Is Poveglia Island haunted? The Venice plague island, explained

What the legend says

The Poveglia island mystery, as it is usually told, stacks three horrors on one small piece of land. First the plague: from 1793 the island served as a lazaretto, a quarantine station, and the Atlas Obscura entry repeats the claim that more than 160,000 infected people lived out their last days there, so many that half the soil is said to be human remains. Then the asylum: in 1922 a mental hospital opened, and one doctor is said to have tortured patients before dying in a fall from the bell tower. Then abandonment: the hospital closed in 1968 and the island has been off-limits ever since. Smithsonian Magazine, reporting the 2014 lease auction, summarised the same story, including crude lobotomies by a doctor driven mad by ghosts.

It is a tidy legend, and almost every number in it is wrong or unsupported.

Where it started

Start with who built Poveglia island. It is three islets totalling about 72,500 square metres, and the oldest structure is the Ottagono, an artificial octagonal islet raised by the Venetian Republic as a defensive work. Il Post dates it to the late fourteenth century; Il Fatto Quotidiano gives 1380 and calls it the oldest of the five such forts in the lagoon. The island was a medieval trading settlement, and in the late eighteenth century its buildings were used to store boats, to inspect people and goods arriving by sea, and, when needed, to quarantine the sick.

That is the Poveglia island plague history, and it is far smaller than the legend. The Venetian historian Alberto Toso Fei, cited by Il Post through the Italian sceptics' group CICAP, says the plague ships quarantined at Poveglia were only two, and that the dead numbered twenty. Mass graves of plague victims have been found, but on the neighbouring islands of Lazzaretto Vecchio and Lazzaretto Nuovo, as Atlas Obscura notes (Smithsonian names Lazzaretto Vecchio); Poveglia itself has never been properly investigated. The 160,000 figure and the half-human soil have no documentary source that any of the outlets we read could point to.

The Poveglia island asylum is thinner still. The hospital pavilions on the central islet date from the first half of the twentieth century, and Il Post describes the institution that occupied them as a home for the elderly and long-term patients, closed in the late 1960s, with wards of the Lido's Ospedale al Mare shut in 1972. Atlas Obscura itself concedes the site is professed to be a former retirement home. We found no record of a doctor who tortured patients or died from the tower. Asked about the ghost stories in 2014, Toso Fei told La Nuova Venezia they were "emerite fandonie", utter nonsense, and challenged anyone to produce a historical document behind them.

How it grew

If the stories are not Venetian, where did they come from? CICAP's answer, reported by Il Post, is television. Local literature and Venetian tradition never mention ghosts on Poveglia; the earliest versions of the modern legend appear after the American series Scariest Places on Earth filmed there in 2001, and the rest after Ghost Adventures in 2009. Toso Fei told La Nuova Venezia that an American production had interviewed him hoping he would confirm the hauntings, and when he refused, used self-described mediums instead. By July 2016 the legend was strong enough that five American tourists on the island had to be rescued by firefighters after reporting ghostly voices.

The 2014 auction turned a ghost story into a civic fight. The Italian state property agency put a 99-year lease on the island up for online bidding, hoping, as Smithsonian reported, for a luxury hotel. Residents of the Giudecca founded the association Poveglia per Tutti and asked supporters for 99 euros each; Il Post reports about 4,500 contributors and roughly 482,000 euros. On the day only one bidder appeared, the businessman Luigi Brugnaro, with 513,000 euros and a plan for a 20-million-euro clinic. The agency rejected both offers, Brugnaro dropped his appeal when he ran for mayor, and after a 2018 regional court ruling against the agency's refusal, Poveglia per Tutti finally received a six-year concession on the island's unbuilt northern portion, made official on 2 July 2025, to create a lagoon park.

Which details hold up

• Poveglia was a quarantine station in the late eighteenth century. Two plague ships, twenty dead, according to the historian Toso Fei. Not 160,000.
• No excavation supports the claim that half the soil is human remains. The known plague graves are on the two Lazzaretto islands.
• A twentieth-century hospital and old people's home existed on the central islet. The mad doctor, the lobotomies and the fall from the tower have no record.
• The ghost lore has no trace in Venetian sources before 2001 and spread after two American television programmes.
• Access is restricted: the island can be reached only by private boat, has no water or gas, and its buildings are unsafe. Atlas Obscura notes that visiting is illegal and that there are no public tours.

Verdict

Poveglia island explained is a story of an abandoned place acquiring a past it never had. The quarantine was real but small; the asylum was a care home; the doctor is fiction; the ghosts arrived with a camera crew. Real or Legend files Poveglia island haunted as debunked: the specific claims that make up the legend contradict the historical record, and the people who know that record best say so.

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