Fine Young Cannibal: The Story of Sawney Beane

"I bury the dead in my belly." Arthur Rimbaud

The waters off of the Galloway Coast in Scotland, between Girvan and Ballantrae, still whisper and gurgle and sometimes roar, we must assume, the name Sawney Bean (pronounced SHAW-KNEE, NOT "sah-knee"). he and the ghost of his reputedly witch-wife "Black" Agnes Douglas can still be seen standing on the rocky coast, arm in arm, staring out in untroubled wonder at the face of the churning waves. But only by the gifted, elect; those with "Second-sight."

Sawney was born in East Lothian to a family of laborers in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth centuries. He toiled day and night digging ditches, pulling weeds, and clipping shrubs. But it was not the sort of life he was suited for, so he left home, hearth, and master and struck out on his own, meeting the accused witch "Black Agnes," and going to live, in the literal sense, in a cave in the forest. His practice became highway robbery.

In a short order of time, Beane amassed a pretty penny of hoarded loot, taking travelers for what they carried upon them as they traveled the increasingly blackly rumored surrounding woods. he and Agnes found a cave, a cleft splayed as wide and dark as a deep granite cunt, going down, down, down into dripping darkness.

The place was flooded at the entrance during high tide. All the better for Sawney (whose birth name, incidentally, is sometimes given as "Alexander") and Agnes, who understandably wanted no uninvited visitors. Inside, they made love on the cold hard earth, all the while degenerating, further and further, letting for the atavistic beast, the resurgent throwback; the "werewolf."

Hunger drove them to kill, as well. For, you see, it was not that the simple provender of waylaid and unfortunate strangers was satisfying meat enough for the diabolical duo. No. (They gave birth to eight sons and six daughters. They had a whole bevy of little mouths to feed.)

With hunger gnawing at their gullets, it was not long before Sawney and Agnes hit upon actually eating the bodies of their victim, taking in the nourishment of their very organs, skin, bones, loops of intestines, buckets of blood--it was unsavory repast (or perhaps not depending on your perspective), but it fed the growing, inbred, degenerate and now cannibal clan of wanton, feral murderers, the fourteen children and the forty-odd grandchildren (all products, of course, of incest).

The bones of their victims would frequently wash up on the rocky coast, much to the horror of local villagers, who assumed them the work of predatory beasts. Others had darker fears, and a few local innkeepers, accused of murder, were strung up, and lynched by angry, terrified crowds seeking an explanation, justice, and an end to the murders of their kin. But it was to no avail. These men were innocent, and, whatever fiend was responsible, was still OUT THERE.

It was not until a local fair that a couple riding through, close by where the Bean clan dwelt and had their hideous hideout, that the truth, the terrible truth was at last revealed. The Bean women fell upon the travelers, pulling the woman from her horse, biting through her throat, and drinking her blood while gutting her like a fish, pulling strands of dripping intestine out, chewing it between rotted, gore-flecked gums.

The husband, a redoubtable foe, attempted to crush the savage Bachante beneath the hooves of his valiant steed, swinging his sword, but he could not save his wife. Just as the Beane women were about to pull him from his animal, a party of revelers came traipsing through the woods, unsuspecting, Happening upon the scene of horror, they quickly subdued some of the women, while others escaped back to their cave.

The captured member of the Bean clan was taken to the village magistrate, who forthwith and posthaste sent a minister to King James, who was informed of the situation. He likewise sent a regiment of men to investigate the matter. Soon, they happened upon the cave where the Bean clan resided. Unbelieving that any human could inhabit such a foul place, they nonetheless ventured within. What they found, to their horror, stayed with them forevermore.

Treasure, stolen goods dating back years, was amid a retinue of human bones, like something from the ogre's keep in a grim fairy tale. And what should they spy, hanging from the ceiling, but human arms, legs, torsos, all rotting and reeking flyblown stuff, preserved for the FOOD of creatures too foul to be imagined.

It was not long before they happened upon the beastly, nightmarish retrograde species of human, born from inbreeding and inculcated with a desire to rob, murder, kill, and consume the flesh of their victims. What happens next varies, according to which version of the legend you believe.

