Hungary during the time
00:07:21.980that she was alive, which is basically, so she was born in 1560. Hungary at the time was divided
00:07:29.040into three parts and this has happened over the course of numerous wars and things so the northwest
00:07:35.200part was kind of royal hungary the kingdom of hungary and it was ruled over by the royal family
00:07:41.840who are the habsburgs who are a family of they're always involved when you're looking at the history
00:07:49.580of like hungary the austro-hungarian empire the holy roman empire um they went over they were
00:07:56.480they intermarried with the spanish royals well like there's just hapsburgs are all over the
00:08:02.100place were we to make some sort of bingo card for this podcast i think they would be the center
00:08:08.080square because basically every story that i'm gonna look at i just keep not on purpose i just
00:08:15.700keep finding hapsburgs connections so basically they were this super powerful rich royal family
00:08:21.580and they were ruling the one part of Hungary, the Northwest part, Royal Hungary. And this is
00:08:28.620where Elizabeth Bathory was from, that part. So her family, the Bathory's were a noble Hungarian
00:08:33.720family. The middle part of Hungary was overseen by the Ottoman Empire. So this was sort of
00:08:42.200Turkish people were there. And then the Eastern bit was Transylvania, a place you might have heard
00:08:49.640of and it was sort of adjacent to royal hungary they were sort of allies but they were sort of
00:08:58.200transylvania was its own sort of independent principality but all these things kept like
00:09:04.340these borders weren't permanent or fixed like it kept moving back and forth who went where
00:09:08.560and the hungarians versus the turks was an ongoing series of wars that went on for
00:09:15.960started way before Elizabeth was born, kept going way after Elizabeth died. But basically,
00:09:21.560you've got these three parts. You have sort of royal, the kingdom of Hungary. You've got the
00:09:25.680part overseen by the Turks. And then you've got to the east, Transylvania. So at the time of her0.93
00:09:34.800birth, Transylvania was being overseen by Elizabeth's uncle, who had been elected as the
00:09:42.280Prince of Transylvania, because it was like a Protestant place where you elected who your king
00:09:47.080was. And because the Bathory's were so rich and powerful, that's who was chosen. When he died,
00:09:53.360her nephew Gabor took over as the new Prince of Transylvania. So just as a side note,
00:10:00.920the Bathory family itself traces their name, which is a Hungarian word, basically,
00:10:07.020that means good hero back to a medieval knight named Vitus, who is said to have fought a dragon
00:10:13.820and saved a village of grateful villagers. And because they were so happy that he'd saved them
00:10:19.480from the dragon, they gave him the honorary name Bathory as their good hero. And that's why the
00:10:26.600Bathory family crest is sort of a dragon that's eating its own tail in honor of him. So basically
00:10:32.640this is like a hugely respected, super wealthy, super powerful family in Hungary. Everything's
00:10:39.460great. And Elizabeth Bathory was born in 1560. So just to have everything in context for what
00:10:47.840else is happening in other history with which you might be familiar. So in 1560, that was two years
00:10:56.020after Queen Elizabeth I had taken over as queen in England. Over in France, Charles IX had just
00:11:03.860taken over as king after the death of his brother Francis, who had been Mary Queen of Scots's first
00:11:09.560husband. Over in Spain, the king was Philip II, who was the widower of Elizabeth I's sister,
00:11:18.600Mary I. So basically, the Renaissance is happening and women were in power in a way that they hadn't0.52
00:11:28.220been historically much before in terms of Europe. So in that sense, for Elizabeth Bathory to be born0.59
00:11:39.000at this time was pretty lucky for her because it was a time when women, noble women, were expected
00:11:45.620to become educated in the sorts of things I've been taught before, which was like household
00:11:50.200management and sewing and dancing and singing, but also in math and languages. And so she got a
00:11:58.000super amazing, very well-rounded education, including the fact that she became fluent
00:12:05.380in four different languages. So she was smarter than most other people around her, not just other
00:12:11.960women but everybody basically so this was another thing that sort of separated people for class from0.67
00:12:20.940the lower class people who are the serfs of the times this is a sort of situation where
00:12:27.420the people who are super rich were like so amazingly rich and the people who are poor were
00:12:33.420like living in the dirt basically and it was a really strict and structured sort of class system
00:13:11.560And so they were all kind of armed and had a lot of strong feelings and sort of were feeling powerful.
00:13:18.080And so they had revolted a bit and the upper classes had to sort of beat them back down.
00:13:24.800I mean, they didn't have to, but that is what happened to retain this social order.0.58
00:13:30.200What happened is that the rich people felt they needed to brutally torture and murder the peasants.0.62
00:13:35.120So they did. And that basically quelled that.
00:13:38.960So everything was back to sort of this uncomfortable status quo, while still everybody was at war constantly all the time. But it meant that the wealthy rich people were, in terms of being landowners and in terms of being the bosses of servants, they were all by necessity to maintain their position in society.
