Author's Note: Though I haven't quite finished writing this, I just couldn't wait to get it published. I hope you enjoy it!
Oh! And this prologue will make sense later! It's not random, I promise!
Prologue:
"Poveglia"
Some five miles of the coast of Venice, Italy lies an island of foreboding. Its dark history bids visitors to stay away. To the locals it is known as the Island of the Dead, or the Land of No Return. However, for most it is simply called: Poveglia. During the daylight hours, Poveglia is a place of beauty and what would appear to be peace, but come night-fall the place holds an aura of evil.
The history of Poveglia dates back to the 1300s during the Bubonic Plague, more commonly known as the Black Death. With much of Venice's population either dead or dying, authorities needed a solution to isolate the sick. Their "solution" was to take the sick and force them into boats, hooded, and cart them away to an unknown place. This unknown place was Poveglia.
Once on Poveglia, the sick would be buried in Plague Pits, even though some were still alive. Then the pits would be burned. The piles of the dead were so massive that it has been said that they reached all the way Hell. To this day, the ashes remain and bones are still scoured up by fishermen in the nearby waters.
But the haunting history of Poveglia does not stop with the Black Death. Hundreds of years later, in 1922, a hospital was opened on its grounds. It was not long until patients began to see spirits from the tragedy six hundred years prior. The Head Surgeon believed them to be mental and took upon himself the opportunity to study and experiment with the human brain. It is said that if you went into his office, you never came back out. Some time later, the surgeon was pushed by unseen hands from the bell tower atop the hospital; from which, though the bell was removed in the 1930s and the tower since bricked up, you can still hear the bell ringing from time to time.
With an active history such as this, only the brave at heart would dare visit this island…