Oubliette
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An oubliette was a form of dungeon which was accessible only from a hatch in a high ceiling. To exit an oubliette was impossible under any circumstances, without outside help. The word comes from the French oublier, "to forget," as it was used for prisoners whom it was desired to forget. Most prisoners were left to die of starvation, although in a few cases an oubliette was known to have a large spike in the center of the floor. This allowed a lucky few prisoners who landed on it to have a quicker, more "humane" death.
The earliest use of the word in French dates 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." (OED) 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 during the Gothic Revival period.
Although they may have been used as an inventive place of detention, their original purpose was to store grain.
There is an excellent example of an oubliette at the chateau in Meung-sur-Loire near Orleans in France. This consists of a submerged structure close to the castle. There is an opening at the top which reveals a large circular stone-clad pit, approximately twenty metres in depth, approximately five metres across, with sheer walls. It has a central hole in the floor, a pit within the pit, the lower pit being used for excrement and dead prisoners. Popularly it is imagined that approximately thirty to forty could be held there. Apparently only one prisoner escaped; he wrote a poem for the king who was visiting.
One example of what might be popularly termed an "oubliette" is the particularly claustrophobic cell in the prison of Warwick Castle, in central England. The access hatch consists of an iron grille secured by a hasp and (now) padlock.
Kurt Vonnegut metaphorically refers to a bomb shelter as an "oubliette" in his book Cat's Cradle. In the book, different types of torture devices are compared:
In any case, there's bound to be much crying.
But the oubliette alone will let you think while dying.
Oubliette is also used to refer to ice formations over lakes or other large bodies of water. As ice crystals formed, and air was introduced in the movement of the tides, tunnels would form under the ice. Presumably if one fell into the tunnel, one would surely be forgotten by spring's thaw.
In Final Fantasy XII, Fran refers to the dungeon she, Vaan, and Balthier are locked in early in the game as an oubliette.
