SYMHC Classics: Poveglia

This 2018 episode covers an uninhabited Italian island that has come to be called all manner of scary things, including, "plague island," "island of ghosts," and "the Venetian island of no return."

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Continuing with our theme of ghost stories and hauntings,
today we are revisiting the allegedly haunted island of Pavlia. Unfortunately,
we do not have any updates on efforts to make
at least part of this into public lands. That's something
we talk about a bit in the episode. If there's
been any movement on that, I haven't got anything about it.

(00:24):
And this episode originally came out on October tenth of
twenty eighteen. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class,
a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy, we

(00:48):
are officially into creepy hunted places time we are, but
as people who have listened to the show in the
past and particularly our Halloween episodes might know. Sometimes even
the creepy things, we have to talk about the explanations
and validity versus not of those creepy haunted claims. So

(01:08):
if you just want a ghost story, you might be disappointed. Well,
and this is one of those cases where the reporting
of the ghosts is very different between like English speaking
ghost hunters and locals. Yes, for sure. Today's topic is

(01:29):
actually about what is now an uninhabited island that has
come to be called all manner of spooky things in
some of the rather more sensationalist discussions of it, including
Plague Island and the Island of Ghosts and the Venetian
Island of No Return, which I love, But plenty of
people have gone there and looked around and come back,
so that doesn't really seem valid. And since we're headed

(01:52):
into Halloween, it seemed like the perfect time to tackle
this odd, tiny little patch of land in the lagoon
surrounding Venice. And first we're going to talk a little
bit about the island itself, which is Pavilia, and then
we're going to talk about its history and finally some
of the legends that have given it all of those
scary monikers. And there is the creepiness even before we
get to that part. Oh sure, there's always a little creepiness,

(02:16):
especially when a place that's been around for a long time.
And the tiny island of Pavlias sits south of Venice proper,
it's west of the Venice Ldo Sandbar in the Venice Lagoon. Yeah,
if you look at a map of Venice. There's the
tight cluster of islands that make up sort of what
I would call the city proper. And then that sand
bar extends to the east of that down kind of

(02:39):
in a southerly direction at a slight angle. And then
Pavilia is kind of towards the base of that sandbar
in the lagoon, and Pavilia is viewed from above, is
shaped sort of and I really have to make clear
that it's a sort of sort of like a narrow
fan in what looks like three pieces when you're viewing
it from an aerial shot. At the southern end of

(03:01):
the island is an octagonal shape, and it's separated from
the rest by a little bit of water. And then
the remaining fan, which is about seven point five hectares
or eighteen point six acres, is bisected by a canal
that runs across it roughly east to west, and there
is a footbridge that connects the two sections of the
island that are separated by that canal. It almost doesn't

(03:23):
look like a real thing viewed from the to me. Yeah,
So there are a number of buildings on the island
that includes the remains of a church, a hospital, and
a series of smaller structures that appear to have been
staff housing and administration buildings. Yeah, and if you're looking
at it, like I said, in those two land pieces
connected by a bridge, the southerly one is the one

(03:46):
where the buildings are. The one to the north doesn't
really have anything built on it. And access to Pavilion
would normally happen via boat from Venice, but there are
no regularly running ferries or water shuttles. You cannot just
ask someone with a boat to take you there because
most of them won't go. And this is usually choked
up to some sort of you know, sinister reason, either

(04:10):
that people are too superstitious to go near it, or
on a more practical level, that they just aren't interested
in tourists, adding to the morass of ghost stories about
the island. But the reality of the situation is actually
quite mundane. It is just off limits to visitors. So
Pavlia's beginnings aren't all that well documented, but it's likely

(04:31):
that it served as a haven in the fifth century
for people who were fleeing invaders to the European continent.
At that point, it was called Popilia, most likely derived
from someone's family name. The island was inhabited into the
early ninth century, when its existing population left as Charlemagne's
son Pepin attacked Venice. But by the end of the

(04:52):
ninth century it was once again inhabited and it had
developed a small but stable economy that was mostly based
on fishing. Was erected on the island in the twelfth century.
It was named for Saint Detaale, and the only remaining
structure from that church is its bell tower. The church
itself was eventually demolished, and in the early nineteenth century
that bell tower was converted into a lighthouse and it

