Italy, a Murder and a Mystery: The Most Haunted Island & The Maso Murders

Written By Kaelyn Moore

Today, we're going to Poveglia, Italy's most haunted island, to hear stories of plague victims burned alive. Then, we're going to hear about a double murder in 1991 that shocked the entire country.

TW: Mentions of Suicide

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SOURCES

https://www.travelchannel.com/shows/ghost-adventures/articles/poveglia-islands-haunted-history

TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to heart starts pounding a podcast of Horrors, Hautnings, and mysteries. As always, I’m your ghost, Kaelyn Moore


A few months ago, I was lucky enough to take a trip to Northern Italy. Usually, when I travel, I like to talk to locals 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’ve found that people will offer them 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 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 my trip in Venice, off the coast of northeastern Italy, probably the best place in the world to hear a ghost story. It’s 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, plazas and bridges.  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 the trip, I was standing by a canal watching the boats and 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 2 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, standing leaning against a wooden pole. He was wearing the classic striped shirt and red bandana, and his jacket had the Gondolier emblem on it, signifying he was a part of the 1000 year old Guild. 


    “Excuse me, do you know what’s on those islands?” walked up to him and asked. “Are they part of venice?”


    The man pointed out into the water and nodded. He explained that two of the small islands were basically owned by resorts, each one looked the size of a few football fields and had one resort on it a piece. Hence why the buildings looked so new and beautiful.


    But then he squinted, and looked out further into the sea. He squatted down to my level and held his arm out as if to guide my eye where he was looking in the distance. 


    “Do you see that bell tower there?” He asked. And sure enough, far in the distance, past the two gilded resorts, I could just barely make out a stone bell tower peaking through thick, overgrown trees. It  looked much, much older than the buildings on the other small islands.


    “That is a forbidden island. It is the most haunted place in all of Venice”


    Ok, well now he had my attention.


    He told me that when the breeze is just right, a gray dust cloud from the island can get kicked up into the air. He once saw the dust, and wanted to see where it was coming from, but the closer he got, the dust started to cake on his hair and skin. It started to obscure his view of the beautiful but eerie island.


    Once when he pinched the dust off his skin and rolled it around in his fingers, he realized It wasn’t what he thought it was. It had the consistency of ashes, which were from  the charred remains of corpses that had been burned on the island. 


    I needed to hear more about this place, so I asked if I bought a ride in his gondola if he’d tell me the story of the island, and he agreed. 


    So today, I want to take you with me on a trip to Northern Italy, and tell you some scary stories as I heard them from the people who know them best.


    Our first story is going to be about the most haunted island in Venice, and our second is going to be about an unspeakable crime that happened in Verona, one that set off a chain of copycat attacks by teenagers.


    But first, I want to talk about Jinx. 

    Jinx is the mascot for our Rogue Detecting Society–the friendly ghost with headphones you may have seen on the website or on the new Rogue Detecting Society stickers. Thank you to everyone who has been scooping those up and the whole sticker pack–I’m super excited to see how you use them so please tag me. If you want to see what they look like check out shop dot heartstartspounding dot com. I’ll link it in the bio. Remember if you’re a patron at the $5 tier you’ll get a free Jinx sticker when you hit your third paid month and discounts on any other orders, and of course anyone listening can purchase stickers from the Heart Starts Pounding store.


    Now I shouted out a new listener review last week but today I want to call out a new review from an OG listener–”Love Love Love, I am hooked! I’ve been listening for almost two years now and I cannot get enough. Every show is captivating” That’s from Cheyenne Marie B on Apple Podcasts. Thanks, Cheyenne. Two years is basically all of it, so thank you for sticking around and thanks to all the OGs listening today. If you’re new here, welcome, we’re here every Wednesday around [10pm EST or 7:30amif you’re listening in Mumbai or elsewhere in India which quite a few of you are.  Now, we’re going to take a quick break, and as always, listener discretion is advised. 


    The local saying goes “When an evil man dies, he wakes up in Poveglia.” It exists like some strange purgatory, a place where the living once were and the dead remain. To be on Poveglia is to have one foot in our world and one foot in the next. 


    The island is in the South Lagoon halfway between Lido and Venice. It’s said The first people to ever live there took refuge around 420 A.D. to escape military invasions on the mainland of Italy. Records from the year 800 show that these refugees were mainly from the cities of Este and Padua. The island’s inhabitants lived in the small community for hundreds of years until they were forced back onto the island of Venice, leaving the place abandoned. 


