S4 E12: The Oubliette: Trapped, Tortured, Forgotten – Inside the Darkest Prison of the Middle Ages

Trapped in total darkness. No sound, no escape—just the slow breakdown of your body and mind. In this chilling episode of The Dark History Podcast, we descend into the terrifying world of the oubliette, one of the most inhumane torture devices ever devised. Used across medieval Europe, these hidden pits were built to erase people completely—no trial, no grave, no memory. Just a sealed trapdoor and silence. 

Join host Rob as he explores the origins of the oubliette, the castles that hid them, and the horrifying experiences of those thrown inside. From secret executions in France to political disappearances in England and Ireland, we uncover real stories of the forgotten—victims driven to madness in underground tombs barely wide enough to sit in. And while these torture chambers may seem like relics of the past, we’ll ask a disturbing question: have oubliettes truly disappeared, or have they just evolved? 

Grim, immersive, and unforgettable—this episode will haunt you. Don’t listen alone. 

Transcript

Darkness Absolute Suffocating darkness.

Not the kind you get when the lights go out. This is the kind that clings to you. That wraps around your chest like a second skin, squeezing the breath from your lungs. This is darkness that lives. That breathes. That watches. It swallows sound, too. You learn that quickly. The moment you open your mouth to scream, it’s like the air eats it before it reaches your own ears. The cry bounces back at you, smaller, weaker, more pathetic than it felt in your throat. The oubliette doesn’t echo. It doesn’t give anything back. You wake on cold, damp stone. Your body feels broken. One arm twisted beneath you, your hip pressed against a sharp edge you can’t shift away from. You try to stretch your legs but they hit the wall. You try to sit up—your head slams the curve of the low, dripping ceiling. You’re not even in a room—you’re in a pit, a hollowed-out wound in the belly of a castle. The walls are slick. You try to press your hands against them, but your fingers slip through something wet. Moss. Muck. Blood. You don’t want to know. The stink is unbearable. The air is thick with it—stale urine, shit, sweat, rot. You can smell the iron of dried blood, like rusting meat. You gag, instinctively. But you can’t vomit. There’s nothing in you. Just bile and fear. There’s no light. Not even a hint. Not even that thin silver breath that sometimes creeps under a door. Just stone above. Somewhere far above. A hatch, maybe. A trapdoor. You can’t see it—but you remember it. The last thing you saw before the darkness came. The outline of a square against torchlight. A face. A hand. Then the slam of finality.

                                                                                                               You try to call out. You say “Hello?” but your voice cracks. No one answers. Of course they don’t. You scream. Loud. You scream your own name. You scream for your mother, your wife, your god. But the stone drinks your voice like wine. It leaves your throat ragged. Bleeding. Pointless. You are alone. But you are not the first. Your hand brushes something beside you. Hard. Dry. You feel around it. It’s not stone. It’s curved. Ribbed. Hollow. You know it before your mind will admit it—bone. A human ribcage. You recoil in panic, only to land hard on a skull. You shove it away, screaming again. It rolls against the wall with a hollow knock. There are bones everywhere. Some shattered. Some whole. One still wearing scraps of cloth. One with a rusty chain still locked around its ankle. Not ancient. Not dust. They stink. The marrow hasn’t even dried out. You realize, then: they didn’t bury the last person. They didn’t need to. They just closed the hatch and left them to rot. And now it’s your turn. Hours pass. Or maybe days. There’s no way to tell. Time doesn’t exist here. Your body begins to cramp. Your skin itches. You piss yourself at some point. You try to stop it, but you can’t hold it. The warmth turns to cold almost instantly. The smell worsens.

Then the whispers begin.