(05:15):
remains and it is the tallest structure on the island.
In the fourteenth century, the Venetians ended a very long
conflict with the Genoese, and this was actually a late
stage of a whole series of conflicts that had started
one hundred years earlier. In the mid thirteenth century, the
Venetians were driven north to the larger island of Judica,
and these conflicts led to this design and construction of

(05:38):
fortifications in the lagoon. So an octagonal fortress, which we
mentioned earlier, was built on the island of Pavilia after
the fourteenth century. That's what forms that base of that
sort of fan shape that I described, And this was
one of several forts in the area that were built
to protect Venice. In addition to the octagon at Pavilia,
there was the Arsenal in Venice proper, the fort on

(06:00):
the island of Sant Andrea, and another octagon at Alberoni.
And this group of fortifications has actually been nominated as
a UNESCO World Heritage Site under the umbrella name Venetian
Works of Defense between fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. When you
look at the aerial views of the island, this octagonal
fort combined with the canal are what really makes it

(06:23):
look like to me, like is this a theme park ride?
It does look a little. It looks to me also
sometimes like a very fat punctuation mark, like an exclamation
point in the fort makes the dot at the bottom. Sure,
but it's not a normal shape. No. Pavelio was briefly
part of the Austrian Empire before Napoleon conquered it for France,

(06:46):
and it was during this time that the Church of
Sant Pittale was brought down and the lighthouse was converted,
and during the Napoleonic Wars in the first two decades
of the nineteenth century. The fortress on Pavilion was used
first by Napoleon as a place to stash weapons, and
then it was repurposed by English soldiers as a location
from which they could launch an ambush on French ships.

(07:08):
And according to legend, the prisoners that they took in
these ambushes were taken to the island and killed, and
then their ships were left to sink in the lagoon.
There is one legend I don't go into later, that
there are still French ships just sitting there at the
bottom of the lagoon. Pavalia was also used as a
lazaretto or a maritime quarantine location as part of the

(07:28):
Public Health office. As Venice has been an important seaport
all through its history, it's often had to take measures
to ensure that visitors and traders who were traveling through
the city would not bring an outbreak of disease with them.
That sort of outbreak could quickly devastate the population of
a city like Venice, and similarly, if Venice had an

(07:48):
outbreak of disease, those leaving could carry it and then
spread it far and wide. So to that end, both
incoming and outgoing travelers would have to wait either on
their ships off the coast or on the island of
Pavilia for a period of forty days to ensure that
they were not brewing a potential health crisis before they
were granted admittance to the city or before they were

(08:09):
let go, and this is claimed in some sources as
the origin of the word quarantine. So Caranta is the
Italian word for forty. Ferdinand von Geram, who was a
commander of a volunteer corps of Viennese soldiers to fight
against Napoleon the First, wrote an account of his time
in quarantine in his book that was called A Pilgrimage

(08:30):
to Palestine, Egypt and Syria. That book was published in
eighteen forty and the account that's dated September sixth, eighteen
thirty one reads as follows. I am on board the
ship Ulysses. She has not finished for quarantine and is
subject to all the rigors of the sanitary laws. Since
my embarkation, I am myself considered as one infected with

(08:50):
the plague. This letter will be taken up with pincers
and put into a tin box, and it will come
to you stabbed, sprinkled, with vinegar and fumigated. I left
Venice at seven in the morning. The Admiralty gondola came
to my hotel to fetch me. The captain of the
port had kindly caused such necessaries as I should want
for the voyage to be purchased for me. I proceeded

(09:13):
to the Lazaretto, a short league from Venice, then went
on board the ship. The Austrian flag was hoisted on
my approach. I was received by the captain, the mate
and the crew. So at least in this instance, it
seems like the quarantine was simply a matter of course.
It was not a scenario of torture or even seemingly fear.
It was just waiting out the days required to determine

(09:34):
that no disease outbreak was coming or going before he
could just move on, because he basically just kept in
his journal his discussion of his days waiting there at Pavilia,
and coming up, we are going to talk about the
historical affliction that is most commonly referenced when it comes
to Pavilia, that being bubonic plague. But before we do,

(09:56):
we're going to have a quick sponsor break. So while
Pavilia's use as a lazaretto went well into the nineteenth century.
It's the surges of bubonic plague that made the island
famous as a holding facility. So during these times, Venice,

