After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Blood Countess of Hungary: Sixteenth Century Serial Killer
Episode Date: December 28, 2023The inspiration behind countless gothic novels, Countess Elizabeth Báthory is said to be one of the most prolific serial killers of all time, accused of the murder of 600 girls during the late 16th c...entury. Maddy and Anthony talk to Professor Kimberly Craft, a legal historian who has spent over a decade researching the life and trial of Countess Báthory and over a year translating original source material into English. Where does the truth lie, a conspiracy started by her enemies or a psychopathic vampire?Edited by Ella Blaxill, Produced by Beth Donaldson and Freddy Chick, Senior Producer is Charlotte LongDiscover the past with exclusive history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code AFTERDARK sign up now for your 14-day free trial http://access.historyhit.com/checkout/subscribe/purchase?code=afterdark&plan=monthly
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Hello and welcome to this episode of After Dark, Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal.
to this episode of After Dark, Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal. Today we're delving into a 16th century history that I think it's fair to say is rather dark and grim. It's one about which
I knew very little until Anthony and I actually sat down with our guest, but it's one that I have
thought about plenty of times since. It's the story of a woman,
Elizabeth Bathory, otherwise known as the Blood Countess of Hungary, and the terrible crimes she
is said to have committed. Elizabeth lived in Hungary from around 1560 until her death in 1614.
She was a powerful woman who managed affairs on her and her husband's vast
estates. She was also, if we are to believe the evidence given at her trial, a torturer and a
serial killer. Whatever the truth, a myth has grown up around her that is blood-curdling and Elizabeth has really become a figure of
legendary evil. Here to tell us all about this story, its facts and its fictions is Kim Craft,
professor and author of Infamous Lady, the true story of Countess Elizabeth Bathory.
infamous lady, the true story of Countess Elizabeth Bathory. Now before we begin, I should warn you that this episode does contain descriptions of torture and death and is not suitable for younger
listeners. Hello everyone, welcome to this episode of After Dark. We are absolutely delighted to be joined by
attorney and legal historian,
Professor Kim Craft. Kim, welcome to the podcast. Hello. Thank you so much for having me.
You're so welcome. So we've got you on today to talk about a story that I have to admit,
I didn't really know that much about until I went on a little bit of a Google rabbit hole and
my goodness, what a story. So we're going to be
talking about the blood countess as she's called. So can you just start by giving us a brief
overview of who this person is, when in time she's living, what's the context for her?
Of course, I'm going to use the anglicized version. Her name in English is Elizabeth Bathory.
version. Her name in English is Elizabeth Bathory. She is a Hungarian countess. So in Hungarian,
forgive my pronunciation, everyone, it's very close to Bathory Archibet. They say the last name first. And she was born in 1560. She died in 1614. So, you know, she's kind of living in the high Renaissance, early modern period.
She supposedly was a very big fan of Queen Elizabeth I. She comes from a very old and
wealthy, noble family. She has relatives who are cardinals, princes, voivodes. Voivode is a
Transylvanian term that also means prince or high noble. She and her
husband would go on to own property in what is today five countries. They entertained the prime
minister. The emperor of the Holy Roman Empire was invited to their wedding. He didn't attend.
He sent gifts. Still quite impressive. Yes. Yes, she had a seat in parliament in the Hungarian court. And she's living in this
intersection of events in history that is extremely dramatic. We have the Ottoman Empire
ravaging Europe. We've got these wars going on with that. We have the Reformation going on. Part of her family is Catholic.
Another part is Lutheran.
Another part is Calvinist.
It's the Renaissance, the Enlightenment.
It's just change everywhere you look.
And against this backdrop, she kind of lives in two worlds.
Her family is old nobility.
They kind of slumber on their estates where they tell legends of their ancestors who fought dragons.
While meanwhile, the husband that she marries has a court that is extremely modern by the time standards.
He has tutors from all over Europe. He has famous poets, artists. His parents love anything that's trendy.
And here she comes.
I almost can picture her arriving as a young girl, like dressed in her somber black, being
raised a Calvinist to her husband's very merry Lutheran, free for all court.
And this merger of cultures that arrive when she gets there must have been quite fascinating for the time.
