DECK THE HOLIDAY'S

   Lady Bathory, "Countess of Blood", the first female vampire, may have been the bloodiest of all.  She married into nobility and was the distant cousin of the vampire that started it all in modern time, Vlad Dracula, "Vlad the Impaler".  She lived a life of leisure and peace in her Hungarian castle home.    That is until, so they say, a servant girl spilled a drop of her own blood upon her while bathing and grooming her.  The countess noticed how the young servants blood made her skin seem rejuvenated and fell in love with its hypnotic effect.    Soon the countess was luring more and more local females to her mountain perch to be sacrificed to her.  When the local flesh started drying up, the countess started a so-called "finishing school" for daughters of nobility and continued her reign of terror until she was caught in the early 1600's.    She devised many ways to make this harvest of blood more painful and efficient, she did this by including

   She adds that it is also very likely that hemlock might have been used by oldern day witches, who might have referred to it as persil,  which by lots of other practitioners is often erroneously taken to be parsley.  But even so, they'd already be pretty scarily close to creating rather poisonous substances.  "Aconite was one of the best-known poisons in ancient times; indeed it was so extensively used by professional poisoners in Rome during the Empire that a law was passed making its cultivation a capital offence.  Aconite root contains about .4 percent of alkaloid and one-fifteenth of a grain of the alkaloid is a lethal dose:, say Murray.    If adiministered, the drug is not immediately similar to recreational drugs, yet it slows you heartbeat or makes it irregular and can kill you.  If belladonna is added however, the effects are likely to be more druglike, creating delirious consciousness.  Far most poisonous of the ingredients is hemlock, which contains alkaloid, on