An island of haunted dolls
Thanks to an unfortunate accident, the beautiful floating gardens of Mexico’s Isla de las Munecas are now the stuff of ghastly nightmares.
According to local legend, a girl drowned in the Xochimilco canals outside of Mexico City decades ago. After her untimely death, dolls began washing up on the shore of a small island in the canal where she died. Tormented that he couldn’t save the girl, the island’s caretaker, Don Julian Santana Barrera, began to hang the dolls from the island’s trees in her memory.
The Island of Dolls is now “dedicated to the lost soul of a poor girl who met her fate too soon in strange circumstances”, Rushali Ramteke said.
Over the years, the trees have filled with the mangled remains of dolls, their mutilated limbs and severed heads rotting in the moist air. Locals say the dolls are possessed with the dead girl’s spirit, and witnesses claim they’ve heard the dolls whispering to each other, luring visitors to the island.
That’s not the end of the story. Some 50 years after collecting dolls and hanging them across the island, Barrera himself was found drowned in the exact spot where the girl had died decades earlier.
Since Barrera’s death in 2001, the island, which is actually a floating garden, has seen hundreds of visitors – some of which even bring their own dolls to add to the haunting collection.