1 MINUTE AGO: The Expedition X Episode Josh Gates Refuses to Talk About…

Josh Gates has investigated hundreds of paranormal locations, but there’s one Expedition X episode he absolutely refuses to discuss. Season 3 mysteriously skipped from episode 7 to 9. The missing episode was filmed at Povia Island in Italy, completed, edited, and then buried forever.
Something happened during that investigation that terrified the entire crew. Phil Torres was found in a state of panic with unexplained injuries. A camera operator quit immediately and never worked paranormal TV again.
Subscribe now because what Josh witnessed on that island was so disturbing he made Discovery promise to never air the footage. Dedicated fans of Expedition X, who meticulously track every episode, maintain viewing spreadsheets, and follow production schedules noticed something strange when season 3 began airing in 2021. The episode numbering jumped awkwardly from episode 7 titled Hunt for the Chupacabra directly to episode 9 titled The Beast of Bray Road with no explanation, no acknowledgement, and no episode 8 anywhere in the lineup. This wasn’t a scheduling quirk or out of order airing.
The episodes were numbered sequentially with an obvious gap that Discovery Plus made no effort to explain or address.
Fan communities on Reddit and Paranormal Investigation forums immediately began speculating about what happened to the missing episode. Some theorized it was simply delayed due to post-production issues and would air later in the season. But when the season concluded with no episode 8 ever appearing, the speculation intensified. Investigative fans began digging through production databases, filming location permits, and crew social media posts from the time frame when episode 8 would have been filmed. What they discovered was fascinating. Public records showed Expedition [music] X had obtained permits to film in Venice, Italy during a specific week in late 2020, and crew members had posted photos from Venice [music] and the surrounding Venetian lagoon during that period before quickly deleting them. One production assistant had posted an Instagram story showing a boat heading toward a distant island with the caption, “Heading somewhere we definitely shouldn’t be before that post was removed.” within hours.
Entertainment industry tracking sites that monitor television production schedules had listings showing episode 8 was titled The Curse of Pavelia Island and had a scheduled air date that was subsequently removed from all listings.
Press releases sent to entertainment journalists about season 3 originally included a description of an episode investigating Italy’s most haunted island, but that description disappeared from later versions of the press materials. When fans began asking Josh Gates directly about the missing episode through social media, convention Q&A sessions, and podcast interviews, his responses were notably evasive and uncomfortable. He would acknowledge the question with forced laughter, make vague comments about not every investigation making it to air, and quickly change the subject. His body language during these moments showed visible discomfort that wasn’t typical of his usually confident and open demeanor when discussing his work.
Povaglia Island located in the Venetian lagoon between Venice and Leo in northern Italy carries one of the darkest histories of any location in Europe, making it both a compelling investigation target for paranormal researchers and a place that many believe should never be disturbed.
[music] The island’s nightmare history began in the 14th century during the bubanic plague outbreaks that devastated Europe. Venetian authorities used Pavvelia as a quarantine station where plague victims were forcibly taken to die in isolation, preventing the disease from spreading further into Venice proper. Conservative historical estimates suggest over 100,000 people died on Povllia during various plague outbreaks. Their bodies burned in massive pers that created layers of ash mixed with soil across [music] the island. Some areas of Povllia allegedly contain so much human ash mixed into the earth that the soil has a distinctive texture and color. The island’s horror continued into the 20th century when in 1922, a mental asylum was constructed on Pavllia, operating until 1968. The asylum’s reputation was dark, even by the standards of early 20th century psychiatric care, which was often brutal and inhumane. Local legends claim the asylum’s chief physician conducted experimental treatments on patients, including crude labbotoies performed without proper anesthesia, sensory deprivation experiments, and torture disguised as therapy. According to local folklore, the doctor eventually went insane himself, haunted by the ghosts of patients he’d tortured and threw himself from the asylum’s bell tower to his death. Whether this story is historical fact or embellished legend, the asylum’s documented history includes hundreds of patient deaths under questionable circumstances. The Italian government closed the asylum in 1968, and Pavllia has remained abandoned ever since.
Public access to the island is strictly forbidden by law with signs warning trespassers of prosecution and fines.
