Poveglia Island — The Plague Island of Venice
A fenced-off plague island with an abandoned asylum — Venice forbids landing, and the internet insists 100,000 bodies lie under the soil.
Case File No. 068
FILE 01 The Legend
Poveglia, a small island in the Venetian lagoon, served as a quarantine station (lazzaretto) during plague outbreaks, and in 1922 its buildings became a psychiatric hospital, closed in 1968. Popular legend adds a murderous doctor who experimented on patients before leaping from the bell tower. The island has been off-limits and deteriorating ever since — bones genuinely surface in the soil, because plague-era quarantine graves are real.
FILE 02 The Sightings Log
Visitors on legal tours and fishermen report oppressive dread, screams carried on the wind, and the bell of the ruined tower. Television ghost hunters in 2009 spent the night and came out calling it a hotspot — their broadcast seeded the island's modern fame, with claim after claim of 'over 100,000 bodies' buried there.
FILE 03 The Skeptic’s File
Italian skeptic group CICAP dug into the records: documented plague deaths on Poveglia itself number around twenty — the six-figure total was manufactured for television, importing Venice's whole plague toll onto one islet. No asylum-era doctor matches the bell-tower story. The dread visitors feel is real, but it is manufactured by a genuinely forbidden, crumbling place — the most honest line about Poveglia ever said.