2. Poveglia, Italy
Okay, that one is really scary. Poveglia is an island in Italia, close to Venice, where no one wants to go. From 421 until 1775, there wasn’t much to fear about the island : it was flourishing for a time, then abandoned. Nothing to freak about yet. However, in 1776, Poveglia came under the jurisdiction of the Public Health Office and and became a check point for all goods and people coming to and going from Venice by ship. In 1793, the island was transformed into a temporary confinement station for the plagued people; this role became permanent in 1805, under the rule of Napoleon Bonaparte, until 1814. There, people lived out the last of their lives together and every time an epidemic happened, barely alive bodies were dumped there and burned in mass graves.
After, in the 1920s, a mental hospital was built to welcome anybody that showed symptoms of any sort of sickness, physical or mental. A doctor ran the mental hospital and conducted all kinds of brutal experiments on residents of the island, as inserting instruments in their brains to see what would happen. Eventually, the doctor fell off the bell tower, and it’s not clear if he did it on his own or was pushed by a patient or a pissed-off ghost. Apparently, he had survived the fall, but some kind of thick mist swallowed him when he hit the ground and finished the job.
Because, yes, ghosts. The island is filled with over 100K angry souls who died in horrible conditions, either by disease or torture. It is also said that 50% of the soil is actually earth. The other half is human ashes.
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