You tell yourself it’s your imagination. The wind. The creaking of the old stone above. But there is no wind. There is no outside. You are in the earth now. Buried alive. You hear your name. Or think you do. You see a flicker of movement—but your eyes are open wide, and there is nothing to see. Just black. Endless, eternal black. You talk to yourself to stay sane. You name the bones. You give them stories. You tell jokes. You pray. But the silence always comes back. The silence is louder than anything you say. Sleep comes in fits. You wake not knowing where you are, then it all hits you again. Each time is worse. The confusion. The panic. The realization that nothing has changed. That the trapdoor is still closed. That your screams still don’t matter. You stop eating, not by choice, but because there’s nothing. Once or twice, something falls from above. A scrap of stale bread. A crust. Once, moldy meat. Thrown down by someone who doesn’t care whether you choke or starve. You eat it anyway. You weep as you chew. You sob and spit and swallow. At some point, you stop counting time. You forget how old you are. You forget your name. At some point, you envy the bones. You wonder if madness is the mercy. If losing your mind is the body’s final defence against what the oubliette does to you. You start talking to the skull beside you like an old friend. You name it. You give it your voice. It answers sometimes. It tells you things. It laughs. Your fingernails fall off. You feel sores bloom on your legs. Something skitters across your foot—rat or beetle, you don’t care. You can’t move enough to stop it. You wonder if you died days ago, and this is hell. But hell would be louder. And warmer. And less lonely. You pray again. Not for rescue now. Just for death. A quiet one. A dream you don’t wake from. But you will wake. Again. And again. Until your body fails. You will become another pile of bones in the oubliette. And eventually, someone else will land on top of you.

[SHOW OPENING – Light Intro & Episode Tease]

Hi everyone, and welcome back to The Dark History Podcast, where we explore the darkest parts of human history. I hope you’re all doing well. I’m Rob, your host as always, and you’re listening to Season 4, Episode 13. Today, we’re heading into something especially grim. We're talking about one of the most horrifying inventions ever used in imprisonment and torture—the oubliette. Even the name sounds like a curse. Oubliette. It comes from the French word oublier, meaning to forget. And that’s exactly what these things were for. Places where people were not just locked away, but erased. Buried alive in silence and darkness, left to rot and vanish—mind, body, and soul. At first glance, they might look like narrow storage shafts or dried-up wells hidden beneath old castles and fortresses. But they were anything but innocent. These were vertical tombs, often just wide enough for a body to drop in, but not stretch out. No door. No ladder. No way out. The kind of place you weren’t supposed to escape from—not physically, not historically, and certainly not alive. Some victims were left there for days, a cruel psychological punishment meant to break them without leaving a mark. Others were tossed in and forgotten for years. And some were never meant to come out at all. There are reports of people thrown into oubliettes for petty crimes, political inconvenience, or simply to settle personal scores. In this episode, we’re going deep into the history of the oubliette—where they came from, how they were built, and the terrifying purposes they served. We’ll talk about who ended up in them, how long they lasted, and what it really meant to die in one. We’ll even explore the slow, quiet horror of how the human mind breaks down in that kind of isolation. 

This is a dark one. Grim. Gritty. Claustrophobic. But it’s a story worth telling—because the oubliette wasn’t just a prison. It was a warning, a weapon, and a window into the brutal ingenuity of human cruelty. Let’s begin the tale of the darkest of dark history.

[SECTION 1 – What Is an Oubliette?]

The word oubliette comes from the French oublier—“to forget.” And that’s exactly what they were built for: to make people disappear, not just from sight, not just from society, but from memory. An oubliette wasn’t your standard medieval jail cell. It wasn’t a barred room or a dungeon with chains on the wall. It was far more insidious. These were vertical shafts—narrow, hidden, often carved deep into the thickest stone walls of castles or fortresses. There was only one way in: a trapdoor in the ceiling. No doors. No stairs. No ladder. To be dropped into one was not just to be imprisoned—it was to be erased. And make no mistake, this wasn’t a typical cell. This was something far worse. The vertical shaft was  easy to miss if you weren’t looking for it. But for the person below, it was a tomb standing on its head. Most were two, maybe three metres deep. Deep enough that escape was impossible, but shallow enough that you'd survive the fall. At least, physically. Mentally? That’s where the oubliette did its real work. Inside, the dimensions were tight. Maybe just a metre or so wide. Enough space to crouch in, to sit in your own filth, maybe even curl up in pain—but not enough to stretch out or stand comfortably. The walls were usually damp, the stone sweating with moisture from underground. Moss and slime slicked the surfaces. The floor? Jagged, cold, uneven. The kind of surface that bruises you just by breathing on it too long. No bedding. No straw. Just raw stone. These spaces weren’t designed for containment, and they certainly weren’t about reform. An oubliette wasn’t about teaching you a lesson. It wasn’t about justice. It was about removal—getting rid of someone physically, mentally, and spiritually. You weren’t punished in the oubliette. You were Erased.

