Welcome back to Heart Starts Pounding, a podcast of Horrors, hauntings and mysteries.

As always, I'm your ghost, Kaylin Moore.

A few months ago, I was lucky enough to take a trip to Northern Italy, and usually when I travel,

I like to talk to locals just to get a better sense of the area.

And when I do this, I like to ask them for scary stories they grew up with. But recently, I found that people will offer me these stories without me even really having to ask. I think we as people just really like telling each other

the craziest stories we've ever heard.

This was also the place, mind you,

where a woman on a train told me

about how her daughter saw the ghost of a civil war soldier in a hotel from the most recent listener tales episode.

I started this trip in Venice off the coast of Nort Italy, probably the best place in the world to hear a ghost story.

It's a small floating island and to get there I got dropped off by a taxi at the only area cars are allowed. Once you're actually on the island,

there's not streets for cars. Just cobblestone alleyways, split in half by canals.

There's plazas, there's bridges, but no cars.

And that, coupled with the fact that the island is always slightly moving because it's gently

bobbing in the ocean, can make it a little disorienting.

Many of the buildings in Venice are original, some from as early as the 12th century

when they were built by merchants, travelers, and members of the church.

On the first day of my trip, I was standing by a canal watching the boats and the gondolas

come in and out of their docks.

I remember looking down at the canal and not being able to tell how deep it was.

It could have been two feet deep. It could have been 200. But I noticed that as the gondolas took off into the Venetian lagoon, they passed a bunch of other

much smaller islands, some with very beautiful new buildings on them. To my right was a gondolier leaning against a wooden pole. He was wearing the

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