The Island of the Dolls: Mexico City's Haunted Hoard

Get ready to uncover the chilling mysteries surrounding the infamous Island of the Dolls.

In this episode, we delve into the eerie tale of Don Julián Santana Barrera and his encounter with the spirit of a drowned young girl in the canals of Mexico City’s Xochimilco district.

But why are dolls so inherently creepy? It's more than their lifelike appearance; it's the uncanny feeling they evoke, that unsettling mix of familiar and unfamiliar.

And beneath the surface, there's a deeper exploration of gender dynamics. Dolls, traditionally marketed to girls, reinforce societal norms and expectations from a young age. There’s nothing scarier than that.

Don't miss this bone-chilling journey into the heart of Mexico's notorious paranormal hotspot.

Key moments

• 0:00 – Content warning
• 1:00 – Travel to the Island of the Dolls
• 4:04 – Don Julián and the drowned girl
• 10:29 – Why dolls are creepy – and what that means
• 17:59 – Dolls and other gendered toys

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View all my sources for each episode and read the episode transcript here.

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Transcript

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Steph: Before we begin, a quick content warning: Paranormal Pajama Party is a podcast about scary stories and legends, but there’s nothing scarier than the patriarchy.

When discussing tales in which women are often the villains, we’ll have to unpack some stories in which women are the victims.

This episode contains the usual amount of cursing, as well as brief mentions of bodies, death, insects and spiders, miscarriage, sexual harassment and assault, and vomit. Please be advised.

This episode is about an island covered in dolls, placed there as protective talismans against the destructive wrath of a ghost girl. If I were a ghost girl, the best protection against my destructive wrath would probably be to give Paranormal Pajama Party a five-star rating and review if you’re enjoying it.

And thank you so much to everyone who’s already done that – I promise not to destroy your crops once I’ve passed beyond the veil.

In the moonlit darkness of Mexico City’s canals, where the water whispers ancient secrets and the night air is thick with the weight of history, lies la Isla de las Muñecas – the Island of the Dolls.

[SOUNDS OF LAPPING WATER AND RUSTLING LEAVES]

Steph: Its eerie silence is broken only by the rustling of leaves and water lapping against the shore.

Legend has it that the island is haunted by the restless spirit of a young girl who met a tragic end in the murky depths of the canal. Her presence lingers among the tangled vines and overgrown foliage, her whispered cries echoing through the night. She wants something.

But it is not just the ghostly presence of the girl that sends shivers down the spine of those who dare to venture to the island. It’s the dolls – thousands upon thousands of them. They watch tourists come and go with empty eyes and silent voices.

And when the last visitor has gone, the night deepens and the moon casts its pale light over the island, the dolls begin to stir.

At first, it’s subtle – a slight tilt of the head…

[PLASTIC RATCHETING NOISE]

Steph: A small movement of the arm…

[MORE PLASTIC CLICKING]

Steph: …Barely noticeable to the human eye. But as the hours pass and the darkness envelops the island, the dolls become more confident.

Some of them seem to dance in the moonlight, their porcelain limbs moving with a strange grace. Others whisper secrets to each other in hushed tones, their voices carrying on the night breeze.

[LOW WHISPERS BEGIN]

Steph: And still others roam the island, their eyes glinting in the darkness as they search for something – or someone.

[WHISPERS GROW INTO A SPOOKY CRESCENDO]

Steph: [WHISPERING] Is it you?

[MUSIC]

Steph: Hi! I’m Steph, and this is Paranormal Pajama Party, the podcast that brings you classic ghost stories and legends featuring female phantoms and femme fatales. Together, we’ll brush the cobwebs off these terrifying tales to shed some light on their origins and learn what they can tell us about the deep-rooted fears society projects onto women.

What a great night to bring your teddy bear to the Paranormal Pajama Party! Let’s set it here next to our guests of honour – all 4,500 of them.

Huh.

You know, I thought bringing the teddy bears and the dolls together would be cute, but it turns out it’s just really, really creepy. All those empty plastic eyes, staring at us.

Wait a second! …Did you see that one blink?

Tonight’s guests are the 4,500 haunted dolls that live on a one-acre chinampa, a man-made island floating in a canal in Mexico City’s Xochimilco district.

Well. “Live” isn’t the right word, exactly. I hope.

In the mid-20th century, Don Julián Santana Barrera lived in a one-room hut on the chinampa, which is only accessible by a type of flat-bottomed boat called a trajinera. There, Julián grew crops and eked out a meagre existence.

In those days, canal waters were much clearer than they are now. In the places where tangled water lilies didn’t block it, you could see straight to the bottom.