00:14:06.820they were all really ruthless and really strict about things. And there was no wiggle room for
00:14:14.520people to break rules at all. Because if they did, it seemed like chaos and revolution could
00:14:21.180break out at any moment. Not to say that that happening would have been a bad thing, but we're
00:14:26.520looking at Elizabeth's life, what she was dealing with. So effectively, everybody who she was
00:14:32.760surrounded by the, all the wealthy people were constantly doing everything they could to keep
00:14:38.820the poor people from revolting against them. So she was trained and she saw the importance of doing
00:14:44.520this. And I just want to point out for not, I'm sure the first time or the only time in this
00:14:51.380podcast that just like everybody in this story is terrible in all different ways. And when
00:14:58.680everybody is terrible the only way to survive and to thrive is for you to also be terrible like you
00:15:06.600could run into a situation like this and be like present moral arguments and explain the common
00:15:12.560good and stuff and then you would probably just have your head cut off or something there wasn't
00:15:16.820really room or space for that it was just kind of like a survival of the fittest scenario and
00:15:23.220Elizabeth was coming into it with a huge advantage being super rich and wealthy and educated so she
00:15:30.120kind of saw what her family was doing she saw how they acted and she saw how they seemingly needed
00:15:35.540to act in order to to do well in a world that was like this world they were living in so she was the
00:15:42.860only child of her parents and so it was especially important that she get married to somebody that
00:15:48.640would be like a good alliance for the Bathory family in terms of alliances with other super
00:15:57.340rich, powerful families. So when she was about 11 years old, she was betrothed to a man named
00:16:03.720Lord Ferenc Nadesdi, who was 15 years old. So just four years older than her. To me in general,
00:16:11.460I just always feel better about an arranged marriage when people are within five years age of each other even 10 years age of each other there's just so many situations where someone's 12 and they're betrothed to a man who's 75 or whatever and I'm just like come on I'm not putting myself in the shoes of that young girl I'm happy when it's somebody her own age-ish because I just feel like there's more hope for them to maybe get along as people
00:16:39.660So they were betrothed at age 11, which is not weird, totally normal in this situation.
00:16:46.280And then they didn't get married for another four years.
00:16:50.100So she was, I think, 15 when they got married, making him about 18.
00:16:54.700So her husband, Ferenc, his father was the Palatine of Hungary,
00:17:00.880which is basically a role that I need to explain to you because this is going to become important in the story later on.
00:17:07.160so the kingdom of hungary this one part of hungary was ruled over by these habsburg kings
00:17:15.420but because they were busy and had a lot of stuff to do they would elect someone called the palatine
00:17:21.240who is sort of like the governor i guess it's somebody who would oversee the day-to-day stuff
00:17:26.480like go out and meet with the people and try to resolve problems so the king didn't have to bother
00:17:30.840himself, dealing with all of that. So Ferenc's father was that role, which was basically like
00:17:36.940second most powerful role in Hungary to the king. So basically Elizabeth's husband was coming from
00:17:44.760a super rich and powerful family. She was from a super rich and powerful family. And when they got
00:17:48.760together, it just made this huge union of two massive families. So Ferenc himself seems like
00:17:57.940he was educated at least as much as Elizabeth was maybe even more he had both of them because
00:18:06.180school wasn't a thing a place you went but you learn stuff by sort of being sent to another
00:18:12.100rich person's home and having tutors and sort of like apprentice mentoring watching other people
00:18:18.180doing the stuff that you needed to know so both Ferenc and Elizabeth had learned a lot
00:18:21.960through this way when they grew up they took in young people to do the same thing with them
00:18:26.420But Ferenc, when he was 17 years old, he was, this wasn't like a beauty pageant or whatever, but somebody wrote in a letter that he was the most promising young nobleman at the court. So great things were expected of him.
00:18:39.200So it's not just that Elizabeth and Ferenc were of similar ages and the same class, but they were also, they'd have a lot to talk about because they were both similarly well-educated. They could talk about all the books they read, et cetera.
00:18:52.100so way later on after a whole bunch of stuff has happened i haven't told you about there were
00:18:58.300rumors that during this betrothal period when elizabeth was somewhere between age 11 and 15
00:19:03.440she secretly had an affair with somebody and secretly had a love child um and that her family
00:19:09.100covered that all up and that's just like not likely but it sort of became part of the romantic
00:19:15.680myth of her later on anything is possible but also this just seems like probably not something
00:19:22.820that would have happened and there's no records of it happening contemporaneously only later on
00:19:28.860people writing weird made-up biographies of her so when Elizabeth and Ferencourt married
00:19:35.140on May 8th 1575 sorry she was 15 and he was 20 years old so it was a massive
00:19:44.620affair um there was something like 4500 invited guests not including the peasants from the nearby
00:19:52.060countryside who like were invited they could come and watch the festivities and hang out and like
00:19:56.780come to the market and stuff so it was just like seemingly they were so rich and important that
00:20:02.620everybody wanted to be there and everybody was and so they got married huge event and then they went
00:20:08.860off to to go and be newlyweds together and one of the main reasons why two two families would
00:20:19.000marry off like this is so that they could have a child and that child would sort of like be a
00:20:23.400living embodiment of those two families being united elizabeth and farenk did not have any
00:20:29.940children for the first 10 years of their marriage for I'm sure lots of reasons why that didn't
00:20:39.100happen but basically the way that medical knowledge worked at this time and place was1.00
00:20:44.700it was believed that it was always the women's something wrong with a woman if if a young
00:20:51.680seemingly healthy couple was having trouble conceiving so they would have thought it was
00:20:55.460something wrong with her and perhaps something wrong with her spiritually uh the sort of
00:21:03.140the overlap of like what is medicine with what is superstition with like what is
00:21:08.500herbs and what is witchcraft were all sort of overlapping so who knows what what different
00:21:15.960remedies she might have tried but eventually 10 years after they were married in 1585 she gave
00:21:23.480birth to their first child, a daughter who they named Anna. Then they had another daughter named
00:21:28.520Ursula and a son named Andrew, but Ursula and Andrew both died in infancy. Then Elizabeth had
00:21:35.060another daughter named Catalin and then a son named Paul. So surviving children, two daughters,
00:21:41.420one son, Anna, Catalin, and Paul. So because Ferenc was often away on military campaigns
00:21:47.800against the Turkish because this was a situation where the Hungarians and the Turkish people were
00:21:54.920at war constantly all the time. And Ferenc was a military leader. This was also a situation where
00:22:03.760the people who were the most rich and powerful men personally went and fought on the front lines
00:22:10.620of battles, which even 100 years later was not as common. But so Ferenc would go off and do that.
00:22:17.800And so while he was away and there are archival letters and documents showing this, Elizabeth would run the household and she was really good at doing that.
00:22:27.260It shows that she was like what letters and stuff still exist, so that she was really organized, super on top of things.0.87
00:22:35.200She was an extremely good CEO of running their enormous household and estates.0.96
00:22:42.300She was also really good at writing.1.00
00:22:44.520She didn't use flowery language at all.