    Over the following years, Italy was bombarded by the plague. First in the 1340’s, then in the 1630’s. I mean, you’ve heard the stories. The dead piled up in the streets because the graveyards were full, their faces and lymph nodes black and bulbous. 


    It’s said that as you walk around Poveglia and hear the dirt crunch under your feet, that up to 50% of what you’re stepping on is ash from the bodies of those killed by the plague and rushed out of Venice and brought to the island. Crematoriums were set up to burn the bodies so quickly, that sometimes the infected weren’t even fully dead as they were loaded into the fires. But you’d only know that once you heard the screams. With nowhere else to put the remains, they were mixed in with the dirt around the island.


    So if you’re brave enough to walk Poveglia, it's rumored you may find a stray bone protruding from the ground, especially if you find the remains of a giant community garden that was built in the 18th century, once people reinhabited the place after the plague died down. Not knowing the extent of the casualties, they built their garden directly on a graveyard. 


    I couldn’t tell if the Gondolier was pulling my leg as he told me this, but he may be right. When I was looking up the island on my own, I came across a National Geographic article that estimated 100,000 bodies were buried on the small island. That’s 100,000 people in the area the size of 14 football fields. Some estimates claim it’s as many at 160,000


    The gondolier said he had heard the story of Giovanni, a cold cuts delivery man from Venice who knew about these ghosts all too well. his father would take him fishing near the island when he was a small boy. He always got a strong sense that something evil had happened there and was entranced by the mystery of the island. So, when he got older, he decided to sneak over and he spent two weeks living amongst the decay. In 2014 he told an Australian reporter about his experience


    He said that he felt like there were three main spirits that were interacting with him. He called them Paolo, Marco and Giorgio. Giorgio was friendly, he remarked, Marco would push him around and seemed mean. But Paolo, Paolo was the bad one. Giovanni felt like Paolo had been a doctor there.


    But Paolo was most likely not a plague doctor back in the day, the gondolier told me. It went silent, except for the sound of the water gently lapping against the algae covered steps and doors that opened directly into the canal. 


    “Who was he, then?” I asked


    Well, there’s a legend about another doctor on the island.


    On the island sit a few brick buildings that have seen better days, Including the bell tower I could barely make out from the docks. If you were to peer in through the windows, you may see cracked tile and shards of glass littering the floors. Evil, twisted faces are spray painted on the walls from vandals who have sneaked onto the island under the cover of night. 


    Parts of This building were constructed in 1814, when Poveglia was turned into a naval medical base. Cases of the plague were still treated here, though there weren’t many. 


    Today, these buildings are dilapidated. They have collapsed Terracotta ceilings and mud-plastered floors, every inch overgrown with ivy and rust on the rogue items like bathtubs, molded tiles and shower curtains, hospital beds and surgical tables. The lush greenery is rapt with poison ivy, rats, as well as scores of rabbits, lizards, millipedes, and blackberry barbs. Asbestos is caked onto some walls


    When Giovanni told the Australian reporter about the ghost of Dr. Paolo, the reporter went out to these buildings to stay the night and was overwhelmed by the feeling of decay and death. They actually snapped a photo of a hospital bed left in the chapel that was all the way to the left of the room. In the morning as they walked out the bed was moved without explanation all the way to the far right. They were terrified


    But in one of their photos is a plaque that commemorates the mental asylum that used to be on the grounds. And that’s where the legend of Dr. Paolo comes from 


    The gondalier got really serious at this point. Mental illness wasn’t regarded with care back in the day and the island was away from the rest of society, the asylum was not carefully regulated and the patients were left in a nightmarish hell. 


    Rehabilitation was not the goal, and instead, patients were tormented in attempts to be “fixed” with surgeries and mistreatment like being chained up to their beds and left alone in the dark for days at a time. People were sent to Poveglia against their will, not unlike the plague victims, and this included people with developmental disabilities, neurological disorders, and physical disabilities. 


    Dr. Paolo would choose from a menu of cruel and barbaric experiments to try and “cure” these patients. Lobotomies, electric shock therapy, and force feeding are among the legends passed down. During these intense physically debilitating procedures it’s claimed by believers that anesthesia was not used and tools were incredibly dirty which lead to infection, illness, and death. The many patients who died under the asylum’s care were buried and forgotten in unmarked graves, adding to the island’s already high body count.  


    In an episode of ghost hunters, Zac Bagans explained that the legend said that Dr. Paolo went insane while on the island and eventually lept from the bell tower to his death. The hospital was shut down after that, in 1968, and the island has lain abandoned ever since. 


