It was said that she enjoyed torturing and killing young girls. At first they were servants at her castles, daughters of the local peasants, but later they included girls sent to her by local gentry families to learn good manners. She believed that drinking the blood of young girls would preserve her youthfulness and her looks. Witnesses told of her stabbing victims or biting their breasts, hands, faces and arms, cutting them with scissors, sticking needles into their lips or burning them with red-hot irons, coins or keys. Some were beaten to death and some were starved. The story that Elizabeth used to bathe in their blood seems to have been added later on.
A Lutheran minister went to the Hungarian authorities, who eventually began an investigation in 1610. In December of that year Elizabeth was arrested and so were four of her favourite servants and intimates, who were accused of being her accomplices. They were tried and found guilty. Three of them were executed and the fourth was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Elizabeth herself was not put on trial, because of her family’s standing, but she was shut up in Csetje Castle, held in solitary confinement in a room whose windows were walled up. She was 54 when she died there in 1614.