Older houses with strange shower heads in the basement?

Question

Recently I have encountered some older homes with strange features. In the basements, usually cinder block types, I have come across random "showers" in the corners. All that is there is a pipe with a shower head coming out of it and a small drain on the cement floor. What are (or were) these showers used for?

I'm not quite sure on the age of the houses... I would say most likely pre-1930's.
And yes, there is room for a person to stand underneath.

I had also seen a tv show where they identified a similar shower as a butcher shower. Where a butcher would cut up meat in the basement and wash the blood off when he finished working. The show was about paranormal activity and the people who lived in the home felt that horrible things had happened in the basement.

So I'm a bit freaked out by these showers.

Answer 1

I saw the same show you did and that was the first thing that came to mind, but it is still just a shower and not necessarily used after butchering animals. I would imagine that they were used to wash off after any chore that was dirty. Like farming, ranching, cleaning stalls as well as butchering dinner.
No reason to be freaked out it's just a shower.

Answer 2

I have no idea...so I'll take a guess.

In our basement we had a shower, finally mom enclosed it in a 3-sided steel enclosure, you could barely turn around in it. At the time my dad worked in the mill and it was for him to shower up so he wouldn't make the rest of the house messy after he came home from work.

It depends on how old the houses were. I remember in the 1950's that my grandparents had no plumbing and had an outhouse (could be that the house was built by the coal mining company in the early 1900's because they used to build houses for their workers who would rent them and then later own them) although they had a basement that I was never in. Those days the guys were coalminers, farmers and craftsmen. When they killed chickens from their farm they would wash them outdoors. Because of that I would presume any shower indoors (and because you say they were prevalent) was for bathing and not for cleaning anything.

Answer 3

Are these very old houses? Like Pre-1930s or so? And is the shower tall enough for a person to get under the sprayer head?

Our old house has one ~ they are just showers to for the guys to get cleaned up under after spending the day getting dirty. Remember, showers weren't very common until the 1950/60s or so and most people just had bathtubs. This was an easy solution for cleaning off work grime.

Answer 4

I grew up in one of these houses. The upstairs bathroom had a claw foot tub and no shower. If we wanted to shower- we went to the basement. There was also an old farm style sink next to the shower. The shower had a metal ring attached to the flooring overhead and had a shower curtain around it. We stood on a wood skid over the drain. Thanks for bringing back the memory.