TG Venezia (13/01/2017) – L’isola di Poveglia sempre più meta di cacciatori di fantasmi

This two-minute item, in Italian, comes from TG Venezia, the evening news of the regional broadcaster Rete Veneta, and aired on January 13, 2017. Its headline says it all: Poveglia is becoming “ever more a destination for ghost hunters.” The report explains that around ten members of a group calling itself the European Paranormal Activity Society were about to land on the island, with permission from the state property office and the heritage authority, armed with thermal cameras and electromagnetic-field meters.

It recalls an episode from the previous summer, when firefighters had to rescue five frightened American tourists who had gone to spend the night on Poveglia looking for spirits, then changed their minds and waved and shouted for help to a passing sailing boat. Then the reporter turns to Alberto Toso Fei, a writer on Venetian history and traditions, who explains why he thinks the island is no more interesting to ghost hunters than any other corner of Venice — and tells a genuinely Venetian ghost story instead.

Toso Fei’s verdict is blunt. The stories found online — mass graves of plague victims, children experimented on by a mad doctor — are, he says, “absolutely false” and the invention of the writers of an American TV series about haunted places. The record backs him up. Poveglia was a quarantine station for ships from 1793 and, from 1922 to 1968, a home and care facility for elderly people. It was only one of several lagoon islands used to isolate the sick over the centuries, and Toso Fei has told the New York Times that plague deaths on the island probably numbered around twenty. The Italian skeptics’ group CICAP traces the haunting and plague-pit claims to the American show Ghost Adventures in 2009.

His closing tale — the skeleton of a nineteenth-century bell-ringer of St Mark’s, which he sold to a naturalist and which is still kept at the Fondaco dei Turchi natural history museum, said to walk out before midnight to ring the bells and beg passers-by for money to buy himself back — is a reminder that Venice has plenty of authentic folklore. Poveglia itself is state property, its buildings derelict; landing there without permission is not allowed.