Cannibal Legends
We occupy a uniquely privileged position in human history. For more and more people, the prospect of wild animal attack or death through starvation is remote, even laughable. For our ancestors however, these were very real and ever-present threats. All over the globe, huddled around campfires, people spun stories transforming wolves and the desperate actions that some resort to in the grips of famine, into chilling tales of the supernatural. As with all horror, the terrifying masks we conjure by firelight hide something far uglier.
Sawney Beane
The cannibal family, or clan, is familiar to most horror fans from mid-70’s films like Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes, but the folkloric roots of the cannibal family go much deeper.
It is said that in the mid-16th Century, Southwest of the burgh of Giran, Scotland, a curious spate of disappearances puzzled local authorities. Searches throughout the region yielded no clues, save for a coastal cave. But it was reasoned that no-one could possibly live in such a cave, with its entrance submerged for parts of the day.
Returning from a fair, some revellers made a startling discovery; the bodies of a married couple being dismembered and eaten by their attackers, who fled upon discovery. King James I ordered a search for this cannibal clan. Searchers decided to storm the coastal cave at Bennane head, following a trail of scattered human bones more than 60 metres down into the darkness.
Within, they found the family of Alexander “Sawney” Beane. The family, mostly the product of incest, had been surviving on a diet of villagers procured during midnight raids. The legends disagree on the 48-strong clan’s exact number of victims, although some place it as high as 1000.
The clan was captured alive and taken in chains to the Tolbooth gaol in Edinburgh, then transferred to Leith or Glasgow where they were promptly executed without trial. the men had their genitalia cut off, hands and feet severed, and were allowed to bleed to death. The women and children, after watching the men die, were burned alive.
Legend also had it that one of Beane’s daughters escaped and settled in Girvan, where she was eventually discovered and hanged by the boughs of a Dule tree called “The hairy tree” that she herself had planted.
Historians consider the tale of Sawney Beane to be a legend, principally because of the lack of reports of death or disappearances from the region at the time. However, it shares several similarities with at least two other reported events in which criminals were arrested and killed for murder and cannibalism, only to have a daughter escape and be later convicted of the same crime, which suggests that there may be a kernel of truth to the Beane Legend.
The Wendigo
The Wendigo is a folk-belief peculiar to Algonquin-speaking Native American peoples. Although beliefs about the nature of the Wendigo may change from region to region, the common thread seems to be that the Wendigo is supernatural, cannibalistic and malevolent. They are associated with winter, the north and famine, as well as with insatiable greed.
A human overcome by greed, according to some traditions, can become a Wendigo. Ravaged by hunger, the Wendigo is emaciated, rotting and decaying but also freakishly strong. In some versions of the myth, it is a giant that grows by the size of whatever it consumes, so that it can never be full. Consuming human flesh, it is said, can also turn one into a Wendigo, as can prolonged contact with the creatures.
The legend contributed its name to the controversial condition of Wendigo Psychosis, although some debate the historicity of the condition. It is supposedly a culture-bound syndrome in which the subject develops an intense craving for human flesh and a fear of becoming a cannibal.
The first written source for Wendigo psychosis comes from a Jesuit missionary in 1661, who says the disease: “affects their imaginations and causes them a more than canine hunger. This makes them so ravenous for human flesh that they pounce upon women, children, and even upon men, like veritable werewolves, and devour them voraciously, without being able to appease or glut their appetite – ever seeking fresh prey, and the more greedily the more they eat. This ailment attacked our deputies; and, as death is the sole remedy among those simple people for checking such acts of murder, they were slain in order to stay the course of their madness.”
Naturally there is much debate over whether or not such a biased source can be trusted.
In 1878, a Plains Cree trapper named Swift Runner butchered and ate his wife and five children, despite only being 25 miles from a known outpost where food could have been secured. Because of the availability of other food sources, this crime was attributed to Wendigo Psychosis.
In 1907, Jack Fiddler, chief and Shaman of the Sucker Doodem (clan) in Ontario was tried for several murders. Amongst his people, he was tasked with euthanising the sick to ensure that they did not become Wendigos. He hanged himself before his trial, accused of the murder of 14 people.
It is easy to see how the myth of the Wendigo first arose; as chilling metaphor for the devastating mental toll of starvation and famine meant to reinforce societal taboos. It is not too difficult to imagine that the belief may have started with a single event, perhaps the discovery of an emaciated human driven mad by hunger.
The Leopard Society
In the Late 1870’s, French colonial authorities in Gabon began investigating a series of bizarre deaths. The victims of these crimes were mutilated, often beheaded, with flesh missing and wounds comparable to those left by animal claws. As the bodies began to pile up, authorities were quick to blame disgruntled slaves and wild animal attack, but to local people the source of these deaths was common knowledge: The Leopard Society.
A strange and mysterious esoteric cult had long existed in the region. Superstitious locals believed that the Leopard men had the ability to literally transform themselves into leopards, control wild animals and gain strength from an elixir involving a mixture of the blood and viscera of their victims called borfima.
The colonial authorities were quick to scoff at this local folklore, but the truth was, perhaps, just as strange. Cult members would symbolically transform into leopards, wearing masks and draping themselves in animal hides, and would steal into the night armed with steel claws and steel-toothed mouth pieces with which they would eviscerate their victims, often wearing devices to disguise their footprints as leopard paw-prints.
Leopard Society attacks would spread throughout the continent, most prominently in Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Tanzania and Liberia. Nigeria was so plagued by these killings, with 81 reported instances between 1945 and 1947, that the entire country was darkly dubbed “Leopard Land”.
Despite repeated attempts by the authorities to clamp down on the cult through arrests, imposed curfews and armed militia patrols, the killings would continue and become more brazen. One young woman was even attacked and killed within a police compound. The inability to capture the Leopard men only added to their mystique, and to the popular belief that they had supernatural powers, including teleportation and being impervious to bullets.
The first real break in the case came in 1947 when Terry Wilson, a district officer in Nigeria who had been investigating the murders (after narrowly avoiding an assassination attempt by the cult) decided to launch a sting operation. He dressed his best officer as the son of a local woman and sent him down a path where multiple attacks had been committed while he and his men lay in ambush.Before long, with a shriek, a man dressed in leopard skins burst from the foliage brandishing a club. The two men struggled, and Wilson and his men arrived too late to stop the Leopard man from clubbing his officer to death. However, the officer’s knife was wet with blood- the Leopard men could be wounded.
Reasoning that the Leopard man might return to mutilate the corpse, Wilson and his men returned to ambush positions. On all fours, the man crawled from the bushes, tearing at the corpses face with a double-pronged claw. Wilson accosted him and, when the man charged him with the claw, shot him in the chest.
After his death, the spell of the Leopard men was broken, with more and more people realising that the cult was simply a murderous group of men, who could be shot or, indeed, hanged. People came forward with information, and arrests increased. Eventually tip-offs would lead officials to the cult’s hidden shrine, a cave complete with stone altar and anthropomorphised Leopard effigy.
In February 1948, 73 cult members were arrested and 39 were hanged. Tribal chiefs were invited to the executions so that they could attest that the cult members were not immortal. Thus, the spell of the Leopard cult was broken, although sporadic attacks would continue to take place right up until the 1980’s.
In West African folklore, the Leopard men were rarely violent. They would appear in times of upheaval and conflict, removing those that stirred up ill-feeling in order to restore social norms and shore up the status quo. Their increased activity during certain years is attributed by historians now to be a reaction to the upheavals of colonialism, and the subjugation of ancient tribal traditions and practices by European colonists.