After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Cannibalism in Scotland: Legend of Sawney Bean

Episode Date: April 24, 2024

According to legend, Sawney Bean and Agnes "Black" Douglas raised a clan of cannibals in a remote Scottish cave. They killed and ate unlucky travellers on lonely roads. This went on for decades with more than a thousand perishing. Who invented this gruesome story? Why? And why has Sawney Bean become a kind of cult hero in Scotland itself?Cat Byers is our guest today, a writer and historian based in Paris currently finishing a PhD on the Paris Morgue.Edited and produced by Freddy Chick. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code AFTERDARK sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/ You can take part in our listener survey here.

Wendy's has a new breakfast deal. Mix and match two items of your choice for only $4. Breakfast wrap, biscuit or English muffin sandwiches, small seasoned potatoes or small hot coffee. Choose two for $4 at Wendy's. Available for a limited time at participating Wendy's in Canada. Taxes extra. This episode of After Dark contains discussion of cannibalism. Hello and welcome to After Dark. I, as usual, am Anthony. And I'm Maddy. And today we don't know what we're doing. Well, we do. But we have something at the top of this episode that we are going into blind, just like you guys. We have a message

from one of our listeners. And this listener is Muriel Buick. And she has sent us in a story which we are about to listen to for the first time right now with you guys. So get comfy and let's listen to Muriel's story. Hello, my name is Muriel Buick. I live in Fife in Scotland, but I'm originally from slightly further north. I was brought up on a farm in the county of Angus. And it's about nine miles to the northeast of Dundee. And it's about nine miles to the northeast of Dundee.

The name of the farm was called Den Find, which I remember being told at a very young age meant Den of the Fiend or Den of the Devil. And it's just something I accepted and never thought any more about. I can't honestly remember when I heard the story about cannibalism. The story is based in a deep ravine which separates the farm that I grew up on, i.e. Den Find, and the farm that borders to the south, which is called Paterley.

And in between these two farms, there is like a den or a ravine, if you like, and there's a wee sort of burn that flows through it. I haven't been down there for years, but I do remember going down there quite a lot with my older brother and my two elder sisters. And we used to play down there quite a lot. You know, you could walk, if you had your wellies on,

you could walk down the field into the den and walk right along it. The den would come deeper and deeper. The ravine would become deeper and deeper. It was quite magical. We used to love going down there and just sort of messing around in the burn and you know all that stuff the story is that basically in the reign of James II which is 1437 to 1460 there was a guy who lived in this ravine

with his whole family and the legend goes that this chap was in the habit of, you know, if there was any travellers going through, he would grab them and eat them. And apparently, the younger they were, the more tender and delicate they tasted. So anyway, as time went on, the locals sort of got wise to this and the whole family would have rounded up and burnt for the crime in Dundee. That was all except a baby girl who was a year old at the time. So they felt that she was too young to be put to death for this. And so she was saved and she ended up being given to a local family to be brought up. The story then goes that somehow when she got a bit older, she discovered that she quite liked the taste of human flesh as well. So she ended up being condemned for the same crime.

Apparently on her way to be burnt, she was crushed and sworn at. And she replied, Wherefore chide you with me as if I had committed an unnatural act? Give me credit. If you had experience of eating either of women's or men's flesh, you would never forbear it again. right muriel firstly that was well told muriel's storytelling ability i'm here for it that was we're out of a job yeah you are now the host of after dark but today's episode we did not know this going into this actually i, I guess it makes sense.

Somebody somewhere is planning these things out. Because we are talking about another Scottish cannibal story, which is from a legend that's growing and has taken on many different forms, it seems, over the time. And that is the tale of cannibalism. And not just cannibalism, but also incest, apparently. The tale of Sawney Bean. So I came across this on our guest today

cat's instagram stories i think it was and it's interesting because i think it has a life of its own at the moment on tiktok on instagram this story is almost okay it's set in the what the 16th century but it's taken on a life of its own hasn't it absolutely has and also the fact that muriel is from fife and I'm also from Fife maybe this is what drew me. You're actually from actual Fife? I am from actual Fife. My accent is going to get stronger as this episode goes on as we talk about it but yeah I grew up knowing this story again I don't know why but this was always a story that I knew. Those of you who don't know Kat is joining us again because she joined us on one of our favourite episodes which was the Paris

Morgue episode. She's a which was the Paris Morgue episode. She's a historian of the Paris Morgue, the New York Morgue, and she is also a photographer and food writer. But today, food writer. Today we were talking about a very specific delicacy and that is human flesh. Kat, you mentioned that you grew up knowing some of these details from living in Fife. What exactly were the parts of the legend that you were familiar with? I actually remember going to the Edinburgh Dungeons when I was very young. I don't know if you've been to any of the dungeons. I haven't actually.

