When you picture iconic rebels of Scottish
folklore, you probably picture William Wallace, as seen in Braveheart, charging into crowds
of English troops with his blue face-paint and broadsword. What you probably don’t picture is a psychopathic,
mass-murdering cannibal with a bloodthirsty family that was said to have killed upwards
of a thousand victims. We’re talking about Alexander “Sawney”
Bean, the Scottish King of Cannibalism, and his terrifying brood – the Sawney Bean Cannibal
Clan. If you’re about to eat, put down the fork
and listen in. It’s going to get gross. When exactly Sawney Bean and his family operated
(if they ever existed at all) is an open question. Some sources have him being born as early
as the late twelfth century, while others place him as late as the fifteenth or sixteenth
century. The mythic nature of the Bean Cannibal Clan
gives it a certain flexibility with the facts, like many other disturbing folkloric figures. America has Mothman, England has Spring-Heeled
Jack, and Scotland has Sawney Bean, who’s undeniably the most gruesome of the national
boogeymen. But, according to most versions of the legend,
Bean was born in the Scottish council of East Lothian sometime just before or during the
reign of King James VI of Scotland. These were humble beginnings, as he was born
to the poor homestead of a farm labourer. Not much is known about his birth family or
childhood, but Young Sawney is said to have done manual work like his father when he came
of age, digging ditches and trimming hedges. However, things took a turn for the worst
when this upstart young gentleman found love. Bean’s crush, known as Black Agnes Douglas,
was a woman of such low moral fibre that many thought her to be a witch. The two were a match made in hell. Sawney and Black Agnes eloped together, leaving
their family and polite society for good. They robbed, fought, and even murdered for
fun, like a brutal, Scottish Bonnie and Clyde. This nightmare couple became so feared and
scorned that they were forced to live off the grid to avoid being killed by angry mobs
or the soldiers tasked with keeping the peace. Where did Sawney and Black Agnes decide to
make their new home? If you guessed “a dark, slimy sea cave”
then ding, ding, ding, you are correct! The legends say that the two of them settled
down across the country in Bennane Cave, by Ballantrae in Ayrshire. This cave wasn’t just a glorified crack
in the cliff face, either. Bennane Cave was a huge rock formation embedded
with a complex series of mile-deep tunnels. The cave mouth would also be flooded twice
a day at high-tide, protecting the secret entrance from any outside intrusion. It was the perfect place to have an evil lair,
or to start a family. Or, if you’re Sawney Bean and Black Agnes,
both! Sawney and Agnes got busy in every sense of
the phrase – and soon enough, they had fourteen more mouths to feed. If you thought that becoming a father and
family man would set Sawney on the straight and narrow, you’d be horrifically wrong. After all, without a real job, Sawney needed
to find some way to feed his family. This encouraged him to take his crime game
up to the next level. He started to rob and murder even more regularly
– and somewhere along the line, Sawney acquired a taste for human flesh. The human-flesh diet was one he quickly got
his family to take up, too, setting in motion a chain of events that would make the Sawney
Bean Clan the most vicious family of killers in Scottish history. When his children became old enough to take
up the family trade (which is to say, murder, robbery, and cannibalism) they joined their
mother and father in ambushing lonesome travellers on Scotland’s back roads. The Bean Clan would murder these unfortunate
passers-by and steal their clothes, cash, and valuables. They would then brutally hack the bodies into
quarters before carrying them back to the cave for salting, cooking, and eating. To the untrained eye, it would just seem like
the victims simply fell off the face of the earth, not leaving a single trace. Nobody knew that they were keeping the Bean
Clan fed. This taboo precursor to the Atkins Diet seemed
to be working pretty well for the Bean family, because over their quarter-century reign of
violence and terror, their numbers swelled massively. The family’s fourteen children bore Sawney
and Black Agnes eighteen grandsons and fourteen granddaughters, all the products of incest. The cave soon became home to 46 brutal, flesh-hungry
savages of varying ages, unified in one purpose: Killing, robbing, and eating anyone who dared
to come near Bennane Cave. With his new horde of loyal and hungry relatives,
Sawney Bean upped his game yet again, organising brutal attacks on whole groups of travellers. They would meticulously track and stalk their
victims, waiting for the exact moment to strike. And when they finally did strike, it was like
something out of a living nightmare. Picture this: You’re a small trading convoy,
it’s perhaps you, some family members, and a few business partners. You’re transporting goods across the highlands
to trade. Perhaps you’ve brought a weapon or two,
just as a precautionary measure. It’ll be enough to frighten off one or two
opportunistic bandits, surely. Then, as you’re walking down a lonely, country
road, you hear an almost demonic screaming and howling echoing out from all around you. You’re so shocked by the sudden cacophony,
you don’t know what to do. You freeze, as suddenly shapes come charging
in all around you. They don’t look like your average highwaymen:
There’s men, women, and children. They’re filthy, bloodstained, crazed. Some wearing tattered fragments of stolen
clothes and others completely naked, like the Celtic warriors they descended from. All of them are bearing knives, clubs, or
fists. They set upon you in a violent frenzy. Before you and your party can muster up any
kind of defence – or even a reaction, beyond screaming and wide-eyed terror – it’s
too late. Your supplies are looted, and your dismembered
corpses are being carried off to Bennane Cave to be salted or pickled. According to the legends of the Bean Clan,
this exact horrifying scenario played out hundreds of times over the twenty-five years
that the brutal cannibal clan was active. While they were typically extremely skilled
at slaughtering whole groups of people without leaving any material evidence, occasionally
some terrifying clues to what was truly going on would slip through the net. Leftovers from the Bean Clan’s legendary
