Isla de las Muñecas – The Mexican Island Of Dolls
The Island of Dolls. Just take a look at the images here and you immediately see that this place is a tad on the creepy side. A haven for photographers, the abandoned Isla de las Muñecas is littered with decapitated dolls, dolls with severed limbs and blank staring eyes.
The island used to belong to a man called Julián Santana Barrera.
The story goes that Barrera found a little girl drowned on the island under mysterious circumstances. Near her dead body he found a floating doll. He believed it belonged to the young girl.
To show respect to the spirit of the deceased he hung the doll from a tree close to where he found her corpse.
Then, in what we can only assume was due to a deteriorating mental state, the man started collecting old broken bodies of dolls from the canals and rubbish tips. These too would be hung from trees around the island – all in a bid to keep away evil spirits and appease the spirit of a dead girl he had found.
After several decades of doll collecting antics, (and isolated island living) Barrera started believing that the dolls were possessed by the spirits of dead girls and that they would come to life every night and walk around the island.
To add to the haunting nature of this tale, in 2001, Barrera was found drowned at exactly the same place he discovered the little girl 50 years previous.
