The world's largest collection of haunted dolls is found on Mexico's Island of the Dolls or La Isla de las Muñecas. Located south of Mexico City within a vast network of canals, the tiny isle houses thousands of broken, mutilated and decaying dolls, hanging from virtually every tree and bush there. This grotesque collection began when a hermit called Don Julian Santana Barrera came to live here during the 1950s, and claimed that he was being haunted by the ghost of a young girl who had drowned in one of the canals surrounding this island three decades earlier. To appease and occupy her restless spirit, he began placing dolls around the island as a kind of shrine, and he became so obsessed with collecting them that he spent his days scouring rubbish dumps and fishing in the canals for old, discarded dolls, and even trading home-grown vegetables and fruit for them. Ironically, he met his own death here in 2001 by drowning in the very same canal where the girl had died back in the 1920s. The Island of the Dolls is now a major, if macabre, tourist attraction, and locals claim that at night the dolls come to life, animated by the spirits of the dead, and begin to call, whisper, move their limbs, and turn their heads of their own accord, hoping to lure the unwary to a watery death in the island's canals. To appease them, every visitor should offer a gift as soon as they set foot on the island.
