The World's Most Haunted Islands: Part 1

When it comes to haunted places, many may at first imagine haunted houses or other buildings that have succumbed to the supernatural. Yet there are also whole swaths of land that appear to be pervaded by these mysterious forces. There are haunted forests, villages, and even mountains, and here we will look at islands that, for whatever reasons, have become home to strange, unexplained forces. 

Many haunted islands come with a history drenched in blood. Lying out in Australia’s Sydney Harbor, right at the junction of the Parramatta and Lane Cove rivers and just out past the bustling metropolis, is a speck of land looming over the water called Cockatoo Island. It seems rather bleak and nondescript now, just a lashing of treeless rock infested by the ruins of old buildings from another time, but this place has a rather colorful yet grim history. 

Between the years of 1839 and 1869, this was a place that served as a destination for the worst of society’s worst. It was a penal establishment designated as “secondary punishment” for convicts, meaning that they only came here when they had been released from normal prisons and reverted to their wicked ways. The convicts were put to work carving out the largest shipyards the country had ever seen, and the island has since been included on the National Heritage List of historic places, but it was not all industry and everything was most certainly not fine on this speck of rock, and there have been persistent hauntings here from way back.

Considering this was a penal colony for the worst of the worst, it is perhaps no surprise at all that living conditions were hellish, to say the least. These hardened criminals were subjected to the worst treatment imaginable, with swift, torturous punishments doled out for the slightest perceived dalliances. Prisoners would be beaten, tortured, and at times left within darkened, constricting solitary confinement cells more like coffins than anything else, and prisoner deaths due to the actions of guards were par for the course. During the shipyard days safety precautions were nonexistent, and penal worker deaths were far from uncommon, with some prisoners mysteriously vanishing into thin air, their fates unknown.

In later years, the prison was shut down, and the facilities became the home for wayward Aboriginal girls between the ages of 8 and 18, and even then the grim atmosphere of the place was kept intact, with stiff punishments given to the poor children who dared to break the rules of their disciplinarian overseers. One researcher has said of this transition to a home for girls thus:

Cockatoo Island was chosen as the new location (for the girl’s institution) but this site was really no better than the old one. The building allotted to the school had obtained a terrible notoriety as a convict gaol. The home influences essential to the wholesome training of girls, the very lack of which had brought them to the school, are impossible to attain within the gloomy walls of a prison.

This has all added to the grim history of this island lair, and it may be no surprise at all that it should be said to be very haunted. Here amongst the abandoned ruins of another time the amount of paranormal activity recorded here is amazing. Dark shapes have been persistently seen roaming about the premises, often with not particularly peaceful thoughts on their minds. Workers and visitors have been pushed, punched, and prodded by unseen hands, and electronic devices are known to malfunction or simply go dead regardless of whether they have a full charge or not. There are also reports of the inexplicable smell of cigarette smoke, as well as disembodied voices, footsteps, and even screams or shrieking.

There have also been spotted apparitions of young girls dressed in period clothing running about and giggling, and there are often reported sudden, overwhelming clouds of dread and suffering. One of the most well-known of these child spirits is said to be the deceased daughter of one of the former superintendents, of which it has been said by one of the island's tour operators:

She's very friendly, very playful, smacking their hands or stroking their hair. Only the other day we had a school group out there where two of the teachers came up to me and very embarrassedly and very awkwardly asked me if anything strange ever happens on the island. When we were here camping two years ago with this group of students in the morning, we asked them how they slept. Two of the girls sharing the same tent said we didn't sleep very well because a little girl in a white dress kept coming in and waking us up and asking us to come outside to play.

There are also anomalous smells that come and go, such as in the account from one of the tour operators on the island, who says:

When we were trialling this new tour we were in the commanding officer's residence, in the dining room, and there was a distinct smell of pipe tobacco. There were six of us. We all smelt it. It lasted for about 20 seconds and then disappeared completely. This is a perfect example of a residual haunting where something is manifesting itself based on events that happened many, many years ago.

