The Horrifying Story of the Cave of Cannibals

Ambient Songs:
By CoAg
https://www.youtube.com/@co.agmusic1823

Intro Theme by Swift Junai:
https://www.instagram.com/swiftjunai/?hl=en
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6hf5nMJ8s6LJJfFR4OQ3lg
https://open.spotify.com/artist/1PoG2b18MHocWZA8zQgWjO

Writers and researchers: Jay Adams
https://instagram.com/jayadamsdigital?igshid=MzMyNGUyNmU2YQ==

Jordan Gottschick https://www.youtube.com/@DerpsWithWolves/playlists

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Take a look at this cave. This is a cave
known as sawny Bean's Cave. It's quite beautiful from the
outside and the surrounding countryside notion is even more so.
But this beauty is deceptive. This cave is actually the
site of one of the most gruesome and mysterious stories
in Scottish history. As always, viewer discretion is strongly vised.

(00:30):
In nineteen seventy seven, theater and drive in movie audiences
flocked in droves to catch the latest movie written and
directed by horror icon Wes Craven. Following the success of
his directorial debut with the nineteen seventy two release of
The Last House and Left. Fans of the genre and
him in particular, were eager to see what Craven's twisted
mind had been working on for the previous five years,

(00:52):
and to many, he didn't disappoint. His new movie, The
Hills Have Eyes equally thrilled and disgusted audiences on its release,
as raked in twenty five million dollars at the box office,
surpassing the success of his first film. Of course, many
big name film critics said it was too gruesome, but
wider audiences of horror genre. Fans propelled the movie into
the status of cult classic. Over the years that followed.

(01:14):
It became a film franchise and was even remade in
two thousand and six, and judging by the average age
of the audience in the channel, you're probably more likely
to have only seen that version now if you're unfamiliar
with the movie. It sort of starts like this. During
a good old fashioned American road trip in the nineteen seventies,
the Carter family is traveling to La with a trailer
in tow of the father. Bob pulls into a gas

(01:36):
station called Fred's Oasis in a remote area of Nevada,
and we're talking extremely remote, like, middle of the desert,
single road, no other stops for miles in every direction.
After they get gas and check the fluids under the hood,
Fred warns the family to stand the main roads, which
of course is advice. They don't follow. The family card
then eventually skids off the highway and wrex causing one

(01:57):
of their dogs to run off into the Nevada Desert hills.
And this is where it all begins. There's something in
the remote desert living the caves there that begins systematically
stalking and killing them. Now. While Craven certainly had the
kind of warp creativity would take to dream up such
a scenario, it was actually during his research following the
release of The Last House on the Left that he

(02:17):
came across the story so revolting that he couldn't help
but let it inspire his next movie. And the story
that would end up inspiring The Hills of Eyes was
the story of the Sauny Bean clan. It's uncertain where
exactly was born, but Alexander Bean, also known as Sawny,
likely came into the world in the late fifteenth century
in Scotland. Sonny was the son of a hedge trimmer

(02:38):
and a ditch digger, and, as was customer at the time,
he would go in to follow in his father's footsteps,
or at least attempt to. Pretty quickly. However, his father
discovered that a working life didn't appeal to Sony. Simply
put in, by all accounts, he was lazy and preferred
to waste his life daydreaming. This was obviously met with
scorn and disappointment from his father, who did all he
could to encourage Sonny into a life of hard labor,

(02:59):
but no matter what, but he tried. Nothing worked, and
particularly sawny. Much of his early life is a bit
of a mystery, but at some point in his adult
years he met a woman named black Agnes Douglas. Around
the time of their meeting, she was being accused of
witchcraft and was also looking for an escape. So the
two ended up being a perfect match and they ran
off together to leave behind a life of servitude, fleeing

(03:19):
for the coastal county of Ayrshire, Scotland. Other than the
relocation itself, neither of them had much of a plan,
but they did manage to find a place to state
that still exists this day, and this was a place
truly befitting of the couple. If you happen to stumble
on it, you'd likely miss it altogether, as it's little
more than a crack in a rocky cliff. It's located

(03:39):
at the north end of Belcrouchean Bay, about five klumbers
north of the community of Bellantree, and it is in
fact not a crack at all. It's actually a raised
cave that the couple took shelter in and decided to
call home. The cave today, which is known as sawny
Beans cave sits right at the high tide mark, and
each time high tide rolls in, it floods much of
the entrance. For Sony and Agnes, though, this was just fine,

(04:02):
maybe even preferred actually, as they made the inner reaches
of the labyrinth of tunnels their main quarters. The cave
itself is about five hundred ninety feet or one hundred
and eighty meters deep, and its quarters measure about one
mile in total length, and the combination of all of
these factors is credited for the couple going completely and
utterly undetected for twenty five years, all of those years ago.

