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Elizabeth Bathory - ‘Modern scholarship has called into question just how extensive her crimes ran. She killed at least 80 young girls, according to court records at her trial, but various testimonies of that trial place her total tally at 36-37, more than 50, 100-200, and 650+. The truth will probably never be known, because reliable records could not be made of the lower gentry class on which she preyed.

Bathory knew that relatively few people would miss young girls of the low classes, at least for a time, and being a member of the nobility, she could always convince people by her very social status. This was the way things worked in feudal systems. People rarely questioned the kings and queens, and the other various ranks. In Bathory’s case, she killed so many people that the evidence against her mounted until it could not be ignored or denied. She always chose young girls to torture and kill, and her motive for beginning this horror does not come from court testimonies given by her servants, who were her accomplices. She hired these girls on temporary and permanent bases to be her personal servants in her castle, Csejte, today called Cachtice, in present Slovakia. In succeeding generations, until the 1800s, folklore claimed that Bathory drank and bathed in the girls’ blood to retain her youth. One day, the folklore goes, while a girl was brushing her hair, she accidentally pulled it, and Bathory jumped up and slapped her so hard she broke the girl’s nose. Blood spattered Bathory’s hand, and where she wiped it away, she thought her skin looked younger. So she cut the girl’s throat and drained her into a bathtub, where Bathory bathed. She repeated this hundreds of times.

In reality, this is highly unlikely. Bathory had no history of such insane ideas, and her trial shed quite a bit of light on her personal history. It is much more likely, if even viler, that she killed these girls simply because she enjoyed it. And the nature of the tortures she inflicted on them indicates an extreme delight in watching others in physical agony.

She would have her servants invite the girls to her castle, and once there, they were bound and taken to her dungeon. It was like something out of Edgar Allan Poe, but it was real. They suffered red-hot needles shoved under their finger and toenails; being bludgeoned in the groin with clubs; being skinned alive; disembowelment; fatal surgeries, in which Bathory burst their organs in her bare grip; beating until death; stripping them naked and chaining them outside in the castle courtyard in midwinter, then pouring cold water over them, so they froze to death as macabre sculptures; locking them in hanging cages from the dungeon ceiling and swinging the cage into spikes on the walls, until the girls were ripped to pieces. This last torture was one Bathory particularly relished, because she could stand under them and be showered by their blood while she laughed at their screams, and this may be the origin of the “bathing in blood” story.

Once, when Bathory caught the flu and was bedridden for a week, she was too weak to get out of bed to torture the girls, so she had her servants bring the girls up to her bedside, where she leaned up and savagely gnawed chunks of flesh from their breasts and abdomens.

This went on from 1585 to 1610, when her crimes were discovered and she was caught. The primary evidence that led to her was the eerie absence of young girls in the villages around her castle, and the repeated missing person notices and grievances of parents in these areas.

Two of her accomplices were condemned to have their fingers ripped out of the knuckles with red-hot pinchers, then to be burned at the stake; one other accomplice was beheaded, then burned, and a fourth was imprisoned for life. Erszebet Bathory was walled up in the bedroom of her castle for the rest of her life, and fed through a slot in the brick. She died in 1614, aged 54. She left a letter, written to Satan, in which she besought him to send 99 cats to kill and eat King Matthias for convicting her.’ (Evil figures throughout history)

Conspiracy Theory: Grand Grimoire

This one is based on the fact that the so-called “Grand Grimoire” exists, and it does. It is a book, also called “The Red Dragon,” and the “Gospel of Satan.” The book is real because the Roman Catholic Church officially claims ownership of it, but has never let the public glimpse it. It is fact that it was discovered in Jerusalem in 1750, in the tomb of Solomon, written in either Biblical Hebrew or Aramaic. The manuscript has not been dated to an earlier time than this, or else the Church has not said, but the book itself is inscribed with the date of 1522 AD. Theorists claims it was copied in that year from a manuscript written in the 1200s AD or earlier.

The earliest known proof of it comes from the writings of one Honorius of Thebes, whose existence has not been undeniably proven. He may have been Pope Honorius III (1148-1227). Honorius of Thebes is believed to have written something now referred to as the “Sworn Book of Honorius,” from which the Grand Grimoire was derived, or which is, in fact, the Grand Grimoire itself.