    Now, those that get close to the island all experience the same strange phenomenon. Disembodied screams can be heard echoing through the thick trees. “I’ve heard the screams” the gondalier told me, rounding a corner near an ancient looking stone wall. 


    Some even claim to see the apparition of  small girl standing on the shore. She’s been named by locals Little Maria, and they believe she died from the plague. Another apparition that’s commonly seen is a woman who looks like she’s hiding, perhaps from Dr. Paolo. 

    “Anyways, we’re here” our gondola bumped into the side of the canal, back by the steps we entered it through. I couldn’t believe we were already back, I wanted to know more, I wanted this man to take us there, I wanted to see Poveglia for myself.


    I went back to the docks and looked out at the island, trying to catch a glimpse of the shadowy figures he spoke about, trying to hear a disembodied scream above the sound of small waves and boat engines. 


    When I got home, I looked more into the story of Poveglia, and I found that some historians dispute this telling of the island’s history. They say that plague bodies weren’t brought to the island, that historical records show less than 100 people who are buried there. They say the island has been turned into folklore.


    And maybe that’s true, maybe the gondalier knew I’d pay him to take me around and tell me the story. Which, fine, that’s good marketing on his end. But as I stood on the edge of the dock looking out at the island, and felt a big gust of sea breeze blowing towards me, I could have sworn I saw a small grey dust cloud form near the bell tower.


    Our next story, after a short break


    Our next story takes us away from the island of Poveglia, way inland in Italy, outside of the city of Verona.


    I heard this story from an older man, who lived in the area and watched the coverage of this case as it unfolded in the early 1990’s. He and every other person in Italy, it seemed. The story of the Maso Murders captivated and disturbed the entire nation .


    The man and i sat next to each other at a dinner for an event I was at and got to talking. That’s my favorite thing, by the way. When everyone else is up chatting and making their rounds at an event, I love sitting in the corner with someone as they tell me the craziest story they've ever heard. It really takes the pressure off of me to be so extraverted at those kinds of things. I guess I fancy myself a bit of a wallflower, in that way.  


    So, anyways, After a couple glasses of red wine, I told him about the podcast and about you guys and the kinds of stories you find interesting.  and he told me he had just the story for you.


    Let’s set the scene: Antonio Maso sat in his car with his wife, Rosa, while he watched his garage door slowly open. The couple were in their driveway after returning home from a night out. It was April, just outside the city of Verona, and spring had not fully bloomed. The air was still chilly and the moon hardly broke through the clouds. 


    As the garage finished opening, Antonio noticed that the light inside wasn’t coming on. Oh shoot, he thought, the fuse must have blown. He opened the car door and told his wife to stay in the passenger seat until he flipped the breaker


    Rosa watched as Antonio disappeared into the dark garage


    Inside their home, it was even darker, and the breaker box was in the kitchen. He bumbled around, feeling the smooth kitchen wall for the indent of the box. 


    When all of a sudden, three masked intruders descended on Antonio. They seemed to materialize out of nowhere, holding an iron, crowbar and a pot. On their faces they wore carnival masks in the classic old Venetian style. Harlequin inspired gold masks that covered only the top half of their faces, with pointy noses and holes cut out for eyes. allowing the wearer's true gaze to remain hidden 


    If Antonio screamed, it wasn’t audible, because out in the car, Rosa wondered what was taking her husband so long, the light should be on by now. She started to get worried, and slipped out of the passenger door and into the house, where she stumbled upon her husband’s body laying in the middle of a gruesome scene. Standing above him are the three intruders. Before she could do anything, they lunged at her.


    3 hours later, at 2am, the couple's son, Pietro Maso, stumbled home after a night out with his friends. When he entered the house, he saw both of his parents lying on the kitchen floor, dead. Blood was everywhere, his mother had cotton wool shoved into her mouth and his father had a sheet over his head. In some of the rooms, drawers had been ransacked.


    He grabbed the phone off the wall and dialed the police, telling them exactly what he saw, and then ran over to a neighbor to ask for help. 


    Police were on the scene fast, remember, this happened in a small community. violent murders like this were NOT common. 


    When police arrived, they saw that The scene was somehow even worse than Pietro described. It was clear that the couple did not die immediately after being struck. It looked like both of them were also suffocated, as if the blows didn’t do the job. 


    Pietro was there walking them through the house and chatting with the officers. He told them he figured it was a robbery based on the opened and emptied drawers around the house. 


