The Allegedly Haunted Island of Poveglia

This uninhabited Italian island that has come to be called all manner of scary things, including, “plague island,” “island of ghosts,” and “the Venetian island of no return,” among others. What's the real story on Poveglia?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy, we
are officially into creepy hunted places time. We are, but

(00:22):
as people who have listened to the show in the past,
and particularly our Halloween episodes right now, sometimes even the
creepy haunted things, we have to talk about the explanations
and and validity versus not of those creepy hunted claims.
So if you just want to go story, you might
be disappointed. Well, and this is this is one of
those cases where the reporting of the ghosts is very

(00:48):
different between like English speaking ghost hunters and locals. Yes,
for sure. Um, today's topic is actually about what is
now an uninhabited island that has come to be called
all manner of spooky things in in some of the
rather more sensationalist discussions of it, including Plague Island and

(01:10):
the Island of Ghosts and the Venetian Island of No Return,
which I love. But plenty of people have gone there
and looked around it come back, so that doesn't really
seem valid. Uh uh. And since we're headed into Halloween,
it seemed like the perfect time to tackle this odd,
tiny little patch of land in the lagoon surrounding Venice.
And first we're gonna talk a little bit about the
island itself, which is Pavilia, and then we're going to

(01:33):
talk about its history and finally some of the legends
that have given it all of those scary monikers. And
there are some creepiness even before we get to that part.
Oh sure, there's always a little creepiness, especially when a
place has been around for a long time. And the
tiny island of Bavlius, it's south of Venice proper, it's

(01:53):
west of the Venice Lido sandbar in the Venice Lagoon. Yeah,
if you look at a map of Venice, there's the
tight cluster of lands that make up sort of what
I would call the city proper. And then that sand
bar extends to the east of that down kind of
in a southerly direction at a slight angle, and then
Pavilia is kind of in the and towards the base

(02:14):
of that sand bar in the lagoon, and Pavilion is
viewed from above, is shaped sort of and I really
have to make clear that it's a sort of sort
of like a narrow fan in what looks like three
pieces when you're viewing it from an aerial shot. So
the base at the southern end of the island is
an octagonal shape, and it's separated from the rest by
a little a little bit of water. And then the

(02:37):
remaining fan, which is about seven point five hectares or
eighteen point six acres, is bisected by a canal that
runs across it roughly east to west, and there is
a footbridge that connects the two sections of the island
that are separated by that canal. It almost doesn't look
like a real thing to me. Yeah, So there are

(02:57):
a number of buildings on the island that includes the
remains of a church, a hospital, and a series of
smaller structures that appear to have been staff housing and
administration buildings. Yeah. And if you're looking at it, like
I said, in those those two land pieces connected by
a bridge, the southerly one is the one where the
buildings are. The one to the north doesn't really have

(03:20):
anything built on it, and access to Pavilia would normally
happen via boat from Venice, but there are no regularly
running ferries or water shuttles. You cannot just ask someone
with a boat to take you there, because most of
them won't go, and this is usually choked up to
some sort of you know, uh, sinister reason, either that
people are too superstitious to go near it, or on

(03:44):
a more practical level, that they just aren't interested in tourists,
adding to the morass of ghost stories about the island.
But the reality of the situation is actually quite mundane.
It is just off limits to visitors. So Pavilia's beginnings
aren't all that well documented, but it's likely that it
served as a haven in the fifth century for people
who were fleeing invaders to the European continent. At that

(04:07):
point it was called Popilia, most likely derived from someone's
family name. The island was inhabited into the early ninth century,
when its existing population left as Charlemagne's son Peppin attacked Venice,
but by the end of the ninth century it was
once again inhabited and it had developed a small but
stable economy that was mostly based on fishing. A church

(04:29):
was erected on the island in the twelfth century, was
named for Saint Detalais, and the only remaining structure from
that church is its bell tower. The church itself was
eventually demolished, and in the early nineteenth century that bell
tower was converted into a lighthouse and it remains and
it is the tallest structure on the island. In the
fourteenth century, the Venetians ended a very long conflict with

