Alexander "Sawney" Bean was said to be the head of a
45-member clan in Scotland in the 16th century that murdered and
cannibalized over 1,000 people in the span of 25 years. According to
legend, Bean and his clan members would eventually be caught by a search
party sent by King James VI, and were executed for their heinous crimes.
The story appeared in The Newgate Calendar, a crime catalogue of Newgate
Prison in London. The legend lacks sufficient evidence to be deemed as
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 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 and Bean
tried to take up the family trade, but quickly realized 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 182.88 meters deep, and the entrance was
blocked by water during high tide, so the couple were able to live there
undiscovered for some 25 years.
Sawney and Agnes produced eight sons, six daughters, 18 grandsons and 14
granddaughters. Various 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. The
clan 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 travelers.
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 more
significantly, 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 lynched 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 fateful night, the Bean clan ambushed a married couple riding from a
fayre on one horse, but the man was skilled in combat, thus he deftly
held off the clan with sword and pistol. The Bean clan fatally mauled
the wife when she fell to the ground in the conflict. 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 with some body parts hanging from the wall,
barrels filled with limbs, and piles of stolen heirlooms and jewellery.
There were two versions on what happened next:
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. In contrast, women convicted of the same were
burned.
There was 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 eventually left the clan and settled in
Girvan where she planted a Dule 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.
There is a debate over the validity of the Sawney Bean tale. Some people
believe that Sawney Bean was a real person, while others think he was
just a mythical figure. Dorothy L. Sayers offered a gruesome account of
the Sawney Bean tale in her anthology Great Short Stories of Detection,
Mystery and Horror (Gollancz, 1928. The book was a best-seller in
Britain, reprinted seven times in the next five years.) A 2005 article
by Sean Thomas notes that historical documents, such as newspapers and
diaries during the era in which Sawney Bean was supposedly active, make
no mention of ongoing disappearances of hundreds of people.
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