The theory claims that Honorius was either Satan himself, or possessed by Satan for the purpose of writing the book. It contains instructions on summoning Satan at any time, at any place on Earth, for various insidious intentions. The word “grimoire” denotes a textbook of magic. Any kind of magic, whether good or bad. A great deal of so-called copies are in circulation around the world, but none of these, the conspiracy theory claims, contains the true words of the actual Grimoire. It is very popular in the voodoo culture of Haiti, and practitioners there claim to use the book all the time, like a cookbook for spells and hexes.

Theorists claims the Grand Grimoire is itself supernatural in that it permanently resists burning, cannot be cut, pierced, penetrated, torn, or in any other way damaged or destroyed. It is the only book with the knowledge of how to summon Satan (all others being fakes that don’t work), with a precise ritual to be performed, and in addition to this, it can summon any number of named demons (Pazuzu, from “The Exorcist” among them). Being written by Satan, it details proofs of various supernatural miracles of the Bible, the precise locations of biblical relics, and even contains Satan’s personal sketches of the faces of Judas Iscariot and Jesus Christ. Because it is in the Catholic Church’s possession, the theory goes on to claim that every Pope starts out a human, and then becomes possessed by Satan once he is elected.

The 1989 film “Warlock,” starring Julian Sands as the prospective Antichrist, uses the Grimoire as a major plot device, and goes even further, claiming that the Grimoire contains the secret name of God, which, when uttered backward, will annihilate the Universe. This lister paused the film and inched it forward at the climax to read the secret name, and it is “Roaisha.” Help yourselves. Think it just couldn’t possibly get any better? Well, this last quality of the Grimoire was most likely invented by David Twohy, who wrote the story for the film. But conspiracy theorists have championed the idea ever since, claiming that everything in this entry is based on provable facts, and that these facts are in the Grand Grimoire itself.

So where is the Grimoire? You guessed it – in the Vatican Secret Archives.

‘The Bible is not the only literature we have of Herod’s crimes. He gave himself the nickname “the Great.” The Bible gives details of his life and character, as does Titus Flavius Josephus. Both agree that he slaughtered thousands of people at whims, whenever he felt his rule threatened. It wasn’t even his rule, really, since he was king of Judea while Judea was a Roman province. He answered to the Roman Emperor.

When his councilors informed him, circa 9-4 BC, of a Jewish prophecy of a young male child being born around Bethlehem who would take away Herod’s power, Herod responded matter-of-factly by massacring all the male children 2 years old and younger throughout the region around Bethlehem. The Bible states that Jesus, 2 years old or younger, was saved by his parents through divine intervention, and they fled to Egypt until after Herod died.

Josephus details more of his utter immorality. As he was dying of old age, Herod became more and more paranoid of everything, afraid of dying and losing all his power. He knew that all of Judea hated him passionately, so to force Judea to mourn after his death, he invited thousands of rabbis to Jerusalem under some pretense, then had them taken captive. Upon his death, they were to be slaughtered. When he died, his sister Salome (not the Salome who had John the Baptist beheaded) and his son Archilaus contravened this order and set the rabbis free, fearing that killing them would be “more than a little impolitic.”

But God got Herod back, if you believe in God. The Bible states that his death was due to extraordinarily vile diseases, and Josephus corroborates this. He suffered from chronic nephritis throughout his life, complicated by diabetes from obesity, Fournier’s gangrene, which causes the entire groin area to rot, and scabies, also called “the Seven Year Itch.” The scabies produced grotesque ballooning and worms in his scrotum, and a nauseating stench from his genitals. He most likely died of kidney failure.’