                   There were bones down there. Sometimes fresh. Sometimes gnawed. Sometimes... still moving. Rats knew the oubliettes. They knew what was dropped in, and how long it took to die. The air stank—piss, blood, mildew, and the metallic whisper of slow decay. You breathed through your mouth to keep from vomiting, but that just coated your tongue in filth. Hours passed like days. Days like lifetimes. You screamed, at first. Cried for mercy. Begged for water, for light, for death. But no one came. Because that was the point. No guards. No torturer with tools. Just time. Silence. And yourself. And yourself is what would break first. Some prisoners clawed at the walls until their fingernails peeled off. Others sang until their voices collapsed, trying to keep the darkness from getting inside. Some turned feral—squatting in their own waste, chewing on leather belts, or worse. Some prayed. And some just... stopped. Not all at once, but slowly. Thought by thought. Word by word. Until all that was left was breathing. Then silence. Left to sit in your own silence. Left to wait, not knowing if that trapdoor would ever open again. Left to starve. To rot. To lose track of time and identity until even you forgot who you were. And here’s the worst part: that was the best case scenario. Because some weren’t left alone. Some were dropped in with the bones of those who came before them. Some had their food lowered in once a day—just enough to keep them alive, but never enough to make it bearable. Some were interrogated, broken slowly, piece by piece, and then thrown back into the dark like a used rag. The oubliette wasn’t a cell. It was a sentence. A slow erasure, written in stone. They weren’t about guilt or justice. They were about vanishing. No sentence. No record. Just the quiet shuffle of a trapdoor being sealed shut, and the long wait to be forgotten. But where did these things come from? Let’s take a step back—into the history that birthed them.

[SECTION 2 – Origins and Use]

The oubliette likely emerged in medieval France, sometime around the 13th century, though earlier versions may have existed before that under different names. It was the perfect tool for a brutal age—an era when kings, lords, and bishops needed to deal with enemies discreetly. Public executions caused unrest. Trials could backfire. But an oubliette? That was clean. Quiet. Secretive. As ive stated they were often built into castles—strategically placed beneath towers or staircases, sometimes disguised as storage pits or waste shafts. To the outside world, the person was simply gone. No body, no grave, no scandal. Just silence. In France, during the reign of Louis XI, the use of oubliette  s flourished. He was a paranoid king, fond of silence and secrecy. He had several oubliettes built into the infamous Château de Loches, where political prisoners simply vanished. England wasn’t far behind. Castles like Warwick and Pontefract were rumoured to contain oubliettes, and some still bear the marks of them today. Monarchs used them to get rid of rivals. Bishops used them for heretics. Nobles used them for anyone who stepped out of line. Even petty criminals could be tossed in on a whim, depending on who they’d offended. And it wasn’t always just about physical imprisonment. The oubliette was psychological warfare. It turned the prisoner's own mind into a weapon—cutting them off from light, sound, time, and identity. A slow burial. A living death. And because they weren’t technically “executed,” there was no martyrdom. No legacy. Just absence.

                                                                 Some castles even boasted of their oubliettes—like they were features of pride. The Château de Loches in France, for example, had one so narrow and deep that prisoners couldn’t even sit down. They were forced to stand in the pitch black, often for days at a time, until their legs gave out beneath them and they were left to collapse and rot. Other oubliettes were built with spikes or sharp rock ledges at the bottom—not to kill immediately, but to make sure that however long you survived, it would be in agony. This wasn’t imprisonment. It was annihilation. Bureaucratic murder. A sentence written in darkness, carried out by gravity and neglect. And it worked. Because centuries later, we don’t even know the names of most who died in them. Just that they were forgotten.