(04:51):
the Genoese, and this was actually a late stage of
a whole series of conflicts that had started a hundred
years earlier. In the mid thirteenth century, the Venetians were
driven north to the larger island of Judica, and these
conflicts led to this design and construction of fortifications in
the lagoon. So an octagonal fortress which we mentioned earlier

(05:13):
was built on the island of Pavilion after the fourteenth century.
That's what forms that base of that sort of fan
shape that I described. And this was one of several
forts in the area that were built to protect Venice.
In addition to the octagon at Pavilion, there was the
Arsenal in Venice proper, the fort on the island of
Saint Andrea, and another octagon at Alberoni. And this group

(05:34):
of fortifications has actually been nominated as a UNESCO World
Heritage Site under the umbrella name Venetian works of defense
between fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. When you look at the
aerial views of the island, the this octagonal fort combined
with the canal are what really makes it look like
to me, like is this a theme park ride? It

(05:56):
does look a little um. It looks to me also
sometimes like a very fat punctuation mark, like the like
an exclamation point, and the fort makes the dot at
the bottom. Sure, but it's not a normal shape. No.
Pavelio was briefly part of the Austrian Empire before Napoleon
conquered it for France, and it was during this time

(06:16):
that the Church of Santa Fatale was brought down and
the lighthouse was converted. And during the Napoleonic Wars in
the first two decades of the nineteenth century, the fortress
on Pavilion was used first by Napoleon as a place
to stash weapons, and then it was repurposed by English
soldiers as a location from which they could launch an
ambush on French ships. And according to legend, the prisoners

(06:38):
that they took in these ambushes were taken to the
island and killed, and then their ships were left to
sink in the lagoon. There is one legend I don't
go into later, that there are still French ships just
sitting there at the bottom of the lagoon. Pavelio was
also used as a lazaretto or a maritime quarantine location
as part of the public Health office. As Venice has

(07:00):
been an important seaport all through its history, it's often
had to take measures to ensure that visitors and traders
who were traveling through the city would not bring an
outbreak of disease with them. That sort of outbreak could
quickly devastate the population of a city like Venice, and similarly,
if Venice had an outbreak of disease, those leaving could

(07:20):
carry it and then spread it far and wide. So
to that end, both incoming and outgoing travelers would have
to wait either on their ships off the coast or
on the island of Pavilion for a period of forty
days to ensure that they were not brewing a potential
health crisis before they were granted admittance to the city
or before they were let go. And this has claimed

(07:41):
in some sources as the origin of the word quarantine.
So Caranta is the Italian word for forty. Ferdinand von Garam,
who was a commander of a volunteer corp of Viennese
soldiers to fight against Napoleon the First, wrote an account
of his time in quarantine in his book that was
called A Pilgrimage to Palestine, Egypt and Syria. That book

(08:01):
was published in eighteen forty, and the account that's dated
September six one reads as follows. I am on board
the ship Ulysses. She has not finished her quarantine and
is subject to all the rigors of the sanitary laws.
Since my embarkation, I am myself considered as one infected
with the plague. This letter will be taken up with

(08:22):
pincers and put into a tin box, and it will
come to you stabbed, sprinkled with vinegar, and fumigated. I
left Venice at seven in the morning. The Admiralty gondola
came to my hotel to fetch me. The captain of
the port had kindly caused such necessaries as I should
want for the voyage to be purchased for me. I

(08:42):
proceeded to the Lazaretto, a short league from Venice, then
went on board the ship. The Austrian flag was hoisted
on my approach, I was received by the captain, the mate,
and the crew. So at least in this instance, it
seems like the quarantine was simply a matter of course.
It was not a scenario of torture or even seemingly fear.
It was just waiting out the days required to determine

(09:03):
that no disease outbreak was coming or going before he
could just move on, because he basically just kept in
his journal his discussion of his days waiting there at Pavilion.
And coming up, we're going to talk about the historical
affliction that is most commonly referenced when it comes to Pavilia,
that being bubonic plague. But before we do, we're gonna

(09:25):
have a quick sponsor break. So while Pavilion's use as
a lazaretto went well into the nineteenth century, it's the
surges of bubonic plague that made the island famous as
a holding facility. So during these times, Venice, at a

(09:46):
heightened state of fear, would send sick people to the
island basically just to die. The bodies would then be
shoveled into mass graves and then burnt, and from the
fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, Venice went through almost two
dozen plagues gears, so there is really no telling how
many people have been buried and or burned on the island.