‘Mengele, like most of the entries to come, not only had no regard for the rules of a society, or the sanctity of human life, he had no law enforcement to elude. He was nicknamed “the Angel of Death” and “the White Angel” by the Jews who last saw him, wearing a white lab coat and directing tens of thousands to their deaths in the Auschwitz gas chambers, while many others were directed to the work camp. Mengele used Nazi rule and state-enforced oppression of Jews and other “undesirables” to satisfy a patently sadistic, perverse bloodlust. He was morbidly interested in identical twins, and wanted to see if hurting one would cause the other to hurt (it doesn’t, at least not physically). He oversaw, and personally engaged in, the torture and murder of thousands of men, women and children, all under the excuse of medical research. Auschwitz survivor, Alex Dekel, stated firmly that Mengele was not even attempting to study medicine with any of his disgusting cruelty. The haphazard techniques and methods he employed indicate that he just enjoyed the power he had over people, enjoyed hurting them, and felt more like God every day, as the War progressed. He supervised the amputation of thousands of limbs, injected children’s eyes with caustic chemicals to try to change their color, and personally performed vivisections on numerous victims, eviscerating, castrating, skinning them, and cutting out their organs in various orders to see how long they would live without this one or that one. He never once used anesthesia on any of his victims, and the excuse was always the same: the anesthesia was needed by German soldiers. Mengele deliberately broke children’s legs, let them heal, then broke them again, and so on, to see how many times a bone could be broken before it would not heal. He escaped Europe in 1949, under a false identity and lived in obscurity in Argentina, a hunted man until his death by drowning, from a stroke, while swimming in the ocean on February 7, 1979. He proved that he was not sorry for anything he had done when he wrote a letter to an acquaintance in Argentina, in which he stated his disgust with Albert Speer for expressing remorse over the Holocaust.’

Vlad, Prince of Wallachimi - ’History prefers to remember him by his nickname, Țepeș, the Romanian word for “Impaler.” He is guilty of crimes so orgiastically malicious that their horror is not expressible. You might consider it impossible for anyone to rank higher than any of the other entries of this list, but if the motive is the same, that of torture for sheer amusement, then in the end, ranking has to be done according to the cruelty of the tortures, and the numbers of victims.

Vlad III lived from 1431 to 1476, about a hundred years before Erzsebet Bathory, in the Wallachia and Transylvania areas of central Romania. His infamous Castle Poenari, on a steep cliff in the middle of the Transylvanian Alps, would be sitting in a peacefully scenic part of the world if it weren’t for the almost Satanic history he brought to the area. During his rule, Transylvania and Wallachia became Hell on Earth.

You’re sure to know at least some of what he did, particularly his preferred method of execution, which is how he got his nickname. The luckier Turkish invaders, under Mehmed II, were merely impaled through the belly or chest, from front to back, or back to front. But most of them were not lucky. Vlad thought of torture as something to study, to extract the maximum amount of pain possible from each body, while keeping the victims alive as long as possible.

The standard impalement method, not invented by him, but made most indelible by him, was to sharpen one end of the stake to a dull point, not very sharp, then oil it and insert into the anus or vagina, erect the victim on it, and leave him or her to die over the course of several days, sometimes a week, as gravity pulled the body down the stake and the stake up, perforating the intestines, pushing the organs aside, and finally exiting at the mouth or collarbone. Death was typically due to general shock, and in one famous woodcut from 1499, not 25 years after his death, Vlad is depicted eating lunch in a garden decorated by hundreds of dying people impaled on stakes.

This is true. The legend that he drank the blood of his victims from a goblet is probably not true, as this tends to make a person violently sick, but he did derive sadistic elation out of watching people suffer, hearing them scream and sob and beg, and then die. As a member of the nobility at war with other states and countries, especially the Ottoman Empire, the only thing anyone could do about it was try to overthrow him. But he was an expert field tactician, and an extremely capable fighter man to man.

Emissaries sent by Mehmed seeking a truce, refused to take their turbans off to show respect to Vlad. To require a Muslim to remove his turban is extremely insulting. So Vlad had his men nail the emissaries’ turbans to their heads, killing them, and then sent them back to Mehmed. Everywhere Vlad invaded and conquered, he impaled the surviving soldiers and most non-combatant civilians, even infants. Anyone caught stealing in his domain was locked in a pillory, had his bare feet coated in honey, and then suffered a goat to lick the honey off. Goats have rougher tongues than cats, and the goat would lick until the soles of the feet came off. Then salt was sprinkled in the wounds and the thief was released. Most of them died soon from infection.