So she's born to wealth and a very long established family. And by marriage,
she finds herself in a world full of political power and that she is arguably a sort of a viable
player on this board. But there is an absolutely remarkable story around her life that this isn't the be all and end all by any
means. So can you tell us the myth version of why her story comes down to us today?
She is such an enigma. What's so unusual about her, what's so strange about her is as she is
serving tea to the prime minister, there are reports that especially her servant girls
are being tortured, victimized, and ultimately killed in the most horrific ways that one
could possibly imagine.
And it's this dichotomy where she'll appear publicly like most good psychopathic serial killers as the picture
of elegance. And yet these rumors keep servicing. Townsfolk keep saying, we see her ladies in
waiting. We see her staff. These girls coming into town and they're bruised, they're bloodied,
they're battered. I mean, they hide it as best as possible. But there's something very strange about them. And these rumors are circulating throughout the congregation of the area parishes as well, where there are these dead bodies that keep piling up. at such a rapid rate that the local clergy is starting to wonder what's going on.
And she's always got an excuse.
Oh, well, it was typhoid, which, you know, disease was popular even in a wealthy household
in that time period.
But you can only use that excuse for so long that it's like, well, why does no one else
have these diseases?
Why only your servant girls?
And it's very
particular. The people who continue to be, who are dying or are found bloodied or mutilated or
later on when her staff gets very sloppy, thrown over the castle wall to wolves or body parts
dug up by dogs. Here's a dog running through the courtyard, you know, holding a leg or an arm or something.
The question is, well, but what's happening?
Why don't you, what?
And so that's where we start to get now these myths and legends that compound eyewitness
statements.
Everything I've mentioned is actually eyewitness testimony.
Everything I've mentioned is actually eyewitness testimony. The myths and the legends take it even further that we've got ritualized serial killings that involve not only torture, can't be sullied in any way. It's got to be virgin blood. That's somehow we start to get the notion of her as the infamous lady, the blood countess.
The myth is quite gendered then, isn't it?
In terms of the gaps that people fill in are, oh, well, this woman must be related to beauty.
It must be related to physical appearance.
It doesn't sit well with us, potentially, that it's just some kind of gruesome bent that she has. Naturally, it must relate to her physical appearance and her beauty,
which is really interesting, right? Exactly. And that is something that I will say I spent time
trying to find out what really happened by not only translating the original source material,
but looking at the literature that came after her. And I think what happens is in the source material,
there is no discussion whatsoever of her bathing in blood as a beauty cream
and, you know, a way to restore her youth.
As you say, it's a very gender-based, sexist sort of fantasy almost.
What really happened, she was very meticulous about cleaning up the blood. The
killings would take place in wash houses or kitchens where it was very easy to hide blood,
clean it up, hose it out. She didn't want anybody to know anything was going on. And there weren't
also hundreds of victims. There were plenty of victims, but where probably the story came around was in the
Victorian era. We got a lot of these sort of, you know, Gothic novels that started to become
popular. And there was an English writer who started creating these wonderful Gothic fictional
tales, but they over time started to become perceived as reality. And where the legend started was the tale where one day the Countess, who's very vain, is sitting at her dressing table and her young servant is combing her hair.
a snag and pulls the countess's hair.
And the countess has a rage reaction to the pain.
She's wearing very big, heavy rings on her fingers. And in a moment of rage, she basically takes her hand and backhands the servant, cutting
her in the face, bloodying her nose.
And because of that, supposedly blood spurts onto the Countess's
hands and face from this young virginal servant girl. At first, the Countess is thinking, ew,
yuck. And she's trying to wipe it off. And then when she does, the legend has it, that's when
my wrinkled skin is new again. And then it's like, wait, get over here. Let me put it on my face.
And of course, the legend spins out of control from that point on. You know, you can only get so much blood from
one servant. We need more. And you see this whole mythology that types into the virginal sacrifice
and pretty soon on the altar of sacrifice with the special sort of ritual blood, she's bathing
to turn herself from being a middle-aged woman back into her vibrant 20s
or something. In reality, she did go to spas, but that was about it.
Kim, I'm so fascinated by the distance that we have between, on the one hand, this huge
out-of-control myth of hundreds of people being murdered. And on the other hand, we've got, you know, real human stories of abuse.
