Sawney Bean

According to the legend — first popularised in eighteenth-century broadsides and The Newgate Calendar — Alexander 'Sawney' Bean and his wife retreated to a deep tidal cave at Bennane Head on the Galloway–Ayrshire coast, where over some twenty-five years they raised a clan of dozens of inbred children and grandchildren. The family lived entirely by ambush, dragging travellers and their horses into the dark, robbing them, and pickling and eating the remains. Vanishing travellers were blamed on innkeepers and passers-by, many of whom were wrongly hanged.

The clan was undone, the tale says, when a man fought free of an ambush and raised the alarm. King James VI himself led a posse of four hundred men and bloodhounds to the cave, where they found its grisly larder of salted human flesh. The whole family was taken to Edinburgh and executed without trial. Historians find no contemporary record of any of it, and most regard Sawney Bean as anti-Scottish propaganda dressed as history — but as folklore he has proved immortal.