No, I don't think I've ever been there. Yeah, they're pretty intense. And I saw any bean is one of the main features of the Edinburgh one. So I remember going as a kid and that being a very formative memory because it was terrifying. And you go on this little boat and it takes you into this cave and then there's the whole

Sawney Bean tale is there. So yeah, I think it's a story that I'd always heard. And I think it's quite well known in Scotland. I'd never heard it before. Not so much outside of it. No, no. It's definitely not known in England.

Or certainly not. Had you ever heard of it? Speaking for every English person ever, I've never heard of it. No, never, ever heard of it until Kat's story so we should specify that it is really a legend isn't it that there's not a huge amount potentially of historical evidence for this story but there are certain details that put it in a place and a time with individuals right so who are the main players and when is this taking place so there's a couple of versions of this story the most common one is set in the 16th century so kind of the mid mid

1500s and it starts with a man called alexander bean whose nickname is sonny so he's known as sonny bean and he is from a laboring family so i think it's ditch diggers or farm workers it's always in as the tales go it's always people are kind of working in the land and in the most popular version it's set in East Lothian but sometimes it's set in Ayrshire so Sonny supposedly grows up and he's quite an idle and lazy young man and he does not want to follow his father into the ditch digging profession and he sort of gets into scrapes and petty crime and that kind of thing and then he meets a young woman who is also on a similar dark path who is known as black agnes douglas because she is supposedly

dabbling in witchcraft and crime and other dark pursuits let's just do a recap. We have black magic. We have witchcraft. We have hints of vagrancy coming in here that they're taking themselves outside society. There's quite a few things coming together in this. Bit of degeneracy. Bit of the kids don't want to work these days and look where this could lead them. Yes, yes, yes.

You know, a bit of a morality tale. You don't want to dig ditches. You don't know where you might end up. Okay, so Sawy and agnes they're they're in love lock eyes and they realize they have things in common perhaps across a market square okay perhaps across a ditch we don't know and yeah so then they they get into trouble in the town that they're in because of the crime and the black magic and you know they're not popular crime and the black magic and just standard activities general satanic we haven't even gone into the incest and cannibalism yet but they're already developing

a bit of a rep and so they leave they leave the town behind they remove themselves from society and they go to the coast and they find a nice cave that they think they can set up home in okay i mean we talk so much on the show don't we about these kind of peripheral spaces woodlands caves areas that are other in some way that are on the edge of society on the edge of quote-unquote civilization scary places in the landscape this is screaming that to me yeah who knows what's going on in there what what are the rules if you're living in a cave what are the rules it's a lawless land and apparently again according to legend this cave was cut off by the tide twice a day right you can also even more remote oh yeah you can get up to dodgy activities in a cave like that people are

probably not going to come across you yes and they are going to get up to i think it's fair to say dodgy activity dodgy dodgy is a word for it, for sure. A grey wave is sweeping in from the Atlantic towards the lonely coast of Galloway. It swells, rises, then crashes down onto the beach, rushing in a rolling fury towards a cave in the cliff. It reaches the narrow entrance, dashing itself against slimy rocks, mingling with the dank air.

Inside, looking back out to sea, are a family of faces. The Bean Clan in full force, more than 40 of them in all. They're finishing a meal. Too full to have another bite, one of them throws what they can't eat out the mouth of the cave. And so our wave returns to the ocean, carrying with it a partially eaten human arm. Bleak.

Horrible. So we had Agnes and we had Sawney Bean. And now they live in a cave, as Kat said. But now they have children. There are many beans. What's going on? There are many beans. Yeah, so they've got their, you know, newly newlywed love nest cave and agnes is impregnant and they have a couple couple of beans according to one legend i think it's eight or ten children i mean that's more than a couple quite a lot and

then the bean clan continues perhaps a little bit of incest encouragement there they're not seeing a lot of other people oh this is where the incest comes in in the legend yeah so they're they're keeping it in the family in that cave and yes supposedly we soon have maybe like 40 45 beans running around the fact that the beans is kind of distracting isn't it it is mr bean was was not i have looked into it i don't believe that he's the one bean who made it out yeah okay i was going to explain an awful lot We'll be right back. Canada Taxes Extra. Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard, Catherine Parr. Six wives, six lives. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb.

