Poveglia Island:
The Most Haunted Place
Nobody Is Allowed to Visit

Twelve minutes by boat from Venice, in the southern part of the lagoon between Venice and the Lido, there is a small island that the Italian government will not sell, will not develop, and will not allow the public to visit. Fishermen who work the lagoon will not fish the waters around it. The Venetians who live a few kilometers away speak about it the way people speak about something that has earned its reputation through accumulated evidence rather than legend.

The island is called Poveglia. It is approximately 17 acres. It has been, at various points in its history, a military fortification, a quarantine station for plague victims, a dumping ground for the dead, and a psychiatric hospital. In some estimations, the soil of Poveglia is composed of more than fifty percent human ash — the residue of bodies burned there over centuries of epidemic. The total number of people who died on or were brought dead to Poveglia is estimated at around 160,000. Nobody knows the exact number because nobody kept consistent records, and because for several extended periods the bodies were arriving faster than anyone could count them.

The Plague Years

The Black Death reached Venice in 1348 and killed more than half the city's population within eighteen months. The Venetian authorities, facing a crisis of staggering scale, needed somewhere to put the bodies — and the sick, and the dying, and the people who had been exposed and might yet die. They chose Poveglia.

The island became a quarantine station. Ships arriving in Venice that carried infected passengers were diverted to Poveglia, where the sick were held and the dead were burned. When the Black Death receded, Poveglia's function as a plague management facility did not end — it continued through subsequent outbreaks in 1576, 1630, and the 18th century, each time serving as the place Venice sent its dying when there was nowhere else for them to go.

The burning was continuous during the outbreak years. Contemporary accounts describe smoke rising from the island for months at a time, visible from the Venice waterfront. The ash of the dead mixed with the soil. The island grew, in a literal sense, from what was burned and buried on it. The ground of Poveglia contains fragments of bone at depths that normal soil disturbance would not explain. Visitors who have accessed the island illegally report finding bone fragments on the surface — not buried, just present in the earth, the way pebbles are present in ordinary ground.

The Doctor

In 1922, the buildings on Poveglia were converted into a psychiatric hospital. For the next forty-six years, the island functioned as an institution for the mentally ill, isolated from the mainland by the lagoon in the way that psychiatric institutions of that era were often deliberately isolated — the water serving as both practical and symbolic barrier.

The accounts that emerged from the hospital during its operational years are difficult to verify, because institutional records from that period are incomplete and because the patients who might have reported their experiences were, by definition, people whose accounts could be dismissed. What the documentary record does contain is a series of staff departures that were more frequent than comparable institutions, and incident reports that have been described by historians who have accessed them as unusual in their content.

The hospital's most documented incident involves a doctor — his name appears in some accounts but not consistently enough to be cited with confidence — who reportedly became increasingly erratic in his behavior during his time at Poveglia. According to the accounts that have circulated about him for decades, he became convinced that the island was speaking to him. That the dead beneath the ground were communicating through the patients, or through the building itself. That something on the island wanted him to understand something he couldn't quite comprehend.

He climbed the bell tower of the island's old church and jumped. He survived the fall, according to the accounts. And then, according to the same accounts, he was found dead at the base of the tower. Whether the fall killed him after all, or whether something else happened in the interval — nobody has ever clarified.

The hospital closed in 1968. The buildings were abandoned. The island has been largely empty since.

Why Nobody Can Go There

The Italian government has maintained ownership of Poveglia for decades. In 2014, under pressure from austerity measures, the government attempted to auction the island to private buyers for development. A Venetian civic group outbid all other offers and won the auction with a plan to turn the island into a public park. The government subsequently refused to complete the sale. The reason given was that the island's status required further review. No further explanation was offered. The civic group's bid was returned. The island remained in government hands.