On a construction site in the town of Cleethorpes in England, a mysterious 200-year-old bottle has been raising questions about what exactly was going on at this location a couple of centuries ago. The bottle isn’t filled with a precious wine, or the blood of Christ, or a rolled-up treasure map. The bottle is filled with piss. 200-year-old piss.
The bottle of ancient piss was found by workers digging trenches on Seaview St. in Cleethorpes, a small town of nearly 30,000 on the East Coast of England. The workers initially thought it was a bottle of rum, perhaps left behind by pirates centuries ago. They were all set to crack it open and give it a swig when the project manager stepped in.
The project manager wasn’t trying to save the workers from their stupidity by thinking they could just crack open and start drinking from an old bottle found buried in the ground. They understood there was probably some kind of historical significance to the bottle, so they had it analyzed by a student named Zara Yates from the nearby University of Lincoln.
Yates used crime scene technology to determine that maybe the liquid in the bottle was rum at one point, but is now definitely a whole lot of piss. Speaking to the BBC, Yates said “It’s very usual to find an object with this amount of liquid still inside.”
The only reason the iridescent bottle remains intact after excavation is that the digging machine couldn’t quite reach into a narrow passageway, so the work crew had to start digging by hand. If they’d been using the machine, they probably would’ve crushed the bottle and released the evil spirits of 200-year-old piss.
The shape of the bottle indicates that it was likely hand-made in 1790, as the mass production of such bottles using molds didn’t begin until 1840. There is no way to definitively know why this bottle is filled with piss, but Yates and her fellow researchers at the University have some theories.
One is that it was a “witches bottle” buried to ward away evil spirits. I like to believe it’s a distant cousin of the piss-filled water bottles you can see strewn on the side of long stretches of highway lacking rest stops.
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