Esparta Palma · CC BY 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Ghost sightingYellow

Island of the Dolls

added28 August 20262001

An islet in the Xochimilco canals near Mexico City, hung with salvaged dolls for half a century. Its caretaker said he hung them to appease the spirit of a drowned girl; after his death in 2001 it became a tourist pilgrimage.

Getting thereDirections Flights Where to stay

Suggest a correction

Comments

No comments yet. Be the first.

On the map

19.27289, -99.08811

Open in maps

Getting there

Booking links may be affiliate links: if you book something, the site earns a small commission. It costs you nothing extra.

Sources

Nearest on the map

Ghost sightingYellow

La Llorona, the Weeping Woman

A woman in white who walks beside water weeping for children she drowned herself. The story is known throughout Latin America, but in Mexico City it is fixed to the canals of Xochimilco — the last remains of the lake system Tenochtitlan stood on. The earliest written versions date from the colonial period and braid two layers together: a Spanish tale of an abandoned woman, and pre-Hispanic accounts of a weeping female voice heard before the conquerors came.

2 km away

DebunkedWhite

Mexico City and the Roswell Slides

On 5 May 2015 a seven-thousand-seat hall in Mexico City was shown two Kodachrome slides from 1947: a small body in a display case, announced as an alien from Roswell. Tickets were twenty dollars and the stream was extra. The slides included a placard blurred past reading. Within days a group of sceptics led by Nab Lator stacked frames from the broadcast into a legible version: the mummified body of a two-year-old boy, an exhibit at the Mesa Verde museum in Colorado. Nobody was refunded.

9 km away

DebunkedWhite

Metepec and the Ranch Alien

In 2007 the Mexican television presenter Jaime Maussan exhibited the body of a tiny creature said to have been caught alive in a trap on a ranch near Metepec in 2005 and drowned in a water tank. According to Maussan the ranchers wanted a fortune for it. The testing that the promoters themselves reported produced an answer nobody had ordered: a skinned primate — a squirrel monkey or a marmoset — with the jaw bones removed and the skin sewn shut. Maussan went on to present several more alien bodies to the public, the Nazca mummies among them.

53 km away

More: Ghost sighting

Ghost sightingYellow

Bhangarh Fort

Bhangarh Fort is a monumental late-16th- to early-17th-century abandoned fortified city located in the Alwar district of Rajasthan, India, situated at the base of the Aravalli Range bordering the Sariska Tiger Reserve. Encompassing the ruins of a multi-tiered royal palace, stone bazaars, defensive bastions, and ornate Hindu temples, the complex is designated as a Monument of National Importance by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) and is globally famous as "the most haunted place in Asia."

+22

Ghost sightingYellow

The Black Lady of Nesvizh Castle

Belarus's best-known ghost is Barbara Radziwiłł, the Polish queen who died in 1551 at twenty-nine. The story goes that her husband Sigismund Augustus was so undone by her death that he had her spirit summoned; the rite went wrong, and she has walked the galleries of the family castle at Nesvizh ever since. The castle is real and on the UNESCO list, tours run daily, and the Black Lady is the one exhibit that does not appear in the museum inventory.

Ghost sightingYellow

The White Caver

The underground counterpart of the Black Climber, known to everyone who goes into caves across the former Soviet Union. What makes him white is calcite, settled on his clothes over years below ground. Meeting him traditionally means the party has lost the route. Cavers have a half-joking initiation rite for newcomers in which he is described — a rare case of folklore whose carriers know perfectly well it is folklore, and which is none the weaker for it.