(10:07):
Just as an fyi, though, you might see images of
excavated plague pits with large, large numbers of skeletal remains
when you searched for pictures of Pavelia online, but those
are from a different island and the Venetian lagoon, Lazaretto Vecchio.
There are almost certainly plague pits still on Pavelia. They've
just never been exhumed. Yeah. I I found one thing

(10:30):
in a note and we'll talk about it a little
bit more towards the end, where there is allegedly a
marker at one point that says do not dig disease
within or whatever. I didn't find that repeated in in
places I would consider reasonable and valid sources. So there
could be, but I don't know. Um in hospital was

(10:53):
established on the island. This is often reported as a
mental hospital, so that's right. At this point, this island
has what you could consider a haunting trifecta of a fort,
plaque pits and a mental hospital. But either eventually or
simultaneously it is a little unclear that hospital was also
used as a housing facility for Venice's older indigent population,

(11:17):
and some stories will say that, oh no, it transitioned
and became basically like a nursing home for elderly people.
Others will say it was always one or the other.
It's a little unclear exactly how that played out. But
in night, Pavilion's home for elderly homeless people closed and
the island has not been inhabited since then. But while

(11:38):
there haven't been people permanently living on it, there have
been people still using the island. There's a small vineyard
and some other agricultural projects that were put there not
long after the hospital closed. Teenagers have long been known
to visit it, as evidenced buy some graffiti throughout the buildings,
and for a while there was a plan to use
part of the island for student houseing. That whole idea

(12:02):
fascinates me, and that project never came to fruition. Uh yeah,
I think there are a lot of moments of public
works intentions in this story that don't ever quite make
it to the finish line. Um. But over the years,
the various remaining man made structures have slowly been reclaimed
by the island's natural vegetation. Various visitors, yes, some people

(12:25):
do visit even though it is technically off limits, have
taken photos of Pavilion in recent years, and the degradation
of the structures make it really apparent that there is
likely a huge safety risk in just wandering around in
the crumbling buildings. The humidity and the seasonal weather changes
have severely damaged the roofs throughout the island. Most of
them are either partially or totally collapsed in the Italian

(12:49):
government tried to leverage Pavilia's cultural popularity to drive revenue
to try to address some really deep debt. They auctioned
off a lease for the island, and the winning bid
would have the island via a lease for ninety nine years.
The property would remain owned by the Italian government. This
is part of a larger effort on the part of

(13:10):
the government to liquidate properties for redevelopment for both short
term and long term economic boost The four other properties
that were chosen were to be sold out right rather
than least, however, and the Pavilion auction was covered in
a variety of news outlets under headlines like you could
own the world's most haunted island, somewhere a little more
stoic than that, but there were a lot along those lines.

(13:32):
But the plan sort of fell apart, so the auction
proceeded as scheduled. Basically, it wasn't an auction like with
a gavel. It was like there was a timeline where
people could put in bids uh and a businessman named
Luigi Bunaro one after bidding five hundred and thirteen thousand euros,
I saw one estimate that put that somewhere between seven

(13:53):
hundred thousand and a quarter of a million dollars uh
in in American money. So through a spokesperson, it was
an now said the purchase was made by Bruniaro to
ensure that this piece of property went to an Italian
rather than a foreign developer, and that whatever project was
chosen for it was going to be designed for public use.
An activist group which was referred to as the Popelia

(14:15):
Association in most English language news outlets, but which is
really called Pavelia Pertuti and its actual name which means
Pavelia for everyone, tried to raise funds to purchase the
island and make it a historic property, and they did
make an offer, but it was much much lower than
this winning bid. It was a hundred and sixty thousand
euros that came from four thousand, three hundred twenty nine donors.

