“According to legend, Sawney Beane was a fifteenth-century Scottish peasant who grew fed up with farming and turned to highway robbery. With his hard-bitten common law wife, he holed up in a seaside cavern on the Galloway coast and sired a large brood of children. Eventually, through incestuous mating, the family swelled to forty-eight members, who subsisted by preying on unwary travelers, devouring their flesh, and pickling the leftover meat in seawater” (Schechter & Everitt, p.54).
The number of victims remains unknown, but estimates are close to 1,000 people who have fallen prey to this vicious clan. Locals were ill-prepared for the truth when they assumed people were being eaten by a pack of wolves, or some supernatural creature…only to find that it was a family who had been hunting, killing, and eating the lost/disappeared.
But how did they find out? Well, let’s go into the story a bit more and learn how this family was captured. Or IF they were captured…
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For this episode, I gathered as many agreed upon facts as I could, to relay the story. However, are those agreed upon facts actually facts? Or fable? You decide.
Join us tomorrow for Part 2 - where Brittany (from Where the Weird Things Are Podcast ) and I will do a deep dive discussion about the case, the people involved, the holes that have been poked in this story throughout history, our thoughts regarding nature vs nurture, and much more. Tune in and join the conversation on Facebook!
Until next time; stay inside, stay alive.