Creepy Wikipedia

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A fediverse community for curating Wikipedia articles that are oddly fascinating, eerily unsettling, or make you shiver with fear and disgust

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Gong farmer: The people whose job it was to remove human effluent from privies and cesspits in Tudor England. Operating at night to avoid the public, they were generally shunned. (en.wikipedia.org)

submitted 8 months ago by 58008@lemmy.world to c/creepywikipedia@lemmy.world

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One notable incident occurred in 1326, when a gong-farmer named Richard the Raker fell into a cesspit whose ceiling had rotted, and drowned while collecting feces.

Possibly the worst death on the job ever?

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[–] PrincessLeiasCat@sh.itjust.works 13 points 8 months ago

Much of what is known about London's privies during the 17th and 18th century comes from witness statements describing what had been discovered among the human excrement, such as the corpses of unwanted infants.

It somehow got worse.