Anyone here old enough to remember having an outside outhouse?

West Coast of Tasmania, 1960's.
Our toilet was outside. Not very pleasant getting up in the middle of the night, pouring with rain, very cold.
There was a Nightsoil collector who would come around once a week to take away the dunny can and replace it with another one.
There were plenty of stories of the dunny can bottom giving way as it has hefted onto the shoulder of the "Dunnyman"

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4meAndyou · F Best Comment

My grandfather had one out by the barn, but it was not in common use any longer, except for emergencies. When I was a kid, I REALLY had to go and my grandmother had been in the ONE bathroom for a LONG time...so my mother told me to use the outhouse.

I said, but how will I wipe myself? She said...use a corn cob. The ONLY corn cobs were on the dirt driveway, dried to sandpaper consistency. I picked one up and had to brush off the ants.

I got out to the outhouse, sat down, looked up, and there was an albino scorpion up in the corner above my head.

It was small...but it did lead me to wonder what was crawling around under the seat where my bare rear end was parked. I got out of there as fast as I could...and yes, I DID try to use the corn cob, which hurt me horribly.

My mother refused to believe me about the scorpion.

There was another outhouse up at a camp in Maine, where I stayed one summer with the family of the 2nd ex. The camp was quite primitive. Grammy used to wash herself in the pond, but did not use soap in the lake water so as not to pollute.

The outhouse was perched up on the hill just above the camp, and now that I have more experience with such things, I realize that the leaching fiend led right down to the pond. Grammy had a huge can filled with lake water on her wood burning stove, and she boiled it and used it to wash the dishes.

Heartlander · 80-89, M

@4meAndyou The daytime experiences of using an outhouse fed the fear of using it at night, in the dark. Out houses tended to be located out of public sight, away from the house, often hidden behind bushes or other structures ... in areas where spiders, snakes, scorpions, frogs, lizards, insects, etc. lived.