And this month on Not Just the Tudors, I'm joined by a host of experts to tell the stories of the six queens of Henry VIII who shaped and changed England forever. Subscribe to and follow Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. question who are they eating then well so obviously as we've heard that agnes and sony are quite idle they don't want a regular job and so they are robbing people but people then you know might go to the authorities then they murder them then you have to get rid of the body again you know could count as evidence okay so they decide to just start eating well the thing is they're not doing any of it right because none of it's true and that's the well cat tell me like why are we left with these stories if they don't seem to serve well they serve a purpose in that what you were saying is okay don't leave society don't seem to serve, well, they serve a purpose in that what you were saying is, OK, don't leave society, don't cut yourselves off.

You have to be part of this greater good. So it serves that purpose. But then we get into cannibalism and incest. So what purpose is that serving? Why are we left with these stories? Where is that coming from? Well, I think it's really interesting. It's like we had from Muriel at the beginning.

stories where where is that coming from well i think it's really interesting it's like we had from muriel at the beginning there are various versions of this story like you say and they do often involve cannibalism sometimes incest often murder as well so you've got these multiple taboos going on and i think that a lot of cannibal stories i guess from this kind of period or from later maybe into the 17th 18th 19th century are about otherness so they're about kind of portraying other people as savage or uncivilized or outside of the boundaries of society and anti-establishment in that way. So we can perhaps see this as a kind of anti-Scottish sentiment. So the people that were originally spreading this story,

according to the sources that we do have, the story begins to appear, and I think it's, you know, the late 18th century in English chapbooks. Yeah, it starts to appear in print I think it's the late 18th century, in English chapbooks. Yeah, it starts to appear in print, doesn't it? So people are reading this. And of course, you think of the 18th century and England's relationship to Scotland. We've got the Acts of Union, but it's a very troubled relationship. There's lots of tension. And of course, in the earliest decades into the 1740s, we've got the Jacobite Risings, of course, and a predominantly Scottish army coming down all the way to Derby before it turns back and is eventually defeated. But there's

huge tension and there's fear from an English perspective of people across the border. They are othered. And you can totally see that they're being represented as, quote unquote, totally see that you know they're being represented as quote-unquote uncivilized you know that they are othered they are monsters really yeah deviant in that way yeah yeah there's also an implication then with all of that in mind i think the 18th century has patty and i would often say is key to most things but it is the answer to everything yeah the idea that the beans have been committing incest and therefore procreating within this cave in the 16th century, right? So by the time we get to the 18th century, how many of them are there? And what are the implications that that's saying for Scotland? Basically, it's saying that this whole group of people are savages.

They partake in incest. They eat humans. That is what we are left with. And that they're multiplying. And that they're multiplying. And that's what the population is, not what it actually was. Yeah.

And that they're very inbred. Yeah. There's really an implication in that. We come back to this again and again, don't we? What's going on that we do not know. Yeah. And taboo. Yes.

Really, I think this is the thing like incest and cannibalism they're really up there with the ultimate taboo so if you want to make a great memorable legend that really encapsulates this idea of people being absolutely savage and as you say uncivilized and couple that with the scottish landscape itself which is this wild thing it's this again especially from an English perspective, it's this unconquerable thing, going up, you know, the British army going to the Highlands to try and deal with the Highlanders, clearing the land eventually.

There's a sense of not having easy control and access to those people, not being able to understand it and work with it, that these stories kind of come from it's interesting to me though that the places where this story or versions of the story survive are still Scottish oh yeah absolutely and I think that there's something like you say of Scotland there's this idea of it being rugged and wild and untamable that we still think of today Scotland absolutely thrives on dark tourism and really kind of capitalises on its very dark history, I think, to do with witches,

bark and hair. Yeah. All these kind of things. Clodding battlefields. Battlefields, all of that. This real sort of haunted landscape where the blood has seeped into the ground and reverberations through centuries

and that kind of idea is really part of, I would say the scottish psyche i think i mean i grew up with stories like this maybe that's also just says something about my family but you know this is this is very much part of scottish culture and scottish tourism and i think as well that scotland loves a folk hero and a folk anti-hero sure the english version that's told in the 18th century story is very anti-scottish but scottish people themselves have actually turned that around and made it to their advantage. It's really fascinating.

