The episode embarks on a harrowing exploration of the legend of Alexander Sawney Bean, a purported patriarch of a clan of cannibals in 16th century Scotland. This tale, steeped in horror, recounts how Bean and his family allegedly committed unspeakable atrocities, including the murder and consumption of over a thousand victims, all while residing in a concealed sea cave. As we delve into the historical underpinnings and the dubious sources that propagate this narrative, we confront the unsettling question of its veracity. While the gruesome details have captivated audiences for centuries, we reveal that there exists no substantial historical evidence to substantiate these claims. Ultimately, we contend that the legend of Sawney Bean serves as a profound reflection of societal fears and the impact of political propaganda, rather than a factual account of historical events.

Hosts: Michael and Alana are professional historians with a passion for bringing the most captivating and often overlooked criminal events of the past to light. ✨

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Takeaways:

• In the 16th century, the tale of Sawney Bean emerged as a dark legend, illustrating the brutality of a cannibalistic clan.
• The historical basis for the Sawney Bean legend is tenuous, with no substantial evidence supporting its authenticity.
• The story of Sawney Bean reflects the political tensions between Scotland and England during the 18th century, serving as propaganda.
• The gruesome narrative of the Bean clan has influenced modern horror, demonstrating society's fascination with transgression and monstrosity.
• The legend's origins are believed to be rooted in older folklore, repurposed for political purposes amid historical upheaval.
• Despite its dubious historical validity, the Sawney Bean tale has become a significant part of Scottish cultural identity and tourism.

Welcome to history's Greatest crimes.

I'm Michael.

And I'm Elena.

In this episode, we travel back to the rugged, windswept coast of 16th century Scotland to a a place of shadows, sea mist and secrets.

We're exploring a story that has been whispered in taverns and told around firesides for centuries.

It's a tale so gruesome, so utterly depraved, that it almost defies belief.

This is the legend of Alexander Sawney.

Bean, the patriarch of a 48 member clan of incestuous cannibals who, forgotten for a quarter of a century, waged a secret war against civilization from a hidden sea cave, murdering and devouring more than a thousand men, women and children.

It's a story that has inspired horror films and haunted the Scottish tourism industry for generations.

But as we'll discover, the most terrifying part of this story isn't the cannibalism.

It's the question of whether any of it ever happened at all.

Our story about Sawney Bean as it has been passed down is set in the tumultuous 16th century.

But before we really dig into that story itself, let's briefly discuss the main source.

That's a good idea, Michael, because the primary source itself is almost as creepy as the story it told.

The first source to popularly introduce the story was the infamous British Newgate Calendar, also commonly known as the Malefactors Bloody Register.

But over the course of the later 18th and early 19th centuries, the Bulletin was appropriated by other publishers who started putting out short biographies about notorious criminals.

Many of the biographies held some degree of truth, but the capitalistic ambitions of the publishers encouraged them to sensationalize them and present them as moralizing stories about sin, crime and criminals who committed them in the 18th and 19th centuries.

In other words, the story about Sawney being the focus of our episode today should probably be taken with a grain of salt.

Correct?

But as noted, the story about Sawney Bean offers an interesting lens through which to view the history of Scotland and its evolving relationship with England and the broader British Empire.

But first, let's recount our listeners with the story of Sawney Bean.

My pleasure, Elena.

Alexander Bean was born in East Lothian, a County about 8 or 9 miles eastward of the city of Edinburgh.

His father was a simple, hard working man.

He was a ditch digger and hedge trimmer by trade trade who tried to raise his son to follow in his footsteps.

But young Sawney, as He was called, was not built for an honest life.

The accounts describe him as having a idle, vicious and pilfering disposition.

He detested the toil of his father's trade and soon abandoned it in his home in search of a different path.

But he didn't walk that path alone.

He found a kindred spirit in a woman named Black Agnes Douglas.

It's unclear whether Black Agnes was called such because she had a dark complexion or because she was suspected of being a witch.

That's right, Michael.

By all accounts, Agnes was a fearsome woman, as viciously inclined as Sawney Bean.

Some versions of the legend even claim that she had been cast out of her own community for her dark practices.

So this outcast pair, Sawney and Agnes together, turned their backs on society entirely.

They journeyed west across the breadth of Scotland until they reached a wild and sparsely populated coast of Galloway, located off the coast of Scotland's inner seas.