(10:19):
at a heightened state of fear, would send sick people
to the island basically just to die. The bodies would
then be shoveled into mass graves and then burnt. From
the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, Venice went through almost
two dozen plague scares, so there is really no telling
how many people have been buried and or burned on

(10:39):
the island, just as an fi though. You might see
images of excavated plague pits with large, large numbers of
skeletal remains when you search for pictures of Pavlia online,
but those are from a different island and the Venetian
lagoon Lazaretto Vecchio. There are almost certainly plague pits still
on Pavlia. I've just never been exhumed. Yeah. I found

(11:03):
one thing in a note and we'll talk about it
a little bit more towards the end, where there is
allegedly a marker at one point that says do not
dig disease within or whatever. I didn't find that repeated
in places I would consider reasonable and valid sources, So
there could be, but I don't know. In nineteen twenty two,

(11:25):
a hospital was established on the island. This is often
reported as a mental hospital, so that's right. At this point,
this island has what you could consider a haunting trifecta
of a fort, plague pits and a mental hospital. But
either eventually or simultaneously, it is a little unclear. That
hospital was also used as a housing facility for Venice's

(11:48):
older indigent population, and some stories will say that, oh no,
it transitioned and became basically like a nursing home for
elderly people. Others will say it was always one or
the other. It's a little unclear exactly how that played out.
But in nineteen sixty eight, Pavilia's home for elderly homeless
people closed and the island has not been inhabited since then.

(12:10):
But while there haven't been people permanently living on it,
there have been people still using the island. There's a
small vineyard and some other agricultural projects that were put
there not long after the hospital closed. Teenagers have long
been known to visit it, as evidenced by some graffiti
throughout the buildings, and for a while there was a
plan to use part of the island for student housing.

(12:33):
That whole idea fascinates me, and that project never came
to fruition. Yeah, I think there are a lot of
moments of public works intentions in this story that don't
ever quite make it to the finish line. But over
the years, the various remaining man made structures have slowly
been reclaimed by the island's natural vegetation. Various visitors, yes,

(12:57):
some people do visit even though it is technically off limits,
have taken photos of Pavilia in recent years, and the
degradation of the structures make it really apparent that there
is likely a huge safety risk in just wandering around
in the crumbling buildings. The humidity and the seasonal weather
changes have severely damaged the roofs throughout the island. Most
of them are either partially or totally collapsed. In twenty fourteen,

(13:21):
the Italian government tried to leverage Pavilia's cultural popularity to
drive revenue to try to address some really deep debt.
They auctioned off a lease for the island, and the
winning bid would have the island via a lease for
ninety nine years. The property would remain owned by the
Italian government. This is part of a larger effort on

(13:42):
the part of the government to liquidate properties for redevelopment
for both short term and long term economic boost The
four other properties that were chosen were to be sold
outright rather than least, however, and the pavilion auction was
covered in a variety of news outlets under headlines like
you could own the world It's most haunted island somewhere
a little more stoic than that, but there were a

(14:04):
lot along those lines. But the plan sort of fell apart,
so the auction proceeded as scheduled. Basically, it wasn't an
auction like with a gavel. It was like there was
a timeline where people could put in bids, and a
businessman named Luigi Brunaro won after bidding five hundred and
thirteen thousand euros. I saw one estimate that put that

(14:25):
somewhere between seven hundred thousand and a quarter of a
million dollars in American money. So through a spokesperson, it
was announced that the purchase was made by Brunaro to
ensure that this piece of property went to an Italian
rather than a foreign developer, and that whatever project was
chosen for it was going to be designed for public use.
An activist group which was referred to as the Povalia

(14:48):
Association in most English language news outlets, which is really
called Pavalia Pertuti in its actual name, which means Pavalia
for everyone, tried to raise funds to purchase the island
and make it a historic property. They did make an offer,
but it was much much lower than this winning bid.
It was one hundred and sixty thousand euros that came
from four three hundred and twenty nine donors. Once Brunaro's

(15:11):
bid was in the Pavlia Association insisted that the Italian
state agency that was handling the auction and the sale
not accept this offer. Brunaro's plan was eventually rejected by
the Agenzia del de Magnio on the grounds that what
he had in mind was incongruous with the restoration needs
of the island. At the time of the determination that

