The HAUNTED Isle!
I went on my ghost hunting expedition yesterday and quite a bit of fun. Here's a shot of me at St. Mark's Square in Venice awaiting our ride to Poveglia. I'm pretty psyched at this point but it is due mainly to the fact that an Aperol Spritz in only 2.50 euro. THAT'S CRAZY! Is this really St. Mark's?!?! I'll have two please!
It was a pleasant boat ride to the island and took maybe 25 minutes or so to reach it from St. Mark's. Here's our first glimpse of the island from the boat.
So the island is uninhabited. I'm not going to go into detail because there are plenty of stories about the island online. Here's a link to the wikipedia article. Here's another random article with some good pics (and no, I didn't get to see the "plague" pits. Here's an aerial view of the island (thanks Google image search!).
Here's some more pictures from our initial landing on the island.
As you can see from the last picture, we found a family of Italians on the island happily picking blackberries. This kind of shattered any illusions of impending doom and dread.
I think the fiercest thing we encountered were the blackberry bushes. I can say that they were in part fed off of human blood (partially mine). We arrived at the island at 6:30 PM and left right after 11 PM. We managed to get good look around in the daylight and then had enough time in darkness to get some EVP recordings in (why do ghosts prefer darkness anyway). Final result was no ghosts, no strange sightings or experiences. However, we did have a good time. If I manage to come back here at this time of year, I'm for sure bringing some buckets to pick blackberries. I bet I could make some awesome plague berry cobbler and plague berry wine. If you ever get the chance and have a few days in Venice, it might be worth a stop over. Happy gaming!
Jealous. I've always wanted to visit Povegila. :)
ReplyDeleteI'm doubly jealous. I've always wanted to visit venice but have never made it. The Wikipedia page says that Poveglia is strickly off limits to visitors, which is surprising given that one can apparently catch water taxi there to look for ghosts and blackberries.
ReplyDeleteThe wiki article sure sounds like it has an interesting history --- insane asylum, quarantine station, battlefield, etc. If this had been a real horror movie, the boat owner would have been unable to come pick you up for some unforseen reason, then you would have gotten EMP readings out the wazoo was the undead crawled out of their graves at midnight. Your D&D knowledge would have helped save your fellow ghost hunters when you instructed them to grab sticks and lead pipes to defend themselves and form up ranks in a hallway to prevent flanking, hobbits and gnomes in the front so 2 ranks can fight at a time.
"This kind of shattered any illusions of impending doom and dread."
ReplyDeleteThat line made me laugh.
@PlanetNiles - It was a lot of fun. To be honest, I hadn't heard about it until we actually started to plan the trip. Not very spooky in actuality - the party yatchs in the Venetian lagoon kinda kill that a bit - but it was fun none the less.
ReplyDelete@Stephan - There are all of these stories about how the Italians are scared of the place. That might have been true at one time but I found that the water taxi drivers were more than willing to take us out there. When we got there, there was plenty of evidence of people having frequented the place.
@Whisk - Heh, I do my best. I like paranormal stuff but honestly find it a bit difficult to take it too seriously. For me it is fun but not scary or even real. When we were doing the Electronic Voice Recordings I found it rather difficult from asking questions into the voice recorder like "do you prefer fish or chicken?". Silly, goofy fun. Kind of reminded me of Scooby Doo a little. Maybe there were ghosts but decided not to show themselves to us meddling kids ;).
Well, you DID get scratched by blackberry bushes, so it is not as if you escaped the cursed island unscathed.
ReplyDelete@Stephan - Heh, yeah those bushes were feirce! We did some EVP sessions and one of the guys has posted some of the results. Kind of interesting. I'll share them later when I get home. I still have not analyzed my EVP recordings yet.
ReplyDelete