(04:24):
After relocating without working, However, there was a big problem
Sony had to contend with. He had to support himself
and his wife, and while he could have learned how
to fish and lived off the ocean right outside his
front door, he opted for a more efficient way to
earn money through robbery. In the areas between nearby towns,
there were narrow roads that were well traveled, giving him
the perfect setting an opportunity to take advantage of travelers,

(04:45):
particularly those using the road alone. When a horse or
a wagon would reach a certain point in the woods,
he'd jump out, forced the travelers to stop, and then
take whatever he could from them. Often this would include jewelry, currency, food,
and other supplies. Then, once he he had everything he
could grab, he disappeared into the woods and brought these
spoilers back to the cave where Agnes was waiting. For

(05:06):
a time. This was enough, but Sonia apparently start to
wonder but the chances of him being caught. The penalty
for the crimes he was perpetrating during the time period
was death, so leaving witnesses was a risky proposition. To
resolve this matter, Sony came up with a fairly simple
and straightforward plan. If there were no witnesses to the crime,
how could he ever be caught. Almost as soon as
the idea struck him, he put the plan to action

(05:28):
and soon realized this created another problem, though, which was
disposing of the evidence. If the local authorities were made
aware of dead bodies left lying in the woods, it
would almost certainly result in an extensive man hunt to
find the killer. But rather than focus on the problem, Sony,
despite his apparent laziness, was a solution minded individual, and
he figured he had actually solved several issues all at once.

(05:50):
To remain undetected while visiting local shops and merchants was
nearly impossible, so trading in the goods he took from
travelers was a risk he no longer wanted to take.
To that point, he'd been trading the valuable items for food.
But if he just killed the travelers and brought the
bodies back to the cave with him, he and Agnes
would also never have to worry about food again. And
so it went afterwards, with Sony continued to ambush travelers

(06:11):
on the narrow roads between villages. He'd lured them off
their horses and wagons, quickly dispatched them, and then drag
them into the cave where Agnes would prepare them. Prior
to this, the couple had been nearly starving, but now
they had a steady supply food and high protein food.
At that soon they both regained their strength, and in
doing so, the couple began to have children. Before long,

(06:32):
they had fourteen kids, eight sons and six daughters, all
of which were fed what Sony brought back from the
moment they could eat solid food. In fact, as the
children became old enough, they start to join Sony in
his attacks. On travelers, and all the extra help made
for much letter work for their father. When more of
them were joining Sony on his daily duties, the bean
clan was able to start picking off larger traveling parties,

(06:52):
sometimes dispatching upwards of six people in one ambush. Years
apparently passed like this, as the bean clan continued to
make a deplorable living for themselves, and as if things
weren't disturbing enough, the kids eventually start to have kids
of their own. And this wasn't from finding outside partners,
if you know what I mean. After long enough spend,
the family that once began as two had grown to

(07:13):
forty six, with all of them living inside the cave
together and all of them hunting travelers together. As you
might imagine, the constantly growing list of missing people was
noticed by the nearby villagers, and, desperate for justice, they
first began to point fingers at one another. The brunt
of the blame initially fell on local innkeepers, since the
inns were often the last place those went missing were seen.

(07:34):
Untold numbers of innocent people were wrongly accused of being
responsible for the disappearances and were sentenced to capital punishment
with not a single one of them confessing to the
crimes on the gallows. After enough of these, attention began
to shift to where all of these disappearances had been
taking place. If it wasn't these condemned people, maybe there
was some other explanation. Local authorities eventually organized massive searches

(07:55):
and hopes of finding some feral group of people living
the force, but efforts came off empty. In fact, during
one skin of the coastline, a memor of a search
party even came across the entrance to Sawny Bean's cave
and pointed out to the others. But everyone would agree
that there was no way anyone could live and survive
inside a sea cave. So more years went by, and
the Bean clan only got better and better at their

(08:15):
family profession. The ambushes on travelers were executed with military
like precision, and there was never a shortage of victims.
The family apparently also became nocturnal, remaining in the cave
throughout the day and coming out at night to hunt
unfortunate travelers. And because they were bringing in more than
they could eat at any one time, the women learned
to salt and pickle the meat to preserve it, but

(08:35):
even then there would be a constant stench of rotting
flesh permitting through the cave. After a while, the Beans
took just tossing limbs into the ocean outside of the
cave entrance, and soon enough these parts would wash shore
and be discovered by villagers, leading many to believe that
the epidemic of missing persons was instead caused by animals.
These prosperous times for the Bean clan, however, wouldn't last forever.

(08:58):
One evening in the year sixteen hundred, darkness had just
fallen when a couple was returning from a fair along
the narrow road which the Beans had made their hunting grounds.
With the man riding on the front of the horse
and the woman riding just behind him, the Bean clan
emerged from the dark woods on all sides of them.
The being women then grabbed the woman and pulled her
off the horse onto the ground, immediately attacking her and
beginning to essentially pull her apart. The way they descended

(09:21):
was so quick and so gruesome that she was almost
in pieces by the time she touched the ground, and
upon seeing this, her husband was horrified and overtaken by rage,
and unlike their previous victims. He had been trained in combat.
He fought against the family as they tried to pull
him from the horse, but the man soon pulled out
his sword in a pistol. Then, moments later, about twenty
to thirty other travelers were turning from the fair, happened

(09:43):
upon the scene and rushed to join the fight. This
was the first time the Beans had he faced serious resistance,
and it soon became clear that they were not going
to win this one, so all at once they scattered
back into the forest and returned to the cave, leaving
behind a scene of carnage. It's unclear if the Beans
immediately knew the const quinces of their first field attack,
but this was the first time they had ever left

(10:03):
behind a living witness. The other travelers then accompanied the
man who was attacked all the way to Glasgow, Scotland,
where he spoke to the Chief Magistrate about his experience
in the woods. And as the man told his story,
the chief magistrate began to connect the dots that had
been missing for decades to that point. The growing list
of missing travelers the body parts waship in nearby villages.
Everything started to make sense. With the store of the ambush.