(15:31):
the original bidder's plan wasn't workable, Venice was also in
the midst of a scandal related to bribes that was
impacting a lot of city officials in actuality that bid
was really too low to meet the needs of the
state in terms of denting their debt. Brunaro initially intended
to pursue this matter through legal channels, thinking that his
offer should have been accepted under the terms of the auction,

(15:54):
but then he decided to run for mayor of Venice
on a conservative platform and he won, and when he
started his campaign he renounced any interest in Pavlia to
avoid any conflicts of interest, and since that time, Pavilia
Pertuti has continued to work on developing a proposal for
the island that will retain its historical identity and make
two thirds of the island public recreational space, rather than

(16:18):
allowing it to become a luxury tourist destination, which has
happened to pretty much all the other little islands that
were sold off. Yeah, it's not surprising at all that
an island with so many tragic historical events is rumored
to be haunted. I mean, like colleague said earlier, it's
got the whole trifecta of hauntings, and because of the
lack of documentation and excavation, there's just a big gap

(16:41):
in knowledge about a lot of different aspects of Pavilia's history,
and that means that people have filled in these gaps
with fantastic tales, and we're going to go through just
a few of them. So the soil, some people claim
is fifty percent human ash, because according to rumor, more
than one hundred thousand bodies are bare, and this is
again a pretty small space. We have no idea really

(17:05):
how many plague victims or other people have been laid
to rest on the island. Recent statements by the group
working to make public spaces on the island say that
those numbers are very inflated in all likelihood. But as
a counter there have been those mass graves found on
Lazaretto Vecchio nearby, so it does not seem that unlikely
that Pavilia has a similar situation. Rumors persist that local

(17:28):
fissures are so terrified of accidentally netting human remains that
they won't go anywhere near the island, and some versions
of this particular part of the story indicate that the
main concern is accidentally disturbing an ancestor. But this story
is just simply not true. Modern photos show active fishing
nets in place around the island, and there are a
couple of different angles to the haunting stories that are

(17:50):
associated with this Venice Lagoon island. The most standard slash
obvious version is simply that all those plague victims ferried
to the island to die never found peace in the afterlife,
and so their spirits are trapped on Pavilia. There have
also been accounts that claim to have seen plague doctors
with those unique and distinctive masks wandering the island in

(18:12):
spectral form A lot of times. That plague doctor image,
which is very creepy and sort of beautiful if you're
into gothicky things, is very much associated with Pavilia. A
more layered version claims that when the mental hospital was built,
the patients were haunted by the plague ghosts who were
already on the island, and then as patients at the
hospital died, they just joined the ghosts that were already there.

(18:35):
And we are going to talk about the darkest and
most grizzly of the haunting legends about Pavilia in just
a moment, So if you are a little bit easily spooked,
or maybe if you have a little ler listener, this
is a good time to just preview this last section
if you're concerned. But before we do it, we're going
to hear from one of our sponsors that keeps his
show going. The most gruesome of the haunting legends on

(19:04):
Pavilion is related to the mental hospital that we mentioned.
So the story goes that one of the doctors there
at the hospital was just incredibly cruel, so much so
that he began conducting experiments on the patients. So stories
of crude lobotomies, that phrase comes up over and over,
patients being chained up or tortured, a variety of other

(19:25):
horrors all enter the story, and they reach varying degrees
of cringe worthy depending on the source that you're looking at. Eventually,
the doctor in this scenario is said to have been
driven to kill himself, either because he realized the horror
of what he was doing and was guilty about it,
or because he was haunted by the dead of the island.
And in this story he jumped from the bell tower.

(19:48):
There are variations about whether he just fell or whether
he was pushed by mysterious forces as well, And in
some versions I found this and I was sort of
delighted the fall did not kill him, but instead he
was engulfed by some sort of other worldly missed presumably spirits. Uh.
These stories often end with the spookiest of lines. But

(20:10):
his body was never found, suggesting sort of obliquely that
he could somehow still be wandering around out there. But
the boring reality is that this entire story of a
doctor who was incredibly cruel and unkind and was driven
mad appears to have been completely fabricated. There is no

(20:30):
record of such a person or event, which is why
nobody has ever found a body. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's
very trophy, it's very yea yeah. A big part of
this whole haunted label that's been put on Pavelia seems
to have come from the TV show Ghost Adventures. In
two thousand and nine, the series had an episode about

(20:52):
Pavlia in which one of the hosts claimed to have
been temporarily possessed during the filming, and the show described
Pavilia is the world's most haunted island, and the stories
have only gained momentum since then. Yeah, you really do notice,
like there's not a lot of write ups that you
can find before that about it being haunted. I'm sure

(21:14):
any place that you know has been abandoned. Those local
stories come up about it, and sometimes they get used
to try to keep children in line, et cetera. But
in terms of like the online content about it and
any sort of like write ups, they're not really about
it being haunted until after this, and then they just
go bananas and they're everywhere you can find haunting stories.

