The terrible story of Sawney Beane

Scotland, the birthplace of the legendary William Wallace has all kinds of stories, but there is one that overcomes all the horrible images, the terrible story of Sawney Beane and his clan of cannibals, a group that terrorized the people of Galloway County during the 25th The details are really disturbing and we will omit a good part of them focusing our attention on history, suffice it to say that it is a real case and a document that can cause concern among the Scots, despite the centuries that have passed since then.

Sawney Bean was born in the county of East Lothian during the sixteenth century, under the reign of James VI of Scotland. The parents have not been wrong in anything. One day Sawney ran away from his house with a woman, those who have decided he had certain "strange inclinations", and together they left in the direction of the coast of Gallway County. That was the last news that his parents had of him, and nobody saw them again approaching any city or town.

It was not strange that some travelers were lost, partly due to the robbers and partly to the best savages, and during the time nobody related the disappearances to each other. But these facts were even more, even disappearing people from the most remote areas of the western region of the county. The transport of the roads was not safe or less than it traveled in groups greater than ten people, having "lost" and some smaller groups. Of course, nobody dared to travel at night, no matter how armed or accompanied we were. Mistrust causes some travelers to become uselessly innocent, guilty of having buried the bodies in remote and secret places.

Some sections of the western highway of Scotland that connect with the Southwestern region of Galloway remained closed during two years, with the hope that the people or animals that caused it died of hunger or were forced to look for another place of hunting. This measure, far from solving the problem, only increased the horror of the situation when the most recent corpses of some cemeteries began to disappear.

In some cases they disappeared completely and in others some parts; This led to the idea that perhaps they were facing witches or Devil worshipers who ate human flesh. There was another wave of arrests, trials and executions by hanging, but they did not put an end to these atrocities. Many of the judges and magistrates came to ensure that crimes could never be stopped by human means, and that God's intervention would be necessary to do so. No one knew anything about the perpetrators, let alone the fate of their victims, about 1,000 (between men, women and children) over 25 years.

One day a man and his wife were traveling back from a trade fair during the Autumn, both riding the same horse and passing close by the area of ​​disappearances. Before realizing what was happening they were surrounded by a large group of men and women of different ages, who attacked them with unusual fierceness. Thanks to the traveler's sword and pistol he was able to cope with part of the group, but his wife fell from the horse during the fray and was captured by the attackers, who quickly took her out of reach of her husband.

Using the horse as a battering ram, the traveler managed to escape from the attack and seriously injure several of them, as well as provoke the escape of the others. Then he pursued them in search of his wife but could only find part of his body along the way. As terrified as he was enraged, he went in search of the authorities to help him hunt down those responsible, and when King James VI learned what was happening he sent a force of 400 soldiers to search.

With the help of the traveler to give them a point to start the search and accompanied by hounds, the soldiers came to the west coast and began to sweep every cave or nook where a human could hide. Finally the hounds found an opening in the rock that faced a dark tunnel, so the soldiers decided to go inside to explore. Before finding those responsible for the disappearances, the soldiers contemplated in a vault inside a terrifying spectacle of human limbs hanging from the ceiling and innumerable bones that carpeted the ground. On one side of the cavern was a huge mountain of belongings of the disappeared, gold, swords, pistols, rings and clothes of all kinds and sizes, which had accumulated during the 25 years of their human hunts.

Those responsible for such atrocity were identified as Sawney Beane and his wife, in the company of their six children, six daughters, eighteen grandchildren and fourteen granddaughters, product of incestuous relationships. It was also observed that they did not speak any specific language, but communicated with a primitive system of guttural sounds and gestures.

Members of the Beane family were locked in Tolbooth until all their victims were found and buried, after which they were transferred to a fortress in Leith where they were executed without trial. The men of the clan were dismembered and executed while the women perished at the stake. This was the end of one of the biggest episodes of crimes that Scotland has lived.