(14:37):
Once Brunaro's bid was in the Pavelia Association insisted that
the Italian state agency that was handling the auction in
the sale not except this offer. Brunnaro's plan was eventually
rejected by the Agencia del de Manio on the grounds
that what he had in mind was incongruous with the
restoration needs of the island. At the time of the

(14:58):
determination that the original bidder plan wasn't workable, Venice was
also in the midst of a scandal related to bribes
that was impacting a lot of city officials in actuality.
That bid was really too low to meet the needs
of the state in terms of denting their debt. Bernaro
initially intended to pursue this matter through legal channels, thinking

(15:18):
that his offer should have been accepted under the terms
of the auction, but then he decided to run for
mayor of Venice on a conservative platform and he won,
and when he started his campaign, he renounced any interest
in Pavilia to avoid any conflicts of interest, and since
that time, Pavilion Pertuti has continued to work on developing
a proposal for the island that will retain its historical

(15:40):
identity and make two thirds of the island public recreational space,
rather than allowing it to become a luxury tourist destination,
which has happened to pretty much all the other little
islands that were sold off death. It's not surprising at
all that an island with so many tragic historical events
is rumored to be haunted. I mean, like colleagues said earlier,

(16:01):
it's got the whole trifecta of hauntings. And because of
the lack of documentation and excavation, there's just a big
gap in knowledge about a lot of different aspects of
Pavilion's history, and that means that people have filled in
these gaps with fantastic tales, and we're going to go
through just a few of them. So the soil, some
people claim is fifty human ash, because according to rumor,

(16:25):
more than one thousand bodies are buried there, and this
is again a pretty small space. We have no idea
really how many plague victims or other people have been
laid to rest on the island. Recent statements by the
group working to make public spaces on the island say
that those numbers are very inflated in all likelihood, But
as a counter there have been those mass graves found

(16:46):
on Lazaretto Vecchio nearby, so it does not seem that
unlikely that Pavilia has a similar situation. Rumors persist that
local fishers are so terrified of accidentally netting human remains
that they won't go anywhere near the island, and some
versions of this particular part of the story indicate that
the main concern is accidentally disturbing an ancestor. But this

(17:08):
story is just simply not true. Modern photos show active
fishing nets in place around the island, and there are
a couple of different angles to the haunting stories that
are associated with this Venice Lagoon island. The most standard,
slash obvious version is simply that all those plague victims
ferried to the island to die never found peace in
the afterlife, and so their spirits are trapped on Pavilion.

(17:32):
There have also been accounts that claim to have seen
plague doctors with those unique and distinctive masks wandering the island.
In spectral form a lot of times. That plague doctor image,
which is very creepy and sort of beautiful if you're
into Gothic key things, is very much associated with Pavilia.
A more layered version claims that when the mental hospital
was built, the patients were haunted by the plague ghosts

(17:55):
who were already on the island, and then as patients
at the hospital died, they just joy going to the
ghosts that were already there. And we are going to
talk about the darkest and most grizzly of the haunting
legends about Pavilion in just a moment. So if you
are a little bit easily spooked, or maybe if you
have a little or listener, this is a good time
to just preview this last section if you're you're concerned.

(18:16):
But before we do it, we're going to hear from
one of our sponsors that keeps his show going. The
most gruesome of the haunting legends on Pavilion is related
to the mental hospital that we mentioned. So the story
goes that one of the doctors there at the hospital

(18:37):
was just incredibly cruel, so much so that he began
conducting experiments on the patients. So stories of crude lobotomies.
That phrase comes up over and over patients being chained
up or tortured. A variety of other horrors all entered
the story, and they reach varying degrees of cringe worthy
depending on the source that you're looking at. Eventually, the

(19:00):
doctor in this scenario is said to have been driven
to kill himself, either because he realized the horror of
what he was doing and was guilty about it, or
because he was haunted by the dead of the island.
And in the story he jumped from the bell tower.
There are variations about whether he just fell or whether
he was pushed by mysterious forces as well. And in

(19:22):
some versions I found this and I was sort of
delighted the fall did not kill him, but instead he
was engulfed by some sort of other worldly missed presumably spirits. Uh.
These stories often end with the spookiest of lines, but
his body was never found, uh, suggesting sort of obliquely
that he could somehow still be wandering around out there.

