The Legend of Sawney Bean

Have you seen the movie, The Hills Have Eyes? Did you think it was a work of pure fiction? What if I told you that the basis for the story was based on a real person? That person was Sawney Bean.

Alexander “Sawney” Bean was born in East Lothian during the reign of James VI of Scotland (also known as James I of England) sometime around the end of the 16th century. His father was a ditch digger and a hedge trimmer, and while Sawney tried to follow in his father’s footsteps, he soon realized he had very little taste for hard labor.

His father beat him for not being a good son. He wasn’t a good worker and wouldn’t make a good family man. So when Sawney met Agnes Douglas, a woman who was very much like him, the couple married and they fled society to live as they wished.

They found a sea cave known as Bennane Cave on the Ayrshire coast and decided to make it home. Bennane Cave was a 660ft deep cave with tunnels penetrating the solid rock and many side passages in which the couple could create rooms for their children. In addition, the entrance to the cave was flooded twice a day, during high tide.

Sawney had no skilled trade, so in order to support wife, he took to robbery. It was a simple task, with the quiet roads that connected the different villages in the area. He would ambush travelers and take their things. But then it occurred to him, that in order to mask his identity and hide his crimes, he would have to kill his victims.

Then, there was the trouble of evidence and having to hide the bodies. At that time, he decided the best plan would be to butcher and eat the bodies. Human meat would provide him and his wife a high protein diet, which seemed to be a good plan, as it wasn’t long before Agnes started producing healthy babies. Fourteen healthy babies to be exact.

As the children grew up, they lived off the same diet of human flesh. Then, as they came of age, and through means of incest, they began to produce children of their own. Over the course of 20 or more years, generations grew up in Bennane Cave. Not only did they build and refine their skills of murder, robbery and cannibalism, but they also began to salt and pickle the flesh of their victims.

Searches were conducted by authorities to locate the numerous missing people, or their murderers, but no one ever thought to search the cave. The missing persons list was huge!

One evening, as the Bean family attacked a man and his wife who were traveling home from a nearby fair, something went wrong. One group pulled the woman from her horse and had her stripped and disemboweled before the other group had even had the chance to wrestle the man to the ground. He fought, driving his horse over and onto his attackers. It made such a ruckus that a group of twenty or so people, also returning home from the fair, came to see what was going on.

For the first time ever, the family found themselves outnumbered, and promptly retreated back to their home inside the cave, leaving behind the mutilated body of the woman and her angry husband.

The husband was taken before the Chief Magistrate of Glasgow, who decided to take the matter straight to the top. King James I promptly traveled to Ayrshire with four hundred men and a pack of tracker dogs, set to find the culprits of this heinous crime.

The search extended through the Ayrshire countryside and up the coastline. Nothing was discovered, until the dogs picked up the scent of decaying human flesh near a flooded cave.

By torchlight, the troops entered Bennane cave and proceeded down the mile-long twisted passage toward the Bean family home. The walls of the cave were strewn with row upon row of human limbs and body parts, like meat hanging in a butchers shop. They found bundles of clothing, piles of watches and jewelry in other areas, as well as discarded bones.

The fight was brief, and ultimately the entire Bean family, forty-eight in total, were arrested and marched off to Edinburgh by the King himself. The King declared their crimes so heinous, that the justice system was abandoned, and the entire family was sentenced to death.

The following day, the twenty-seven men of the Bean family met their fate, by having their legs and arms cut off, and being left to slowly bleed to death. The twenty-one women were then burned at the stake, like witches, in huge fires.

Sawney Bean isn’t the only famous cannibal in history. Of course there was Jeffrey Dahmer, but have you also heard what James Jameson, heir to the Jameson Irish Whiskey empire did?