But also that what you're talking about earlier, Maddy, about this idea that from an English perspective, if the Scots are savages, then they need to be tamed and controlled. And therefore, what can we do? I say this as an Irish person. The comments are going to pop up. do i say this as an irish person comments are gonna pop up what can we do but go up and take what we need because they just don't know what they're doing with it and we see it again and again in that colonial narrative i mean that's the core of so much colonial and imperialistic narrative isn't it is that they need us yes so actually we have to go for the sake of civilization

yeah we have to go and help them exactly we must go and tame them and, you know, bring them to our civilized ways. They involve not eating each other. So a lot of this discourse, though, is coming in the later centuries. But the story itself is taking place in the 16th century, in the 1500s. We've got these beans running around the landscape, attacking people, eating them or taking them back to the cave and eating them they're going to get caught presumably because we we know about this story whether or not it's true presumably we wouldn't know about it if everyone that they attacked died and what their you know remains were destroyed so there must be a survivor

yeah so like you say if they just you know continued happily with the cannibalism forever we might never have known of the legend but instead unfortunately at some point it was bound to go wrong as well as as cannibalism goes you can only do it at home you can only do it for so long but again according to legend they had a good go of it about 25 years of cannibal activity and no one noticed during this time well supposedly people did notice because they ate around a thousand people wow goes the the standard statistic although i also did not buy that no because that's what i did wait how many people would you need to eat over 25 years you could eat

a thousand people so i worked this out yesterday. People? I did work this out yesterday in advance. I think it's about 40 people a year, which also isn't enough for a family of... 40 people a year? Yeah. How many people is that? Okay, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Hannibal maths. Yeah. So a family of, what, 40? It's just like 40 of them. Yeah, they're having one person a year. Yeah, that's not enough people. So the maths doesn't work out. But then I did also see a year yeah that's not enough people so the maths doesn't work out but then i did also see a statistic it's a very generous term for this that on wikipedia

it says 5,593 people very precise you don't know who got this incredibly precise number i love the way we're trying to work this out and none of it happens yeah why do you bring a menu together but then i mean we could get also siege diets. People did make bread out of bones once upon a time, but that's all, and eat all the animals in the zoo in Paris once upon a time. Yeah, I mean, we're talking about this particular history that didn't actually happen, but cannibalism does have a real gruesome history. And you're totally right that at various points,

human beings have eaten each other to survive. Yeah, sometimes for for needs sometimes ritualistically you know cannibalism has existed there's evidence of cannibalism going back to the prehistoric period people are always going to eat people and if they don't they're going to have stories about them eating 5993 or whatever it was people that in a cave in scotland somewhere it is it's this is what i often find i often find that the actual stories or the myths that we explore in After Dark are way less scary than actually what's happening. And if you put it in the context of the 18th century again, and you are a Scottish person living on the highlands and the clearances are coming, that's going to be petrifying. That is going to be potentially the most scary thing you are going to encounter in your life.

encounter in your life and then the fear and the just degradation the inhumane treatment that you're going to experience afterwards once you're displaced then that's the kernel of the fear as opposed to this cannibal that doesn't exist in a in a cave somewhere right but it is fascinating that it's adopted in scotland because i mean are we saying then that it's english in origin this is that what is that what we're i mean it's so hard to find the origin isn't it certainly appears in the english print in the 18th century but that's not to say that it didn't exist for this the two centuries before in scotland you know that it's not a story being handed down in which case it totally changes the meaning of it i think it's so hard to know who is telling this why they're telling it what kind of story they're trying to tell what's the message what's the cannibal element

about and i i totally buy cat what you're saying about it being to do with sort of colonial viewpoint and othering these people i also think there's something anthony you said about not wanting people to go to that part of Scotland. It's frightening people. You know, presumably a lot of the people who are disappearing are travellers, are people walking up and down the routes of Scotland along the coast. There's something there about wanting to keep strangers out. stories kind of change shape so many times that it's used for all these different kinds of political standpoints and that it's sort of morphed into it's cannibalized itself you might say you're welcome but you know that it's that it's really it's serving lots of different people

in completely different ways yeah i mean it's also it's a classic bogeyman story isn't it and like you say i think it might it could very well have operated at a local level so there's so many different versions of this sonny bean is the most well known but there's various versions of scottish cannibal stories like we had from muriel at the beginning and they date back to kind of the 1400s 1300s in terms of when the story is set so we don't also know that this wasn't something told locally of a watch out for that road yes there's a cannibal family or yes to children to tell them to not stray too far what muriel was saying to me the warning was initially kids stay out of that place yeah that's not safe because it's not safe like in terms of the physical landscape anything could happen in those ravines yeah and a cave that's cut off by the tide at certain points is a really seriously