It was here, near the modern day town of Ballantry, that they discovered their new home.

A deep, dark sea cave at a place called Benane Head.

This was no ordinary cave.

It was a subterranean fortress, perfect for their purposes.

The legends claim its tunnels reached through the solid rock, extending for more than a mile in length.

More importantly, its entrance possessed a unique and formidable defense.

Twice a day at high tide, the churning waters of the north channel would surge into the cave, flooding the first 200 yards and completely sealing it off from the outside world.

It was a layer that was both hidden and impenetrable.

Here, utterly isolated from civilization, Sanni and Agnes began their new life.

But a life of isolation still requires sustenance.

Having rejected honest labor, Sawney turned to the only trade he knew.

Theft.

He began to ambush lone travelers on the desolate coastal roads, robbing them of their money and possessions.

But this violent enterprise created a dangerous problem.

It left witnesses.

Sawney's solution was as ruthlessly logical as it was monstrous.

To ensure there were no survivors to report his crimes, he resolved to murder every person he robbed.

This, in turn, presented another grim dilemma.

What to do with the bodies?

The answer, as recorded in the lurid pages of the Nougat calendar and other chapbooks, was one of pure pragmatic horror.

To dispose of the evidence and to feed themselves in their remote hideaway.

So Sawney and Agnes began to butcher and eat their victims.

The legend of the cannibal clan had begun.

For a quarter of a century, the Bean clan lived and bred in the darkness of Benane Cave.

Their existence a secret kept by the tides and their own Brutality.

And apparently, Sawney and Agnes were prolific.

They produced eight sons and six daughters.

This first generation knowing no world beyond the cave and no law.

But their fathers then bred with one another, an ongoing cycle of incest that swelled their numbers.

Soon the clan consisted of 18 grandsons and 14 granddaughters.

They were a feral army, 48 strong, bound by blood and a shared horrific secret.

Their survival depended on the hunt.

The accounts described their attacks as operating with a terrifying efficiency, almost with military precision.

At night, they would emerge from their cave and lie in ambush along the coastal roads, sometimes targeting a lone traveler, other times a group of up to half a dozen people.

Their sheer numbers ensured that escape was all but impossible.

No one was ever alive to tell the tale.

The victims were then dragged back to the cave where the truly unspeakable work began.

The bodies were dismembered and eaten.

Years later, when a search party finally discovered the cave, they found by torchlight.

The a scene of unimaginable depravity.

One account describes it as such body parts hanging from the walls, barrels filled with limbs and piles of stolen heirlooms and jewelry.

Another notes that the family would pickle the leftovers in brine, preserving the human flesh for leaner times.

The evidence of their crimes would sometimes find its way back to the civilized world.

Pickled limbs and other curiously preserved but decaying body parts were discovered washed up on the surrounding beaches.

These grisly discoveries, combined with a steadily rising number of missing persons, spread terror throughout Galloway.

The local authorities were baffled.

They launched massive searches.

But no one ever considered that the waterlogged cave at Benane Cave could be the human dwelling.

In their frustration and desperation for justice, the townspeople began to turn on one another.

Suspicion often fell on the local innkeepers, as they were frequently the last people known to have seen the missing travelers alive.

Several innocent people were accused, tried and hanged for the clan's crimes.

A tragic misdirection that only allowed the beans to continue their slaughter unimpeded.

The legend claims that over their 25 year reign, the Bean clan murdered and consumed more than 1,000 people.

That's quite a number.

The clan's isolation was also so complete, their methods so brutal, that they might have continued their secret war on this world indefinitely.

But their downfall came, as it so often does in these tales, from a single mistake, a single survivor.

One night, the clan ambushed a husband and wife returning from a local fair, both riding on a single horse.

But this time, their intended victim was not so helpless.

The man, the husband, was skilled in combat, armed with both a sword and.

A pistol, he fought back with a ferocity born of desperation.

As he battled the male members of the clan, the women swarmed his wife, dragging her from the horse.

He was forced to watch in horror as they stripped and disemboweled her, and in a frenzy, began to devour her raw flesh on the spot.

Fueled by rage and grief, the man redoubled his efforts, driving his horse into the attackers, fighting for his life.

Just as he was about to be overwhelmed, fate intervened.

A large group of other fair goers, some 30 or 40 strong, came upon the bloody scene.

