Island of the Dolls

On a chinampa — one of the ancient man-made islands threading through the canals of Xochimilco — caretaker Julián Santana Barrera began hanging dolls from the trees sometime in the 1950s, after he said he found the body of a young girl drowned in the canal nearby and, shortly after, a doll floating in the same water. Believing the doll belonged to the girl's spirit and that hanging it would honor and appease her, Santana kept adding more dolls over the following decades, scavenging them from trash heaps and trading local produce for donated toys until hundreds hung rotting, limbless, and eyeless from the branches around his home. In 2001, Santana was found dead in the same canal where he said he had found the girl, in what family members described as an eerily similar drowning. Visitors and boatmen today say the dolls' heads turn to watch them pass and that faint whispers rise from the canal at dusk.