problematic place as a child so therefore that's what you're being told as a child but maddie you were talking earlier about how they're being caught and how they're being discovered and i think if we go to the next part of the story it'll give it it gives a flavor of how the myth ended i suppose the disappearances of a thousand people did not go unnoticed. Everyone knew that you walked this stretch of the Western Road of Scotland at your peril. Innocent people were accused and hanged. At last, the bean's luck finally turned sour when they attacked a couple coming home from a fair. The woman was quickly killed, but the man proved a fierce fighter and the Beans were still swarming him when a crowd

of people from the fair appeared around the corner. The Bean clan fled into the countryside and the news of the attack spread like wildfire all the way to King James VI of Scotland himself. So the way this story ends, now, it's probably worth bearing in mind that this story might end a thousand different ways depending on who's telling it. Because it's not real. Because it's not real.

But what we have is this idea that there were travellers on the road, which we've spoken about already, they get taken in, but actually they fail in their task of eating them this time. And there's an escapee. And eventually we are alerted all the way up to James VI of Scotland and I of England. Which, it makes total sense that James would be involved in this particular story, right? James crops up all the time

on after dark and we know about his demonology we know his obsession with witches and the fact that in the beric witch trials he actually goes to face to face to meet one of the witches which is the most extraordinary thing for a king to do so actually it's no surprise to me that he's in on this supposed story supposedly leading hundreds of men and bloodhounds to the beans by the way i just can't cope with their surname being beans you said something like the beans were surrounded i was like where are they so hold on you're saying that james the sixth takes men and dogs and goes hunting this is what the legend says okay yeah which what the legend says. Okay. Which is, just because it reminded me,

because you were saying about going face-to-face with the witches. So it's not unusual that he would potentially do this. Putting himself right in there. Classic James. Yeah, what else would he be doing? Obviously, we don't have records, technically, of James doing this. If he went on a cannibal hunt in Scotland, surely that would be in a record somewhere.

Yes, exactly. I mean, any involvement with him and this would be in a record somewhere yes exactly i mean any involvement with him and this he'd write a book on it we know we know that he likes to write about his beliefs in this kind of shadow world and the supernatural like 100 he is taking a thousand men even if he didn't write the book which he would have had but if he's taking a thousand men that's documented and it ain't documented it ain't documented. It ain't documented. So, therefore, problems. No, I mean, it seems unlikely.

It does. It does, a little bit. You know, there is a lack of sources. But as the tale goes, he took his men and the dogs and all the rest. He was led by locals to the cave. And obviously they found this absolute scene of carnage. Children in rags and blood everywhere and body parts. Real horror film tropes.

I think one of the versions has like body parts in jars and things like that. And then obviously stolen goods as well. So there's clothing from people and that kind of thing all around. they round up the beans the bean clan and cart them off to town which again varies in location as a legend going yes yeah some stories Glasgow and some stories it's Edinburgh and put them to death and the ways that they put them to death vary whichever the most gruesome version at the time whoever is telling the story you do so it could be that they were burnt it could be that they had their limbs chopped off and they were bled to death could be hung drawn and quartered so there's a real variety of options there but

the consistent idea is that they died yeah apart from oh oh as as legend also goes and this links what muriel was telling us at the beginning, one version is that a daughter escaped and moved to Girvan, of all places. Wow. Moved to Girvan, to the seaside town, and attempted to live a quiet life, but was discovered perhaps for continuing her cannibalistic urges, or perhaps just because she seemed've just seemed a bit weird and he was new that's such a tantalizing element of this kind of story isn't it like yes very

cinematic one person got away and they're still living amongst us it's it's very talking of cannibals it's like silence of the lambs is at the end of that film or one of the hannibal franchise films where he's like out in the world he sort of looks back at the camera or doesn't he phone clarice or something and he's like i'm on a nice holiday about to have a meal dot dot dot hangs up you know it's that kind of thing isn't it of like it's still out there you can never be sure that we're all safe yeah it's the follow-up movie isn't it it's it's that's the final scene in film one. Yeah. Setting up for film two. Well, talking about movies, this story has had a massive legacy in cinema, hasn't it? It's the inspiration for a few films, right?