And for the first time in their history, the Bean clan found themselves outnumbered.

They broke up the attack and fled back to the darkness of their cave.

But they left behind a mutilated corpse, a score of witnesses, and one man who had seen their faces and lived to tell the tale.

The secret was out.

The lone survivor was taken before the chief magistrate of Glasgow.

When the authorities heard his harrowing account, they finally understood the true nature of the horror that had plagued their region for a generation.

The years of disappearances, the strange body parts washing ashore, it all coalesced into a single monstrous truth.

The news of this cannibal clan was so shocking, so beyond the pale of normal criminality, that it was brought to the attention of the king himself, James VI of Scotland.

King James was a monarch deeply invested in the project of civilizing his kingdom.

He was known for his determination to impose law and order, especially in the more unruly parts of Scotland, like the Borders and the Highlands.

It was those unruly parts of Scotland, as he called them, that actually created the background for Shakespeare's Macbeth, Particularly outside of Scotland, the regions were described as dark, dreary, damp, and full of witchcraft and debauchery.

Official documents from King James reign describe the people of the Highlands as void of the knowledge and faith of God, who were prone to all kind of barbarous and bestial cruelties.

End quote.

This negative image of Scotland was largely based on biased English perspectives.

Being located right next to each other, Scotland and England were old enemies.

Under King James I, he sought to unite the two kingdoms.

But this was a slow process, and memories of past violence and biases lingered for quite some time, which contributed to anti Scottish views in England and vice versa.

And now, according to the reports, there was a large group of murdering cannibals that was causing trouble up in Scotland.

Exactly.

And that was antithetical to the King's goal of uniting the two crowns of Scotland and England.

And perhaps more importantly, the existence of a 48 member cannibal family operating with impunity was an affront to the King's authority that could not be tolerated.

He took personal charge of the manhunt.

The King assembled a formidable force, a posse of 400 armed men.

He personally led this army to the Galloway coast.

Determined to eradicate the monstrous clan, they scoured the coastline, the same ground that had been searched fruitlessly so many times before.

But this time was different.

This time they brought the bloodhounds.

As the search party passed the cave at Benane Head, the dogs went wild.

And picking up the overwhelming scent of decaying human flesh that emanated from within.

The soldiers holding torches aloft, cautiously entered the waterlogged cave.

What they found inside confirmed their worst fears.

The clan was there, surrounded by the grisly evidence of their crimes.

The limbs hanging from the walls, the barrels of pickled remains and the piles of their victims plundered belongings.

The beings caught completely by surprise in their subterranean lair were vastly outnumbered and overwhelmed.

They were captured without a significant fight.

All 48 members of the clan Sawney, Agnes, their children and their grandchildren were put in chains.

They were marched to Edinburgh and imprisoned in the city's notorious Tolbooth Jail.

The nature of their crimes were considered so uniquely heinous that the authorities dispensed with the formalities of a trial.

Their guilt was taken as self evident.

Justice was to be swift, as it was brutal, as their own savagery was.

The very next day, the entire clan was taken to Leith for a public execution.

The 27 men of the clan suffered a fate mirroring that of their victims.

Their hands and feet were cut off and they were left to bleed to death in full view of the watching crowd and their own families.

The 21 women, including Agnes and all the daughters and granddaughters, were then burned alive in three massive bonfires.

The customary punishment for witches, they reportedly screamed and cursed until the very end.

Justice in its most terrible and final form had been served.

The monsters of Benane Cave were dead.

The story was over.

It would be a neat, if horrifying end to our story, except for one very large, very inconvenient fact.

There is absolutely no historical evidence that any of this actually happened.

So if Sawney Bean and his clients clan were responsible for one of history's greatest crime sprees, where's the proof?

That's the question that has troubled historians for centuries.

The short answer is there really isn't any.

In the early 20th century, the respected Scottish historian and amateur criminologist William Rookied spent years looking for Sawney in the official records of the time, including contemporary journals, diaries and memoirs.

His conclusion?

He failed to find, either in print or in manuscript, the slightest mention of the man.

The entire story, he determined, had to be a myth.

And when you start to look at the details, the myth quickly unravels.

Let's start with the sheer scale of the operation.

The legend claims A family of 48 people lived in a single cave for 25 years.

They supposedly murdered and ate over 1,000 victims.

That's an average of 40 people a year every year for a quarter of a century.

