In one of the most gloomy places in Scotland, which is nevertheless very popular with tourists, eight or nine miles from Edinburgh there is a very peculiar attraction - the Cannibal Cave.
A dangerous path through lakes and sharp stone ledges leads to a cliff with a suite of caves. The entrance to them cannot be seen either from the sea or from land. Only at low tide opens a hole through which you can get inside. This place has always enjoyed a bad reputation among local residents, because earlier in the cave there lived real cannibals who ate … more than a thousand people!
The escape
During the reign of King James I (1566-1625), a poor day laborer named Bane lived in a Scottish village with his only son, Jacob. A wild, rude, grumpy boy, whom nature, in exchange for mental abilities, has endowed with extraordinary strength, gave a lot of anxiety to his father and terrified the villagers.
Jacob Banya turned 16 when, in a fight with fellow villagers, he beat a man to death with a blow of his fist. This act overwhelmed the general patience, and the fierce teenager was chained. Jacob was sentenced to death, but on the day of the execution of the sentence, Banya managed to escape. The search was in vain, the criminal seemed to have sunk into the water.
Over time, people calmed down and were content with the fact that the killer never appeared in the vicinity of the village. For a long time Bane, like a beast, wandered in the forests, but hunger forced him to enter the service of a farmer in a remote village. The correct way of life was hated by Jacob, and soon he fled from there, and with a girl even more savage and cruel than himself. In parting, the young savages set fire to the farm and went to the rocky coast. During a strong low tide, the entrance to that very eerie cave opened. She became a reliable refuge for Banya and his companion, all that remained was to find food for themselves.
Hunting
The area here was deserted, even the birds seemed to avoid it. The new inhabitants of the cave satisfied their hunger with roots and forest fruits, until chance suggested a different, terrible way of life. The forester of a landowner once saw the savage Bané, chasing game in the master's forest, and tried to stop him. A fight ensued. Bane, armed with a club, beat the enemy to death, and to hide what had happened, he dragged the corpse into the cave. And here, apparently out of hunger, Banya's wife offered to eat the deceased.
They fried part of the body, and what was left was prepared for the future in the way they were used to: they seasoned with sea salt and hung up to smoke. This was later confirmed by the testimony of Bane at the trial in Edinburgh. And since then, the hermit hunt for people, like for game, began and continued with impunity for many years, until the scattered human remains found, thrown ashore, horrified the inhabitants of the surrounding villages and forced to organize a search for the killers.
Volunteers, familiar with the deserted coastline, combed the area far and wide. Some returned with nothing, disappointing the frightened fellow villagers, others did not return at all, obviously becoming victims of Banya and his growing family. The authorities ordered to send part of the city police to help residents.
Armed policemen, peasants and hunters wandered among the rocks all day long and were on duty at night, but the cautious cannibals sat in their cave and avoided meeting strangers. Unable to achieve results, the police returned to the city. The authorities came to the conclusion that there is no monster and cannot be, which means that the killer must be sought among the inhabitants of the nearest village.
Therefore, when a traveler mysteriously disappeared here, the blame was placed on the owner of the house where the missing person had spent the last night. The defendant could not prove his innocence, and therefore he was executed without delay - in order to intimidate everyone else. It was assumed that one of the main murderers was eliminated and that such a severity of the court would prevent all further atrocities. But the assumption turned out to be wrong. Soon a local fisherman fished out several human bones with the remains of meat with nets.
In Edinburgh, they examined the find and attributed the "eating of the remains" to fish. It was ordered to continue monitoring the coast, but the more actively the search was carried out, the more cautious the gang of cannibals became. Bane and his family never attacked horsemen, but only on foot, even if there were several of them. The corpses were carefully brought into the cave by water, which is why all the traces found indicated that the killers came from the sea and left the same way.
About 40 years passed in this way. A whole generation grew up in the cave, who did not know any other way of life except hunting for their own kind. Bané ruled over his descendants as the king of cannibals, and only chance helped to reveal the secret of the disappearance of a large number of people in these places.
Footprints drop by the water
One night, a local farmer with his wife and worker walked from the fair. Noticing the travelers, the cannibals hid and prepared for the attack. When the "game" came closer, the gang jumped out of the ambush. The young woman and the worker were immediately killed. The farmer, fortunately, had a pistol with him. Desperately resisting, the man fired a shot, which saved his life.
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Riders patrolling the coast rushed up to the noise, and the villains fled. With difficulty it was possible to examine the fleeing, their tracks, as always, ended at the sea. But now it became clear: the murders were committed by a well-organized gang. But for what purpose?
Cannibal cave tour for tourists
Neither the farmer nor the riders who arrived in time saw the boats on which the killers could hide, so it was decided that they were hiding in a cave. A crowd of several hundred people, gathered from all nearby villages, surrounded the dwelling of the cannibals to prevent them from escaping.
And now - low tide.
The armed men went inside the cave, the rest waited outside. Having reached the deepest part of it, the daredevils saw something terrible: human flesh was hung on the walls and on the ceiling, which served the monstrous family's only food. Contemplating the dismembered corpses and piles of bones, even the harshest and most desperate hunters felt nausea rise in their throats. In addition, the smell in the cave was unbearable. An ordinary person, having spent even one night here, would probably lose his mind. But the wild creatures, who have lived like this almost all their lives, did not notice any inconvenience.
The gang members were tied up without the slightest resistance. Together with Yakov Banya, there were 48 of them! All the remains of human bodies found were buried. Piled up in a cave in a huge heap of money and jewelry, looted by the murderers, were taken to Edinburgh and, if possible, returned to the relatives of the victims.
Live in legends
The lawsuit against Banje and his family aroused unheard-of interest among the people and bewilderment in legal circles: none of the legislative acts provided for punishment for such crimes. The judges of Edinburgh rendered their verdict together with their French colleagues - the case of the cannibals was sent to the professors of the Faculty of Law at the University of Paris.
The execution of Bané and his family in front of the gates of the Scottish capital was one of the worst in the history of Scottish legal proceedings. The criminals were brutally tortured, then quartered and burned at the stake.
The clan of cannibals was then talked about for a long time throughout England and throughout the educated world. And although later cases of cannibalism also occurred, as, for example, in the Duchy of Weimar in the 18th century, the case did not reach such a scale as in the Bane family.
Since then, the coast with caves has become a cursed place for the inhabitants, as if evil spirits lived there. It was rumored that, perhaps, someone from the family of cannibals survived and is now wandering in search of new victims, so they tried to bypass these surroundings.
Over time, the real outline of events was forgotten, but folk fantasy gave birth to hundreds of legends, altering the memories of ancestors, so for many years tales about "cannibals from the cave" were a favorite topic for evening conversations by the hearth, replacing modern "horror films" for the then peasant youth. As an epilogue, it can be added that the magazine "Niva" in 1886 first told about this terrible case to the inhabitants of Russia.
As for Scotland itself, although the Bane cave is known there, many doubt the veracity of this story, considering it just an idle fiction.
Ekaterina GOLUBEVA