Poveglia

Poveglia is a cluster of three islets in the southern Venetian Lagoon, between Venice and the Lido. Its bell tower – the last remnant of the church of San Vitale, demolished under Napoleon in 1806 – is visible from the water for miles. In the early Middle Ages the island was a busy fishing and salt-making community, but the War of Chioggia between Venice and Genoa (1378–1381) emptied it, and it never truly recovered its population.

The documented history that feeds the ghost story begins in the late 18th century. Venice’s health magistrates took charge of the island in the 1770s, and from 1793 Poveglia served as a quarantine station where incoming ships, crews and cargo were checked and isolated. A carved stone from that year, found on the island, warns in Latin not to dig because people who died of contagion rest there. In 1922 the old buildings were converted into a home and long-term care facility for elderly people, linked to the Lido’s seaside hospital; writers who visited in the mid-20th century described residents tending vegetable plots and making wine. It closed in 1968, and the island has been empty ever since.

Almost everything else in the popular legend is modern invention. Online lists and TV scripts claim that 160,000 plague victims were burned there, that half the soil is human ash, and that a sadistic doctor experimented on psychiatric patients before falling from the bell tower. No record supports any of it. Venice used several islands – above all the Lazzaretto Vecchio and Lazzaretto Nuovo – to isolate the sick over the centuries, and the Venetian historian Alberto Toso Fei has told journalists that plague deaths on Poveglia itself probably numbered in the dozens, not the thousands. The Italian skeptics’ group CICAP traces the mass-grave and haunting claims largely to the American series Ghost Adventures, which filmed there in 2009.

Poveglia’s future has been fought over for a decade. In 2014 the Italian state offered a 99-year lease; a citizens’ group, Poveglia per tutti (“Poveglia for everyone”), raised hundreds of thousands of euros from thousands of small donors to keep it public, and the sale fell through. In 2025, after years of legal appeals, the association won a six-year concession over the island’s northern part, which has no buildings, to create a community lagoon park. Volunteers now plant trees and clear brambles there, while the ruined hospital pavilions on the main islet remain state property, derelict and off-limits.

Ghost-hunting shows and online accounts describe disembodied voices, screams, a sense of being pushed or watched, and figures in the windows of the old hospital. These reports come almost entirely from television crews and unauthorized visitors; Venetians themselves mostly know Poveglia as a place to row to, fish near or picnic by.

Stories focus on the derelict hospital pavilions and the bell tower on the main islet, and on the overgrown fields said – without evidence – to cover mass graves.

Poveglia tops countless “most haunted island” lists and has appeared on Ghost Adventures and other paranormal series. In Venice the island is better known as a cause: Poveglia per tutti’s campaign became a national symbol of resistance to selling off public heritage, and the association now holds volunteer days and festivals on its park.