    But there was something about that theory that didn’t sit right with police. There was something about all of this that didn’t sit right with the police. First and foremost, they had never seen a thief that opened and completely emptied drawers while looking for valuables. Typically, when they were investigating robberies, they’d found that the drawers were open and rummaged through as intruders looked through the contents. But dumping things out on the floor was… atypical.


    There was also something that was off with Pietro’s demeanor. While  he sat and chatted with the police, they couldn’t help but notice how nonchalant he seemed about the whole thing. Which was surprising considering hours ago he walked in on the gruesome murder of his own parents. 


    And it’s not long before Pietro’s two sisters realize that nearly 20 thousand dollars of today’s US currency is missing from their parents bank account. 


    And so, Pietro is brought in for questioning, but he insists he had nothing to do with the murder of his parents. the more he speaks, the more he contradicts himself, the details of his story ever changing. 


    Eventually, after two days of interrogation, Pietro breaks down. He admits that he and four three of his friends are responsible for the deaths of his parents. 


    Why did he do that? I asked the man


    Well, back in the 80’s and 90’s, there was a kind of mania that drove a bunch of young adults insane, including Pietro. He took a long sip of his full wine glass, and continued

    Pietro was born in 1971, to Antonia and Rosa Maso. He had two older sisters Nadia and Laura, and the family of five lived outside of Verona located in one of the poorest regions in Italy, Veneto (Venne-toe). 


    But something interesting happened when Pietro was born, and this is what the man claims infected the youth with a form of insanity. He told me that Veneto went through a huge economic boom in the 1970’s, while the rest of the country was plunged into economic turmoil. A series of advancements in agriculture and industry left the general population of Veneto richer and more employed than other people throughout Italy.


    it was believed in italy that this generation of kids who were born into wealth from parents that used to be poor had evil tendencies. 


    Pietro’s father really benefited from this time. He was a once poor farmer who made a lot of money during the boom and enjoyed spending it on his family. And since Pietro was the baby, he seemed to be spoiled the most. 


    Eventually, when Pietro was old enough, he enrolled in agricultural school himself to follow in his fathers footsteps. But he found school to be a waste of time, and he quickly dropped out. He tried Seminary but was expelled, and he was also discharged from the military shortly after for “schizoeffectiveness”. Symptoms of Schizoeffective disorder can be delusions, hallucinations, mania and depression, but it can vary from person to person. It’s unclear exactly what symptoms Pietro was suffering from at the time, but he was deemed unfit for military service. 


    So while his sisters left the house to find work and get married, 20 year old Pietro moved back home. And instead of trying to figure out what to do with his life, he devolved into complete hedonism. He started buying designer clothes, going out to clubs every night. He started taking ecstasy and doing an amount of cocaine I can only imagine would kill most people. All of his pursuits were financed by his parents.  


    Pietro also developed a cult of personality with  younger guys who admired his lavish lifestyle. They were 19 year old Giorgio, 18 year old Damiano, and 19 year old Paolo. Each time Pietro saw these guys he had a different girl or a different pair of expensive shoes. The young guys all wanted to be him.


    But his parents weren’t as excited about his lavish lifestyle. They enjoyed spoiling their son, but this was getting out of control. Anything he wanted he bought. The family started arguing constantly.


    And that’s when Pietro decided that his whole family had to die. That way he could have his inheritance, and his sisters’, in peace. 


    The plan for the family assassination went as follows: he was going to place two gas cylinders in the basement of the house that would slowly leak. Then, he’d program an alarm clock so that a noise would activate disco lights he set up. In his plan, turning on the lights was supposed to ignite the gas that had dispersed in the room. Pietro had filled the chimney with clothes so the gas couldn’t escape, which would cause an explosion.


    The kid was too much of an idiot to execute a plan that complicated, the man said. He couldn’t figure out how to remove the knobs of the gas cylinders and then his mother found them.


    Giving up on that plan, Pietro recruited his friend Giorgio to help with a new one. Rosa had recently found money in Pietro’s pants pockets while she was doing laundry and asked where it had come from. She knew her son was out of work and worried that the cash meant he was involved in something sketchy. 


    Pietro told her that the money was from commissions he was owed from a car dealer, and to prove it, he’d bring her along to the dealership with him. But in reality, Giorgio would be hiding in the car with a hammer, and once she stepped in, he was instructed to hit her from behind, killing her. Then, the two were going to head back to Pietro’s to kill his father. 