(19:43):
But the boring reality is that this entire story of
a doctor who was incredibly cruel and unkind and was
driven mad appears to have been completely fabricated. There is
no record of such a person or event, which is
why nobody has ever found a body. Yeah. Yeah, it's
it's it's very trophy, it's very Yeah. A big part

(20:09):
of this whole haunted label that's been put on Pavelia
seems to have come from the TV show Ghost Adventures.
On two thousand nine, the series had an episode about
Pavelia in which one of the hosts claimed to have
been temporarily possessed during the filming. The show described Pavilia
as the world's most haunted island, and the stories have
only gained momentum since then. Yeah, you really do notice,

(20:33):
like there's not a lot of write ups that you
can find before that about it being haunted. I'm sure
any place that you know has been abandoned, those local
stories come up about it, and sometimes they get used
to try to keep children in line, etcetera. But in
terms of like the online content about it and any

(20:54):
sort of like write ups, they're not really about it
being haunted until after this and and they just go
bananas and they're everywhere you can find haunting stories. But
there also has been a growing movement to give Pavilia
a place in Venice's history. Without all of those paranormal
and spooky rumors. So for many locals, even though the

(21:15):
island has officially been off limits to visitors, it was
part of their youth. Many of them grew up going
to the island to fish or explore with friends or
get into a bit of teenage mischief away from adults.
In addition to wanting Pavilion to be spared the fate
of the other Lagoon islands, which most of them have
had hotels built on them. They tend to be very big,
luxurious hotels. These Italians want to put to rest the

(21:38):
ghost stories that have really sensationalized the identity of the
island on the global stage. In some cases, this seems
like it might be muddling the history even farther though.
For example, there have been claims that the hospital on
the island was never a mental hospital, but there is
at least one sign that's been photographed there in recent
years that reads psychiatric department and Italian. Yeah, So, so

(22:03):
that kind of fuels the idea that it was a
mental hospital. But it also really does not help the
case of people going no, no, no, nothing weird happened here. Uh.
It's kind of like you gotta acknowledge what what was
real in order to soothe a more sensationalized discussion about it. Uh.
And of course there are loads of places to find
references to Pavilia in modern fiction, which in many cases

(22:26):
are kind of adding to that haunted mystique. A place
that appears to be based on Pavilion is actually in
the first chapter of the graphic novel Sandman and This
Endless Nights by Neil Gaiman, and Pavilion also appears in
other graphic novels as well. It's referenced periodically in various
fictional TV shows, and it is currently the setting of
an Italian film that is in development titled The Plague Doctor.

(22:49):
And in nonfictional art, there's a drawing of Pavlio by
Jack m'guardy and the Metropolitan Museum of Arts collection. This
image is labeled the Island of Pavelio with British naval
officers embarking, and it was drawn sometime in the late
eighteenth early nineteenth century. Features a scene that looks full
of life and very active. There's not a ghost in sight.

(23:09):
And we'll put a link to it in the shout outs. Yeah,
that's in there. Online archives, so you can look at
it and see that it it just looks like any
drawing you would see of a busy island with a
military personnel coming and going on it. Well that spooky
at all? Yeah, you just went to the MET. I
was gonna ask if that it was what inspired that.
I do not see it at the met. Um if

(23:30):
I had, that would have been a whole other thing.
I did get another idea for a different show at
the MET, but you'll have to wait for that one. Um. Yeah,
we'll talk about that then. But yeah, so that is
pavilia an island that it is fun to think about
being haunted, but I feel like the reality is probably
more mundane. That's usually mine go too. There was one

(23:50):
discussion that I stumbled across online. They're like, we went
and we recorded and there were all these noises of
thumping and bumping, and in my head, I'm like, those
buildings are falling apart before our eyes. Like, yes, I
believe there was something of bumping. Yeah, probably roof tiles
falling off. I know, I'm very skeptical. Well, Um, I

(24:11):
stayed in a cabin one time many years ago, and
I was I was staying there two nights a week
for several weeks in a row, and something about this
old that there was like a newly built on edition
which was where I was staying, and then a very
very old part. And the old part just gave me
the creeps real bad the whole time I was there.

