The Pit Built To Make You Forgotten

In medieval castles across France, Germany, Austria, England and Ireland, certain rooms contained a feature that didn’t appear on any courtly plan. A hatch in the floor. A shaft of stone. A drop into darkness — deep enough that you could not climb out, narrow enough that you could barely move, and isolated enough that no one outside would hear you scream.

The French had a word for it. They derived it from the verb oublier — to forget.

Oubliette. A place of forgetting.

The Horror

An oubliette was not a dungeon. Dungeons had doors. Dungeons had gaolers. Dungeons had a system: sentences, ransoms, pardons, escapes. The oubliette had none of these. It was usually bottle‑shaped — narrow neck at the top, widening slightly below — cut straight down into the rock beneath a room or passage. The only access was through the hatch.

The prisoner was lowered or dropped through the opening. The hatch was shut. No one was meant to come back.

There was no trial date, no expectation of release, often no formal sentence at all. Being put into an oubliette was less a punishment for a crime than the erasure of a person. The objective was not pain as spectacle — though pain was inevitable. The objective was disappearance. Once the hatch closed, you ceased to exist in the world above.

Some oubliettes were small: around six feet deep and three feet wide, essentially standing room only. In those, the prisoner could not sit or lie down. They might not even be able to turn fully around. They stood in darkness and silence, pressed by stone on all sides, until thirst, exhaustion or collapse killed them. Some pits had rough or pointed stones at the bottom, so that even standing was agony.

Others were much deeper — fifteen, twenty, thirty feet — reachable only by rope. At that depth, the air cooled, the light vanished, and sound from the castle vanished with it. A person in such a shaft was about as isolated from the living world as you can be without being buried.

The mechanism of the oubliette was simple and terrifying. It was not chains. It was not beating. It was not even deliberate starvation. It was neglect. The prisoner died because nobody remembered they were there.

Historians debate how often oubliettes were actually used for true “forgetting” as opposed to short‑term confinement or storage. Some point out that not every pit described as an oubliette was used for slow death. Others, citing the human remains found in several shafts, argue that at least some were used exactly as the name suggests.

The Modern Relic

Oubliettes still exist in castles and fortified houses across Europe. The Château de Pierrefonds in northern France has one. Warwick Castle in England has a vertical shaft cut into the rock beneath its central tower, long described as an oubliette. Leap Castle in Ireland has perhaps the most infamous example: a pit opening into a chamber in which workers clearing rubble in the early 1900s reportedly found human bones in such quantity that they filled several cartloads. Mixed among the remains were short wooden stakes, suggesting that at least some victims were dropped onto spikes.

Today, tourists visit these places in guided groups. They peer down through iron grilles or glass covers into darkness. A rope or railing keeps them safely back. Information boards explain the word, the practice, and the legends.

Outside the castles, “oubliette” has become a fantasy word. It appears in novels, role‑playing games, and films — most famously in Labyrinth, where the Goblin King threatens to drop people into one. The term now signals something exotic, theatrical and medieval.

What gets lost in that transformation is the original mechanism. The oubliette was not the dramatic execution. It was the absence of execution. You weren’t taken out and beheaded. You were dropped in and left. The word itself — “to forget” — describes both the architecture and the sentence.

The holes are still there. In some, the bones are still there too. The forgetting is the part we’ve mostly forgotten.

← Back to the archive