Further Reading for Sawney Bean & The Princes in the Tower
Sawney Bean: Dissecting the Legend of the Scottish Cannibal
The Survival of the Princes in the Tower: Murder, Mystery and Myth
Info
If it wasn’t for the legend of the Sawney Bean tribe, we’d have no Texas Chainsaw Massacre. There would be no The Hills Have Eyes. The great American horror movie trope of hillbilly psychos that operate outside of the social margins would never be. It’s a real doozy but the bummer of the entire affair is that it’s actually unlikely that Sawney Bean was a real person and the entire story was made up to smear the Scots.
So the story goes, Alexander Sawney Bean, was a loathsome Scottish dude with a wife and children that allegedly moved into a cave off the Scottish coast. At low tide, Bean, wife, and his awful brood of children would cross the channel from their cave lair and hijack passers on the nearby highway. They were robbed, murdered, and then said to have been taken back to the cave, butchered and eaten.
The Bean clan evaded capture because their cave was only accessible at low tide and locals considered the location impractical for a lair, so they left it alone for as long as they did. During that time, the Bean clan engaged in every kind of awful act you can think of. They kept their numbers strong though incest, they ate their victims. In the end, they’re eventually found out and a manhunt 400 strong tracked them to their cave and arrested them. One ending has them being executed without trial, being butchered and then having their severed body parts cast into a fire. Another has the entrance of the cave blasted shut with explosives, leaving the Bean clan to suffocate in darkness.
Episode: 22
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