Haunted Island

Poveglia is a haunted island near Venice, Italy. It’s darkened shores are strewn with polished human bones and it is supposed to be so scary that no tourists are ever allowed to set foot on it.

When the plague hit Italy in 1576, thousands of dead bodies were piling up in Venice and the stench was terrible. Something drastic had to be done.

The dead were hauled to the island and dumped in large pits or burned on huge bonfires. But as the plague became worse, people began to panic, and anybody who had symptoms of the Black Death were dragged screaming from their homes.

These living victims, including children and babies, were taken to the island of Poveglia and thrown into the pits of rotting corpses, where they were left to die in agony. As many as 160,000 tormented bodies were dumped there over the years.

The whole island is still covered in a layer of ash, the remains of all the burned bodies. Before long, local people began seeing strange things and hearing strange sounds coming from the haunted island.

Despite the ghostly goings-on, in 1922, a mental hospital was built on the haunted island. The patients immediately reported seeing the ghosts of rotting plague victims and of hearing whispers echoing off the walls. But nobody believed them because they were already regarded as demented and insane.

The hospital was run by a weird doctor who was interested in experimenting on his live patients, trying to discover what caused insanity. His methods were crude, to say the least. Lobotomies were performed using a basic hand drill or just a hammer and chisel. The crazed patients were taken to the hospital’s tower, where they were subjected to terrible tortures.

After years of performing these horrible acts, the doctor himself began seeing the ghosts of harrowed plague victims. It is said they led him to the top of the bell tower, and forced him to throw himself off. As he lay writhing in agony on the ground, a fine mist swirled up around him, entered his body, and choked him to death. It is rumored that the mental patients then bricked up his body in the bell tower. There his ghost remains, haunting the empty tower for all eternity, and on a still night the bell can be heard tolling across the bay.