What does an oubliette look like?

Search: oubliette

Why: I just finished Silence of the Lambs on audiobook. If you are a fan of that awesome movie - which was the first DVD I ever owned, btw, when I was 16 - you should totally read it (or listen to it - it's only 3 hours long!) (and read by Kathy Bates!). It's super creepy, even when you're listening to it in the middle of the day while driving. Jame Gumb's dungeon is described thusly:

The top of the oubliette glowed green, the stones and mortar distinct, the grain of the wooden cover sharp in his vision. Hold the light and lean over. There they were. It was on its side like a giant shrimp. Perhaps asleep. Precious was curled up close against its body, surely sleeping, oh please not dead.

Or here's a whole passage, so you can see how fun this book is:

He had in the past hunted young women through the blacked-out basement using his infrared goggles and light, and it was wonderful to do, watching them feel their way around, seeing them try to scrunch into corners. He liked to hunt them with the pistol. He liked to use the pistol. He could stand in absolute darkness with his goggles on, wait until they took their hands down from their faces, and shoot them right in the head. Or in the legs first, below the knee, so they could still crawl.
That was childish and a waste. They were useless afterward and he had to quit doing it altogether.
In his current project, he had offered showers upstairs to the first three, before he booted them down the staircase with a noose around their necks - no problem. But the fourth had been a disaster. He'd had to use the pistol in the bathroom and it had taken an hour to clean up.

Mr. Gumb wanted very much to offer this one a shampoo because he wanted to watch it comb out the hair. He could learn much for his own grooming about how the hair lay on the head. But this one was tall and probably strong. This one was too rare to risk having to waste the whole thing with gunshot wounds.
No, he'd get his housing tackle from the bathroom, offer her a bath, and when she had put herself securely in the hoisting sling he'd bring her halfway up the shaft of the oubliette and shoot her several times low in the spine. When she lost consciousness he could do the rest with chloroform.

!!!

Answer: Well, it's kind of just the same as it is in the movie. You might describe that one as a "well," but an oubliette is just a "dungeon that opens only at the top." The name comes from the French word oublier, "to forget." Sad.

But it may not have been a real thing that anyone actually used:

The earliest use of oubliette in French dates back to 1374, but its earliest adoption in English is Walter Scott's Ivanhoe in 1819: 'The place was utterly dark—the oubliette, as I suppose, of their accursed convent.' There is no reason to suspect that this particular place of incarceration was more than a flight of romantic elaboration on existing unpleasant places of confinement described during the Gothic Revival period.

Source: Merriam-Webster, EtymOnline, Wikipedia

The More You Know: I hate to tell you this, but I didn't get to hear Kathy Bates say, "Owait, was she a great big fat person?"

She said something similar, but not that. You will have to listen for yourself to find out what and how!