And it's very dark and terrifying, really.
And, you know, there's potentially mental health issues in there and all these things.
So you've obviously done a lot of work, not only translating original documents from the period in which she lived and to do with the accusations that were set against her.
But you've spent a lot of time kind of trying to reconstruct the story of what happens and how she gets caught
out. So can you tell us, you know, if she is going about murdering, whether it's dozens or
hundreds of people, how on earth is she getting away with that? And how does she get caught?
That is such a good question. She gets away with it for actually quite a while. Where we get the legend that there were 600 girls murdered actually came from the trial testimony of a very young child who wished to testify.
And in the time, the child got up and testified and started showboating for the court.
Even the people in the day did not believe the child who has an audience is saying,
oh yes, there were 600 murdered victims. And she kept a diary writing about all of them.
And I will just say, no diary has ever been found. In the archives in Budapest, they repeatedly get
calls from people asking, do you have the diary? And they over and over say there is no diary.
No. And again, even the judges and the lawyers in the day did not believe this testimony,
but it was so salacious. It started to become almost truth being told and how she gets away
with this. There were killings going on though. The trial records seem to suggest along the order of
maybe 50 to 60 victims over the course of about 30 years, which is still a good number. It's not
600. The king, who was trying to get an edict against her, wanted to say the number was closer
to 300. That's even a little high, but she had a very meticulous system set up where she had a close band of very, very cruel servants who work for her.
And they would basically do anything that she wanted.
So how she gets away so long, it's because of her political status.
It's because of her political status. It's because of her social status. It's very frightening for the townspeople, even for the local clergy who were speaking. They had days in which they had to work a certain amount of produce or animals or harvest that they had to pay to her in taxes.
was running properly. And they were terrified because if they spoke against her, the trial would be in front of her or her sheriffs or her appointed people. And she had power of life and
death over them. They also could not actually legally lodge a case against her because they
were not nobility. So they could speak against each other. They could
go to the clergy. The clergy had some power in a moralistic sense or religious sense to
chastise her or question her, but legally they couldn't do anything either. So it started to
become, well, just rumors. So if the serfs themselves cannot bring a legal case
against her, who is it that brings her to justice? Is she brought to justice in the end?
She is. Yes. What happens? She finally pushes too far. It's one thing to do whatever you want
with your serfs. But she went too far when she decided after her husband died, she started to
have some financial issues. She did not have a lot of liquid assets. She started to wind up
selling off castles. And you can only do that for so long. And she also had a very lavish lifestyle.
So in an effort to get more money, she opened up a lyceum for girls. It was going to be a
finishing school for girls of the nobility. These tended to be either, in many cases, lesser
nobility or sort of maybe mid-noble families. But for them, it was an honor to have their girls study and learn domestic and courtly ways,
dances, music with this high noble woman.
And that was the undoing because the parents of these noble girls did have legal standing
to file actions with the prime minister, with the king's court.
And that's what happened. She started
doing her usual victimization of these noble girls. When their parents would come to visit
them, the parents would be barred or banned. Or if the parents really insisted, no, no, I want to
see her. I haven't seen her in six months, for example. They tell them, wait, and maybe an hour would pass and then the
girl would come out and you could see she had makeup put on, the bruises, the burns, the marks
would be hidden under clothing or makeup. She was probably cautioned, don't say a word or it's going
to be the worst for you. And the girls would sometimes erupt in tears, you know, whispering,
begging, please get me out of here, take me home. One of the girls actually managed to escape. She was
found with a knife in her foot. She like in this condition, barefoot hobble down the hill into the
town escaping. It was insane. And once the relatives started talking to each other of the
nobility, that was the undoing.
That's when they started going to the prime minister to say, we need to lodge a complaint
against her.
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Catherine of Aragon.
Anne Boleyn.
Jane Seymour.
Anne of Cleves.
Catherine Howard.
Catherine Parr.
Six wives, six lives.
I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb,
and this month on Not Just the Tudors, I'm joined
by a host of experts to tell the stories of the six queens of Henry VIII who shaped and changed
England forever. Subscribe to and follow Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your
podcasts. So we now have the situation where we've moved from having this woman who was born into the Hungarian nobility.
