It's the 19th of December 1702. We're in

the Bastile, an enormous prison complex

in Paris. And in the absolute lowest

boughels of this fortress of

incarceration and torture, stands a man

who has spent the last 33 years rotting

behind bars. Well, actually, it would be

more accurate to say he has been rotting

under bars as he suffers one of the

worst fates possible. The ubliet, a

pitch black underground dungeon the

victims are tossed into, left with

nothing but darkness and scuffling rats

for company until they're completely

forgotten to the world and finally

succumb to malnutrition

or madness. And as for the man currently

in the ubliet under the Bastile, nobody

knows for certain how long he's been

there or why he's been imprisoned in the

first place. Guards are under strict

orders never to communicate with him,

only breaking the silence to toss down

flasks of feted water or scraps of moldy

bread. So extreme is his seclusion

within the dungeon that these guards

don't even know his name or what he

looks like. Most have never seen his

face through the pitch black cell. Those

that have gotten close enough to

actually make out his features are sworn

to an oath of complete silence. To most

of the gods, he's known simply as the

man in the Iron Mask. It's the only name

we have for him that survives to this

day. And although many have tried to

uncover his true identity, no one is

certain who this prisoner in the Ullet

is. The oolet itself comes from the

French word ooier, which means to

forget. For the man in the iron mask,

it's most certainly been effective. No

one can remember his true identity, and

after three decades of wasting away in

total darkness, neither can he. This was

one of the very few confirmed cases of

the obliet's use. You could argue that

this was because it was an exceptionally

rare punishment. But perhaps the real

reason that records are so scarce is

simply because of how effective the

ooiet was at making people utterly

forgotten and forever erased from

history. But what actually was the

ooiet? And who was the man in the iron

mask?

[Music]

In the medieval and early modern period,

prison was not a go-to punishment like

it is today. Instead, punishment was

swift and public with an emphasis on

corporal punishments like flogging or

capital punishments like hanging. This

is partly because keeping a peasant

behind bars and feeding them every day

whilst they can no longer contribute to

farming or labor would have been an

outrageous expense at the time. But it

was also because of some religious

beliefs around crime and punishment in

medieval Europe. Serious crimes like

murder were believed to add a kind of

moral pollution to the community. And so

a public execution or punishment was

seen as a way of cleansing the moral

community of that corruption and

restoring things to a state of harmony.

