By Wongani Chipeta
Strange and shocking but true story
Today www.avantmalawi.com features one of the darkest places on earth. What made this place to be dark to the extent that the government prohibits people visiting the place?
www.avantmalawi.com takes you to Italy at a place called:
Poveglia Island: Haunted place Like Hell, But in Italy
Poveglia Island is a secluded little piece of land that even most of the Italians stay away from. It is labelled as the final restless place of thousands of diseased, murderous and insane people. Poveglia is the convergence of everything we know about evil.
Back when the bubonic plague also called Black Death ate up most of the world’s population, the Romans had a clever idea to keep the healthy people separated from the sick. The plagued people were shipped off to Poveglia Island, a small, secluded land mass that floats between Venice and Lido. There, people lived out the last of their wretched lives together until they died with no care. Since the island already reeked of death, the next time an epidemic came along, like the Spanish flue barely alive bodies were dumped there and burned in mass graves.
In 1922, a mental hospital was built there. It was used to welcome the island’s newest “guests,” or anybody that showed symptoms of any sort of sickness, physical or mental. Basically, if you had an itch, away you went to Poveglia where you’d sink your feet into the soil with half dirt, half human ash and be in the company of over hundred of thousands of diseased ghosts. Yes, the soils on the island is covered with decomposed human flesh and human skin ash.
The doctor ran the mental hospital and conducted all kinds of brutal experiments on mental challenged patients on the island. He could sometimes shove or drill chisels through the scar into their brains to see what was moving inside. This method called lobotomy killed almost 160 000 people before the year ended. The procedures were heinously wicked, and painful, too. He used hammers, chisels, and drills with no anesthesia or concern for sanitation.
He supposedly saved his darkest experiments for special patients, whom he took to the hospital’s bell tower. Whatever he did in there, the screams from those being tortured could be heard across the Island.
According to the story, the doctor began to suffer his own mental torture and was pursued by the island’s multitude of ghosts. Eventually, he lost his mind and climbed to the top of the bell tower and flung himself to his death below. There are varying accounts of his death, though. Some say he may have actually been pushed, either by an angry island spirit or by some of his furious patients.
Supposedly a nurse witnessed his fall, claiming that he initially survived, but that a ghostly mist overcame his body and choked him to death. Somehow, the mental hospital remained open until 1968. Yes, no one knows exactly who killed the doctor.
Since then it is said that the Island is a home of ghosts which could be heard upon visiting the island. The people from Ghost Adventures video got all kinds of spooked on the island. Their episode on Poveglia, where the crew stranded themselves there for 24 hours, is full of perceived curses, apparitions, creepy music, weird energy, inexplicable equipment malfunctions, and off-the-charts ghost monitors. The crew used their best Italian to ask the ghosts pertinent questions like “are you a murderer?” and seemed to get responses from the dark abyss. Mysterious bangs, audible footsteps, disembodied voices and strange orbs are all captured on video and audio. As with most episodes of Ghost Adventures, people bashed the validity of their haunted claims.
There are no boats that make regular stops at the island. The Italian tourism board prohibits visiting the island (on paper) and requires a lengthy application process, where you must obtain approval, before you can step your trembling foot onto the human ash-covered land. But as with most things, for the right price (about 200 euros), you can hire a boat to float you over there, no approval necessary. Those who visited the Island never wish they revisit the place.
Italians like to keep Poveglia at the bottom of their list of tourist attractions. But nosey scare-seekers have found their way onto its forbidden shores with mixed results about their encounters with the undead. When it comes to ghosts, it seems that people always find exactly what they’re looking for. In the end, it’s hard to say if this island is actually haunted but we can tell you that it’s 100 percent better to be scared in Italy than visiting Poveglia.