Then this myth starts to kind of be propagated around her.
There are deaths apparently not directly at her hands, but sometimes directly at her hands.
Numbers vary from 50 to 600.
She's now being caught out because she transgresses from punishing and killing working class children up into the nobility.
So I'm assuming a trial ensues.
And if so, what comes out in the trial?
What facts are we left with that can kind of wipe away some of that myth making?
So the prime minister who's given legal jurisdiction happens to be a man that she has been very close with.
jurisdiction, happens to be a man that she has been very close with. Just a month before her arrest, she attended his daughter's wedding. She called him cousin. So it's a very political
situation for him where he's kind of caught in the loop. The prime minister was also requested
at her husband's deathbed to care for her as the poor widow. So he needs to bring justice. He's got
the king breathing down his neck. He's got all these nobles coming to him, and yet he knows her.
Even right before the arrest, he's writing to his wife, and he and his wife are wondering,
is it true? Are the myths true? It's Christmas time. The arrest happens while the Countess is throwing a Christmas party.
And if you can imagine this, she's at her manor home at the bottom of the hill.
The castle is at the top of the hill.
She's having a dinner party, dressed beautifully.
And that's when it's almost like a movie where the Prime Minister, as well as other high
nobility, one of them is Countess Bathory's son's
tutor, involved her two sons-in-law who had married Countess Bathory's daughters. These
were people who knew her personally and well, along with the entire town. Imagine this,
here's the townspeople with torches. Everybody is gathering around the door to the manor house.
with torches. Everybody is gathering around the door to the manor house. This is when the prime minister, the son's-in-law, the son's tutor, everybody busts in and make the arrest at this
point. I can't imagine what her guests were thinking because they seem not to know anything.
She stands up, you know, what is this indignity? How dare you? And I mean, they grab her by the hair. They do a raid of the manor house. And this
is where they find girls are hidden away in a back room. So they rescued those girls and then
they physically dragged the Countess up to the castle. And again, if you can imagine this trade
of people with torches in the middle of the snowy, freezing cold night. They get up to the castle
and that's when they find a hell house. There are dead bodies everywhere. They are in states
of decomposition. They are dismembered. Some of them are still alive and they drag her through
the castle asking her, look, have you done this? How did you do this? And she refuses
to answer. So they put her in prison within the castle while they spend the night bringing carts
and wheelbarrows up to the castle, literally to take these dead bodies out and back down into
the town. They start interviewing the few that are still alive, you know, who are in tears and horrible condition,
who were explaining how they had been there for months, just systematically being tortured.
And much of the torturing is happening by the Countess's immediate staff. Again, some of it,
she comes to play, I guess I'd say that, or if she's in a bad mood and needs to let off steam,
then she participates. But it's her servants doing this as well or if she's in a bad mood and needs to let off steam, then she participates.
But it's her servants doing this as well.
As she's in the dungeon of her own castle, they ask her, if you knew your servants were
doing this, why didn't you stop them?
And she makes this absurd comment where she said, well, even I was afraid of them and
insists until the end, I didn't do anything, which is very pathological.
So this trial ensues. There are two trials. In one case, the church is asked to officiate if
they want to try her as a witch. There's lots of stories also coming out that in this time where
we have not only the mashup of religions during the Reformation, there's not only
ancestor worship, spirit, paganism going on, it's mixed with Christianity. So Countess Bathory
thinks nothing of praying to the Trinity while invoking a god of cats, you know, to send 90 cats
to attack her enemies and, you know, working a spell with a forest witch that
she tends to be living with who's working constant spells to poison her enemies or kill her enemies
or again, while she's also praying to God. Kim, it strikes me as being so cinematic,
and we know that there have been multiple novels and films written about her. But it's amazing to
think that this was the reality. This is terrible abuse and it's so incredibly grim. She's captured
and we sort of see her in this new light, all her neighbours and contemporaries are seeing her in
this new light and in this context of the strange mashup of Christianity and sort of more ancient
magical beliefs. Are we able from a modern perspective today
to get anywhere close to thinking about her motivation for these crimes?
Are we able to understand her as a person,
anything about her psychology
and what led her to be able to commit these things?
I am not a forensic psychiatrist,
but I do have my own personal theory.