One day, Don Julián was horrified to spot the body of a young girl beneath the clear water outside his front door. He pulled her out but it was too late – the girl had drowned. Depending on the version of the story you hear, she fell from a passing trajinera, or perhaps she wasn’t a strong swimmer, or maybe she became tangled in the twisted vines of the lilies. One thing is certain – Don Julián was deeply affected by her death.

The following day, he spotted a doll floating down the canal near the same spot where he’d found the girl’s body. He fished it out of the water and, filled with the conviction that it had belonged to the dead girl, kept it in honour of her memory.

And that would have been the end of that sad story, except that things began to go very badly for Julián. His crops began to fail. At night, he heard footsteps prowling outside his one-room home. He claimed to hear a little girl’s voice screaming, “I want my doll!”. And every time he left the house, he said, he found new dolls in the trees.

Convinced that the little girl’s spirit was wandering around the chinampa in pain, Don Julián began to seek a way to soothe her tortured soul.

He first set up an altar and candles in his hut, but to no result –  the spirit continued to wreak havoc on his island. Then he remembered the doll.

Don Julián’s Xochimilco neighbours began to catch him poking through their garbage bins and fishing things out of the canal. He was hunting for more dolls to appease the little girl’s spirit. He even began trading the vegetables in his garden for more dolls to add to the growing collection.

It didn’t matter what kind of doll, or the state it was in – as soon as he found one, he brought it back to the island and placed it there as a talisman either to ward her off or to win her favour.

Soon, dolls were strung from trees, nailed to walls, strung from clothesline, and placed wherever there was space. This went on for about 50 years, during which he gathered more than 1,000 dolls.

Eventually, it became clear that Julián needed help. He was in his 80s and living alone on the island, so his nephew Anastasio moved onto the property.

While fishing off the chinampa one day, Don Julián told Anastasio that he sang a particular song because a deadly mermaid lived in the canal. She wanted to drown Julián, and the only thing keeping her away was his melody.

Anastasio later said he briefly left the old man to fetch something on the island. When he returned, he found Julián’s body, facedown in the water, in the same place the drowned girl was found so many years before. An autopsy revealed the old man had died of a myocardial infarction. He was buried on the island.

The chinampa passed to Anastasio, who knew an opportunity when he saw it. Since Don Julián’s death in 2001, the Island of the Dolls, or la Isla de las Muñecas en español, has become a popular dark tourism destination.

It’s so popular, in fact, that local cartels have set up competing, knock-off Islands of Dolls nearby to try to get a slice of the creepy, creepy pie.

These days, another nephew runs the chinampa, where Don Julián’s one-room cabin still stands, displaying the first doll he pulled from the canal and his favourite doll, a big one named Agustina. There’s also a small museum on the island. Oh, and dolls. Lots and lots of dolls.

The current collection is closer to 4500, and the island has the dubious distinction of being the Guinness World Record holder of the largest collection of haunted dolls.

“It’s of course impossible to prove if the dolls themselves are haunted,” said Guinness’ editor-in-chief, Craig Glenday. “We’re not saying ghosts are necessarily real and that they’re possessing these plastic bodies, but as claimed haunted dolls, this certainly is the largest collection we’ve ever seen.”

It’s fine if you don’t believe the dolls are haunted, but you’d be foolish not to bring along a gift for them like the other visitors do. If you don’t, you risk the wrath of the drowned little girl’s spirit, which still stalks the island – and some say, occasionally possesses the now heavily decayed dolls.

So that’s freaky! It’s a fascinating story, but it does raise a few questions.

For example, I’d love to know more about the little girl whose ghost is at the centre of this whole thing. We know her life ended too soon, and we know she likes dolls, I guess.

In different tellings of the story I read – some even told by the same man, the current caretaker of the chinampa – the circumstances of her drowning differ. In one version, she fell from a boat. In another, she was swimming with her sister but couldn’t keep up. In another, she was hopelessly caught by the weeds.

The reason we don’t know anything about her might be – and I’m so sorry to be a party pooper here – because she never existed. There is no record of a girl drowning in the area at the time that Don Julián claimed to have found her body.

But even if the girl is entirely fictional, she’s still the axel this story revolves around. Her ghostly rage made this whole thing happen – it powers an entire tourism economy, for Pete’s sake – and the fact that the men telling – and benefiting from – her story haven’t given her a name, an identity, or even a consistent backstory is revealing. She doesn’t have those things because she doesn’t matter to them. She’s just the mechanism that made the dolls happen.

And the dolls are definitely real, and definitely creepy as hell. But why is that? Why are these toys – usually associated with little girls, mind you – so gosh-darn scary that they’ve inspired a whole range of horror stories and movies, from Chucky to that freaky clown doll in Poltergeist, to Annabelle?

To answer that question, we first need to talk about the difference between feeling creeped out and feeling afraid, because there is a difference – like, scientifically.

