Poveglia - Near Venice, Italy
Poveglia is a tiny island located in the Venetian Lagoon in Italy. But it is not an island for holiday makers or tourists wanting to capture Venice’s old world beauty. It is an island of horror.
When an outbreak of the bubonic plague swept through Venice panic gripped the city. Dead bodies piled up in the streets and fear of catching the Black Death was all-consuming. Authorities decided to make use of the uninhabited Poveglia and dead bodies were gathered up and dumped into huge pits on the island. But as the plague prospered, people’s fear began to get out of control and those showing the slightest symptoms of the disease were rounded up and dragged to the island where they were unceremoniously dumped into the pits without a second thought. The plague chose not to discriminate when claiming victims and so neither did those in charge of keeping the diseased away from the healthy. Women and children were included in the scouring of contaminated and just like those that had already died, were also dumped into the pits of rotting carcasses to slowly die in an altogether horrifically unimaginable way.
After the final waves of the plague subsided, the island sat quietly in the sun for many years.
In 1922, the island, for reasons unfathomable, was chosen as the site for a psychiatric hospital. Immediately the patients began to claim seeing ghosts of the long dead plague victims and hearing strange noises and screams. The doctor in charge of the hospital, in an “attempt” to figure out why the poor residents were experiencing visions of the dead, began conduction crude experiments and performing twisted lobotomies on them. But it wasn’t long after that the good doctor himself began seeing and hearing the ghosts and it is said that “something” chased him up to the bell tower and pushed him off to his death.
The hospital has long since closed and now the island’s only use is as a vineyard. It is not open to the public and people are warned to stay away. It is lightly patrolled by local police during the day but when night falls, they too are eager to distance themselves from the cursed place.
Those who have managed to brave the unknown have said the island exudes pure evilness and that the cries and screams that seem to come from nowhere and everywhere all at once are enough to make the most fearless man flee in terror.
Recently, in a plot straight out of a horror movie, a group has decided to try and restore the buildings on Poveglia and turn it into a culture center where students from all over can come and learn. If the project happens, one wonders what students might learn from Poveglia that aren’t taught in a class.
