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The story of Sawney Bean, Scotland's most famous cannibal.
Strangely enough, the bizarre 2006 film ‘The Hills Have Eyes’ was actually based on the folklore story of Sawney Bean, the head of an inbred cannibal family.
See the illustrations and go inside the bizarre story of Sawney Bean, Scotland’s most famous cannibal and inspiration behind ‘The Hills Have Eyes’ —
Legend maintains that for over 25 years, Sawney Bean and his incestuous family of cannibalistic children terrorized medieval Scotland. According to folklore, the family would descend upon unsuspecting travelers and then dismember, pickle, and devour them. Some estimate that the family cannibalized up to 1,000 people — until one man escaped and told King James VI.
The story appeared in The Newgate Calendar, a crime catalog of Newgate Prison in London. The legend lacks sufficient evidence to be deemed true by historians, and there is debate as to why the legend would have been fictionalized; nevertheless, the myth of "Sawney" Bean has passed into local folklore and has become a part of the Edinburgh tourism circuit.
According to The Newgate Calendar, a London tabloid publication from the 18th and 19th centuries, Alexander Bean was born in East Lothian during the 16th century. His father was a ditch-digger and hedge-trimmer; Bean tried to take up the family trade but quickly realised that he was not fit for this work.
He left home with an allegedly vicious woman named Black Agnes Douglas, who apparently shared his inclinations and was accused of being a witch. After some robbing and the cannibalization of one of their victims, the couple ended up at a coastal cave in Bennane Head between Girvan and Ballantrae. The cave was 200 yards (180 metres) deep, and the entrance was blocked by water during high tide, so the couple was able to live there undiscovered for some 25 years.
Sawney and Agnes produced six daughters, eight sons, 14 granddaughters, and 18 grandsons; the grandchildren were products of incest between their children.
Lacking the inclination for regular labour, the Bean clan thrived by laying careful ambushes at night to rob and murder individuals or small groups. The clan brought the bodies back to their cave where the corpses were dismembered and eaten. They pickled the leftovers in barrels and discarded body parts, which would sometimes wash up on nearby beaches. This strategy was used to help conceal their crimes and lead villagers to believe that it was animals who were attacking travellers.
The body parts and disappearances did not go unnoticed by the local villagers, but the Bean clan stayed in their cave by day and took their victims at night. The Bean clan was so clandestine that the villagers were unaware of the murderers living nearby.
As local people began to take notice of the disappearances, several organized searches were launched to find the culprits. One search took note of the cave but the men refused to believe anything human could live in it. Frustrated and in a frenetic quest for justice, the townspeople hanged several innocents but the disappearances continued. Suspicion often fell on local innkeepers since they were the last known to have seen many of the missing people alive.
One night, the Bean clan ambushed a married couple riding from a fayre on one horse. The man was skilled in combat, so he deftly held off the clan with sword and pistol. However, the Bean clan unhorsed the wife, and she fell to the ground. The women in Bean’s group that night killed the wife, cutting her throat and sucking her blood; they also pulled out her intestines. Before they could take the resilient husband, a large group of fayre-goers appeared on the trail and the Beans fled. The fayre-goers took the survivor to the local magistrate, whom they informed of this experience.
With the Beans' existence finally revealed, it was not long before the King (perhaps James VI of Scotland in tales linked to the 16th century, though it is less clear who this could be in other tales from the 15th century) heard of the atrocities and decided to lead a search with a team of 400 men and several bloodhounds. They soon found the Bean clan's previously-overlooked cave in Bennane Head thanks to the bloodhounds. Upon entering the cave by torchlight, the searchers found the Bean clan surrounded by human remains: some body parts hanging from the wall, barrels filled with limbs, and piles of stolen heirlooms and jewelry.
There are two versions of the events following the Bean clan’s discovery. The most common of the two is that the Bean clan was captured alive where they gave up without a fight. They were taken in chains to the Tolbooth Jail in Edinburgh, then transferred to Leith or Glasgow where they were promptly executed without trial as people saw them as subhuman and unfit for one. Sawney and his fellow men had their genitalia cut off and thrown into the fires, their hands and feet severed, and were allowed to bleed to death, with Sawney shouting his dying words: "It isn't over, it will never be over". After watching the men die, Agnes, her fellow women, and the children were tied to stakes and burned alive. These execution practices recall, in essence if not in detail, the punishments of hanging, drawing and quartering decreed for men convicted of treason[citation needed]. In contrast, women convicted of the same were burned. There is also another claim that the search party placed gunpowder at the entrance of their cave, where the Sawney Bean clan faced the fate of suffocation.
The town of Girvan, located near the macabre scene of murder and debauchery, has another legend about the Bean clan. There are claims that one of Bean's daughters evntually left the clan and settled in Girvan where she planted a tree that became known as "The Hairy Tree". After her family's capture and exposure, the daughter's identity was revealed by angry locals who hanged her from the bough of the Hairy Tree
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