Some say the Beans simply surrendered. Some say they fought, but were overpowered by the sheer force of the armed soldiers they struggled against.

Still others say they fled deep into the bowels of the Earth, and that "all the king's men" used gunpowder to bow up the entrance of the cave, preventing egress and ensuring the Beans died of eventual suffocation or starvation, in the darkness, deep within the confines of their personal butcher shop. (The discovery of the Bean clan hideaway brings to mind the passage from Might is Right, from the chapter entitled "Man--The Carnivore!" in which old Redbeard intones that this world is "No Nirvana, where peaceful pleasure flows..." It is instead he insists, a "...butcher shop...where slain men hang in rows." Redbeard informs the reader that he believes such tales as that of Sawney Bean and the similar "Christie-of-the-Cleek" are "no legends.")

The most popular version of events has Sawney, Black Agnes, and their large, sullen, sickening brood transported to Tollboth Jail in Edinburgh, then perhaps to Glasgow; however, being found too savage to be accorded the privilege of trial, they were summarily executed int he manner of the time: the men were drawn and quartered, and the women and children burned at the stake.

(Beforehand, it is said that the men had their genitals torn off with white-hot pincers and then cast into the fire. One supposes it equally likely they might have had their genitals and perhaps intestines fed to the street curs or pigs. But then, perhaps, even the medieval peasants wanting to enact the cruelest and most torturous revenge might have balked at such an extreme. Beyond the blasphemy of feeding an animal human flesh, they might have considered that it was unwise to do so because, well, what if the beasts developed a taste for it? In the same manner as Swaney Bean?

Reportedly, Sawney's last words were, "It's not over. It will never be over."

And he may have been somewhat prophetic.

The Flesh Eaters

I well remember my second day at Ball State University. It was 1997. I was consumed with videos and books on serial killers and macabre subjects and had just purchased a fascinating book called The Flesh Eaters (1979), by a writer called L.A. Morse. It had a somewhat misleading fantasy illustration cover by Frank Frazetta, but the novel, I knew, purported to be the true story of Sawney Bean. I was drinking iced coffee, raspberry flavored, and smoking clove cigarettes. I was sitting at an outdoor cafe in front of the MT Cup coffee house. The White Rabbit Used Bookstore was right next door.

I was surrounded by the hustle and bustle of campus life: students, poets, artists, intellectuals, and professors. Freshmen plodded down the walk like castaways in a dream. Cars thundered by blaring rap music, the elephantine thump occasionally blowing my concentration out of the water.

Nevertheless, I was transported to the grueling, impoverished, and grim world of Medieval Scotland, to the time and crimes of Sawney Bean. That day will stick with me forever, I think.

Today, in modern times, Bean lives on in the influence of horror films such as Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes (1977) and Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre ( 1974, also inspired partly by Ed Gein). Several old-time sailors and explorers that became stranded or were caught in horrible conditions (such as the soccer team whose plane went down in the Andes, inspiring the film Alive) had recourse to the cannibalism of their dead comrades just to survive. (Famous examples include the Donner Party, Alferd Packer, the sailors who went on trial for the cannibalism of cabin boy Richard Parker, a happening eerily similar to Poe's novelette Arthur Gordon Pym, even down to the cabin boy's name, and reportedly soldiers at Stalingrad.)

Primitive tribes in places such as Papua New Guinea are said to have indulged in cannibalism. This is the fate said to have befallen downed explorer and Rockefeller heir Michael Rockefeller. The eating of human flesh is never advisable as a disease called Kuru, a.k.a. "laughing sickness' can result in a horrible death.

Psychopathic serial killers or cannibal murderers have been, thankfully, few and far between. They include such well-known notables as German "lustmord" killer Fritz Haarmann, who prowled train stations during GErmany's Weimar period, looking for young male hustlers. He would then take the men back to his digs, where he would chew through the throat. He and his lover Hans Grans would then strip the meat from the bones, taking whatever possession or money they could find, and turn the rest into black market meat, to sell to his neighbors as "venison." George Karl Grossman and Karl Denke were, likewise, German serial killers, said to indulge in anthropophagy.