(24:32):
And one night I heard this like creepy thumping sound
that was kind of muffled, like weird footsteps, and it
scared me so bad. And then I got up in
the morning to get in my car and leave, and
I heard the noise again and I whipped around and
it was apples falling out of the apple tree. Yeah. Yeah, unfortunately,

(24:52):
like gravity will give you some good ghost noises sometimes.
Uh yeah. I mean, I love to think about a
haunted place, haven't knows. The haunted mansion is my favorite place.
But uh yeah, usually it's it's a pretty mundane explanation.
I have a general listener mail round up today, like
I often mentioned, but I always feel like I should

(25:15):
mention it again. Uh it's so easy to get behind
because we get a lot of great listener mails. So
I'm not going to read all of them, but I
will discuss each of them. There are a few so
The first is from Uh. It looks like Jessica and
I think Jose this is a case of a postcard
that got slightly Uh. It didn't really get mangled, they
just got a little smeared on the on the journey.

(25:36):
They listen to the podcast, and they were recently on
vacation in Canada, and they sent us a postcard from
a castle whose name I'm probably going to terribly mispronounced,
which is Craig Dark Castle in Victoria, British Columbia. It
is very beautiful, uh, and I appreciate it. It's a
They mentioned that it has quite a rich family history,

(25:58):
so I might that the list of things to investigate.
Thank you so much, Jessica and Jose. I hope you
had wonderful travels. My next one is an email that
I really love from our listener Will. I want to
withhold some of the information because what he tells us
I can explain where his house is. Uh. He said,
thank you. I just listened to your Carmen Miranda podcast.

(26:19):
I am particularly interested in Carmen because I recently purchased
and now live in her first home in California. I
was not much of a Carmen Miranda fan before I
bought the house, but I have since come to learn
her story, which impresses me, and I am a Carmen
Miranda fan. Now I haven't yet come across any relics
from Carmen Miranda at home, but eventually I will collect
a few items of memorabilia to honor the past. And

(26:40):
then the line that I thought was super cool, he said,
I guess it's kind of cool that your podcast about
Carmen Miranda has been played where she once lived. I agree,
that's super cool. Cool. Um, if I show up on
your doorstep, just know that you told me where you live,
so I wouldn't really show up and announced on someone's doorstep,
but it is very tempting. I also have a listener

(27:01):
from Caroline. This is also about Carmen Miranda. Uh. She
had sent us a lovely little note in a beautiful
envelope with a wax seal. You guys, in your wax
seals are really bringing it to the next level. She says,
I was so excited to hear your new episode on
Carmen Miranda. She's popped up often in my historical research
on the Caribbean and is featured in one of my
favorite books and is on the cover, and it talks

(27:23):
about how women's labor basically runs the world, but they
don't get any credit. With your excellent podcast, you bring
so many women to the foe and assess them with nuance.
Thank you for your hard work, Caroline. Thank you so much, Caroline.
I love Carmen Miranda's story and think she's a fascinating uh.
I don't want to say character. She's a real human,
but she's a fascinating figure in history, as there are

(27:43):
many of the women UH and men and other people
that we talk about. I love all that stuff. So
thank you guys for sharing your thoughts, telling me where
you live, and sending us beautiful postcards all the time.
We really appreciate it. I wish we could always get
all of them on the air, but it's just not feasible.
Would be a podcast just called mail bag and it
would go on for months and people would stop listening.

(28:05):
If you would like to write to us, though, you
can do so by writing History Podcast at house to
works dot com. You can also find us across the
spectrum of social media as Missed in History. You can
find our mailing address at our website which is missed
in History dot com. That is also where you will
find the entire archive of all of the shows, even
from long before Tracy and I were involved, and you

(28:25):
can find show notes for the ones that Tracy and
I have worked on together. So come and visit us
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