00:22:46.460her letters are all written really well she you know good use of language and grammar and stuff
00:22:51.760and just nothing florid no poetic touches she was very straight straightforward to the point
00:22:58.000sort of person around this time so the governess for the children seemingly this woman was the0.79
00:23:07.340governess of the children she might have had a different important servant job but anyway a woman
00:23:11.660named Anna Darvulia is known to have joined their household at around this time. There's also a
00:23:18.040young man known as Fixco who became one of their servants and both of these people become important
00:23:25.680later. So Anna Darvulia in some of the myths of Elizabeth Bathory in some of the movies and
00:23:35.000sexy books written about her, Anna Darvulia is presented as like her sort of evil lover but
00:23:41.100there's nothing in what few records remain suggesting that that was the situation i'm not
00:23:47.420like that could have been the situation but what we do know about anna dervulia is that her last
00:23:54.140name so dervulia was probably a nickname but the word has neither hungarian nor slovak roots we're
00:24:00.920not sure where she came from exactly, but in 1602, so that's like 15, 17 years after the first
00:24:11.300children were born and Anna Darvulia was maybe their governess, a minister from near where they
00:24:17.800lived recorded a complaint that Anna Darvulia had been acting cruelly to the young servant women.
00:24:26.640so this suggests that Anna might have been sort of like the head housekeeper the person who
00:24:33.720supervised the young women servants unclear but basically in this complaint Elizabeth and Ferenc
00:24:40.180were both also sort of condemned by this minister who said like basically these people are up to no
00:24:45.900good don't like what they're doing and so just keep that in the back of your mind for later
00:24:51.800and then shortly after that happened while he was away Ferenc was he came down with some sort
00:24:59.100of mysterious disease and it made him suddenly unable to use his legs and then by 1604 he was
00:25:07.060basically dying and he knew he was dying and he did a thing that very rich people did in Hungary
00:25:15.020at this time which was basically he wrote a letter to the new Palatine of Hungary so remember his
00:25:19.660father used to be palatine of hungary but now someone new was in that job of like governor of
00:25:25.040hungary and frank wrote a letter saying like you know once i die i requested you the palatine of
00:25:32.080hungary please look after my wife and my children and my estates and uh because women couldn't own
00:25:39.240property so everything was supposed to get sort of complicated anyway the new palatine of hungary
00:25:45.000was a man named Georgi Thurzo. And he would become the man responsible for Elizabeth Bathory's
00:25:52.880entire downfall. So the fact that Ferenc wrote him a letter being like, look out for my family
00:25:57.080is just sort of like huge foreshouting of everything. So the thing is that Elizabeth
00:26:04.660was super powerful. Her family's super powerful. Her nephew was the Prince of Transylvania.
00:26:10.300She owned, I forget, some huge proportion of just like all the property in Hungary,
00:26:14.400like the between when her family joined a pharynx family they just took over everything but now that
00:26:20.940she was a widow her house and her estates and stuff would I guess go to her young son Paul who0.94
00:26:28.020wasn't even 10 years old yet he was a little kid so sort of created a power vacuum where if she was0.97
00:26:35.280a man this wouldn't be a problem or if their laws were different this wouldn't be a problem but
00:26:40.020basically she was 44 years old and had been basically single-handedly running all these
00:26:48.260estates for this whole time because Frank was away so often so she was capable of doing this
00:26:54.460but just legally she couldn't be in charge of anything and so a bunch of men were like aha
00:26:59.700this is our chance to take over and get some more money because just a reminder everybody
00:27:03.860in the story is the worst so thurzo the pautine of hungary was like seemed to be interested in
00:27:13.280taking over some of her land um her son paul's guardian slash tutor who's a man named imri
00:27:19.820meguri also seems to have wanted to maybe get a bit more control than harry had and her two
00:27:27.860daughters had both married and their husbands also seemed to have been like keen to to get0.99
00:27:35.020some of her money in the states her daughters probably did too because basically everybody
00:27:41.060wanted her money so it's the sort of thing where like when you become the most rich and powerful
00:27:46.640person like you have the money and you have the power but that also puts you the most at risk
00:27:51.880because now everybody wants to steal it from you everybody was sort of scheming around to see what
00:27:59.240they could do and surzo had an extra reason for wanting to to get rid of her which was basically
00:28:06.800that he as the representative of the king wanted to take over transylvania because transylvania was
00:28:15.120this like independent principality currently being ruled over by elizabeth's nephew gabor
00:28:19.540who was like 17 years old and pretty awful from everything I read about him.
00:28:27.120He was sort of like Nero meets Caligula meets Joffrey from Game of Thrones,
00:28:34.920But the reason that Thurzo wanted to get rid of him was because Thurzo, I think,
00:28:40.980wanted to make Transylvania part of the Kingdom of Hungary again
00:28:45.120and perhaps wanted to make himself Thurzo, the new prince of it.
00:28:49.540He was sort of fearing that if Gabor, the Prince of Transylvania, teamed up with Elizabeth Bathory, with all of their power and wealth and stuff, that this wouldn't be good for Thurzo.
00:29:00.700It might get him out of power, and so he tried to figure out what to do.
00:29:05.400And his first plan was to just have Gabor assassinated, but that plan was foiled at the last minute.
00:29:12.200And now we're just going to take a break for a word from our sponsors.
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00:32:18.600episode right now. Something You Should Know. And we're back. And so then he moves on to plan B,
00:32:27.260which is basically to destroy the Bathory family reputation, which is what he started to do next.
