The Pit and the Pendulum

In Edgar Allan Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum," the narrator initially faces two major dangers. First, he discovers a deep pit in total darkness, narrowly avoiding falling into it. This pit...

The prisoner is drugged by his torturers after he discovers the pit, as they seek to implement a new method of torment. Initially, the pit was intended to be his demise, but when that plan fails,...

The mechanism by which the walls force the narrator into the pit in "The Pit and the Pendulum" involves the walls progressively heating up and moving inward. This creates an increasingly narrow...

The narrator is a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition, awaiting torture and death. The Pit smells rotten, so the narrator thinks it must go deep into the bowels of the earth--maybe all the way to...