The few people who have obtained special permission to visit Pavllia, journalists, historians, and occasionally paranormal investigators with expensive permits, have reported overwhelming feelings of dread, unexplained sounds, and visual phenomena that defied explanation. Local Venetians refuse to visit the island, and fishermen allegedly avoid sailing too close to Pavllia’s shores, believing the island is cursed and that disturbing it brings misfortune. This is the location Josh Gates and Phil Torres chose to investigate for what would become Expedition X’s most controversial and ultimately buried episode. According to sources close to the production who spoke anonymously because they signed non-disclosure agreements, the Povia Island investigation began normally enough, but deteriorated rapidly into what one crew member described as the most terrifying and dangerous situation I’ve ever experienced in 20 years of television production. Josh Gates and Phil Torres arrived at Pavelia with a full production crew, including camera operators, sound technicians, safety coordinators, and local guides who had reluctantly agreed to accompany them, despite expressing serious reservations about investigating the island after dark. The investigation was scheduled to run from dusk until dawn following [music] expedition X’s typical format of daytime location exploration, followed by nighttime investigation using thermal cameras, EMF detectors, and audio recording equipment. The first warning signs came during the late afternoon setup when multiple pieces of equipment malfunctioned simultaneously without explanation. Cameras that had been functioning perfectly suddenly died despite fully charged batteries. Audio recorders produced only static and thermal imaging cameras displayed error messages that technicians couldn’t diagnose or fix. The local guides became increasingly agitated, insisting these malfunctions were signs the island was rejecting their presence and they should leave before nightfall. Josh, ever the experienced investigator who dealt with equipment issues and superstitious locals on countless investigations, dismissed these concerns as coincidence and local folklore, pushing the team to continue with the planned investigation.
As darkness fell and the team split up to investigate different areas of the island, Josh and one crew exploring the asylum building while Phil and another crew investigated the plague quarantine areas. The situation escalated from equipment problems to genuine danger.
Multiple crew members reported feeling physically ill, experiencing sudden overwhelming dread and panic attacks that came on without warning. One camera operator became so disoriented and [music] nauseous he had to be evacuated from the island by boat, unable to continue working. The turning point came approximately 3 hours into the nighttime investigation when Phil Torres’s crew heard screaming from inside the asylum building and lost radio contact with Phil himself. When they rushed to his location, they found Phil in an extreme state of distress that sources describe as beyond simple fear. He was incoherent, visibly injured with scratches and bruises appearing on his arms and face, [music] and initially unresponsive to crew members trying to help him. Phil Torres’s experience inside [music] the Pavelia asylum building became the incident that ultimately led to the episode being permanently buried and remains the aspect of the investigation that neither Phil nor Josh will discuss in any detail publicly. According to crew members who were present that night and have spoken anonymously, Phil had been conducting a solo investigation in what was formerly the asylum’s surgical ward, a room where the alleged experiments and crude medical procedures had taken place decades earlier. He was wearing a body camera and had radio communication with the production team stationed outside the building, providing periodic updates about his observations and any paranormal activity he might encounter.
For approximately 20 minutes, Phil’s investigation proceeded routinely. He documented the decaying surgical equipment still present in the room, took EMF readings that showed some elevated activity, and conducted EVP sessions, asking questions into the darkness and recording for potential spirit responses. His radio communications during this period were calm and professional, showing no signs of distress. Then suddenly, Phil’s body camera footage showed him reacting to something off camera. His expression shifting from curious investigation to genuine fear in seconds. His radio transmission became frantic. Something just grabbed me. Something’s in here with me. I need to get out. The audio captured sounds of Phil moving quickly through the building, breathing heavily, and at one point, what sounded like a physical struggle or collision with something. Then his radio went silent, his body camera feet cut out, and the production team outside lost all contact with him. Crew members immediately entered the asylum to locate Phil, which took several minutes because the building’s interior is a maze of collapsed hallways and rooms in various states of decay. When they found Phil, he was in a different section of the building from where he’d been investigating, seemingly disoriented about how he’d gotten there. Most [music] disturbing were the visible injuries on his body. Deep scratches running down both forearms that appeared fresh and were actively bleeding.