00:32:34.440so a couple of just things to point out first of all is that in 17th century royal hungary
00:32:45.140if you weren't a noble person you basically didn't have any rights at all like if people
00:32:52.680killed someone's servant that was seen as not as bad a crime as killing someone's cow like
00:33:01.580killing serfs was sort of not a crime, which is something that happened in a lot of cultures and
00:33:11.560a lot of societies all over the place. But I'm bringing it up because what is going to happen,
00:33:16.440spoiler, for fairly well-known history, is that Elizabeth is going to be accused of
00:33:22.380mass murder, serial killing, hundreds of peasant girls. And so I just want to point out at this
00:33:31.220point that basically even if she did do that which she might have done that that wasn't a crime
00:33:39.180at the time so thurzo basically i think was trying to figure out things to do to get rid of elizabeth
00:33:48.960to to make her head less power and he would have come across this thing that the minister wrote
00:33:54.540saying that that household was treating their servants, especially cruelly. And there was sort
00:34:01.720of word on the street that maybe that house was, that some of the female servants were being
00:34:09.520mistreated there. And I mean, side note, servant women were being mistreated everywhere,0.95
00:34:17.460but potentially it was, they're being mistreated more than the usual amount in this house.
00:34:21.900but again that's not against the law so thurzo is not the sort of person to be like morally
00:34:28.700outraged by that um he's not someone who's like we need to change the laws so we can protect the
00:34:33.680serfs from being mistreated by their mistresses he was just like oh this is a way i could get
00:34:37.460rid of elizabeth bathory amazing let's just see where this takes us so i just want to clarify0.99
00:34:44.460that like she might have killed a bunch of people. Thurzo went after her for allegedly having done
00:34:53.900that but that wasn't because he thought that was a bad thing for her to have done. He was doing it
00:35:01.120because he thought it was a way that he could take over her house basically. So he was sort of
00:35:07.980running around like casually informally chatting with people in the nearby village being like so
00:35:13.500tell me about how Elizabeth Bathory is maybe like totally awful and mistreats her servants and the0.99
00:35:19.060young women who are sent there to learn from her. And he started collecting sort of statements from
00:35:23.980people. The statements were mostly coerced and they were mostly from people who were related
00:35:29.740to him or indebted to him in some way, or were people who were tortured. So they're not everything
00:35:35.620they said could be true, but his methods put that into question. Elizabeth clearly seemed to suspect
00:35:41.920what he was up to because at one point before she was even arrested she went to a local authority
00:35:47.340with the mother of one of her servants who died while living with her to explain that the girl
00:35:52.520had been ill and had just died of natural causes so that's super interesting in and of itself
00:35:58.060because again like even if she had killed the servant that wasn't a crime so to take the girl's
00:36:04.860mother into the authorities to be like hey guess what elizabeth bathory didn't kill my daughter
00:36:10.220It's just interesting because even if she had, the authorities would be like, who cares?
00:36:15.380So it seems like she kind of knew that these charges were maybe coming against her.
00:36:18.560And she thought of, well, here's this one person who died.
00:36:20.420So I'm going to make sure that they don't accuse me of killing this one person.
00:36:24.240And so the thing is that a lot of people were dying in and around this place at this time
00:36:32.220for lots of reasons, including the plague, dying in childbirths, lack of medical intervention,
00:36:41.020penicillin hadn't been invented, lots of things. So for someone running a huge estate like she had,
00:36:47.540every year, probably some servants would die regardless. But Thurzo is trying to make it
00:36:53.560seem like there was something weird and suspicious about how many people were dying.
00:36:56.680so that being said it does seem like some of the young women who were working in her house
00:37:07.140were treated really badly which again they probably were in other places too but the fact
00:37:12.620that some people found it like a bit much or a bit weird would ultimately fall on elizabeth
00:37:17.920because she was the owner um and all the servants worked for her but it seems like it might have
00:37:22.880been her sort of higher up servants, people like Anna Darvulia, who maybe were really rough on the
00:37:29.900other servants. So did Elizabeth know how much they were doing? We don't know. Did Elizabeth
00:37:34.960instruct them to use these methods? We don't know. But again, it was sort of a brutal time and place
00:37:39.680where servants would have been treated really poorly. Anyway, so I'm just kind of trying to show
00:37:47.840all the sides here. It does seem like maybe something weird happened at least once in her
00:37:54.680house with regards to a young woman dying. Were 650 people murdered? We'll get to that, but
00:38:03.320I'm thinking no. So, but again, if servants are being killed, if people are being mistreated,
00:38:09.460like the minister wrote up a note and everyone was kind of like, big, who cares? But Thurzo was
00:38:13.860like maybe there's something here but still at the same time like that that wasn't something he
00:38:18.540could charge them with so what he had to do was find a way to suggest that she had been responsible
00:38:24.480for killing someone who wasn't a servant someone who was seen as a person so he had to start
00:38:30.280suggesting that she had been responsible for the murder of wealthy young women like some of the
00:38:35.220young women who would be sent to her house for um schooling type purposes so the other thing about0.80
00:38:43.140all of this is because she was so rich and so just the way that sort of the law worked as well0.74
00:38:48.500which said that like serfs are not people rich people are people but it basically said that rich
00:38:55.700people are such people like you can't charge a noble woman with anything you can never put a
00:39:02.080rich person on trial that was basically as i understand it from having been researching this
00:39:07.220for like two weeks it seems like that was the law so thurzo knew that even if he found something he
00:39:12.280could charge her with he would never be able to put elizabeth on trial because she was so rich
00:39:17.040basically she could counter sue him for charging her with a crime but the loophole he figured out
00:39:23.960was that if he was able to catch her in the act of doing a crime she could be arrested without
00:39:30.680even needing to be put on trial so this is where we get sort of two two parallel narratives which
00:39:39.540is sort of what the legend is the legend and the myth is that he walked in on her in the act of
00:39:46.140murdering a young woman what the records seem to suggest is that he said he did that he uh
00:39:58.960so on december 30th as elizabeth and her her household were sitting down for sort of a nice
00:40:05.200Christmas season meal, he came in and arrested her along with four of her servants. And he said
00:40:11.940that he had seen her killing someone. So the story of him walking in on her killing someone
00:40:19.460seems to not be true because if that was the case, why would he then leave, come back later
00:40:26.420and arrest her? And why would she just be like casually having dinner if she knew that she'd
00:40:30.320just been caught murdering someone doesn't quite add up so basically he came in he said i'm here
00:40:37.580to arrest her because i saw her killing somebody and they were like well where's your evidence of
00:40:41.920that and he's like hang on um and then 24 hours later he provided the dead body of a dead girl
00:40:48.460that had been dug up from outside the castle so this could be a girl who died of lots of different
00:40:53.980things um she could have died of plague she could have died which plague was happening all over the
00:40:59.760place. She could have died of many different things. She might have been murdered by Elizabeth
00:41:02.800Bathory. The body was like sort of tied up, which some people thought was like a hint of Elizabeth
00:41:09.360Bathory doing sort of weird sex things or whatever. But that's basically what you did to bodies to0.81
00:41:14.600bury them. So that's not actually weird. And he also brought in a young woman who was not dead,
00:41:19.540but who was pretty grievously injured. So again, he might have found someone who was injured
00:41:24.740to bring her in as evidence. He might have perhaps injured her himself to bring her in.
