Island of the Dolls, located on a canal just outside of Mexico City, was established in the 1950s when the island’s sole inhabitant at the time, Don Julian Santana Barrera, mysteriously found the corpse of a young girl having drowned in a nearby canal. In another strange occurrence, just 1 day later, the same man also happened to come across a doll floating in the water in the exact same spot where the girl apparently died. He proceeded to hang the doll from a tree right there as an offering to the deceased girl’s spirit.
Clearly traumatized by what happened, Barrera always claimed to be haunted by the young girl’s spirit as well as other supernatural phenomena around the island. He became obsessed with trying to appease these spirits and began collecting other discarded dolls from nearby canals and trashcans. Barrera would even go so far as to trade his produce just to acquire hundreds, if not thousands, of dolls over the course of the next half-century. Much like with the first doll, he would hang all of the others, often in states of disrepair with missing body parts, from trees and poles all over the island.
After the caretaker’s death in 2001, his family decided to open the island to the public as a tourist attraction. Today, it’s still a very popular and macabre sought-after location in the Xochimilco canals. Many tourists flock there just to get a glimpse of the many dolls, as well as bringing their own dolls to hang themselves.