I have had people who practice in that
area say that it's plausible. I don't know if we'll know ever officially because, you know,
the idea, the sort of Freudian analysis of self or motivation was not part of the culture at the
time. But as you say, if we were to approach it through a modern lens, personally, what I
think it's very specific how she would victimize and brutalize and murder specifically young
girls between roughly the ages of 11 to 14.
And my thought on that is in her own life, that was the age she was betrothed to her
husband at the age of 10, which was very common.
It was a marriage contract. And when she was 11, she left her home court to travel to her husband's
court. And during that time for herself, between the ages of 11 and 14, before her wedding, when
she was 15, her husband 17, I think she herself was brutally victimized as a means
of getting her to toe the line and be a good, noble woman and wife for her husband.
She was a very strong-willed girl who was used to getting her own way.
She had her own staff.
her own way. She had her own staff. And now all of a sudden, this girl, this high minded,
imperious young girl is at her husband's court and they're not messing around with this child that's going to someday be in charge of them. I think it also speaks to something of how we
want to consume history in terms of us wanting to find motive. We are fascinated to know why would somebody do something that's so grossly intrusive and violent, particularly when there's a woman involved?
It feels like it's almost more unbelievable if the acts are carried out by a female, right? the almost complete power she had over her staff and her servants and the history of the way the
nobility and her family had treated commoners so brutally and viciously, it all came together to
motivate this pathological behavior. Sexual deviance tied with the very nature of femininity is what seems to be so apparent in the trial documents.
She did not become enraged or torture or victimize men or boys. There's no evidence
of that whatsoever. It's almost exclusively this particular age group and gender that are the victims of her insane rage and insane cruelty that to the point,
I almost wonder if she would feel, when I was your age, I went through this and I survived it.
And how dare you be weak or sniveling? It was the girl's weakness or their imperfection
that drove her to such extremes of rage or pathological behavior.
I think as well, Kim, you know, it's obviously this is such an extreme case and it's such a
horrifying case, but it also gives us such an insight into women's lives more generally in
this period and something of their bodily experience. I mean, obviously not everyone
was a victim of this woman or indeed lived the life this woman lived, but I think
it gives us that kind of road in.
I know that you've done a lot of translation work for this.
So if our listeners wanted to read any of those translations, is there a place where they can read some of this documentation for themselves?
In my book, Infamous Lady, I have every known trial transcript, letter, her last will and testament, depositions, interrogatories,
they've all been translated into English.
Everything I could possibly find on the planet, especially the second edition of the book.
And there's also an appendix where if you want to just read the naked writings of the trial transcripts, if you want to read the
naked testimonies of her witnesses who in those days, the trial practice had it such
that if you were brought to trial, you would be tortured to get your testimony.
That was just common procedure.
And the theory being if the witness is being tortured, well, obviously they're going to
tell the truth, which is funny because we all sort of think, yeah, but wouldn't that make them say
anything just to make the torture stop? They didn't think that way in those days. And you'll
see it's fascinating when the witnesses, her servants who are also brought in chains to trial are testifying. They are testifying against each
other vehemently, and every one of them is killed in a very barbarous way. In punishment for their
crimes, we see their hands are cut off. They're thrown live onto the fire. One has her fingers
pulled out as part of the punishment. And these, again, are women. The
woman servant who was the forest witch, we're saving a witch burning for her. No question,
she's getting that. While it was interesting, she had one servant boy who is called a lad or a youth.
It's hard to know exactly how old he is. He's probably somewhere between 15 and 17.
how old he is. He's probably somewhere between 15 and 17. Because of his youth, he was beheaded,
even though he participated in these crimes as much as anyone else. And the countess herself, the question is, did she ever go on trial? The notion of subjecting a noble woman to torture
as part of the procedure was unthinkable. Even as unthinkable as the allegations against her were,
there was a letter-writing campaign to the prime minister
from her family begging them,
please, please, please, please, we beg you,
pretty much we'll do anything you want,
just do not let her testify, whatever you want.
And there's all this conflict
where the king wanted her beheaded.
Her family and the prime minister are trying to think maybe we can quietly put her away in a convent. But when,
you know, these testimonies came out, it was too much. She's insisting to the end,
I did nothing wrong. And she said, submit me to the fire, submit me to the trial. I'll tell you.