(10:26):
The chief magistrate then decided to do something that was
well beyond usual protocol for the time. He marched the
man right to King James the Fourth, who just so
happened to have taken a keen interest in the pattern
of missing persons in Scotland, and he had also developed
a theory that witchcraft was to blame. The King then
listened intently as men retold the story of his wife's
death and the animalistic behavior of her attackers. Immediately upon

(10:48):
the story's conclusion, the king gathered narmily four hundred men
in a pack of tracking hounds, and the large caravan
began heading toward Ayrshire. As the king and his army traveled,
the caravan apparently grew with volunteers jumping in line to
aid in the search for the perpetrators, and leading the
way was the man whose wife was viciously attacked by
the sawny Bean clan. Upon reaching Ayrshire, the search area

(11:09):
extended throughout the countryside and along the coastline, but at
first there were no signs at all. Some rogue families
living in the forest. When the party passed in front
of sawny Bean's cave the opening in the rocks wasn't
even paid attention to by them, But the dogs were
a different story. All at once, the hounds began to
pull wildly on their leads and howl in the direction
of the rocky cliff. It wasn't until someone inspected the

(11:30):
narrow cave entrance that the king, who had already passed by,
was told what they fined and backtracked. It's just that
from the outside of the cave, no one could fathom
that anyone would be living or even hiding out inside
the tunnel, as all they could see from the sand
was darkness beyond the opening. The dogs, however, continued to
make it clear that there was more to it. Soon enough,
as many men as could fit inside the cave lit

(11:50):
torches and began to slowly make their way down the tunnel.
The further and further the went, the more prevalent the
smell became caused them to realize what the dogs had
alerted them to. When this soul reached the very end
of the tunnel, about a mile from the entrance, they
were greeted by an unimaginable sight. Apparently, parts of all
kinds were strung up along the cave walls round barrels
for pickling, making the entire space look like a butcher shop.

(12:12):
To the side of the main living era were piles
of clothing, jewelry, and bones, and in the middle of
it all was the entire Bean clan, looking just as
surprised as the men who came upon them. When the
shock wore off, the Beans attempted to fight, but they
were quickly subdued thanks to being greatly outnumbered. Then, once
every man, woman and child in the family was captured,
they were marched to a nearby village, where the king
decided to forego the established justice system, sentencing each member

(12:35):
of the Bean clan to capital punishment. The day after
their capture, the family was taken to Leith, where they
would come to a particularly brutal punishment. The men would
go and to have each of their removed and were
left to succumb to blodloss while the women watched in horror.
And as they witnessed this slow process happened to the
men in the Bean family, the army prepared three large bonfires. Then,

(12:56):
once all the men were gone, the women were given
the fate typical of witches of the air, bringing an
end to the story of the Ruthless Bean Clan. Now,
if you're wondering why some of the elements of the
story seem to not make sense, you're not the only one.
Many people have asked, and rightfully so did this actually happen?
And while Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes is unquestionably

(13:16):
a work of pure fiction, the tale of the Bean
Clan has often been presented as verified facts. The truth is,
though there's a significant amount of supporting information and evidence
that's missing from the tale. Historians have scoured records, newspapers
and diaries of the time in Scotland, and not a
single one of them mentions a trend of disappearing travelers,
And certainly you have to imagine the discovery of a
person eating family of forty six would have made the news.

(13:39):
So how exactly did this story come about? The beginnings
of the story had been traced back to a publication
that was popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries called
the Newgate Calendar. This publication told of crimes of the
day with a sensationalized twist, making it difficult to separate
fact from fiction When it comes to the Bean Clan. Others, however,
maintain that there are at least bits and pieces of truth

(14:00):
woven into the store of the Bean Clan. Centuries earlier,
there was a slightly more evident story of a man
named Christy Kleek, a butcher said to have turned to
eating whatever he could find during a devastating fourteenth century famine.
He apparently also led a small band of outlaws who
preyed on travelers, which sounds remarkably similar to the Bean
Clan story. There's also the undeniable history of banditry and

(14:21):
smuggling along the Ayrshark Coast, where caves were used as
hideouts for ambushes. So combine all these together with broken
telephone across decades, and you have the perfect mix for
the birth of a legend about a grotesque cave dwelling
flash eating clan. So what do you think. Do you
think the legend is just that or do you think
there's more to the story.