00:41:29.760Or maybe he is telling the truth and these were Elizabeth Bathory's victims.
00:41:34.100But basically, he came in and arrested her.
00:41:36.780And so the four servants that were arrested as well were named Helena Jo, Dorothy Sentiz, who is known as Dorco, a woman named Katalin Benneke, and a young man named Fizco.
00:41:51.680To me, she's like the most interesting part of this whole story.
00:41:53.940like people kept being like it was nice it was in a dervulia where it's like that's who i think
00:41:58.840the legend should be all about she's the one who like should be called dracula where did she go
00:42:03.740where did she come from like what's anyway she's long gone by this point whatever elizabeth and
00:42:09.400four of her servants were arrested and the thing is that he couldn't put her on trial because again
00:42:15.540she was super rich so he just put her in jail and put the four servants on trial
00:42:22.780so just sort of another side note i guess which is that this isn't like georgie thurzo coming up
00:42:31.340with this genius idea on his own for the first time ever he himself had done this he'd railroaded
00:42:37.040other nobles like this and then took over their castles this was a thing he had done um he knew
00:42:41.820that it was an effective technique um the Habsburg royal family who we worked for had also done this
00:42:47.720sort of thing and they all knew that doing sort of a show trial where you make somebody seem like
00:42:53.020they're doing something terrible and then public perception is colored is a way to dispatch of your
00:42:59.900enemies so it's not like legend of Elizabeth's serial killing spread far and wide and they had
00:43:07.700to do this thing that was weird it's like no this was the thing they did all the time
00:43:10.920to lots of people this is just an instance of it where it got really extreme so basically
00:43:18.780again elizabeth might have been totally or partially responsible for the deaths of some
00:43:25.500young women who'd been in her care but even if she had been that wasn't a crime in this time0.75
00:43:31.820and place it would be a terrible thing it would make her sort of a shitty person but that's not
00:43:38.520why Therese had arrested her really he just wanted to ruin her reputation and saying that she had
00:43:43.860killed some servants wasn't enough to ruin her reputation because everyone would be like big
00:43:48.440shrug like whatever we all feel servants were like the noble rich people of renaissance hungary
00:43:53.400so he had to make it seem like weird and also extreme which is why he started getting testimony
00:43:59.520and witness statements from people who started saying stuff that like she was into like weird
00:44:04.460sex stuff um that she hadn't just killed one or two people but like hundreds of people like they
00:44:10.400just made took it to this whole extreme level to explain why it was so bad that she had to be
00:44:15.340locked up and have her land taken away and the land given to him so this is where uh the interviews
00:44:22.080slash interrogations began so the four servants themselves are questioned and all of them kind of
00:44:27.100all blamed each other and or anna darvulia but also it's sort of hard to in the book i was
00:44:34.740reading about it was explaining how the way the pronouns worked in hungary at the time and
00:44:40.960potentially hungry at this time i'm not familiar with contemporary hungarian linguistics but
00:44:46.860basically um pronouns the same word was used for he and for she so even within that it's hard to
00:44:54.760tell when the and the the notes taken from these servants statements aren't complete because it's
00:45:01.780somebody writing down what somebody said so when they say like she did it she killed him like that
00:45:06.460could be saying he killed her he she killed him like you don't know who they mean but basically
00:45:12.660they all the consensus seemed to be that the one servant named dorko was perhaps the most
00:45:19.780responsible so she might have been the one who took over as being in charge of the servants
00:45:24.540after Anna Darvulia left, unclear, but basically out of all the servants, the woman named Catelyn,
00:45:32.700everyone sort of agreed that she was like the least responsible. Like she had been asked to,
00:45:38.800to torture these girls in some way that she was uncomfortable with and she refused to do it. So
00:45:44.060then she herself got tortured. But basically they were saying, like they were, they were
00:45:47.400confirming that servants in this household were treated abominably but at the same time they were
00:45:55.100all tortured themselves before they gave these statements sort of like in salem witch trials
00:46:00.440if you listen to aaron manke's podcast about that he gets into this where it's like the statements
00:46:06.860that people give under duress like where they've been tortured into saying things when they're
00:46:12.260giving details of stuff about witchcraft or stuff about like weird sex serial killing like that says
00:46:17.480more about the questioners and it does about the people or what really happened like all the weird
00:46:22.340messed up details are what's coming i think suspect strongly suspect that's just coming from
00:46:28.360the questioner's own imaginations and they're putting the words into these people's minds
00:46:31.900rather than those people repeating those things necessarily i mean it's been proven numerous times
00:46:39.240between then and now and even then that torture testimony that it provided from a torture
00:46:46.940situation is not always true that's not a method to get people to tell the truth that's just a
00:46:53.120method to get people to say what you want to hear so you'll stop torturing them and
00:46:58.200thurzo himself clearly even knew that because he took these records and it said in the records like
00:47:03.280this testimony was gotten by torture but then when he wrote up his report for the king he was like
00:47:07.900crossed that off so the king wouldn't know that these statements were were made under dress so
00:47:14.380at this point so there's there's this trial is going on all these witnesses are appearing
00:47:19.360elizabeth herself not appearing because she as a noble person wasn't allowed to appear or like it
00:47:27.260would be unseemly for her to appear and the trial is technically for the servants and not for her
00:47:32.480so like we'll just tuck her away for a minute we'll get back to her in a second
00:47:36.100that all these people were testifying like hundreds of people testifying many of them
00:47:40.800were the relatives or in-laws of thurzo himself what a coincidence or uh servants who had been
00:47:48.320tortured to say whatever and then also just like sort of a widespread momentum start building up
00:47:53.120where people are just like if you were part of this the lower class and you have been treated
00:47:58.460so shittily for so long if you see like oh this is a place where i can like come and say these
00:48:03.860horrible things that happen and maybe some justice will happen. So people just started
00:48:08.400chiming in. So hundreds of people started testifying and among them was a woman known
00:48:12.940only as Susanna. And so she appeared, we don't even know her last name. So she said that her
00:48:19.620friend had seen Elizabeth, had been keeping a list of how many people she had killed.