cannibal feasts would sometimes wash out of the cave mouth and end up on Scotland’s
other shores. People who lived on the coasts would sometimes
see cooked or eerily well-preserved limbs appear on the beaches, some covered in human-looking
bite marks. The Sawney Bean Clan’s activities were even
affecting the local economy. When the body parts began to wash up with
greater frequency, local authorities realised there must have been some prolific murderers
on the loose. Local innkeepers were grilled by ye olde police
in connection with the murders, seeing as they seemed like the most likely suspects,
considering most of the recent disappearances had been travellers passing through. The pressure got so great that some local
businesses even closed up shop for good, unable to cope with the severity of police scrutiny. Not that any of these leads ever led anywhere
productive. Meanwhile, the Sawney Bean Clan continued
to do what they did best: Murder, robbery, and cannibalism. People were being falsely accused and executed
for the Sawney Bean crimes, while these murderous Scots were getting away Scot free, pun intended. Villages near Bennane Cave were becoming ghost
towns, as inns closed down and rumours spread that anyone who passed through the area was
doomed to disappear and die a horrible death. And, to be fair, could you really say this
was inaccurate? The Sawney Bean clan was impressively prolific
– by some counts, murdering more people than Gary Ridgway, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy,
Jeffrey Dahmer, and the Zodiac Killer combined. They were setting murderous world records. Of course, when you have such an impressive
winning streak, it’s unsurprising that you’d eventually let it go to your head. And when you get cocky, you get sloppy. This is exactly what happened one fateful
night towards the end of the Bean Clan’s tenure. A man and his wife were riding home on horseback
from a local fayre and happened to unknowingly wander onto one of the Bean Clan’s favourite
routes. The two of them were in high spirits, laughing,
joking, gleeful from their time at the fayre. If they knew what was about to happen, they
probably would have savoured those last few moments together for longer. The hungry, watchful eyes of the Bean Clan
were staring at them from the darkness. Just as had happened so many times before,
the Sawney Bean Clan emerged from the darkness, ready to slaughter the unsuspecting couple. However, for the first time, even though the
Beans had numbers on their side, they were in for a real battle. The husband, as it turned out, was an experienced
fighter – packing a sword and a gun that he used to single-handedly fend off the cannibal
horde. During the bloody exchange, the wife of the
couple tragically fell from the back of the horse, and was gorily dismembered by the Beans. Legend has it that they began tearing out
her entrails and eating her alive. This, however, only galvanised the husband’s
Scottish fighting spirit – bringing out the William Wallace in him, as he continued
to valiantly fight the cannibal clan with his pistol and sword. While he probably couldn’t have sustained
combat for long, the noise of the brawl unfolding alerted thirty nearby villagers. They charged in with their own weapons, forcing
the enraged Bean Clan to retreat off into the night. For the first time since the start of this
twenty-five-year-long nightmare, their cover had been blown. Survival wasn’t enough for the husband. He’d seen these animals slaughter his beloved
wife – he wanted justice, he wanted revenge. That’s why, as the legend goes, he travelled
all the way to Glasgow to request a personal audience with King James (some sources report
it being James IV, others report it being James VI. Point is, it was definitely a king called
James. Moving on). He told the king his tale of the cave-dwelling
cannibals, and the King was so horrified that he pulled together a four-hundred-man hunting
party and set out for Bennane Cave himself. The days of the Sawney Bean Clan were officially
numbered. King James and his elite cannibal-hunting
squad charged into Bennane Cave with a pack of ferocious hunting dogs, overwhelming the
Beans with sheer numerical force. The cave looked like a set from a grimy, 1970s
horror movie – filled to the brim with stolen items and half-eaten corpses. Meat was pickled in barrels, hanging from
hooks, cooking over open fires. The sight was so horrifying that the Beans
were immediately hauled out of the cave and dragged back into mainland Scotland, where
they were executed without trial. The brutality of the enraged Scottish public
almost rivalled that of the family itself – the men, women, and children of the Sawney
Bean Clan were alternately dismembered and burned alive. Their reign of terror was finally over, once
and for all. This brings the gruesome legend of Sawney
Bean and his bloodthirsty family to a close. Was any of this grounded in truth? Well, probably not. There exists no real concrete evidence to
prove that Sawney or any of his or his family’s crimes ever really happened. The tales of his exploits were only committed
to writing hundreds of years after they supposedly happened, leaning more into frightening folklore
than fact. Some contemporary scholars, such as Dr. Louise
Yeoman, also attribute the figure of Sawney Bean to Anti-Scottish propaganda on behalf
of the English monarchy. Even the nickname “Sawney” was popularly
used at the time as shorthand for a stereotypical violent Scot. However, even though he was probably never
real, Sawney Bean’s cannibal clan has since reverberated through pop culture in a massive
way. In Scotland, Sawney Bean has made Bennane
Cave a popular tourist attraction, allowing locals to profit off of the legend. The story of Sawney Bean also inspired the
brutal horror novel “Off Season” by Jack Ketchum and Wes Craven’s horror cult-classic
“The Hills Have Eyes” – about an American family being stalked by mutant cannibals in
the Nevada desert. Even though Sawney Bean and his clan were
(thankfully) a product of fiction, the ripples of his dark legend have the power to make
us feel just a little bit queasy even today. Thanks for watching this episode of The Infographics
Show! You may have lost your appetite for food,
but if you have an appetite for more insane cannibal facts, you should watch “Did This
Cannibal Couple Eat 30 People?” and “Could You Survive An Emergency By Eating Your Family?” And remember: If ever you’re in Scotland,
maybe give the local sea caves a wide berth.