Also, Ed Gein, the Plainfield Wisconsin graverobbing ghoul who exhumed nine bodies, turned bits and pieces of them into face masks and furniture, and then shot two women that "reminded him of mama," trussed one of them up like a deer, decapitating her. Ed was adjudged "not guilty by reason of insanity" (chronic schizophrenia) and, well, Ed was also a cannibal. (At least, we believe so.) Note: I've written about Gein numerous times in various books, and have an article on him here: "There Once Was a Farmer Named Ed..."

Other cannibal killers have included Henry Lee Lucas and lover Ottis Toole, Richard Trenton Chase, Katherine Knight of Queensland, Australia (who cooked and served, like something from a Greek myth, the body of her boyfriend as soup to his relatives), and, of course, everyone's favorite perverted, sadistic psychopathic old grandpa, Albert Hamilton Fish, the "Grey Man," who one fine day abducted by pretense little twelve-year-old Grace Budd.

Picture, if you will, little Grace in the overgrown, weed-choked yard of a sprawling tract of land, hidden away among the thickets of upstate New York. Upstairs, in the cottage, called "Wisteria Cottage," the nude Fish eyes her steadily, greedily out the window, lost in his vile, sick fantasies like a fairy tale ogre. One scene is idyllic: the little girl is outside picking flowers. The other is horrific, the sickening old monster breathing heavily, his heart hammering in his chest, visualizing the savory thrill he will get as he chews through her throat.

She is up the stairs, and he hears her. Thrusting open the door, she sees him in his evil, sickening, natural state.

"I'll tell Mama!" she bawls. But it is the last thing she ever says.

He later confesses to having turned her into a stew with carrots and potatoes, which he consumed over nine days, masturbating furiously.

Fish likewise confessed to the murder of little Billy Gaffney, a young child he consumed except for the "monkey and pee wees" (genitals), as he found them, "too chewy."

Fish was executed at Sing-Sing in 1937.

In 1991, a fine, upstanding citizen named Jeffrey Dahmer, a man that had previously been incarcerated for sex offenses against minors (he exposed himself to two kids at a street fair in Milwaukee) was found to be living in a small apartment full of human remains: skulls, severed heads, human torsos, chemical drums full of human meat. Dahmer, an ex-soldier and a homosexual who frequented gay bars in search of young men to prey upon (his victims were largely blacks as Dahmer realized they carried less priority with the police department) was on parole and employed at the Ambrosia Chocolate Factory when victim Tracy Edwards, a young black man, was discovered running nude and bloody, one arm dangling handcuffs, by two cops down the street. The police accompanied Edwards back to Dahmer's apartment (which fellow tenants had repeatedly complained had a "funny odor" to it) and discovered a scene of horror they could not have imagined in their wildest nightmares.

Dahmer confessed to seven teen killings, as well as acts of necrophilia, cannibalism, and sadistic torture (i.e. trying to create "zombies" using drillbits and injecting acid into cranial wounds). He was sentenced to hundreds of years in prison with no possibility of ever seeing freedom again. However, he was beaten to death by fellow inmate Cristopher Scarver in 1994.

There are other examples we could give, such as the Russian cannibal Dzumagaliev, also known as "Metal Fang" (we presume because of his exceptional orthodontic work), who was said to have fed his unsuspecting guests pieces of his victim. Also, the New York killer Joe Metheny, documented by Sondra London in her excellent book True Vampires (Feral House, 2004) fed packets of "venison" to the homeless, which later turned out to be the ground-up meat of his victims. In Greek Myth, both Tantalus (who was condemned to a special Hell wherein he reached forever and ever toward food and water that he could never grasp) and Lycaon were guilty of serving human meat to godly guests and were thus punished. Lycaon was turned into a werewolf.

