Inside world's 'creepiest' island with 160,000 corpses where tourists are banned

Daily Mirror

21-06-2025

A chilling abandoned island were 160,000 people died and were buried has been pictured - the public is banned from setting foot on the creepy site
A tiny island, known as the "creepiest" in the world, has banned adventurous tourists from ever entering the chilling site.
The small patch of land, just off the coast of one of Italy's most famous cities, has a chilling history which has given it it's now scary reputation. The island of Poveglia sits just off the coast of the historic and picturesque city of Venice and is made up of three areas each as frightening as each other. The abandoned island, dubbed "the island of ghosts" is filled with derelict buildings that have been left to fall apart and crumble, including a former military fort.
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These unsteady and unsafe buildings have resulted in the strict ban that prohibits tourists from visiting the spooky island. Limited exceptions are made to this strict rule, for things like research or filming.
The abandoned island gained it's chilling reputation from it's wretched history and use in the past. The island was a quarantine zone during the 18th century, where people who were infected with the plague were sent.
Desperate people were forcibly taken to island, often against their free will, when they started to present the horrifying symptoms of the deadly Black Death. The 18-acre island turned from a quarantine zone and into a mass grave site where around 160,000 victims of the deadly disease died and were then buried.
Local legends about the tragic island have said it is believed over 50% of the island's soil today has been made up of ash and decomposed body parts from the thousands of people who horribly died there.
Despite the strict no visitors rule for the tiny island, two British explorers, Matt Nadin and Andy Thompson, posted a video of themselves visiting the eerie site, in 2020, onto their YouTube channel Finders Beepers History Seekers.
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The travelling duo said the island was "really, really eerie" and added that it was full of "dark history". Matt said: "The island is so full of dark, dark history, a hell of a lot of people died there and you really get a sense of the horrors that took place there while you're walking around.
"The island is so full of dark, dark history, a hell of a lot of people died there and you really get a sense of the horrors that took place there while you're walking around.
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"They burnt all the bodies and left them where they lay. The island has never really been cleared properly or anything so everything has just been left. Later on, when it was turned into an asylum, and because people were shoved there out of the way of prying eyes, they started to do experiments on them, horrible, horrible stuff.
"Whilst we were there, we heard the bell toll and that was quite spooky, that did actually freak me out a little bit. It was like an omen or something. The whole place was just really weird and eerie although you could tell from the tiles and the archways it would have been a beautiful building originally.
"You could see that hardly anyone had set foot there for years because there is no graffiti or anything it's all just natural decay."
Incredible images of the derelict island show how decades of no human activity on the site allowed for nature to take over and sprawl around and into the crumbling buildings.