Sawney Beane (????-1435?) was a legendary leader of Scottish family of cannibals in the 15th century. Many historians consider him entirely mythical figure. Different accounts of his life have him living anywhere from the late 12th to early 17th centuries.
How much of Beane's tale is a fact and how much a legend is hard to say. Supposedly Sawney Beane (or Bean) was born in East Lothian, Scotland, to a ditchdigger's family during the reign of James I of England. He eloped with a woman (according to one version, she was a witch called Black Agnes Douglas) to the Scottish wilderness and moved to a seashore cave in the Galloway county. The cave reached 200 yards into the rock and during the high tide the entrance was blocked by water. It is supposed to be the cave now called Bennane Cave, in Ballantrae in Ayshire. There they are told to have lived undiscovered for twenty-five years.
At first, Beane and his wife supported themselves as brigands by waylaying and murdering travelers, stealing their money and hoarding their valuables. They used only the money they took from their victims because valuables could be more easily recognized. But as the population of the Beanes' little cave grew, with the two of them having children, and then later, the children interbreeding amongst themselves, the meager proceeds from highway robbery were not enough to sustain the growing clan. So rather than waste the bodies of his victims, Beane fed himself and his family on them.
There is not agreement about the numbers of their victims.
The large amount of missing people aroused suspicion and various people tried to find the culprits. Investigators either found nothing - or became new victims. Sometimes locals found remains Beanes had thrown away. Locals reputedly lynched various supposedly suspicious but innocent strangers but the disappearances continued. Also reputedly so many innkeepers fell under suspicion that those who escaped the vigilante justice moved elsewhere.
The implausibility of four dozen people — said to be the number of the entire inbred Beane clan at the time of their eventual capture — evading capture for a quarter century has sown the seed of skepticism amongst many historians. At some point, the disappearances along the particular stretch of land near the Beanes' cave, which must have numbered in the thousands, would have had to lead to some intense investigation of the area. According to the story, mass searches of missing victims were conducted, but for some reason, no one ever thought to look in the cave along the coast.
Eventually Beanes were found out when they ambushed (unnamed) man and wife riding alone back from a county fair. The man fought back with his sword and pistol but Beanes dragged the wife down and butchered her on the spot. Fortunately a number of other people were returning from the same fair, spotted the struggle and proceeded to help. Outnumbered Beanes beat a hasty retreat.
Man was taken to Glasgow to tell his tale and local magistrate sent a message to the king asking for help. Couple of days later the king himself arrived to the scene of crime with four hundred soldiers and a number of bloodhounds.
The dogs found the cave, presumably because of the stench, and soldiers went in. There they faced the Beane clan, their loot and a spectacle of thousands of body parts hanging from the ceiling or pickled in barrels of salt. Soldiers captured all Beanes after a brief struggle and took them to Tollbooth in Edinburgh and later to Leith. At the time of discovery, Beane clan consisted of 48 people.
King did not brother with any kind of trial. The day after their arrival the whole group was executed. Males were dismembered alive. Females were immolated in three bonfires.
Whatever the truth of the Sawney Beane story, the grim legend has entered the folklore of the British Isles.
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The Sawney Beane tale has directly inspired at least two horror films: Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes, which has a family menaced by a cannibal clan in the Americann desert; and Gary Sherman's Raw Meat, aka Deathline, in which the Sawney character is a derelict living in the London Underground subway tunnels. There is a Sawney Beane display in the London Dungeon wax museum.
