The Hills Have eyes is, according to Mr Wes Craven, said to be inspird by the Sawney Bean story...and this is the story....

Alexander 'Sawney' Bean(e) was the storied patriarch of a forty-eight member clan in 16th century Scotland brutally executed for the mass murder and cannabilisation of over a thousand people.

Alexander Bean was born in East Lothian during the 16th century. His father was a ditch digger and hedge trimmer, and Bean tried to take up the family trades but quickly realised that he had little taste for honest labour. He left home with a vicious woman who apparently shared his inclinations. The couple ended up at a coastal cave in Bannane Head, near Galloway, where they lived undiscovered for some twenty-five years.

Their many children and grandchildren were products of incest and lawlessness. The brood came to include eight sons, six daughters, eighteen grandsons and fourteen granddaughters. Lacking the gumption for honest labour, the clan thrived by laying careful ambushes at night to rob and murder individuals or small groups. The bodies were brought back to the cave where they were dismembered and cannibalised. Leftovers were pickled, and discarded body parts would sometimes wash up on nearby beaches.

The body parts and disappearances did not go unnoticed by the local villagers, but the Beans stayed in the caves by day and took their victims at night. The clan was so secretive that the villagers were not aware of the forty eight murderers living nearby. In a frenetic quest for justice, the townspeople lynched several innocents, and the disappearances continued. Suspicion often fell on local innkeepers since they were the last to see many of the missing people alive.

One fateful night, the Beans ambushed a married couple riding from a fair on one horse, but the man proved a tough opponent, deftly holding off the clan with sword and pistol. Unfortunately, they fatally mauled the wife when she fell to the ground in the conflict. Before they could take the resilient husband, a large group of fairgoers appeared on the trail and the Beans fled.

With the Beans' existence finally revealed to the world, it was not long before King James VI o Scotland heard of the atrocities and decided to lead a manhunt with a team of four hundred men and several bloodhounds, soon finding the Beans' cave in Bannane Head. The cave was rife with human remains, having been the scene of a thousand plus murders and cannibalistic acts.

The clan was captured alive and taken in chains to the Tolbooth Jail in Edinburgh, then transferred to Leith or Glasgow where they were promptly executed without trial; the men had their hands and feet severed and were allowed to bleed to death, and the women and children, after watching the men die, were burned alive.

The town of Girvan, located near the crime scene, has another legend about the cannibal clan. It is said that one of Bean's daughters eventually left the clan and settled in Girvan, where she planted the Hairy Tee. After her family's capture, the daughter's identity was revealed by angry locals who hanged her from the bough of the Hairy Tree.........