A country that acts as a popular tourist hotspot, with over six million Americans visiting each year, is home to an eerie island that is prohibited from tourism.
The United States is lucky to be located between Canada and Mexico, two countries with a rich history, and further below the latter lies the Caribbean in all of its splendor, less than an hour and a half from Orlando, Florida, to the Bahamas.
However, the country in question is in mainland Europe, and approximately 5% of the US population claims to have ancestors from there, according to a 2021 US Census Bureau report.
I’m talking about Italy, as 15,947,138 people in the United States claim to be of Italian-American origin.
Yes, Italian tourism journal All Roads Lead to Italy states that an estimated six million Americans fly over the Pacific Ocean each year to visit the country’s many ancient monuments, but there is one area they are not permitted to visit.
That is the island of Poveglia on Italy’s east coast, about 3.5 miles south of Venice.
It has been dubbed the world’s ‘creepiest island’ because it contains 160,000 corpses, and tourists are no longer permitted to visit due to its dilapidated state.
Poveglia is only seven hectares in size, but the legendary Alcatraz Island off the coast of San Francisco, California, was 8.9 hectares.
However, Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary had a maximum capacity of 336 convicts. Poveglia was not a prison, but in the late 18th century, it was used to isolate people suspected of having the plague.
When other quarantine stations were full, it quickly became a dumping ground for plague victims. When they died from the sickness, they were interred in large ‘plague pits’.
It operated as a quarantine station until 1922, when it was converted into a psychiatric hospital before being closed in 1968.
Approximately 160,000 people are thought to have died there and were later buried and burned.
After half a century, the island’s buildings are collapsing, and local authorities have declared it too dangerous for tourists to visit.
However, British explorers Matt Nadin and Andy Thompson gained access to it for their YouTube series ‘Finders Beepers History Seekers’ in 2020.
In one video, Nadin explained: “The island is so full with sad, awful history; a heck of a lot of people died there, and you really get a sense of the tragedies that occurred when you’re going about.
“They burned the bodies and left them where they were. The island has never been fully cleansed, so everything is just left alone. Later, when it was converted into an asylum, and people were pushed there out of sight of inquisitive eyes, they began to conduct horrifying experiments on them.
“While we were there, we heard the bell toll, which was rather creepy and freaked me out a little. It seemed like an omen or something. The whole scene was bizarre and unsettling, despite the fact that the tiles and archways indicated that it was once a lovely edifice.”
Explaining: “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.”
