Poveglia

Lying in the Venetian Lagoon between Venice and Lido, the small island of Poveglia has been called "the most haunted island in the world," a reputation built over centuries of grim use. First recorded in 421, the island was abandoned by its farming population in 1379 amid warfare, and beginning in 1776 it served for more than a century as a quarantine station where plague victims were isolated, and, according to local tradition, where the dead and dying were burned on mass pyres, leaving ash said to still make up nearly half the island's soil. From the early 20th century until its closure in 1968, Poveglia housed a psychiatric hospital, and persistent, though unverified, stories claim a doctor there performed crude experimental treatments on patients before either being driven mad himself or thrown from the hospital's bell tower. Decades of abandonment since have only deepened the island's sinister reputation, and Italian authorities restrict access, doing little to discourage the ghost stories that surround it.