00:48:26.680So like, just think of that for a second. So Susanna, a woman with no last name who never0.99
00:48:31.700appeared again we don't know who she is Anna Darvulia in disguise I mean no but like maybe
00:48:38.480so Susanna appears she says you know I never saw anything but my friend who worked there it said
00:48:44.780that he had been working there one day and he saw a list that Elizabeth's bathroom had been keeping
00:48:50.660and it was a list of all the people she had killed and there was like 650 names on the list
00:48:56.120And that's where we get this 650 number from. No one else ever said that. The first servants had estimated like 30 to 50 people died per year, which in Renaissance Hungary is not weird considering how many people would have been working in Elizabeth Bathory's home.
00:49:16.100but 650 is a massive number the only evidence quote-unquote evidence we have for that is a
00:49:22.400woman named Susanna no last name said her friend saw a list and they were like great so can you
00:49:28.920like provide us the list and she never did but that's that's where that number comes from and
00:49:34.400today Elizabeth Bassery is in the Guinness Book of World Records as the most prolific female serial
00:49:39.060killer killing up to 650 people so literally that's the only place that number comes from
00:49:45.980anyway other witnesses started seeing other things that thurzo i suspect kind of got them to do just
00:49:52.240so he could have some backup plans to root her reputation some people mentioned witchcraft one
00:49:57.920person said that elizabeth bathory had made a secret magic cake that she was going to feed to
00:50:03.080her enemies to try and kill the king etc so it was just like a huge show trial everybody was lying
00:50:10.680and at the very end of it the four servants were all found guilty three of them were executed for
00:50:16.900their crimes the force person catalan the one who ever answered the creed wasn't as involved
00:50:23.800in the the tormenting of young servant girls we're not sure what happened to her she might
00:50:30.300have been put to death she might have been sent to jail but she was like slightly higher class
00:50:35.620than the other servants so maybe she was just like sent off to a nunnery or something like that
00:50:39.780During all this, Elizabeth still set aside. We'll get to her in a minute. So the four servants were found guilty. This whole thing was just like trashing the Bathory family name. And Elizabeth's longtime sort of advisor, there was a woman named Irvatsy, who was the wife of a farmer.
00:50:59.540and she was some sort of folk healer who had been helping elizabeth for a long time
00:51:05.260with uh various things because that wasn't a strange thing to do was just sort of grabbed
00:51:12.860and burned at the stake for allegedly being complicit in elizabeth's crimes and this is
00:51:17.280based on what some of the witnesses had said during the trial she wasn't even put on trial
00:51:21.520she just was grabbed and burned basically specifically for having been involved in
00:51:27.760baking that evil magic poison cake so while this is all happening elizabeth was just kept in a room
00:51:38.640by herself and not just a room with a door like sometimes when you hear about british people who
00:51:44.600were sent to the tower of london for prison it's basically like fancy apartments this is like she's
00:51:50.100put in a room that was bricked in so there's no door and no windows and just a little sort of like
00:51:56.280whole for air and also that like food could be slid in and out of us and so and that's just where
00:52:05.500she was kept so while this trial was going on thurzo is sending his records to the king in
00:52:10.680hungary being like yeah here's what's up you know it was about three years all these statements
00:52:14.040totally didn't torture anybody this is what's going on the hungarian king was like oh shouldn't
00:52:18.460we get like a steaming from her shouldn't we like let her testify on her own behalf and thurzo was
00:52:23.900like yeah sure and for three years he just never did so part of why he didn't do that was he had
00:52:32.860agreed on a deal with elizabeth's male relatives so her son's guardian her son's-in-law um that
00:52:40.580basically if she was never put on trials and they and thurzo would divide up her money in estates
00:52:47.200between themselves so she was kept in a room in her same castle where she had been living
00:52:51.920I think the same one where she was arrested perhaps I'm not sure she had a lot of castles
00:52:56.160but for sure castle that she used to live in so she's just trapped in a room for four years
00:53:01.400during which time all these trials were happening she had no voice like I'm sure she had a voice0.99
00:53:08.420she could talk but like she had no no one would listen to her nobody was on her side so she'd
00:53:14.220been so so so so powerful but then just suddenly not at all and because she wasn't put on
00:53:21.440trial she wasn't convicted of anything she wasn't even charged with anything just the servants were
00:53:27.340so it's like she was just put in jail not put on trial and they just kind of waited for her to die
00:53:33.280and at one point thurzo's wife um was given basically a citation with the authorities for
00:53:41.920being a horrible person for going into elizabeth's castle and taking her money and dresses or
00:53:47.180something. So like everybody in the story is terrible. Elizabeth might have been terrible
00:53:51.540also, but at this point, it's hard not to feel badly for her. So she was 54 years old when she
00:53:58.080died, bricked up in this room. They just found her body there. She had never been formally charged
00:54:04.540with anything. She had never been found guilty of anything. She'd just been hidden away in a little
00:54:09.040room sort of not treated like a person for four years um one year before she died her nephew
00:54:17.580Gabor the prince of Transylvania had been murdered perhaps by Thurzo or on Thurzo's instruction
00:54:24.300but basically that paved the way for the Hungarian empire to take over Transylvania
00:54:29.140and with his deaths and Elizabeth's deaths basically that marked the end of the Bathory
00:54:35.080family's power and influence in Eastern Europe. But the story doesn't end there, of course.