Even in the 16th century, Galway was not an unpopulated wilderness.

While the population density was low compared to today, it was still a region of towns, farms and trade routes.

The disappearance of over a thousand people would have been a demographic catastrophe.

The legend itself admits as much, claiming the whole country was almost depopulated by their actions.

An event of that magnitude, of a localized apocalypse even would have left an indelible scar on the historical record.

But there's nothing.

And it's not as if we lack records from that period.

The National Records of Scotland holds sheriff court records that survive from the 16th century, including those for the regions in question.

We have the records of the parliaments of Scotland, which detail the business of the kingdom.

A royal expedition led by King James vi himself, with 400 men to hunt down a clan of cannibals would have been a major state affair.

It would have required funding, royal decrees, even logistical planning, all of which would have generated a mountain of paperwork.

Yet not a single document has ever been found.

So if the story didn't originate in 16th century Scotland, where did it come from?

Well, as we discussed towards the beginning of this episode, the 18th century London was obsessed with chapbooks, which were cheap skills, sensationalized pamphlets that were basically the equivalent of today's tabloid newspapers.

One source, the nougat calendar, sought to bring together these wildly popular collection of moralizing stories about sin, crime and criminals.

These publications were notorious for their lurid details and were often highly embellished to create maximum shock value and sell copies.

The story of Sawney Bean, with its blend of murder, cannibalism and incest, was perfectly suited for this market.

And these stories weren't just limited to criminals and murderers in England and Scotland.

As we had mentioned in our previous episodes about Pirates.

And although it's entirely possible that multiple people wrote under the pen name of Captain Charles Johnson, the fact remains it was also highly embellished.

These were not sober historical texts.

They were commercial entertainment, the true crime podcasts of their day, if you will.

So the story of Sawney Bean itself is riddled with the kinds of inconsistencies that are hallmarks of folklore, not history.

And of course, as the story proliferated over the years, it gained new and different details in different versions.

A broken telephone, if you will.

This chronological confusion makes it impossible to pin down historically, but it makes perfect sense if the story is a legend adapted and retold over time with little regard for.

For factual accuracy.

If the story of Sawny Bean is a fabrication, the next question is why?

Why invent such a monstrous tale?

The answer, many historians now believe, lies not in the annals of crime, but in the realm of political propaganda.

The timing of the story's appearance is the crucial clue.

It doesn't emerge in the 16th century, when the events supposedly happen, but.

But in the early 18th century, a period of profound political tensions between England and Scotland.

This was the era of the Jacobite rebellions.

This was part of the Glorious Revolution, during which the English Parliament kicked another King James off the throne due to his absolutist tendencies in Catholic faith.

In fact, when William first arrived in England, he proclaimed the that the liberties of England and the Protestant religion.

I will maintain for historical context, we.

Should mention that while the Protestant Reformation was old news, by this time in the late 17th century, the division between Catholics and Protestants was still intense, if not more than it had been a century earlier.

By this time, England had shifted back and forth a few times between adherence to the Roman Catholic Church or the Church of England, depending on the king or queen of the time.

And now, with the Catholic King James II gone and William and Mary Protestants in his place, it seemed to ensure a Protestant future for England.

Not surprisingly, some people saw this arrangement as far from completely settled.

Supporters of the exiled Stuart King James II were known as Jacobites.

The name Jacobite derives from Jacobus, Latin for James.

And the core goal of the Jacobites was to reinstate the former King James and his descendants, who they believed ruled by divine right, by the will of God.

Interestingly, while the Jacobites were often associated with Catholicism due to their support for the Catholic Stuart dynasty, the movement was not exclusively Catholic.

In Ireland, most Jacobites were indeed Catholic, but in England and Scotland, most were Anglicans or Presbyterians.

They thought Scotland should remain its own kingdom, not subsumed by England.

The former King James was living in exile in France, where King Louis XIV had recognized him as the rightful heir to the British throne.

And King James had a son, an heir named James Francis Edward Stuart, who could continue the Stuart dynasty.

The government in London responded with brutal military force each time.

And those who fled or were found to be somehow connected to the uprisings were.

Were ruthlessly hunted down.

English leaders executed prisoners, they burned their settlements and seized their livestock.

But the English government leaders knew that it wasn't enough to just physically put down the rebellion.