Researchers have conducted studies attempting to pinpoint the distinction between the two feelings.

Basically, their hypothesis was that when we perceive that there might be a threat, but we aren’t sure about it, we start to feel creeped out. Fear and disgust, on the other hand, are related emotions, but they come from direct sources.

If someone is standing a little too close to you, or their appearance is a little bit off – their hair is greasy or their eyes are darting, or their actions are not normal – they’re pacing, or talking to themselves, or asking you something that doesn’t seem quite right, there’s a good chance you’ll feel creeped out. That’s the scientific phrase, by the way – creeped out.

You’re not sure if this person represents a threat to you, and therefore you’re not sure how to respond. Our brains really don’t like this, and it can lead to actual physical discomfort, like goosebumps or chills.

On the other hand, if someone has just vomited all over your coat, or has taken your teenage daughter hostage, you know exactly what the threat is and exactly what you need to do: Get away from them, and later, when you are safe, ask them to cover your dry cleaning bill or call them to let them know about your very particular set of skills.
It’s the uncertainty that gives us the creeps.

This is probably an evolutionary adaptation – early humans survived by noticing when something wasn’t right, which increased their attention and prepared them to flee or fight.

Incidentally, this same study hypothesised that men were more likely to be perceived as creepy because they are more violent and physically threatening and that women were more likely to perceive sexual danger behind creepy behaviour because that is a common outcome. Both of those hypotheses were shown to be correct based on their survey. So the next time a guy creeps you out, just know you are not being crazy – there’s a cavewoman in you and she’s a survivor.

People often describe dolls as creepy. When we see a weird-looking one, or a shelf stuffed with them, or a whole damn island piled with them, it sets off the big red “creepy” alarm way deep in our lizard brains. Something about them just isn’t right, and there may be a threat there, but it isn’t clear.

And unfortunately, that brings us back to Sigmund Freud and the uncanny.

We first talked about the uncanny last season in the “Coraline” episodes – check them out if you want a slightly deeper dive. As a little refresher, Freud didn’t originate the idea of the uncanny, but he built upon it. Essentially, he argues that uncanniness arises when something is simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar – it makes us feel uncomfortable and uneasy.

Actually, he specifically mentions dolls in his 1919 essay on the uncanny. They even gave Siggy the creeps! And it makes sense, right? Dolls look like babies or little versions of us. They have human features and are human-shaped. But they are also lifeless, and their eyes don’t have anything behind them. Without anyone playing with them and giving them life, they’re little corpses. That’s what scares us.

This fear is amplified on the Island of the Dolls because due to the nature of the collection, most of the dolls are rotting and decaying in an especially horrifying way. Many of them are haunted – by the insects and spiders living in their heads.

We’ve given dolls to kids since… well, basically since kids were invented, and they’ve played a significant cultural role in ceremonies. We still use them in religious ceremonies – think of the nativity scenes at Christmas, for example. But dolls took a big leap forward on the creep scale when they started to become a little more humanoid. The sleepy-eyed baby doll was invented in the early 1900s, and these days, dolls and even robots are beginning to look as realistic as possible.

There’s a big market for reborn dolls, those hyper-realistic baby dolls you may have seen. Most reborn doll collectors are older women. Some are collecting them just because they’re interesting, in the same way a stamp collector collects stamps. Others have bonded with them emotionally, sometimes after experiencing a miscarriage or the death of a child.

And unfortunately, this kind of behaviour is often viewed as creepy, too. The researchers who surveyed for creepiness also asked participants, just for fun, to tell them about hobbies that gave them the creeps. Doll collectors were right up there with reptile and insect enthusiasts, taxidermists, and – surprisingly – birdwatchers.
This is even true within the doll-collecting community. If a collector refers to her dolls as her babies, or to her collection as a nursery, other doll collectors are more likely to think of her as creepy.

But this made me think about something we touched on during last season’s episode on women and cats. I mentioned briefly that female animal hoarders were more likely to be prosecuted for breaking code laws than male hoarders because they fit judges’ stereotypes more closely.

The articles I read about Don Julián described him as an eccentric, a hermit, and even an artist – but none called him a hoarder, even though it would be pretty easy to argue that he was. And none of them quoted anyone who said that Julián himself was creepy, but I do wonder if we’d cut him the same slack if he’d been a woman. What’s the difference between Don Julián’s chinampa and the Grey Gardens estate? What makes him an artist and Little Edie and Big Edie cultural punchlines?

I’m not a psychologist by any means, but I have been to therapy for my own mental illness, and I’m sorry to say I’ve watched more than a few episodes of Hoarders. It certainly seems to me like there could be some obsessive-compulsive thinking driving Don Julián’s actions.