(21:37):
But there also has been a growing movement to give
Pavilia a place in Venice's history without all of those
paranormal and spooky rumors. So for many locals, even though
the island has officially been off limits to visitors, it
was part of their youth. Many of them grew up
going to the island to fish, or explore with friends
or get into a bit of teenage mischief away from

(21:59):
adult In addition to wanting Pavilia to be spared the
fate of the other Lagoon islands, which most of them
have had hotels built on them. They tend to be
very big, luxurious hotels. These Italians want to put to
rest the ghost stories that have really sensationalized the identity
of the island on the global stage. In some cases,
this seems like it might be muddling the history even

(22:20):
farther though. For example, there have been claims that the
hospital on the island was never a mental hospital, but
there is at least one sign that's been photographed there
in recent years that reads Psychiatric department and Italian. Yeah,
so that kind of fuels the idea that it was
a mental hospital, but it also really does not help

(22:42):
the case of people going no, no, no, nothing weird
happened here. It's kind of like you got to acknowledge
what was real in order to soothe the more sensationalized
discussion about it. And of course, there are loads of
places to find references to Pavilia in modern fiction, which
in many cases are kind of adding to that haunted mystique.

(23:03):
A place that appears to be based on Pavilia is
actually in the first chapter of the graphic novel Sandman
and This Endless Nights by Neil Gaiman, and Pavilia also
appears in other graphic novels as well. It's referenced periodically
in various fictional TV shows, and it is currently the
setting of an Italian film that is in development titled
The Plague Doctor. And in non fictional art, there's a

(23:24):
drawing of Pavilia by Jakomogardi in the Metropolitan Museum of
Arts collection. This image is labeled the Island of Pavilia
with British naval officers embarking, and it was drawn sometime
in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. It features
a scene that looks full of life and very active.
There's not a ghost in sight. And we'll put a
link to it in the show notes. Yeah, that's in

(23:46):
there online archives, so you can look at it and
see that it just looks like any drawing you would
see of a busy island with a military personnel coming
and going on. It not spooky at all. Yeah, you
just went to the MET. I was going to ask
if that it was. What inspired is that? I do
not see it at the MET. If I had, that
would have been a whole other thing. I did get

(24:06):
another idea for a different show at the MET, but
you'll have to wait for that one. Yeah, we'll talk
about that then. But yeah, so that is Pavilia, an
island that it is fun to think about being haunted,
but I feel like the reality is probably more mundane.
That's usually my go to. There was one discussion that
I stumbled across online. They're like we went and we recorded,

(24:29):
and there were all these noises of something and bumping,
and in my head, I'm like, those buildings are falling
apart before our eyes. Like, yes, I believe there was
something at bumping. Yeah, probably roof tiles falling off. I know,
I'm very skeptical. Well, I stayed in a cabin one time,
many years ago, and I was staying there two nights

(24:49):
a week for several weeks in a row. And something
about this old that there was like a newly built
on addition, which was where I was staying, and then
a very very old part, and the old part just
gave me the creeps real bad the whole time I
was there. And one night I heard this like creepy
thumping sound that was kind of muffled, like weird footsteps,

(25:12):
and it scared me so bad. And then I got
up in the morning to get in my car and leave,
and I heard the noise again, and I whipped around
and it was apples falling out of the apple tree. Yeah. Yeah, Unfortunately,
like gravity will give you some good ghost noises sometimes,
uh yeah, I mean I love to think about a

(25:34):
haunted place Heaven knows. The Haunted Mansion is my favorite place,
but uh yeah, usually it's It's a pretty Monday and explanation.
Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since
this episode is out of the archive, if you heard
an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar

(25:54):
over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now.
Our current email address is history at iHeartRadio dot com.
You can find us all over social media at missed Inhistory,
and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts,
Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen
to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a

(26:19):
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.