Poveglia Island: World's Most Haunted Still?

By Chris 73 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0, 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7382950

Wikipedia says  Poveglia is “located  between Venice and Lido in the Venetian Lagoon, northern Italy.”   

It consists of a three-part island. The first island is where an octagonal fortress can still be seen—the only one remaining, it has been said, of five octagonal forts constructed in 1645—with the first one  thought  to have been built after Genoa attacked Venice in 1379.  The fort was used in 1776 as a check point for people and products entering and leaving Venice.

On the second island stands a bell tower—what remains of the 12^th century Church of San Vitale. There are also buildings said to have been used as a confinement station or hospital from 1793 to 1814 for those afflicted with the plague and then used as asylum for people suffering from mental illness from 1922 to 1968; sites for administrative operations and houses for staff; and shelters for boats (called cavanas in Italian).

The third island, connected by a bridge to the second, is rumored to have been used for agricultural purposes before it was  abandoned. 

How did Poveglia earn the epithet as the world’s most haunted island?

Most of the articles published on the web point to about more than 160,000 people buried in Poveglia’s plague pits—specific locations still presently unidentified--over the centuries since the bubonic and other plagues visited Europe, including Italy.

Trying to figure out the accuracy of the number of the dead, Ransom Riggs writes that it is possible, stressing that  “in just the plague of 1576 alone, Venice lost 50,000 people (which, creepily, is the current population of Venice) -- and there were at least twenty-two outbreaks of plague in the two hundred years before that” (May 2010, www.mentalfloss.com/article/24658/strange-geographies-happy-haunted-island-poveglia).

It was alleged that victims of the plague who were still alive were burned in plague pits when these were filled to the brim. In this light, Anna Starostinetskaya  writes of Poveglia  as “where you’d sink your feet into the soil (half-dirt, half-human ash) and be in the company of over 100K diseased ghosts”  (Dec. 4, 2013,  www.huffingtonpost.com/off-track-planet/poveglia-island-like-hell_b_4188986.html).

And then there is, according to Tom Kington,  this popular tale of a mad doctor who after having for years  “allegedly experimented on  patients” from  Poveglia’s asylum “with crude lobotomies,” “later threw himself from the hospital tower after claiming he’d been driven mad by ghosts” (April 2014, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/10767781/Worlds-most-haunted-island...)

Starostinetskaya informs that the doctor “survived the fall but rumor has it that some sort of mist swallowed him upon landing, effectively finishing the job” (Dec. 4, 2013,  www.huffingtonpost.com/off-track-planet/poveglia-island-like-hell_b_4188986.html)

Anything else?

There was a vampire among the dead.

Riggs recounts that when archaeologists worked on “one grave pit filled with the remains of more than 1,500 plague victims” -- the pit was accidentally found by “work crews on nearby Lazaretto Vecchio” while they were trying to dig “the foundation for a new museum,”—and they “discovered something even more shocking: a vampire. Which is to say, someone who was thought to be a vampire back in the 16th century. The tip off: there was a brick shoved between its teeth, which it was believed would starve the vampire”—more effectively than just sticking a stick through its heart (May 2010, www.mentalfloss. com/article/24658/strange-geographies-happy-haunted-island-poveglia).

Is this--other than the thousands of people who met their death by plague, premature burial, or burning even while still alive—among the reasons why, Wikipedia says, the Calmadolese monks refused Poveglia when it was offered to them in 1521, and the “descendants of original inhabitants” refused “to reconstruct their village on the island” when the government offered it to them in 1661?

Four years ago, in 2014, when the Italian government auctioned Poveglia for a 99-year lease, “Italian businessman Luigi Brugnaro won…with a bid of  €513,000 (roughly $704,000)” (May 14, 2014-updated intro to Ransom Riggs’ May 2010 article, www.mentalfloss.com/article/24658/strange-geographies-happy-haunted-island-poveglia).

Has the lease put an end to Poveglia’s fame as the world’s most haunted island?