Case file · Haunting
Poveglia island
A small island in the Venetian Lagoon, once a quarantine station and later a psychiatric hospital, now sold online as one of the world's most haunted places.
2009 CE · 45.38, 12.33 · status: legend
The account
It was a quarantine station from 1776 and a psychiatric hospital that closed in 1968. In 2025 part of it was granted to a group planning a public park.
The sceptical view
The Italian skeptics' group CICAP says the stories of hauntings and 100,000 plague dead were created by the US show Ghost Adventures in 2009; a Venetian historian puts the island's plague deaths at around 20.