During his war with Mehmed’s Ottomans, Vlad had a total of 30,000 to 40,000 men at his disposal, against a little less than 100,000 Ottoman Turks, but Vlad was no fool, and fought a series of masterful ambushes and skirmishes, flanking and cutting off mountain passes from the Turks. Vlad was not going to sit around and wait for Mehmed to come to him. He invaded modern Bulgaria and, near Oryahovo, which Vlad called “Rahova.” It is right on the present border between Romania and Bulgaria, and in that area, in early February 1462, Vlad invaded and killed 23,884 Turks, by his own count, among them women, children, peasant and wealthy. Most of them, he impaled. Then he burned down the entire city.

Why? To provoke Mehmed, and show him what sort of a monster he was dealing with. Mehmed, who was known to be sadistic, himself, responded in fury by invading Wallachia. The two armies fought around Targoviste, Romania, where Vlad routed and killed 15,000 Turks. Mehmed was already demoralized by what he had seen, and tried to flee, but was nearly forced back by his officers.

He attempted to besiege Targoviste, but instead found the city gates open and the whole city empty. On the other side of the city, his army followed the one road deeper into Romania, and the sight that greeted them was awesomely horrendous. The road was flanked for 60 miles by 20,000 Ottoman Turks and Bulgarian Muslims impaled, dead and dying and circled by clouds of vultures. The stench and plaintive moaning disgusted Mehmed, who turned with his army and left, never to return. Vlad had run out of money to pay the mercenaries in his army. He appealed to an old Hungarian friend, who promptly imprisoned him, probably out of fear for the safety of the entire country. While in prison, he relished impaling all the rats he could find. Vlad was released about 1474 and immediately attempted to start a new war. But he was assassinated on a road from Giurgiu to Bucharest, in late December or early January 1476-77. How he died is not known, but he is sure to have gone down swinging. He was beheaded before or after death, and his body was buried in a monastery. The total number of people he killed has been estimated at anywhere from 40,000 to 100,000, most of whom he impaled for his enjoyment. He is a national hero in Romania.’

Tamarlane - ‘Western history remembers him best as “Tamerlane.” This is an Anglicization of “Timur-e-Lang,” or “Timur the Lame.” He suffered an injury to his left foot in battle which never properly healed. He intended to restore and expand the Mongol Empire famously founded over a hundred years before by Ghengis Khan. Timur invaded from present Uzbekistan in all directions, and everywhere he conquered, entire regions of inhabitants were murdered.

All he cared about was conquering people, taking everything they owned, and subjugating them. Isfahan, Iran, surrendered without a fight in view of his massive approaching army in 1387, and he treated them mercifully, until his tax collectors started collecting impossibly high tax revenue, whereupon they were killed in the streets. When Timur heard this, he ordered his army to about-face, march on the city, and kill every single living thing in it, even the rats. Birds were shot out of the sky by his archers. The people, men, women and children were beheaded, to a total of 70,000 in just over two days of slaughter. He then ordered their heads piled up as 28 giant towers in the grassy hills around the city, each tower consisting of about 1,500 heads.

In 1398, Timur invaded northern India, massacring whole cities of Hindu people in every direction. His only real motive for the invasion was India’s vast gold and gem treasuries. He was opposed in December of that year by Sultan Mehmud, who sent 120 war elephants against him. Timur forced the elephants to panic back into their own lines by stacking wood on the backs of all his camels and setting the camels on fire, then goading them toward the charging elephants. The camels bellowed in agony and the fiery sight did the trick. The elephants turned around and fled.

Timur then entered the capital of Delhi, pillaged it, burned it to the ground, and executed 100,000 innocent civilians in one day, by having them beheaded or speared. Timur claimed in his memoirs that he wanted to restrain his army from killing all these people, but could not, and besides this, he finally decided that he should not restrain his men, because it was the will of Allah that the residents of Delhi had to die.

He made it a point throughout his career as conqueror to wipe the Christian religion off the face of the earth, and thus, Christian areas, such as Armenia and Georgia, were depopulated. 60,000 civilians in Armenia and Georgia were spared to become slaves, while every major city in both countries was sacked and destroyed, and every inhabitant in it beheaded. The total is estimated to have been one million killed. The total number of people killed during his career is a broad estimate of 17 million. His motive was a desire to own the entire world for himself. He died in Otrar, near Karatau, Kazakhstan, on February 17, 1405, after contracting bubonic plague. He was planning an imminent invasion of China.’