Eerie 'island of ghosts' where 160,000 people died and tourists are banned

dailystar.co.uk:

ghosts.These days, few people are allowed to visit Poveglia Island, where 160,000 are believed to have died of plague.Fearless urban explorers Matt Nadin and Andy Thompson ventured onto Poveglia to snatch some video of the forbidden island.Their video shows the abandoned, crumbling buildings and vast mass grave as well as several large containers that may have been used to burn bodies.There are reminders everywhere of the island’s haunted past.

In the undergrowth a Latin inscription on one headstone dating from 1793 says, “Do not dig. Those who suffered contagion in life lie here.”40-year old Matt, a salesman from Sheffield, South Yorkshire, posted the footage to his YouTube channel, Finders Beepers History Seekers, where he can often be found exploring abandoned and historic places of interest with Andy.He said: "It was really, really eerie.

You could tell even the taxi driver was scared, not just of the police but of the place itself, he couldn't get away quick enough”.Poveglia’s high body count stems from its time as the place where people suspected of carrying the Black Death were quarantined before they could enter Venice.The word “quarantine” is derived from the fact that ships carrying suspected plague victims would have to remain offshore for 40 days before docking in Venice.In practice, anyone being quarantined on Poveglia was being handed a death sentence, because the plague was endemic there.In 1922 the island’s buildings were repurposed as asylum for the mentally ill.

Rumours abounded that doctors there performed cruel experiments on the inmates, including including crude lobotomies, before the director in charge, “driven mad by ghosts” hurled himself from the hospital’s tower.