Early in his life, Sawney realized that he doesn’t have a taste for honest labor and left his home to get married to an atrocious woman who apparently shared the same “taste” for food.
The couple settled their home at Bennane Cave, by Ballantrae in Ayrshire, Scotland. The entrance of the cave was usually flooded twice a day at high tide. Inside, the cave had many tunnels and passages. The couple remained there for 25 years, together with their 14 children and 22 grandchildren – many of them products of incest.
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| Entrance to Snib Scotts cave Bennane Head Ayrshire #Scotland Pinterest |
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| Sawney Bean at the Entrance of His Cave. Note the woman in the background carrying a dismembered leg. photo: wikipedia |
Since the Beans didn’t know honest work, they robbed strangers in the evenings, killing them and dragging the bodies into the cave where they were dismembered and eaten. Leftovers were pickled, and discarded body parts would sometimes wash up on nearby beaches. The missing people and body parts were of course noticed by the local villagers, but nobody could suppose that murders lived in the nearby cave which entrance was flooded.
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| Snib Torbett's Cave at Bennane Lea Wikimedia Commons |
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| After a monstrous crime spree that lasted twenty-five unimaginable years, the Bean family had murdered so many people that King James VI of Scotland put together a manhunt to track down the culprits. When their remote cave home was finally uncovered, the inside was reportedly littered with the remains of over one thousand people. photo: gorgon-video.com |
As the family grew bigger and bigger, so did their appetite, and they murdered more and more people. Once, as an elderly couple was returning from a fair, the Bean family attacked them and as they struggled, a group of 20 more people also returning from the fair came by. The Beans managed to mutilate the body of the woman but there were 20 witnesses and a husband who went before the Chief Magistrate of Glasgow.
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| Sawney Bean Inside Cave |
After hearing what happened it was easy to connect the long list of missing persons and mysterious pickled body parts with the attackers. King James I himself went to Ayrshire with a small army of four hundred men and a pack of tracker dogs, and together with a band of local volunteers, launched one of the biggest manhunts the country had ever seen. What they didn’t expect to see is what they found in the cave with the help of the dogs.
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| James I Biography, Religion, & Facts Britannica |
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| Cave clan Sawney Bean in Ayshire photo: dailyrecord.co.uk |
The Bean family fought but couldn’t win against the King’s army, so all the members were arrested and marched off to Edinburgh by the King himself.
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| Sawney Bean » Tales of Crime |
Even the justice system didn’t have a suitable punishment for the Bean family, so they were all sentenced to death. In the name of justice, the entire family faced the same fate as their victims – their legs and arms were cut off and they were left to slowly bleed to death, watched by their women. The women were burned like witches in huge fires.
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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Thevintagenews . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
Do you have an opinion on the veracity of this story? I think they probably did kill and cannibalize strangers, but I don't think it was 1000 victims. That seems like it might have been exaggerated over time.
ReplyDeleteThe wikipedia link you shared mentioned a 1-year-old baby in that clan who was adopted by an unrelated family but who apparently was put to death at age 12 for killing and eating people. This makes me wonder if that family had some sort of hereditary mental illness or something that gave them the compulsion to do this.
What do you think?
First of all thanks for sharing, any story or myth has a grain of truth, in this case I tend to think it is quite true since King James himself went to Ayrshire with a small group of people and managed to arrest and convict them
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