Bruising on his [music] chest and shoulders as if he’d been grabbed or struck, and a cut above his right eye.
Phil was in an extreme state [music] of psychological distress, speaking rapidly about something that had attacked him in the darkness, something that had [music] touched him with hands that felt wrong and had whispered things to him that he refused to repeat to the crew. Medical personnel who examined Phil on the boat back to Venice documented his injuries with photographs and could [music] find no environmental explanation for how he sustained them. The raw footage captured during the Pavelia Island investigation allegedly contains material so disturbing and potentially evidential of genuine paranormal phenomena that Discovery Plus’s legal team strongly advised against ever airing the episode.
not due to content standards, but because of liability concerns and the possibility that broadcasting such material could traumatize viewers or open the network to lawsuits. Sources who claim to have viewed the raw footage before it was locked away describe several sequences that would have made the episode unprecedented in paranormal television. The most significant footage comes from multiple stationary cameras that had been positioned throughout the asylum building to capture activity from different angles simultaneously. Three separate cameras positioned to cover different rooms, but with overlapping fields of view in hallways, allegedly captured what appears to be a full-bodied apparition of a human figure moving through the building. Unlike typical ghost footage that shows shadows, orbs, or [music] ambiguous shapes that could be explained as dust or camera artifacts, this footage reportedly shows a clearly defined human-shaped figure that passes through camera frames with apparent physicality and purpose, moving in ways consistent with an actual person walking [music] through the space. The figure appears on all three camera angles at times that align perfectly with its movement between rooms, eliminating the possibility of camera malfunction affecting [music] a single device.
Perhaps more disturbing is footage from Phil Torres’s body camera during the minutes leading up to his panic and the loss of his radio signal. The footage allegedly shows in night vision mode Phil turning quickly as if responding to sound or movement behind him. And in those frames, something appears in the background of the shot, a shape or form that moves independently and doesn’t [music] match any crew member’s position or any reasonable explanation like shadows cast by Phil’s own movement. The audio from this sequence reportedly captures sounds that audio engineers who analyzed the footage could not identify or explain. Not typical building settling or wind, but sounds with characteristics suggesting vocalization or deliberate noise creation. Most controversial is a segment of footage from inside the asylum’s basement area where temperature readings dropped dramatically over 30° Fahrenheit in less than 2 minutes while multiple EMF detectors simultaneously maxed out their measurement capabilities, suggesting an electromagnetic event of intensity that shouldn’t occur naturally in an abandoned building. One of Expedition X’s experienced camera operators, who had worked with Josh Gates across multiple shows and had participated in dozens of paranormal investigations without incident, made the decision to resign from the production immediately after returning from Pavllia Island and has refused to work on any paranormal television programming since. The camera operator, whose identity has been protected through anonymous statements he’s given to paranormal research communities, described his experience at Povaglia as fundamentally different from every other investigation he’d participated in throughout his career.
In his anonymous statement, he explained that he’d always approached paranormal television with healthy skepticism, believing that most evidence captured on shows was either misidentified natural phenomena, equipment malfunction, or occasionally deliberate fabrication by producers seeking dramatic content. His role had always been technical, operate the camera, capture quality footage, and let others worry about interpretation and storytelling. Povia changed that perspective completely. According to his statement, what he witnessed and filmed that night convinced him beyond any doubt that genuine paranormal phenomena exists and that some locations should never be investigated because the forces or entities present are genuinely dangerous rather than just subjects of folklore. He described capturing footage that he knows cannot be explained through conventional means, footage he reviewed multiple times, looking for rational explanations and finding none.
More significantly, he described his own personal experience during the investigation, where he felt an overwhelming presence of malevolence directed specifically at him, as if something intelligent was aware of his presence and wanted him to leave or was considering harming him. The sensation was so powerful and unambiguous that it transcended subjective feeling and became a survival instinct response.
