I would imagine that these types of toilets would have attracted other creatures as well that one would have to beware of before going in. Because of this, I would think that people would have developed some sort of system for temporarily clearing the spiders and other things away, such as dropping a match into the bucket or what not. The Wikipedia article on Outhouseprivy/outhouse [/wiki] didn't say what was done to clear it out. It did refer to it also as a "kybo" and gave a possible explanation of the half moon carved into the door for the purpose of Muslim soldiers who needed a focus. This seems a bit of a stretch to me, though, and that explanation is somewhat unclear to me.
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