    But Giorgio got scared and backed out of the plan. Instead, Pietro told her that the money was from a friend who had bribed him to keep quiet about his illegal computer sales. She believed him, and the two went home. 


    After these two failed attempts, Pietro asked for a loan of about 20 thousand dollars in today’s currency so he could buy a new car, which his parents denied. Really, he needed the money to help Giorgio who was in debt with his bank for that amount. He had squandered the money on nights out, fancy meals, and designer clothes, and, I cannot stress this enough, an insane amount of cocaine. 


    So Pietro went ahead and stole the money from his parents by forging his mothers signature on a check written out to Giorgio. 


    And this puts a ticking clock on Pietro’s plan, because he felt like he needed to kill his parents before they figured out about the missing money. 


    So, on April 17th, 1991, his parents were going out for the night, and he asked them to come back by 11pm. While they were out, he unscrewed the lightbulb in the garage so that his father would come inside and check the fuse box. Then, he and his friends hid in the house wearing carnival masks and holding different household items they would use to bludgeon the couple. 


    Both of his parents were alive after the bludgeoning, so Pietro instructed the group to hold a sheet over his fathers head until he stopped breathing, 53 minutes after the initial attack. Then, they shoved cotton wool down his mothers throat so she would stop breathing as well. And after that, they went out to the club. 

    Prior to the trial Pietro, Giorgio, Damiano, and Paolo all underwent psychiatric evaluation which determined they were mentally sound and culpable for the crime. Pietro was advised by council to renounce his portion of the inheritance. Because of this, he received a lesser sentence of 30 years in prison. Giorgio and Paolo received 26 years while Damiano was sentenced to 13 years since he was a minor.


    What’s really crazy to me, though, is pietro became a rockstar, the man told me. He inspired a bunch of other kids to kill their parents. Ones that also had gone mad from their wealth.


    And it’s true. Once Pietro was in prison, he started receiving fan mail from other young adults around Italy saying that they too wish they could have killed their parents. And that they understood why he did what he did. Some called him brave. 


    Pietro’s story caught fire in the Italian press, people couldn’t get enough of the updates on the case. One Italian paper I read referred to him as an “Unscrupulous Dandy” and I am BEGGING you guys to please start using that as an insult.  


    Not long after the Maso Murders, a teen boy in Lazio (lahtsee-oh), Italy, south of Rome, killed his parents. Another boy in Verona hired some friends to kill his parents for not telling him he was adopted, but they backed out and told the police. I found a statistic that At the time, 30% of Italian men age 29 still lived at home with their families, I can imagine the number is higher the younger you get but 30% at 29 is a lot, so it caused immense panic throughout the country. Parents looked at their children with suspicion, and some children looked at Pietro with admiration. 


    But Pietro was not the first person to commit this kind of crime, and he himself may have been inspired by the Menendez brothers, who, two years prior, killed their parents with shotguns in their Beverly Hills home. At the time they looked like greedy rich kids eager to get their inheritance, however, now we know that the boys may have been afraid of their father’s abuse. Pietro’s motive always just remained financial, he never tried to hide it. When asked directly why he murdered his parents, he would always talk about what he had to gain financially from their deaths. When on the stand at his trial he said “We did it for the inheritance. So we could buy more expensive cars and clothes.”


    Eventually, Pietro was released from prison in 2013, after only serving 22 years of his sentence. Three years after that, his sisters claimed he began harassing them for the portion of the inheritance he believed he was owed. He told them he was “finishing the work he started 25 years ago”


    The following year he was admitted to a  psychiatric clinic for undisclosed mental disorders and cocaine addiction


    I asked the man if he really believed that wealth had infected the minds of young people and drove them to kill their parents. 


    The only God in Veneto was money. He said. People would go to church but they were worshiping clothes and cars. The values were all messed up there and that’s why the kids all went crazy. 


    Maybe Pietro had been driven mad by his family’s wealth and lack of values, or maybe he was a mentally unstable kid with a bad drug problem, but the people of Italy seem to think it was the former. I have a feeling it was a mix of both


    So those were the two stories I heard on my travels, as told by the locals. I hope you enjoy them, and if you have any trips coming up, you can send me the stories you hear on HeartStartsPounding.com. We are off next week, so if you’ve been wanting to catch up the dark summer series or other older episodes ad free, now’s a good chance to check out a free trial on Patreon or Apple Podcasts. And when I come back, I have a more current episode that I’ve been working on for a few months now–a true and tragic story that took me down a lot of rabbit holes. Until then…stay curious.

Kaelyn Moore
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