[SECTION 3 – Real Stories of the Forgotten]

Let’s talk about the victims. Oubliettes were scattered across Europe, each one a grim tomb where the forgotten slowly starved, went mad, and died in darkness. Ireland and England had some of the most notorious examples—places where people vanished into stone silence, never to be seen again. In Ireland, the infamous Leap Castle stands out. Known as one of the most haunted castles in the world, Leap’s shadowy dungeons hide secrets darker than most. It is said that the oubliette, which was located in the insidiously named bloody chapel,  was so narrow and deep that prisoners dropped in had no room to sit, only to stand trembling in utter blackness. The worst stories come from the late 16th, early 17th century, when the castle was a site of brutal family feuds and bloody betrayal. One prisoner, a member of the O’Carroll clan, was thrown into Leap’s oubliette during a violent struggle for power. Locked inside for weeks, his mind fractured in the oppressive darkness. Guards later found his body crumpled on the jagged stone floor, fingers digging into the walls as if trying to claw his way out of oblivion. His skin had turned ghostly pale, and his voice was gone. Some say the spirits of those trapped in that oubliette still haunt Leap’s corridors, their sorrow echoing in the dead air.

                                                    Over in England, oubliettes were less common but no less cruel. One of the most harrowing cases comes from the Tower of London, a place notorious for imprisoning the high-profile and the powerless alike. Though the Tower is better known for its dungeons and executions, it also contained narrow shafts used as oubliettes. The story of Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, is a haunting example. Imprisoned in the Tower for years during the reign of Henry VIII, some records suggest she was briefly confined in a pit-like oubliette before her brutal execution. Locked away in complete darkness, deprived of light and fresh air, she reportedly descended into despair and near madness before the final, savage blow. Letters she smuggled out speak of cold stone walls pressing in and endless silence that gnawed at her mind. Another chilling tale is from Ludlow Castle, where political prisoners in the Wars of the Roses were dropped into deep pits disguised as oubliettes. One man, whose name was lost to time, was confined in near total darkness for months. The only sounds were his own ragged breathing and the drip of water on stone. When he was finally found, he was a hollow shell, his mind broken, speaking only in riddles and whispers. He died shortly after, the victim of starvation and madness.

                                                                    Back in Ireland, In Dublin Castle, political prisoners fared no better. There was the case of Seán Mac Carthaigh, a rebel captured in 1641 during the Irish Confederate Wars. Seán was condemned to a slow death in a deep oubliette beneath the castle. According to surviving letters, he was kept in total darkness for weeks. His only sustenance was water poured down from the trapdoor. He begged for a blade or rope to end the nightmare himself but was denied. Historians note that after his death, his body was left in the oubliette, undiscovered for weeks until the stench forced guards to retrieve it. Some accounts mention that in his final days, Seán became delirious, talking to shadows and scratching the walls until his hands were raw.

                                                                                                                                            Across Europe, oubliettes had their own horrors. At the Château de Châteaubriant in France, a famous oubliette known as la fosse was little more than a narrow well in the dungeons. The notorious prisoner Gilles de Rais—once a knight and companion to Joan of Arc, later convicted of horrific crimes—was briefly confined in an oubliette here. Though records are unclear, rumors suggest the darkness and silence drove him further into madness before his public execution. The oubliette was said to have no ventilation or light, amplifying his torment. In Germany’s Wartburg Castle, another grim oubliette was used during the Thirty Years’ War. Prisoners were thrown in as punishment for spying or dissent. One man, whose name was lost to history, was reportedly left for months. Guards heard only faint scratching and moaning from below. When they finally opened the trapdoor, they found a pitiful figure—skin pale and translucent, eyes sunken, hands shaking uncontrollably from starvation and isolation. He survived only long enough to mumble incoherent phrases before dying. The stories share common threads: utter darkness, bone-chilling cold, the creeping stench of decay, the endless pressure of walls so close you can feel your ribs pressing into stone. And most haunting of all—the mind unraveling. Madness in the oubliette was inevitable. The brain craves light, sound, connection. Stripped of all three, prisoners lost themselves first. Time blurred into an endless nightmare. Delirium, hallucinations, despair—the oubliette was a crucible that crushed the human spirit. And yet, none of this cruelty ever left a mark on history books. These were hidden deaths, secret disappearances, and forgotten screams.

