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ABANDONED ISLAND OF DEATH

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Two YouTubers charter a boat to the one island in the Venetian Lagoon that Italy would rather you forget.

Matt Dajer and Thomas Brag of Yes Theory didn’t just film another abandoned-building walkthrough. In “We Went to the Abandoned ‘Island of Death’… (ITALY),” the pair travel to Poveglia, a small island sitting between Venice and Lido that Italian authorities have kept officially off-limits to the public. Getting there required a chartered private boat and local authorization — there’s no ferry stop, no tourist dock, no easy way in.

• Poveglia functioned as a plague quarantine station starting in 1776 before becoming a psychiatric hospital in 1922, which closed in 1968.
• Local legend holds that more than 160,000 plague victims were buried or burned on the island, and that roughly half its soil is made up of human ash and remains.
• Folklore surrounding the asylum includes stories of a doctor who performed crude lobotomies on patients before jumping to his death from the island’s bell tower.

Poveglia Island Remains Permanently Closed

The island’s closure isn’t a marketing gimmick — it’s a function of its layered, brutal history. Records point to Poveglia’s use as a checkpoint for plague victims dating back centuries, with the lazaretto system designed to quarantine the sick and dying away from mainland Venice. That original purpose is why the ground itself carries the reputation it does: a place where bodies were processed faster than they could be properly buried, according to the legend Dajer and Brag reference on camera.

The island’s second life came in 1922, when the same buildings were converted into a psychiatric hospital, which operated until it shut its doors in 1968. That transition from plague station to asylum is the reason Poveglia carries two separate layers of ghost stories instead of one, and it’s part of why Venetian officials have never reopened it for casual tourism.

Inside the Asylum’s Darkest Legend

The story that dominates the video’s back half is the tale of a doctor at the psychiatric hospital who allegedly subjected patients to crude lobotomies, then supposedly threw himself from the bell tower after being tormented by what he’d done. Dajer and Brag don’t present this as verified fact — they treat it the way most who visit Poveglia do, as the piece of local folklore that gives the ruins their edge.

Roughly 50 percent of the island’s soil is said to be composed of human ash and decomposed remains from more than 160,000 plague dead.

That statistic is doing a lot of work in the video — it’s the detail that turns an old, crumbling hospital into something closer to a mass grave with hallways built on top of it.

Evidence Discovered by Surveillance Cameras

Strip away the legend and what Yes Theory documents is a genuinely dangerous structural site. The hospital wards are gutted, corridors sag under overgrown vegetation, and rusted medical fixtures sit exactly where they were left when the facility closed in 1968. Roofs have collapsed in sections, floors are unstable, and the crew has to navigate the complex carefully to avoid the kind of real physical hazard — not a ghost story — that could actually end the trip.

That’s the throughline of the video: the psychological unease of walking through an asylum with Poveglia’s reputation is real, but so is the risk of a rotted staircase giving out underneath you. It’s the same tension that runs through other extreme, real-stakes content built around dares and physical risk, the kind seen in stunts like World’s Largest Challenge! or World’s Most Dangerous Escape Room! — the danger isn’t manufactured for the camera, it’s already sitting there waiting.

Poveglia isn’t going anywhere, and neither is its reputation. Getting onto the island still requires a private boat, a permit, and a willingness to walk through a building the Italian government has left to rot rather than restore — which is exactly why Dajer and Brag’s footage of it, hazards and all, is the closest most people will ever get.