And I think the pathology too, she under torture would
be willing still to say, I did nothing wrong, even though everybody was pointing a finger,
not only at each other, but they did point fingers at her. And those servants, when they were being
tried by fire, they were being interrogated separately, were all saying the same things about the very
particular killings that she did. When she had high ranking staff members who were not arrested
or under trial, but interrogated, they said the same thing. So we know there are definitely 30,
40 murders that she in cold blood did.
So we have this trying to bring Elizabeth to account.
What does all this investigation, this questioning, what does it lead to in the end?
Does she get away with this?
Is this something that she's held to account with?
She is held to account, maybe not in the way that we might have liked.
She was not executed.
She was actually held in perpetual imprisonment within her castle,
kind of under house arrest, which might lead one to think, oh, well, she could roam the estate. No, no, that was not true. She did get her just desserts. She survived under house arrest for
about four years. But if I can describe what she went through, it drove her insane. She was actually walled up in a tower room of her castle. Literally,
they bricked up the doors, the windows, only left a little space that they could pass food to her.
When the priest came from town to write out her will and hear her confession. They were doing it outside of the door.
She could speak through this little hole where they would pass the food to her jailer. Her
daughters would sometimes bring her food or candles or writing materials, but after a while,
they weren't coming anymore. And the rumor has it that after a point she was actually writing on the walls in her own blood.
There's also the possibility that she never, ever was able to get out of the gown she wore on the night of her arrest.
And why I say that is because, you know, anybody who's familiar with with gowns and bodices and corsets of the time period.
That's why she had a staff of maidservants.
You need someone to help you get out, get into and get out of that clothing.
She could not have reached around and literally got herself out of that dress. So in a strange torture upon herself, she probably had to live in the same dress for four years. She would
have had to eat the common food of her jailers, which would have been a terrible insult to her.
And she was just slowly driven insane. She also was very well aware that the wives of the area
high nobles were coming in and raiding her castle of her jewelry. And she was
screaming about, you know, my cousin, the Prince of Transylvania is going to avenge me and he's
going to ride in and kill all of you. And they're like, yeah, whatever. They would not allow her to
send letters, see visitors. So at the end, the last report is given from the prime minister's relative who
gave a report based on the jailer's statement that the night before she died,
she complained of leg pain. She probably had congestive heart failure and circulation issues
and saying that she was very cold. And her jailer basically said, well, you know, I don't know, put a pillow under your legs.
I don't know.
And he commented that she was singing a beautiful hymn that night.
And then at around 2 a.m. in the morning, she passed away.
So that's what happened to her.
We have never officially found her grave or burial site, though.
Her legacy seems to me to live on in so many different ways,
encapsulated in the myths that we've spoken about,
in the history that you've written about,
in this fictionalized way that Maddie has spoken about before as well.
But I believe for you personally,
she lives on in a more immediate way in some correspondence you may have received.
Yes, you know, I do get letters from readers or other researchers. And one of the most
interesting letters I received from someone who had read the book told me she was extremely angry
with me that she was the countess incarnated and how dare I tell her story to the general public. And she was just enraged. And I
thought for a while, how do I respond to this? So I wrote back and I just said, I, first of all,
thank you so much for reading the book. You know, your ladyship, I'm so sorry I gave offense to you,
but I have to tell you though, it's been 400 years and a lot of people know the story.
And what I'm trying really to do is just to tell the true story of what really happened.
I'm actually, you know, trying to defend you against a lot of defamatory stories that have
also come out about you.
And it was so funny.
The person wrote back.
We're doing email and she writes back and she says, well, all right.
Thank you then.
Okay, good. Dodged a bullet on that one.
After everything you've just told us, there is one person that I would not like to get on the
wrong side of, and that seems to be Elizabeth Bathory. But thank you so much for sharing
those details with us. So fascinating. I think so too. Thank you.
And all of this information is held in these transcripts. It's really fascinating
stuff, Kim. Unfortunately, that is all we have time for today. There's hours of chat that we
could do, but there's also hours of research and, you know, new information I'm sure to find. And
you've done such a fantastic job in bringing this story to life. So thank you so much.
Thank you so much.
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