There are very scary places in our world, perhaps the most terrifying, the island of “La Isla de las Muñeca” or as it is known as the “Island of Dolls”, located south of the Mexican capital, Mexico.
“Island of Dolls” contains thousands of deformed dolls hanging from trees, and can only be reached by a journey through the Canals of Xochimilco, two hours south of Mexico City.
When the mysterious and dark past meets, with surprising situations and scenes that are keen to send a chill of fear in your ridge, know that the story can only be curious and surprising, and your curiosity may reach the point of daring to visit the place where those events took place that still carries a lot of question marks.
It is a small island in Mexico that, not too long ago, was a deserted place, but it gradually turned into the “island of terrifying dolls”, which carries behind it a mysterious story of a drowned girl, a doll, and a man accused of madness, which makes this part of the world, one of the most frightening areas, spread and hanging all over it tattered and worn dolls, some with heads or severed legs, some hanging from trees, others lying still below, watching you with their open eyes, and their tattered bodies, as if they were about to whisper what happened.
Many societies believe in the existence of ghosts of the dead, and Mexico can be one of the countries in which these societies coexist, and it is also the country from which the hero of this story, Don Julian Santana Barrera, came from, specifically southern Mexico, from the town of Choquimelo, the person who you can’t talk about the Island of the Dolls without mentioning it.
There is not much information about Barrera before he moved to that place, he left his family, his children, and his wife in the mid-nineties, deciding to live his life in isolation away from humans, and he chose an island overlooking Lake Tochoelo, without there being clear reasons for that. However, there are enough logical explanations that may emerge later with diving into the details of the story, specifically its ambiguous ending.
It did not take long for Barrera to settle in that secluded place before he was surprised by the discovery of a frightening thing that washed up on the banks of the island, and that was the body of a young girl who had drowned in the lake, but the feelings of panic that ran through his body faced another terrifying shock that changed the course of Santana Barrera’s life exactly when a floating doll was washed across the canal a few moments later.
Alone on that island, Barrera took the doll and hung it in a tree, believing that it would calm the angry girl’s soul. His only task for the 50 years that followed that day was to search and pick up dolls from the trash, and what the canal might have uttered, to hang them and distribute them throughout the island, some of them were complete, and some were distorted.
Some believe that Barrera was not a sane person in the first place, and some find that his psychological state was not that bad, and that madness has invaded his weak mind, alone on that island after discovering the body of the girl and her doll, and many question the validity of the whole story, including Parreira’s family personally, was there even a girl’s body? Whether the story of the girl was realistic or a figment of his crazy imagination, what was real, is that Barrera dedicates the rest of his life to her in this exciting way, but what raises more fear and mystery towards this man, is the connection of his death personally to that drowned girl.
In 2001, the drowned body of Don Julian Santana Barrera was discovered, exactly in the same place where the girl’s body was found 50 years ago, which has turned the place into a shrine for curious tourists, who also bring their dolls to hang or place around the island, in honor of each From Barrera and the girl (real or not).