Every part of his being telling him he was in immediate danger from something he couldn’t see or understand. He witnessed Phil Torres’s condition after whatever happened to him in the asylum, saw injuries that appeared on Phil’s body that had no logical explanation, and heard audio recordings that contained sounds and apparent voices that couldn’t be dismissed as environmental noise or radio interference. The combination of these experiences led him to conclude that continuing to work in paranormal television was literally risking his physical safety and potentially his life. Josh Gates, who is typically forthcoming and enthusiastic when discussing his investigations across Expedition Unknown, Expedition X, and his other projects, becomes noticeably evasive and uncomfortable whenever the subject of the missing Pavllia Island episode comes up in interviews or public appearances. His careful avoidance of the topic [music] is particularly notable because Josh usually embraces discussing even failed investigations, debunked claims, or episodes where nothing paranormal occurred, treating them as learning experiences or entertaining stories about the challenges of paranormal television production. But Pollia is different, [music] and his response pattern when asked about it reveals that something genuinely disturbing happened that he’s either contractually prevented from discussing or personally unwilling to revisit. During a podcast interview in 2022, a listener questioned directly asked about the missing season 3 episode and why it never aired. Josh’s typically animated demeanor shifted immediately.
He paused for several seconds before responding, his voice losing its usual enthusiastic tone and becoming measured and serious. There are some investigations where what we experience or capture on camera crosses lines that I’m not comfortable sharing with audiences. Pavllia was one of those situations. We went to a place with an incredibly dark history and what happened there convinced me that some locations should be off limits regardless of their potential for paranormal evidence. When the interviewer pressed for more details, Josh politely but firmly declined to elaborate, stating only that everyone who was there that night understands why the episode won’t air, and I’ve asked the network to permanently archive that footage. At a paranormal convention in 2023, during a Q&A session, an audience member asked if Josh had ever been genuinely frightened during an investigation rather than just experiencing the thrill of exploring spooky locations. Josh’s response referenced Pavllia without naming it directly. There’s been one investigation where I experienced genuine fear. Not the fun Halloween haunted house feeling, but actual terror that something dangerous was present and aware of us.
That investigation ended with a crew member injured, and I made the decision to evacuate rather than continue filming. It’s the only time in my career I’ve done that. Body language experts who analyzed video footage of Josh discussing the episode noted consistent stress indicators, reduced eye contact, defensive posture, and verbal deflection techniques that suggested he was protecting information he found difficult to discuss. The Pavelia Island investigation fundamentally changed how Expedition X approaches location selection, safety protocols, and the well-being of cast and crew in ways that became evident in seasons following the incident. Viewers who carefully watch postpia episodes notice significant operational differences that weren’t present in earlier seasons, suggesting the production company and network implemented new policies specifically in response to what happened in Italy. The most obvious change is the addition of a dedicated safety coordinator role that didn’t exist in earlier seasons. This person, typically someone with emergency medical training and crisis management experience, is now present at every investigation regardless of location.
Their responsibility is monitoring the physical [music] and psychological condition of all personnel during investigations and has explicit authority to [music] halt filming if they determine anyone’s health or safety is at risk. This represents a significant shift from the [music] previous approach where production decisions were made by directors and producers focused primarily on capturing compelling content. Location vetting procedures became [music] substantially more rigorous after Povia. Earlier seasons of Expedition X featured investigations at locations chosen primarily for their paranormal reputation and visual appeal with relatively minimal research into the specific history or potential dangers beyond basic historical facts. Post-P Pavagia episodes show evidence of much more thorough advanced research, including consultation with local authorities, interviews with previous investigators who visited the locations, and psychological assessments of whether locations have histories so traumatic that investigation might be ethically questionable, regardless of paranormal potential. Several planned investigations for season 4 were cancelled during pre-production. After this enhanced vetting process identified them as too similar to Povllia in terms of historical trauma or previous investigator experiences, Phil Torres’s participation in the show changed noticeably after Povalia. While he continued working on Expedition X, sources say he initially refused to return for season 4 and only agreed after extensive conversations with Josh Gates and substantial changes to his contract. These changes allegedly include Phil having veto power over any investigation he deems too dangerous, the right to leave any location immediately if he feels unsafe without production pressure to continue, and the presence of a dedicated safety coordinator who monitors his well-being specifically [music] during solo investigation segments. Episodes filmed after Povllia show Phil rarely conducting extended solo investigations in the most dangerous or allegedly active areas of locations. A departure from earlier seasons where solo investigation segments were