Moving across the pond, you’ll find some supposedly haunted islands that have both repelled scaredy-cats and attracted curious ones (of whose fate we’re all well aware) for centuries. Take Poveglia, in Venice, Italy’s South Lagoon. The Travel Channel says it has been “a refuge, stronghold, place of exile and a dumping ground for the diseased, dying and deceased” for hundreds of years. Its first inhabitants arrived in 421, but not on vacation. They were escaping invaders on the mainland. The islanders and their descendants enjoyed a peaceful lifestyle until the 14th century, when the Black Death scythed through Europe’s population by the millions. The ghastly gentrification of Poveglia continued in the 1800s, when the citizens of Venice figured it was a great place for an asylum for the city’s mentally ill. The island is “abandoned” today.

A visit to Scotland’s Isle of Skye is incomplete without a thorough investigation into the Fairy Flag of Dunvegan, a piece of woven silk that most likely dates back to 4th century Rhodes or Syria, according to the Dunvegan Castle website. There are several creepy tales to explain its purported supernatural powers (the word fairy in Scotland denotes something more akin to what Americans call ghosts, rather than the cute, winged things the word conjures up on this side of the Atlantic), but the Fairy Flag has been credited with protecting the Dunvegan clan from invaders and other threats, as well as spontaneously bursting into song, for centuries.