Terror Island
The World’s Scariest Movie Comes to Life in Italy
By Tina Safi – Feb 1, 2011
It’s the perfect horror-movie formula: Take a lonely island located in the stretches of an isolated lagoon, add hundreds of helpless, plague-ridden people and an experimental, mad-scientist of a doctor and viola! The scariest movie of all time is created. Unless, of course, it’s not a movie. This is real life.
Italy’s Venetian Lagoon stretches from Sile in the north to Brenta in the south and consists of only eight percent land, with around 80 percent of the area consisting of muddy flats, salt marshes and tidal shallows: the stuff of nightmares. Within the lagoon, nestled between Venice and Lido, there exists a small island called Poveglia, abandoned in 1380 after the War of Chioggia.
In 1576, Venice was hit by the plague. As the unknown cause disintegrated the city and its occupants, thousands of dead bodies piled up, cursing the entire area with a morbid, foul smell. As a solution, city officials decided to haul the dead to Poveglia and dispose of the bodies there by burning them in large bonfires.
As the plague grew worse, however, people grew desperate. Anyone with even minor symptoms of the sickness, now called the Black Death, was dragged screaming from their home and taken to Poveglia, the dreaded mortuary. Over the years, as many as 160,000 tormented bodies are said to have been dumped in the fires, left to die amongst rotting corpses.
Due to the abundance of fires and burning bones, before long, the island was covered in a layer of ash. Locals soon began to hear strange sounds coming from the island, attributing the noises and strange sightings to ghosts. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, in 1922, officials built a mental hospital on the already haunted island.
The “crazy” patients started reporting sightings of rotting corpses and hearing suspicious whispers, but as their credibility has already been tarnished, no complaints were taken seriously. To further afflict the patients, the hospital was run by a doctor whose main interests lay in discovering what caused insanity, not treating it. That said, his methods of experimentation were cruel and by today’s standards, torturous.
The doctor would often perform operations on his patients using less than conventional methods and questionable tools. The hospital’s bell tower usually served as an operating room and was home to some of the most torture the patients experienced.
Eventually, after hurting patients for years, the doctor himself began to suffer. He began seeing the ghosts that had first been reported by the crazy patients and after he just couldn’t take it anymore, the doctor’s guilt caught up to him. According to local legend, the doctor followed the ghosts he kept seeing to the top of the bell tower, where they forced him to throw himself off. As he fell hundreds of feet, a white mist apparently encircled him and choked him to death.
Rumor has it that the angry mental patients disposed of the doctor’s body in the bell tower, where his ghost remains. On quiet nights, the bell can be heard ringing across the still water.
Today, the uninhibited island is closed to tourists and is primarily used for farming. Its ashy beaches remain deserted and all who have tried to visit tell harrowing tales of having to tread on a murky soil consisting of human remains and a breeze that catches in the lungs, choking all who try to check out the “haunted island” for themselves. Poveglia Island provides the world with a movie-quality story that comes with its own real-life ending.
The World’s Scariest Movie Comes to Life in Italy
By Tina Safi – Feb 1, 2011
It’s the perfect horror-movie formula: Take a lonely island located in the stretches of an isolated lagoon, add hundreds of helpless, plague-ridden people and an experimental, mad-scientist of a doctor and viola! The scariest movie of all time is created. Unless, of course, it’s not a movie. This is real life.
Italy’s Venetian Lagoon stretches from Sile in the north to Brenta in the south and consists of only eight percent land, with around 80 percent of the area consisting of muddy flats, salt marshes and tidal shallows: the stuff of nightmares. Within the lagoon, nestled between Venice and Lido, there exists a small island called Poveglia, abandoned in 1380 after the War of Chioggia.
In 1576, Venice was hit by the plague. As the unknown cause disintegrated the city and its occupants, thousands of dead bodies piled up, cursing the entire area with a morbid, foul smell. As a solution, city officials decided to haul the dead to Poveglia and dispose of the bodies there by burning them in large bonfires.
As the plague grew worse, however, people grew desperate. Anyone with even minor symptoms of the sickness, now called the Black Death, was dragged screaming from their home and taken to Poveglia, the dreaded mortuary. Over the years, as many as 160,000 tormented bodies are said to have been dumped in the fires, left to die amongst rotting corpses.
Due to the abundance of fires and burning bones, before long, the island was covered in a layer of ash. Locals soon began to hear strange sounds coming from the island, attributing the noises and strange sightings to ghosts. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, in 1922, officials built a mental hospital on the already haunted island.
The “crazy” patients started reporting sightings of rotting corpses and hearing suspicious whispers, but as their credibility has already been tarnished, no complaints were taken seriously. To further afflict the patients, the hospital was run by a doctor whose main interests lay in discovering what caused insanity, not treating it. That said, his methods of experimentation were cruel and by today’s standards, torturous.
The doctor would often perform operations on his patients using less than conventional methods and questionable tools. The hospital’s bell tower usually served as an operating room and was home to some of the most torture the patients experienced.
Eventually, after hurting patients for years, the doctor himself began to suffer. He began seeing the ghosts that had first been reported by the crazy patients and after he just couldn’t take it anymore, the doctor’s guilt caught up to him. According to local legend, the doctor followed the ghosts he kept seeing to the top of the bell tower, where they forced him to throw himself off. As he fell hundreds of feet, a white mist apparently encircled him and choked him to death.
Rumor has it that the angry mental patients disposed of the doctor’s body in the bell tower, where his ghost remains. On quiet nights, the bell can be heard ringing across the still water.
Today, the uninhibited island is closed to tourists and is primarily used for farming. Its ashy beaches remain deserted and all who have tried to visit tell harrowing tales of having to tread on a murky soil consisting of human remains and a breeze that catches in the lungs, choking all who try to check out the “haunted island” for themselves. Poveglia Island provides the world with a movie-quality story that comes with its own real-life ending.