Poveglia

An island in the Venice lagoon near the Lido, once a quarantine stop for shipping, whose haunted reputation the Italian skeptics' group CICAP traces to a 2009 US television show.

Poveglia is a 7.5-hectare island close to the Venice Lido. According to The Guardian, which ran an Agence France-Presse report in 2014, it served as a quarantine stop for ships bound for Venice during the 1700s and 1800s, guarded the city with an octagonal fort, and was made into an asylum during the 1900s. Italian Wikipedia says it took in the plague-stricken crews of two ships, in 1793 and 1798, probably the last plague cases in Venice.

Il Post reported in 2022 that CICAP, an Italian association that checks pseudoscientific claims, found no mention of ghosts on Poveglia in Venetian local writing or folk tradition. English Wikipedia cites CICAP as saying the haunting and a claim that more than 100,000 plague dead lie buried there both began in 2009 with Ghost Adventures, an American TV show. The same article says Alberto Toso Fei told The New York Times that Poveglia was one of several isolation islands used over centuries of plague, and that nearer 20 people died of plague on it.

The Guardian's 2014 headline, over the AFP report, said the island sold for €513,000. In 2025 Campaign For A Living Venice reported that the State Property Agency had granted the northern part of the island for six years to a group called Poveglia per tutti, after an 11-year campaign, clearing the way for an urban lagoon park.