It’s also interesting to me that he started with an altar but decided that wouldn’t work.

I’m making some assumptions here, for sure, but I also think it’s likely that Don Julián was Catholic. Mexico has the second-largest Catholic population after Brazil, and in 2000, the year before he died, 89% of Mexicans self-identified as Catholic.

Maybe this is a stretch, but the young drowned girl in the story can be seen as a symbol of innocence and purity. In Catholic theology, the Virgin Mary is often depicted as the epitome of purity and virtue, free from sin. Mary is also associated with themes of suffering and compassion, and the girl’s suffering may have struck a chord with Don Julián in the same way.

In Catholic belief, Mary is also considered a spiritual presence who can intercede on behalf of believers. Julián seems to have believed wholeheartedly in the young girl's spiritual presence.

It makes perfect sense to me that a religious man might deal with the trauma of discovering the body by turning to his faith. Add in a spritz of OCD, and voila! Suddenly Mexico City has a floating altar of dolls dedicated to the spirit of a drowned girl.

Could any other collection be more fitting for a little girl? As any Fox News viewer will tell you, dolls are for girls – not for boys. If you let boys play with them, civilisation will collapse. It’ll all be over. Masculinity will be dead, traditional family values will be out the window, society will break down and the end times will be upon us. Hope you enjoyed tea time with your dollies, Timmy.

You’d think there would be a long association between girls and dolls – after all, we use “doll” as a colloquial term for women, which is offensive in its own right. Dolls, after all, are pretty, silent, and do whatever we want them to.

They also reflect some bonkers ideas about female bodies and beauty standards – looking at you, Barbie – and many a conservative has made the argument that baby dolls teach our little girls important nurturing and mothering skills that little boys just don’t need. Blech.

Toys are definitely gendered – your nearest department store will have an aisle that’s all pink on one side, and all blue on the other. The toys marketed to boys are action-oriented and tend to be more aggressive – Nerf guns, GI Joes, and R/C hot rods.

The toys marketed to girls are decidedly more passive. One of my sources, an article by Megan K Maas, an assistant professor at Michigan State University, referenced a 2018 survey of LEGO sets which showed that the ones targeting girls were all about “caring for others, socialising, and being pretty.”

But “marketed to” is the key phrase here. Maas wrote that toys weren’t marketed to different genders until the 1940s, when manufacturers realised they could sell a whole new set of the same toys to the same wealthy families if one was for boys and one was for girls. That’s when the idea of pink for girls and blue for boys was born.

So gender-neutral toys, including dolls, are still within living memory. They’re also making a comeback as we slowly let go of the gender binary. But as a society, we’ve really glommed onto the idea that particular toys are for a particular type of child.

We’re fairly open to girls playing with so-called “boy” toys. (And hey, if you’re a girl with the OTHER kind of boy toy, good for you.) However, in a 2017 survey, only 64% of people said it was also good to encourage boys to play with toys marketed to girls. Far fewer men were cool with it, and older, more conservative people were the most strongly opposed. Surprise!

But we learn when we play, and some of the things we pick up are gendered expectations. Girls who play with toys focused on caring, nurturing, and beauty learn that that’s their role. Boys who play with aggressive, active toys learn that they, too, should be active and aggressive. They learn that’s what it means to be a man.

These lessons have knock-on effects well into adulthood. In her article, Maas points out that girls who have been sexually assaulted are more likely to be blamed by others for what happened to them if they did something perceived as outside a female gender norm, such as cheating. Cheating is for boys, you see.

I think we see a similar thing in conservative communities where women who get pregnant before marriage are publicly shamed, but the men who fathered those children face no consequences.

She also referenced another study that found that adolescent men who subscribe to traditional masculine norms were more likely to engage in dating violence including sexual assault, stalking and physical or emotional abuse.

On its surface, the Island of the Dolls is a quirky dark tourism stop based on the story of an imaginary girl, an eccentric man, and a spooky collection. But if we dig a little, those creepy dolls reveal a lot about the nature of our fears and anxieties, particularly regarding gendered expectations and societal norms.

What I’m trying to say is: Let your sons play with dolls. Even the ones that are creepy as shit.

[MUSIC]

Steph: It’s time for lights out at the Paranormal Pajama Party. Hug your teddy bear tight and try to forget that when your eyes are closed, its eyes are still open. And still watching you.

To learn more about the Island of the Dolls, the consequences of gendered toy play, and the occupation that people agreed was the creepiest of all, check out my sources in the show notes.

Follow @ParanormalPJParty on Instagram to see visuals from today’s episode.

I’ll be back next week with more spine-tingling tales and critical discussion. In the meantime, don’t forget: Ghosts have stories. Women have voices. Dare to listen.

[MUSIC FADES OUT]