(One could also offer the legend of Sweeny Todd, the "Demon Barber" of Fleet Street, said to have lived in Old London, perhaps in the late Sixteen Hundreds. He had a barber's chair on a revolving axis, it is said, and would cut the throat of his unsuspecting victim, and then drop them through a trap door into the catacombs below his shop, which adjoined St. Dunstan's Church. Then, his partner, her name often given as Mrs. Lovett, or Margery, would strip the body of valuables, strip the meat from the bones, and turn the meat into pastries which she sold to eager, unsuspecting customers. This legend of course inspired the films and famous musical, first being chronicled by Thomas Peckett Prest in the penny dreadful potboiler A String of Pearls, between 1846-1847.)

Somewhere on the Gallow Coast, in Bennane Head, is the slit-like crack in the face of a cliffside, grown dark and terrible with noxious fumes and the funk of bat guano over the decades and centuries. Along the coast, you may see dual footprints emerge in the sand. Side by side they may walk, like a cookie-cutter refrigerator magnet pic with a little heartfelt homily on it. But these are ghosts, my dear, ghosts of the wretched dead who have returned to the scene of their former atrocities. They may be trapped here, forever, doomed to live out the nebulous half-life of damned souls. But here they are, nonetheless. And time, and terror, and the torture of the ages tick on, minute by minute, into INFINITY.

One Final Thing.

A German man, Armin Meweis, was convicted in 2001 of an act of "consensual cannibalism with a man he met on an internet fetish site. The man consented, apparently, to being killed, and Mewies, a man who was long a sufferer of fantasies of cannibalism, slowly dismembered and ate him over an extended period. In between bites, he read a Star Trek novel.

Addendum

There is an apocryphal story that one of the Beane girls escaped, moving to a nearby village where she was unknown. She there is said to have planted a tree that became know locally, for some reason, as the hairy tree. Somehow it is said, her true identity was discovered (one wonders how), and that, out of outrage, the villagers lynched her, hanging her from the Hairy Tree.

Also, we realized that we omitted to mention Japanese actor, fetish writer, and cannibal murderer Issei Sagawa, who died recently. Sagawa, hailed from a wealthy family, and was born with a variety of mental and physical defects, became obsessed with cannibalistic and other violent sexual fantasies at an early age. He was arrested for the attempted rape of a German woman, but the influence of his wealthy father freed him.

Moving to Paris in 1977, to attend the prestigious Sorbonne Academy, Sagawa confessed to having used prostitutes on many occasions and being consumed with a desire to kill them. He remained innocent of murder however until meeting Dutch exchange student Renée Hartevelt, and decided that because of her beauty, he would kill and consume her. He invited her to his apartment at 10 Rue Erlanger where he shot her in the back of the head while she read poetry on the couch. He then performed an act of necrophilia on the corpse, which he consumed, dismembering the body with a butcher knife and eating parts of the face, breasts, thighs, buttocks, and kneck. The remains he loaded into a suitcase and attempted to dispose of in the Bois de Boulogne park, throwing the thing in a lake. (Note: Like Dahmer, he took photographs at each stage of dismemberment and consumption, and stored some of the flesh, which he described as tasting, "like tuna," n his refrigerator.)

He was discovered and arrested by French police but judged "criminally insane" and deported. He was held for two years in a mental asylum in Tokyo, but judged "sane" and released, much to public outcry. He later became a sick sort of tabloid celebrity, a sometime actor and writer for pornographic magazines. He died 24th of November, 2022.

Bibliographic Note.

The best books on this subject are by Peter Haining, author of the book Cannibal Killers (Magpie Books, 2008), Sondra London, who wrote True Vampires (Feral House 2004), and Harold Schechter, who authored Deviant (Gallery, 1998) about Ed Gein, and Deranged (Pocket Books, 1998) about Albert Fish. The Reader is also advised that The String of Pearls by Thomas Peckett Prest (or James Malcolm Rymer?) is rather an excellent old novel. It can be obtained easily from Internet Archive or Project Gutenberg.

Sawney Bean: The Scottish Cannibal Killer (Ghastly Tales of Scotland) | Documentary