[SECTION 4 – Decline and Obsolescence]

The oubliette didn’t disappear because people became more merciful. It vanished because cruelty evolved. By the 17th and 18th centuries, the old medieval castles—cold, stone fortresses with hidden shafts and secret dungeons—were falling out of use. Warfare was changing. So was politics. Torture was slipping out of fashion in many places, not because rulers grew a conscience, but because public order demanded something more… controlled. More visible. Death behind closed doors didn’t send the right message anymore. The rise of formal prisons and legal systems meant fewer secret punishments. Public executions, forced labor, penal colonies—these became the new tools of fear. In England, for example, prisoners once thrown into oubliettes were now shipped off to places like Botany Bay in Australia. In France, the Bastille became the symbol of political imprisonment: still brutal, still soul-destroying, but with a paper trail. And the oubliettes? They were simply bricked up. Covered over. Forgotten. In Leap Castle, the shaft was sealed for centuries until workers stumbled upon it in the 1900s. Inside, they found hundreds of human bones. So many that it took cartloads to remove them all. Some skeletons were impaled on spikes at the bottom—ensuring death for those unfortunate enough to survive the fall. In Warwick Castle, England, one of the most intact oubliettes still exists. Tour guides will show you the trapdoor, the sheer drop, the damp stone below. They’ll describe the horror, but standing over it, you can feel it—the cold breath of history rising from the pit. You’re staring into something designed to unmake a person, piece by piece.

By the 1800s, oubliettes were relics. They belonged to a darker time—one most people wanted to forget. But forgetting is exactly what they were built for. So, in a way, they succeeded. And yet, they never really vanished. We may not use oubliettes today, but we still know how to bury people alive—just with bureaucracy, silence, or isolation instead of stone. Supermax prisons. Solitary confinement. Disappearances in war zones and detention camps. The oubliette didn’t die. It just changed its shape.

[SECTION 5 – Closing Thoughts]

Thank you for taking the time out of your day to listen to this dark and heavy episode. It’s easy to talk about oubliettes like they’re just some grim curiosity from the past. A bit of medieval cruelty buried under castles and behind glass in museums. But when you really stop and think—really picture what it meant to die like that—something shifts. Imagine sitting in that dark, narrow pit. No sound. No sunlight. Your voice hoarse from screaming. Your stomach clawing at itself. Hours blurring into days, and days into madness. You rot in the dark while life carries on above you—people eating, laughing, sleeping in warm beds. And you… you’re erased. Not because you did something unspeakable. Sometimes just because you annoyed the wrong noble, or spoke the wrong words, or believed in the wrong god. And nobody even has to clean up after you. That’s the part that lingers with me. The oubliette wasn’t just a method of imprisonment. It was a sentence of silence. Of vanishing. Once the trapdoor shut above you, it wasn’t just your body that was trapped. It was your name. Your identity. Everything you were. You didn’t even get the dignity of being hated or remembered as a warning. You were deleted. Quietly. Efficiently. Completely.

It makes me wonder what we forget now. Who we forget. And who’s doing the forgetting. We forget the people who die nameless in war zones. The ones disappeared by dictatorships. The homeless man people step over every day like he doesn’t exist. The prisoners locked in isolation cells, speaking to no one for years. We think oubliettes are gone. But maybe they’re not. Maybe they’ve just become less visible. Anyway, If you enjoy the show, please consider leaving a review—it really helps us reach more listeners by boosting our visibility in the algorithm. if you think friends or family might enjoy the podcast, don’t hesitate to share it with them. You’ll find links to all our socials below.

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