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Oubliette Dungeons: The method of execution similar to Gas chamber use in the medieval times

The oubliette was a method of execution, not a method of imprisonment or torture. You didn’t go and get the victim after they had served their time. You didn’t question them for information. You didn’t listen to any new evidence after they were tossed in - that iron grate might as well have been the gates of hell. Once you were in, you were never getting out. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, you didn’t exist. As the name suggests, you were forgotten.

It was the preferred method of execution for many. Taking someone’s life with an axe or a noose was considered a mortal sin in many cultures, so the oubliette was a way to kill someone without actually killing them - the executioners were apparently able to convince themselves that it was nature or whatever that did the actual killing.

For this reason, the famous pit at Leap Castle wasn’t technically an oubliette:

This pit had wooden staves at the bottom, which impaled victims as they fell. That breaks the primary rule of an oubliette, which is that the forgotten person must die of “natural causes.”

When the oubliette was in use, people were thrown in as often as executions were needed. It wasn’t like a special punishment for particularly nasty offenses - anyone deemed deserving of death would likely find themselves in an oubliette. The only exceptions would be mass killings, since an oubliette obviously could only handle a small number of people at a time (many were only built to hold a single person, though I imagine that capacity was stretch from time to time). The death shaft in Leap Castle contained over 150 skeletons, and it is believed to have been in use for approximately 300 years. If we use that as a guide, we might estimate that a real oubliette might have had a new occupant once every 2 years or so.

They were left there until excavators, remodelers, or explorers from a later era came and removed their skeletons. No one ever “cleaned out” an oubliette. The whole purpose was to drop someone in there and pretend the victim never existed, and it obviously would have been a pretty nasty job, so they just didn’t bother. I’m sure there are still some as yet undiscovered oubliettes that still hold the remains of their victims today.

Ironically, it wasn’t until the oubliette was literally forgotten that there was a chance of the victims’ remains being recovered. As long as the oubliette was in use, or at least known about by the castle owners, it would be ignored. Once those owners and anyone who knew about the oubliette passed on, there was a chance it would be discovered and excavated.


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