From a mile-long strip of land packed with over one million corpses just off the shores of New York City to a floating fortress in England used by a developer to escape his creditors, these 7 islands are among the world’s strangest. While the exact histories of some can only be speculated upon, like Japan’s formerly top-secret chemical weapons facility and Mexico’s wildly creepy Island of the Dolls,  each of these mysterious islands has a fascinating story to share.

Poison Gas Island Now Overrun with Rabbits

Suspecting that the United States and Europe were producing chemical weapons despite signing the Geneva Protocol banning chemical warfare in 1925, Japan decided to move forward with developing some of its own, claiming a tiny isolated island that they subsequently removed from maps. Workers at the chemical weapon facility producing mustard gas and tear gas weren’t even clued in to what they were creating, and many of them suffered from toxic-exposure related illnesses. When the Russo-Japanese war ended in 1929, documents relating to the plant were destroyed, and the gas was dumped or buried.

Today, the island is home to the Okunoshima Poison Gas Museum – but that’s not what draws most of the tourists who visit the island, which is now part of the Inland Sea National Park system of Japan. It’s the thousands of rabbits that have multiplied there, leading to the nickname ‘Rabbit Island.’ Some people speculate that these rabbits are the descendants of animal testing subjects that were let loose after World War II, but as the rabbits have few natural predators to fear on the island and hunting them is forbidden, it may just be a case of stereotypical rabbit reproduction rates.

North Brother Island, New York

Visible to anyone who cares to notice from the windows of airplanes landing at LaGuardia Airport, the creepy abandoned North Brother Island is nonetheless unknown to most New Yorkers. The dilapidated remains of brick structures can be spotted through a tangle of vines in the overgrown forest that has sprouted around them since they were left to decay a half-century ago. The island was established as a New York City quarantine hospital in 1885, and was home to the infamous Typhoid Mary, the first American identified as a carrier of typhoid fever. Later, the island became a rehab center for teenage drug addicts before it was decommissioned in 1963. Invasive kudzu vines soon took over. Due to its proximity to Rikers and the fragility of its structures, the island is permanently closed to the public, but occasional visitors still get in. These incredible images were taken by photographer Christopher Payne for his book, North Brother Island: The Last Unknown Place in New York City.

New York Island is a Cemetery for Unknown Individuals

As beautiful and creepy as North Brother Island may be, it’s hardly the only isolated island with a sad story that can be found within a stone’s throw of America’s most populated city. Located in the Long Island Sound, Hart Island was used as a Civil War prison camp, with 235 prisoners dying there. Later, the island became the setting of a hospital, a women’s insane asylum, a tubercularium and a corrections facility for boys. But unlike many islands with such a past, this one has not been converted into a memorial, nor has it been entirely left to ruin: it is the final resting place of the city’s unknown or unclaimed dead. Used as New York’s Potter’s Field, the mile-long island holds the remains of more than one million individuals, with about 1,500 bodies (and many more amputated body parts) buried there each year. The historic buildings on the island are being torn down to make room for additional burials, which are conducted by Rikers Island inmates.

Isla de las Munecas: Mexico’s Creepy Doll Island

The eyes of decapitated dolls blink lazily from their perches in the trees on Mexico’s Isla de las Munecas – ‘Island of the Dolls.’ There’s something undeniably terrifying about seeing what look like naked infants – sometimes remarkably realistic – clinging to the branches or dangling from their necks. Legend has it that after a little girl drowned in Teshuilo Lake, island resident Don Julian Santana began collecting dolls and installing them in the trees. Eventually, their numbers grew into the hundreds. Santana often sourced the dolls from the trash or traded produce for them, taking them in any condition, no matter how dirty or worn. While many people viewed the doll-infested island as something out of a nightmare, to him it was a shrine. Tragically, in 2001, Santana was discovered drowned in the same area of the lake where he believed the little girl had perished.

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Forbidden Islands Part I 7 Isolated And Abandoned Wonders

(Check out our complete collection of Underwater and Oceanic Oddities.)

Did you know that one in every ten people in the world lives on an island? There is even a word for a “craze or a strong attraction to islands” – islomania! From places of paradise to the last refuge of pirates each of these islands has set at least one world record and some have stories that are truly stranger than fiction. From the greatest and grandest to the most remote, mysterious, deadly and least populated, here are seven amazing islands from around the world.

The Pitcairn islands are best known for being the home of the descendants of the HMS Bounty mutineers and the Tahitians who accompanied them, an event retold in numerous books and films. Due to infighting, famine and disease, many of the initial compliment of the island perished. Today, Pitcairn boasts only 50 inhabitants (from nine families) and is also notable for being the least populated jurisdiction in the world. The wreck of the HMS Bounty is still visible underwater off the shores of the main inhabited island, and the Tahitian/European descendants speak a unique language: a mix of Tahitian and English known as Pitkern.

Palmyra is the quintessential combination of classic island stereotypes. It is simultaneously a kind of desert island paradise as well as a mysterious source of superstition. Its long strange history includes buried pirate treasure, tragic deaths, shipwrecks, military use and abandonment and a recent grizzly double-murder of a vacationing couple. Some believe the island to be cursed, but even rationalists are astonished at the number of bizarre happenings that have plagued the island since its discovery in the 1700s. It remains currently the only unorganized incorporated U.S. territory.

Bouvet is the remotest uninhabited island in the world. Is roughly 75 square miles of surface is mostly covered by glaciers and and very little survives on the island aside from moss, seals, seabirds and penguins. However, the island has been at the center of some peculiar mysteries. An early discoverer of the island documented second island nearby that was never seen again. In the 1960s an abandoned lifeboat was found on the island, though nothing was ever seen of its passenger. In the above satellite images, it can only be picked out by spotting disturbances in the weather patterns.

Tristan da Cunha is the remotest group of inhabited islands in the world, thouand of miles from South America and South Africa deep in the Atlantic Ocean. Among other strange native species, the Inaccessible Island is home to the smallest living flightless bird. Only 272 people live on the islands. The islands have seen there share of troubles, having been blamed for dozens of shipwrecks over the centuries. More recently, the populace had to be temporarily evacuated in the 1960s during a volcanic eruption that destroyed multiple buildings on the island.

Bishop Rock holds the Guinness Book of World Records title of smallest island in the world. An amazing lighthouse, built in 1858, is the only thing stands on this tiny island off the coast of Britain. The first lighthouse erected on the island was washed away before it could be completed. The current lighthouse has managed to survive currents and winds for well over a century. In historical times, convicted criminals were left with bread and water on the island to die.

Nauru is the smallest independent island country in the world. This Pacific island is only 8 square miles, and is the third smallest country in the world next to Monaco and Vatican City. Once its natural reserves of phosphate were depleted, this once-rich island nation first became a haven for money laundering and then had to seek aid from Australia. The island has since become a way station for asylum seekers looking to enter the land Down Under.

Dubai is home to an increasingly infamous set of awe-inspiring man-made islands, by far the largest in the world. One would almost have to be living on an island oneself to have not seen or heard of this project. These islands, in the shape of everything from a palm to the world itself, constitute the most massive land-moving operation of all time. Dubai has recognized that oil, its original source of wealth, will only last for so long. With islands like these and a thriving tourist industry around them there is no doubt that Dubai will outlast its oil supplies.

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