The Island of the Dolls

A small island in the Xochimilco canals just outside Mexico City where Julian Santana Barrera hung dolls by the hundreds. Many people say it is haunted.

Julian Santana Barrera lived on an island in Teshuilo Lake, part of the Xochimilco canals. Atlas Obscura says he moved there more than fifty years ago, leaving a wife and a child behind, and hung dolls by the hundreds until they covered the island. In 2001 Sebastián Flores Farfán, chronicler of the Xochimilco borough, wrote down Santana's own reason: the dolls kept bad spirits away and made his crops grow better. Santana told him the dolls turned up without warning and kept him company at night.

Other tellings give a different reason. In these, Santana said he had found a girl dead in the canal, and he hung the dolls to honour her. His family disagrees on this. Atlas Obscura and HuffPost (2014) say his relatives think he imagined the girl. His great-nephew Rogelio Sanchez Santana, who now looks after the dolls, told the New York Post in 2021 that she was real and drowned when a current took her while she was swimming with friends or her sister.

Santana died in 2001. Guinness World Records says he died close to the spot linked to the girl, and that accounts differ on the cause: some say he drowned, others a heart attack. Guinness also reports that many people credit his death to the girl's spirit and say she still haunts the island.