Although most of the world doesn’t celebrate Halloween, here in North America it’s the spookiest day of the year! Of course this isn’t to say the rest of the world doesn’t have their share of terrifying places. Considered one of the most haunted places in the world Poveglia is a haunted island near Venice, Italy.

This island isn’t messing around either, it’s darkened shores are strewn with polished human bones and it is reputed to be so scary that no tourists are ever allowed to set foot on it.  In the late 1500’s when the plague ravaged Italy, and bodies were piling up by the thousands, city officials took the drastic step of sending the sick and dying, including children and babies, to the island of Poveglia and thrown into the pits of rotting corpses, where they were left to die in agony. As many as 160,000 tormented bodies were dumped there over the years.

The whole island is still covered in a layer of ash, the remains of all the burned bodies. Before long, local people began seeing strange things and hearing strange sounds coming from the haunted island. In light of the islands dark history, in 1922 they did the only logical thing…they built a mental hospital on the island!

The hospital was run by an excentric doctor who experimented on live patients. Lobotomies were performed using a basic hand drill or just a hammer and chisel. After years of these horrible experiments, the doctor himself began seeing ghosts. It is said they led him to the top of the bell tower, and forced him to throw himself off. It is rumored that the mental patients then bricked up his body in the bell tower. There his ghost remains, haunting the empty tower for all eternity. HAPPY HALLOWEEN