00:54:43.320More than a hundred years later, a man named Laszlo Turotsky wrote sort of an unauthorized
00:54:51.260biography of Elizabeth Bathory. And he's the one who threw in the detail that she liked to bathe
00:54:55.740in the blood of young victims. So again, if we're like, oh, Elizabeth Bathory is so creepy. It's
00:55:00.660like no you know who's creepy is the people writing these stories so like the whole thing
00:55:05.940about bathing and blood never came up once over the course of hundreds of victims during the actual
00:55:10.760trial what did come up was um bathing in ice which a lot of people thought was weird
00:55:16.800and which might have been just some sort of weird medical thing they were into but anyway bathing
00:55:24.140in blood not mentioned at all until this one guy wrote a biography that included that this is where
00:55:29.600we start getting stuff about her secret illegitimate teenage baby as well then the
00:55:35.400myth started getting embellished even more especially in the victorian time period
00:55:38.940where more people started writing about it because you know dracula and stuff became a popular story
00:55:44.520allegedly on bram stoker is so the inspiration for dracula itself was the transylvanian
00:55:54.060soldier um Vlad Tepes but he might have been also inspired by some of the folk stories about
00:56:00.420Elizabeth Bathory which was basically the story became that she was an older woman who was jealous
00:56:07.300of young women and so she killed them and based in their blood to magically make herself look young0.99
00:56:13.000or something um she's also the blood aspect started making her become presented as maybe
00:56:19.020sort of a vampire and as i noted before she is still as of the time i'm recording this in the0.62
00:56:25.980guinness book of world records as the most prolific female serial killer even though0.91
00:56:29.720on their page on guinness book world records it says she is alleged to have killed up to 650 people
00:56:37.280which is like is that what it takes to get the world record in something just like
00:56:42.140a random woman named suzanna with no last name says her friend saw a list of names that you think
00:56:48.060was a list of murder victims anyway the castle where she died is in so it's called catch teeth
00:56:57.600castle it's in modern day slovakia the castle itself was abandoned in 1708 and it's basically
00:57:05.080ruins but you can visit it in the city of catch teeth and where there's also a museum and that's
00:57:11.100also where the church where Elizabeth's body was interred is housed. So I for sure want to
00:57:17.840shout out the book that I learned so much of this about, which is a biography by a man named Tony
00:57:23.600Thorne that is called Countess Dracula, The Life and Times of Elizabeth Bathory, the Blood Countess.
00:57:29.500He used a lot of original texts, a lot of the archival materials written in Hungarian and
00:57:38.040Slovakian to really look at Elizabeth's letters, to look at the witness testimony. He even got
00:57:44.100current lawyer to look over the case and testimony to think like, you know, if you were the lawyer,
00:57:49.140would you have found her guilty, et cetera. There's so many things that are like Elizabeth
00:57:52.800Bathory, the blood countess, and they don't really delve into, but what was the actual story? Like
00:57:56.720what's the actual history in this biography? Absolutely does. And it's really well-written
00:58:01.260and I recommend it a lot. And that's time to score Elizabeth Bathory on our scale. So
00:58:09.760the first category is scandaliciousness. And this is tricky because we're looking at her0.98
00:58:18.260and who she was and what she might've actually done. But the scandal itself, like the fact that
00:58:25.480she met is the fact that her legend is now that she was a lesbian vampire who sex murdered 6500.87
00:58:35.020virgins to bathe in their blood is pretty extremely skandalicious at the time what the trial0.91
00:58:42.440alleged was that she might have killed up to 650 people also in like a weird sex crime sort of way1.00
00:58:48.740did she actually do what we don't know but people i'm gonna give her a nine out of ten because the
00:58:56.860allegations are maximum scandalous but the fact that she may not have actually done it is why i'm0.72
00:59:04.040taking f1 one point to keep her from a 10 in terms of scheminess this is tricky because she
00:59:11.220if she was a serial killer of 650 people you know what even if she was i wouldn't have been1.00
00:59:19.960a lot of scheminess because if she was this super rich noble serial killing a bunch of1.00
00:59:24.840servant girls she wouldn't have had to have been schemey because nobody would have stopped her1.00
00:59:28.360so and the fact that she was caught would mean that she wasn't schemey0.83
00:59:33.440she was really capable she was good at running the household i don't know there's a0.99
00:59:40.280truly out-schemed her real family i don't think i'm gonna give her i'm gonna give her a three
00:59:48.640for scheminess i think because she did a good job running the household which might have included
00:59:55.640some scheminess the fact that she went to the authorities at that one point to be like hey
00:59:59.140guess what i didn't kill this person the fact that she lost as long as she did surrounded by
01:00:03.820entirely horrible people means she would have a certain innate level of scheminess but
01:00:09.080both her alleged crimes and what she might have actually done neither of which involved a very0.98
01:00:14.800high level of scheminess her significance this is where i think she's gonna rack up some points
01:00:22.080because she's super famous well she isn't herself but the legend of her the whole story of her there's
01:00:29.240like countless like death metal bands and songs and books and movies people remember her in a way
01:00:37.680that they don't anyone else any of the other women that we've done thus far in the show like1.00
01:00:44.420her significance to like world history you know she wasn't a queen she didn't affect things in
01:00:52.040that way but i'm gonna give her seven for significance because i think her legend is
01:00:59.380significance even if she herself didn't affect the events of world history personally the last1.00
01:01:07.180one is the sexism bonus and i am giving her a goddamn 10 in this because if she had been a man1.00
01:01:13.580none of this shit would have happened to her she could have serial killed 5 000 young seven girls1.00
01:01:20.840and nobody would have batted an eye or cared but because she was a woman when her husband died1.00
01:01:26.540she became vulnerable and that's why basically everybody in her whole life turned on her
01:01:32.320so that gives her a huge total c19 29 that gives her a score of 29 which is the highest
01:01:40.580highest score of anybody that we've done so far so yeah this is such a tricky thing to talk about
01:01:48.560and i hope i've done it as respectfully as possible the whole thing is just when i started
01:01:53.580reading about her something just didn't seem right when i was reading about like yeah she was this
01:02:00.920noble women and she killed all these people and she bathed in her blood and it's like okay well
01:02:04.080then why didn't anyone ever find any bodies like there was the one that there's a brought in but0.96
01:02:10.540if she killed 650 bodies and if 650 women and all these people had witnessed it like why was there
01:02:19.000no evidence for it and why didn't thurzo ever put her on trial for it and why like it just doesn't
01:02:28.660all add up to me, which is why I was really grateful to find that one book,
01:02:34.000Tony Thorne's biography, which I'll put a link to in the show information.
