This podcast is part of the BombPod Media Network.

This podcast is part of the BombPod Media Network.

Hi, I'm Joel Micah Harris, the host of this week in True Crime History. Join me as I dig into the recent and not so recent past to uncover true crime stories on the week of their anniversary.

You can find this week in True Crime History on iTunes, Stitcher, and Google Play. For more information visit us at thisweekandtruecrime.com.

Welcome to episode 62 of The Elbally Horror Stories. My name is Jerry and I'm here with, you know who, Tracy.

Well, y'all know who too, I guess. Hey, what's up everybody?

All right, we've got some cool stuff for you tonight. We've got a story that we've been contemplating on telling for a while. It's on the secluded haunted Forbidden Island right off the coast of Italy called Provilia, Povella Island.

I'm sorry, I'm not real good with my Italian, unless it's lasagna or spaghetti. I'm pretty good with that. You are.

Well, we're going to tell that story really cool. We did a listener story last week, but we kind of did it in the style that we do or other stories. It's gotten a really good response. So we got two more of those to do really cool stories.

And so if you guys have a longer detailed story that you want to send us on something that's happened to you will be more than happy to read it at some point in time on the air. That'd be great.

Also, we've got Andrea Whitney on because our nice little newspaper release will be out by the time you hear this. So that's pretty cool. And she's going to tell us about about the Black Hope horror, which is an awesome story out of Texas that we talked about last week. It was the story that the Poltergeist movie was actually based on. So I can't wait.

We are going to do the iTunes reviews and stuff a little later in the show. Okay. So we can just get started with this story. So are you ready to get started? I'm ready.

So let's talk about Pavilion Island. Pavilion Island is just a small island off the Northern coast of Italy. It's very isolated, which is actually what's going to lead to its horrible past that goes all the way back hundreds of years.

This goes back to even the Roman times back in the Roman days. Romans would actually take thousands of people that were dying of various plagues back then that had hit Europe. They would actually take them to this island because it was so secluded.

And basically just kind of leave them there to die because there was no cure for these things. And this continued in the mid 1300s when the Black Death actually hit which the Black Death was caused by the Pubonic plague.

Wow. That's terrible. And it happened, you know, actually two different phases of this. It happened in the mid 1300s, but it also happened in the 1600s. And in both cases, people were actually taken from all over Europe mainly Italy, though, taken over to this island and left for dead. Now how bad was the was the Black Death when it hit Europe, it was estimated that it killed 30 to 60% of the European population. Oh my God.

So I thought that some estimate that it reduced the world's population from 450 million to 350 to 375 million. Oh my goodness. That's how bad this whole thing was. That's so crazy. No wonder they had to do that. Right. And they would take them over there, obviously, but not only just because of that, if they had any fear at all that you had something, if you had a cold or a slight cough, they were sending you over there. And obviously when they sent you over there, that was pretty much of that sentence.

You weren't coming back and you went to that island. That's where you went to die. I wonder how many people fought. No, no, no. I just was nipple. It's my sonuses.

You could imagine that it'd be like, it's just hay fever. Oh my gosh. That is the saddest thing ever, though. I mean, could you imagine if you just swallowed something and it went down the wrong way and you called it and be like, no, no, try to hold that back. So it was. It's not funny.

So on the island, they would have these huge what they call plague pits. And a plague pit was this giant pit that sounds just like what you think it would be.

They would throw the dead. And in some cases, people that were too weak to fight back in their and burn their bodies. Oh, no, they were still alive. In some cases, yes. Oh gosh.

It's estimated that 160,000 people died on this tiny island. And when I say tiny, I couldn't find any actual measurements for the island, but it looks like by the pictures that you see the aerial pictures and seeing the size of the building, it don't look like it could be any more than 10 miles. Oh, dude.

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