So when someone was actually put behind

bars, it usually meant that they weren't

just criminals, but were instead

hostages from wealthy families or rival

political factions, and they would be

held in captivity while their captor

used them as a bargaining chip for

negotiations and settlements. For this

purpose, most captives would be kept

inside a castle dungeon where they would

wait until a settlement was agreed, at

which point they would be let free to go

on their way. But in some cases, far

deeper within the complex was a very

particular kind of dungeon called the

Uliet, where people could be locked away

for far longer periods of time, often

forever, and far away from the public

eye. Unlike a normal prison cell, an

ooliet was usually a narrow vertical

shaft, sometimes barely wide enough to

stand or sit in, with a single trap door

at the top. No windows, no light, no

comfort. Victims were lowered in through

the trap door and left in total

darkness. The only sounds were that of

your own breath, the scurrying of rats,

and the drip of water echoing off of

cold stone walls. Often times the ubliet

was so tight that the victim would be

forced to stand for the entirety of

their time within leaning on the slimy

mossridden face of the stone walls or

worse against the remains of those who

had come before and were discarded in

the hole to perish. Since the whole

thing was at the very bottom of the

castle's structure, waste from latrines

and rotten groundwater would often pull

at the base of the ubliet, leaving the

victim kneede in stinking water, who

would be unable to see what was

underneath the surface since everything

was pitch black. First, the darkness,

not just nighttime dark, but a

suffocating absolute black. The kind of

dark where your eyes never adjust. Where

you can't see your own hand in front of

your face. Days and nights blur into

each other. Time stops existing. Then

there's the cold. The uglier was dug

deep into the stone, damp, bitterly

cold. The air stale and heavy. Your

clothes, if you had any, would stay

permanently wet. Your skin would

blister. Your joints would ache

constantly. You'd never get dry or ever

get warm. And worst of all, the silence

broken only by distant echoes, the sound

of rats, or the occasional clang of the

trapoor far above. No voices, no

sunlight, no human contact, just endless

solitude. You wouldn't even know how

long you'd been down there. Weeks,

months, years. You'd lose track of

everything. Speech, memory, your sense

of self. And eventually, if starvation

or thirst didn't kill you, your own mind

would. Few people who went into an

ubliet ever came out. And if they did,

they rarely came out sane. There were

many ways to die in a hole like this,

but none of them were quick. Starvation

was common. Some were thrown down with

just enough food and water to prolong

the suffering. Crusts of stale bread,

filthy water dripped down from above. It

kept them alive just long enough to make

them wish that they weren't. Then there

was exposure. These pits were deep stone

shafts, always wet and as we said,

always cold. Hypothermia could take you

slowly, especially in winter. Infections

would fester in the filth. And you can

imagine where you would need to go to

the bathroom. In this situation, rats

would gnaw at you while you slept,

standing up, or while you were too weak

to stop them chewing on you. But worst

of all was the mind. The total silence,

the complete darkness. It could break a

person long before the body gave out.

Locked away with nothing but your own

thoughts. Not knowing if it's a day or

night, if it's been a week or a year,

the brain starts to fracture.

Hallucinations set in. Memory slips. You

forget your name. You forget the world.

Some prisoners reportedly began to speak

to walls, to sing to themselves for

hours, or simply to stop responding

altogether. The ubliet didn't need

torturers. The ooiet was the torture. We

don't have diaries from victims, but we

do know what happens to a human mind

under similar conditions because modern

psychologists have studied it by looking

closely at solitary confinement,

especially in supermax prisons. And the

effects are disturbing. After just a few

days in complete isolation, inmates

report anxiety, paranoia, insomnia,

hallucinations, even full-on psychotic

breaks. And these are people who still

get food, lighting, warmth, and maybe a

toilet. Now imagine what it's like in an

ooliet. No light, no human voices, no

clear sleep cycle, no stimulation,

nothing. The brain needs stimulation to

stay grounded in reality. And if you

take that away, the mind starts creating

its own. That's when the walls start to

breathe. That's when you hear voices

that aren't there. That's when you start

to believe you're being watched or eaten

alive from the inside. In short, the

ubliet doesn't just punish the body. It

strips away a person's sense of time,

place, identity, and eventually sanity.

By the time starvation or infection

finally sets in, the person who dies in

the pit might no longer resemble the

person who went in. And maybe that was

the point all along, not just to make

someone disappear, but to unmake them

completely. So, how often was this

punishment actually used? Well, the

ublier is one of those punishments that

barely leaves a trace. And that's the

point. It was designed to make people

vanish quietly and completely. Because

of that, we don't have long lists of

names or detailed court records. Most

who were thrown in were meant to be

forgotten. That's what makes tracking

real cases so difficult. You don't

record what you're trying to erase. But

the concept appears in whispers and

rumors across Europe. In the L Valley,

some castles have narrow stone shafts

that match the exact design, hidden

behind walls or beneath trap doors just

wide enough to let someone in. In

Scotland and Germany, some accounts

described bottle dungeons, deep pits

beneath towers where political enemies

or traitors could be sealed away without

trial. And then there's the one case

that might prove the obli wasn't just a

legend. The individual with whom we

started this episode, the man in the

iron mask. He was arrested in 1669 under

a false name. And for the next 34 years

he was shuffled between the most secure

prisons in France. Pignarel Exil Samari

and finally the Bastile. His guards were

given strict orders never to speak to

him, never let him be seen and above all

never reveal his identity. At all times

he was forced to wear a mask. Some said

velvet or black. Some claimed it was

iron, hence the name to keep his face

hidden even in death. He died in 1703

and was buried under yet another false

name. To this day, no one knows who he

really was. Theories have spiraled for

centuries. A disgraced noble, perhaps an

Italian diplomat, the twin brother of

King Louie, perhaps even a valet who

happened to know too much about royal

corruption. None have ever been proven.

And that was the whole point. A human

being with a name, a personality, a

past, and hopes for the future had been

removed from history, memory, and even

themselves, remaining only as semi-

mythical legend. A man behind an iron

mask. The Ullet wasn't just a hole in

the ground. It was an act of erasure.