01:02:43.120I have to say, I am a little disappointed to know that I recorded that in 2019. And here we are now
01:02:48.680in 2024. And Elizabeth Bathory still in the Guinness Book of World Records is the most
01:02:53.160prolific female serial killer. Like historical fiction novels still coming out pretty regular
01:02:58.600being like, look at this bitch who was a murderer. I'm like, excuse me, I, Ann Foster,1.00
01:03:04.380a young crone from Saskatoon released an hour long podcast in 2019. And that didn't change
01:03:09.940the entire cultural understanding of this historical figure. Like, well, then what am I
01:03:14.360doing? But I know that it did change the understanding for those of you who have
01:03:17.400listened to this podcast. Sometimes I see when somebody's talking about her on TikTok or
01:03:21.040something, I see tits of brigade members being like, um, actually she listened to vulgar history
01:03:24.920podcast and this isn't true. So like, I see you and I appreciate it. And again, when Shelley's
01:03:30.100book comes out, The Blood Countess, a feminist reinterpretation of the story of Elizabeth Bathory,
01:03:35.580I'm dying to read it. I can't wait to read it. And just a couple of things I'm going to say,
01:03:40.580actually, I recorded this so very long ago and it was one of the earliest episodes.
01:03:46.880Just to let you know, kind of like who else has gotten the same score as her? Like Elizabeth
01:03:50.940Bathory is the one I'm comfortable with where she landed in a scandalous scale. I don't feel
01:03:54.140the need to revisit that. Should I? I don't know. Let me know. But she's got a 29. Other people with
01:03:58.760a 29 are like Louisa May Alcott, Lady Catherine Gray, Hortense Mancini, Mary Shelley is one point
01:04:06.000above Latisse Knowles. Like she's, I feel like a 29 is higher than average on the Scandosha scale.
01:04:11.940And that's kind of where that feels good to me. That fits in. Anyway, so disregard everything I0.97
01:04:17.140said in this episode about social media and merchandise and everything, because here's the
01:04:22.080actual January, 2024, correct information, which is you can find me on Instagram at vulgar history
01:04:29.260pod. I'm also packing my head in every now and then on Tik TOK at vulgar history. And I love
01:04:36.280to hear from you all the time. Um, and you can get in touch with me. There's a form at vulgar
01:04:40.060history.com, or you can email me directly at vulgar history pod at gmail.com. You can get
01:04:45.820merch at vulgar history.com slash store. Or if you're outside the U S the shipping is a bit
01:04:50.520better if you use vulgarhistory.redbubble.com. I also have a podcast on Patreon at patreon.com
01:04:55.960slash annfosterwriter, where for $1 a month, you get early ad-free access to all episodes.
01:05:00.900And for $5 or more a month, you get access to bonus episodes of Vulgar Peace Theater,
01:05:05.100the after show. So this asshole and all the bonus podcast stuff that I'm putting on there.0.97
01:05:11.020It's funny because when I talk about this, I'm like, if you want to hear more from me,0.98
01:05:13.960like, do you remember last year for a while, I was doing like two episodes a week.
01:05:16.840Okay. I was like, who out there was like, I need more Anne, but you know, we're at a weekly pace
01:05:21.600again. So maybe you do want to hear these older episodes and transcripts of recent episodes are
01:05:26.880available at vulgarhistory.com. You just click on the episode you're looking for the transcript of.
01:05:31.600And if one is there, it will show up. And if it's not there, just wait a few weeks, probably.
01:05:35.300Um, thank you to Evelyn Malick from the wordery for providing these transcripts, which are kind
01:05:38.720of going from the most recent and then backwards, although I'm re-releasing these older episodes.
01:05:42.700so now there'll be the older transcripts also but anyway we're going to be back again next week with
01:05:48.440some more revisiting oh a classic episode that i still hear messages from people traumatized by0.98
01:05:55.980that's right next week we're revisiting mary toft so until then keep your pants on and your tits out0.97
01:06:02.800vulgar history is hosted written and researched by ann foster and edited by christina lumagi0.99
01:08:35.760And we host I Think Not, a true crime comedy podcast covering some of the wildest stories from your favorite true crime campy TV shows all the way to Unsolved Mysteries.
01:08:46.060Baby, you will laugh. You will cry. You'll think about true crime in a whole new way. And you'll also ask yourself, who gave these people mics?
01:08:53.320New episodes of I Think Not are released every Wednesday with bonus episodes out every Thursday on Patreon.
01:08:59.340And every Monday, you can listen to our True Crime Rundown, where we go over the top true crime headlines of the week.
01:09:06.920So come and join us wherever you listen to your podcasts.