Yeah, The Hills Have Eyes. Wes Craven said that he was inspired by the Sonny Bean tale. But set in a different landscape, interestingly. Yeah, so that was sort of in the sort of American desert. I don't know. I've never seen it. It's too scary for me. It's also actually too scary for me.

I watched it really yesterday and it freaked me out oh I should watch this yeah it's a very it's one of the very sort of it's a real classic horror yeah very dark murder incest

but isn't that oh more incesty stuff more incesty stuff okay that's quite dark cannibalism obviously cannibalism but it is you know this idea of there being

like a clan of cannibals ah I see and murder people interesting as well that story's transported to another remote landscape where there's questions around its wilderness

and conquering that landscape and things. That's really interesting. Yeah, it's a good space for it. And I think also, you know, there's so many different cannibal tales

that have made it into popular imagination. We think also of Sweeney Todd. Yeah. That's a cannibal tale. Yeah. There's a lot of these and I think it really is

because it's such a taboo both eating someone and being eaten both sides of this are very taboo and I think that it makes it a perfect boogeyman story because also you could be eaten and never found again you know that's the whole idea as well it's not just that you've been murdered yes that you've disappeared forever and they're never going to find your body there are no remains yeah and that you become a kind of mutant. Some of these tales obviously have that idea as well that, you know, by eating human flesh, you become some other version. Yeah. Which is a very early modern idea, actually.

This idea of like, you are what you eat. And, you know, sort of things like women breastfeeding children. If you've got a wet nurse in, obviously there are real issues around the transference of disease. But I was also worried that if you were, were for example an upper class woman who gave your child over to a lower class wet nurse that she would transfer some of her lower class morals or intellect supposedly onto the child and there was real worry about that so it's no surprise then that you know we're thinking about the story in the 16th century context going into the 17th and 18th centuries that that's an issue as

well that you are corrupted literally by eating human flesh this is bleak it's got incest it's got cannibalism what does it say that people want to hear an exploration of this story i think it's so outlandish and it's so taboo and like you say it's such a grotesque big story the part of the fascination is is is it real? And also, could humans really be pushed to that limit? I think that's the fascination is people want to know, is there any evidence that this happened? Because could it happen?

Could people go to that limit of absolute, whatever you want to call it, sort of depravity to create an incestuous, cannibalistic clan? There's a word that we haven't said in this episode yet cult they are a cult they are cults and i think people people love a cult they're so fascinating understanding the psychology of how a group like that works obviously in this case they're all very much related but you know how people get away with things and how people influence each other's behavior because obviously in this case you've got sauny and agnes at the start of the story starting a family and

they bring a family up into the world who eat people it's a sort of family tradition a family way of behaving an inheritance isn't it yeah and it's a kind of cult i think it's definitely a cult i would say i think also one thing that's worth noting is that, you know, there's corpse medicine. So there's various, you know, and that it's a version of cannibalism. We need to do an episode on this. Yeah, I mean, it's a whole rabbit hole to go down in that, you know, especially during the sort of 15, 16 centuries, there was a lot of medical treatments, I suppose you would call them, that relied on the body. So you had people trying

to take blood from executed criminals supposedly that showed epilepsy you had powdered egyptian mummies being used you know in europe so i've been taken from egypt being brought to europe and used for all sorts of different cures it was used for paint as well so there's so much evidence and research into how bodies were used in pharmaceutical purposes very early on and for quite a long period and then you know in lots of different countries yeah so that you know it's a form of cannibalism that i think as well we often don't realize and one that's legitimized and made okay because it's for medical purposes very very interesting i think that's a good place to end i think we're done how how much more cannibalism can you take,

listeners of After Dark? It has been fascinating yet again. Kat, thank you so much. We will have you back on because we have really enjoyed these conversations. If you enjoyed listening to Kat talk about her research topics, where can they find you, Kat? At HeyMorgueGirl on Instagram and Twitter.

It's probably the best place. And I will say to people, Kat's Instagram is not only fascinating for historical reasons twitter it's probably the the best place and i will say to people cat's instagram is not only fascinating for historical reasons it's beautiful she is a photographer everything is gorgeous follow her now yes it's so good listen like us subscribe leave your reviews it helps other people find us until then we shall see you next time wendy's has a new breakfast deal Thank you. for a limited time at participating Wendy's in Canada. Taxes extra. Well, thank you for listening to this episode of After Dark. Please follow this show wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. Don't forget, you can listen to all these podcasts ad-free and watch hundreds of documentaries

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