To truly stop the Jacobite cause, they had to fully vilify the culture connected to it.

So, in addition to military force, the English also carried out a sophisticated, ambitious propaganda campaign.

As historian Dr. Louise Yeoman and others have Documented English propaganda from this period systematically portrayed the Scots, particularly those living in the Highland clans who formed the backbone of the Jacobite armies, as savages, as primitive and uncivilized barbarians.

Tales of Scottish cannibalism were a recurring theme in this propaganda, a way to dehumanize the enemy and justify the brutal suppression.

And the name of the monster Sawney Bean is perhaps the most damning piece of evidence.

The nickname Sawney was a common and deeply derogatory English slang term for a scotsman in the 18th century.

It was the equivalent of a racial slur used in political cartoons and pamphlets to mock the Scots.

So a story about a cannibalistic monster named Sawney, the story Scott, first published in London during the height of the Jacobite threat, starts to look less like a random piece of folklore and more like a targeted political attack.

The story was a dig at the Scots, a people the English believed were so barbarous that only they, the Scots, could produce such a monster like Sawney, a person who lived in a cave and ate people.

It painted the Scots and their Jacobite cause as fundamentally other, a threat to the civilized Protestant English and their Hanoverian kings.

But what's really interesting is that the 18th century authors who crafted the Sawney Bean legend as anti Scottish propaganda likely didn't invent it from whole cloth.

They seem to have repurposed an even older, authentic Scottish legend.

Later versions of the story identify him as a butcher from Perth who, with a band of scavengers, resorted to cannibalism, used a clique or a long hook to drag travelers from their horses.

It was the location of the primary royal residence and center of government for the Scottish monarchy.

The parallels between this earlier story and the later Sawney Bean story are unmistakable.

A Scottish cannibal who preys on travelers during time of hardship.

It appears that the English writers of the 18th century took this genuine, if obscure, piece of Scottish folklore and moved the location to the remote coast of Galloway, gave the protagonist a derogatory Scottish nickname, and set the story during the reign of the famous Scottish king, James I, to add a veneer of historical credibility.

The result was a masterpiece of propaganda.

It took a Scottish horror story and turned it back on the Scots themselves, transforming it into a political weapon.

It was a narrative designed to reinforce a specific that the Scots were savages, a threat to the stability of the newly formed Great Britain, and that they needed to be controlled and civilized by a strong central English led government.

The crime of Sawney Bean wasn't cannibalism.

It was a character assassination of an entire, entire nation.

So the greatest crime in this story of Sawney Bean was most likely not a string of murders.

Murders but the crime of libel.

A piece of political propaganda masquerading as a folk tale.

And yet the legend of Sawney Bean refuses to die.

In a strange twist of history, it's probably more famous today than it was in the 18th century.

It has a surprisingly potent modern legacy, particularly in the world of horror.

He came across the Legend of Sawney Bean and was captivated by the idea of a feral inbred family living in the desolate wilderness, preying on civilized travelers.

He updated the setting from the Scottish coast to the American desert and added a layer of Cold War anxiety about nuclear fallout.

The result was the iconic horror classic, the Hills have Eyes.

6 and in an even greater irony, the story has been enthusiastically reappropriated by Scotland itself.

The very legend that was likely created to defame the Scots has become a lucrative part of their tourism industry.

That's right, Michael.

The tale of Sawney Bean is a staple of the Edinburgh Dungeon, a popular and ghoulish tourist attraction.

Tour guides on the Ayrshire coast point out the supposed location of Sawney Bean's cave.

The monster invented to slander Scotland has become one of its most famous and marketable boogeymen.

The endurance of this story tells us something powerful about our own culture.

We have a seemingly bottomless appetite for tales of transgression.

The more taboo the subject, cannibalism, incest, mass murder, the more fascinated we become.

The fear of the savage other that lives just beyond the fringes of our well ordered civilized world.

In the end, the tale of Sawney Bean is not of this a story of the 16th century cannibal.

It's a story of an 18th century political smear campaign and it's the story of our own 21st century fascination with the dark, the depraved and the monstrous.

A crime that in all likelihood, never happened.

And it has become one of the history's most unforgettable and greatest crimes.

Thanks for joining us today on History's Greatest crimes.

If you like our work, don't forget to follow us and become a subscriber.

I'm Michael.

And I'm Alaina.

Until next time, stay curious.

Sam.