As it is today, Cockatoo Island is a curious expanse of rusted-out, long abandoned buildings from another era, all preserved and opened to various tours, many of them specializing in the more haunted aspects of the island. It leaves one to wonder just what went on here to warrant such haunted madness. Was it all the death and the pain? Does the suffering that went on here have some role to play? Or is it just the musings of minds cued up to experience the paranormal at such a desolate place that seems perfect for it all? Whatever you may think, Cockatoo Island still lurks out there and is accessible if you only dare.

Another island with a grim history seems at first to be an utter island paradise. Sitting out 30 miles off the southern coast of the country of Panama is the lush and beautiful island of Coiba. With an area of 194 sq. miles, it is the largest uninhabited island in all of Latin America, and it is a magnificent hotspot of biodiversity, featuring hundreds of species of flora and fauna, many of which are completely unique and endemic to Coiba. The island is home to Coiba National Park, encompassing over 1,042 square miles of smaller surrounding islands, forests, beaches, mangroves and coral reefs, brimming with a staggering diversity of plant and animal life both on land and in the sea, with the marine biodiversity including 760 species of marine fishes, 33 species of sharks, and 20 species of cetaceans. Coiba is indeed one of the most thriving biodiverse regions on the planet, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and from all appearances, it is a vibrant gem of natural beauty and biodiversity. For these reasons, looking at its azure waters and vast expanses of forest it is hard to believe that this place has a dark past that haunts it, both figuratively and literally, for buried here within the natural splendor of this paradise is a place with a violent and sinister past, and which is supposedly roamed by ghosts and one of the most haunted places in all of Central America.

In 1919, a prison was established on Coiba, where Panama’s most dangerous criminals were sent, and during the military years of Panama’s back-to-back dictatorships of Omar Torrijos and Manuel Noriega from 1969 to 1990, the prison was mostly used for opponents of the military regimes. It was greatly expanded into a penal colony composed of 30 makeshift prison camps around the island and quickly gained a fearsome reputation as a hell on earth that was the last place anyone wanted to be sent. With its treacherous mountains, nearly impenetrable rainforests full of poisonous snakes, crocodiles, and other dangerous wildlife, with even trees known to drip a toxic juice that runs off and burns the skin when it rains, and the surrounding shark-infested waters full of strong currents and the nearest island a six-hour boat ride away, Coiba was considered to be utterly inescapable, full of perils and dangers that made any hope of freedom a stranger.

In addition to the unforgiving terrain of the location, there were also the horrid conditions the prisoners here had to deal with. The days of the prisoners were filled with backbreaking work in the fields interspersed with long periods of crushing boredom, the only break from the exhausting manual labor was a single meal break per day. Torture and harassment were commonly doled out by the guards here, both physical and psychological. One of the guards’ favorite things to do was to march prisoners out into the dim forest and conduct mock executions, making the prisoners fully expect to die, yet merely scare them and allow them to work another day. Considering that real executions were often carried out here, it was never sure what was going to happen when you were taken out there into that mosquito-infested jungle and had a gun held to your head, whether these were your last moments or not. The living conditions were appalling as well, with prisoners stuffed into tiny, cramped cells with no windows, furniture, or bathrooms, living in their own filth and with nearly no human contact, which led to many of them losing their minds to the depths of madness. Many prisoners died in these harsh conditions, their bodies allegedly thrown to the sharks in the surrounding waters or unceremoniously dumped into unmarked graves. Indeed, there have been several mass graves uncovered on the islands, and although Panama had no death penalty, being sent to Coiba was seen as tantamount to one. So many people were shipped to the island to never return or be heard from again that the prisoners here were often referred to as Los Desaparecidos, or “the disappeared.”

At its peak there were over 3,000 prisoners at Coiba at any given time, with the number of those who died here unknown. What is known that for many being shipped off to Coiba was a one-way trip, which of course led to stories that the island was cursed, haunted, or both. Locals refused to go anywhere near the place, and even before the prison closed in 2004 it was generating stories of supernatural terror. Prisoners often complained of being menaced by shadow figures in their rooms or in the halls, there were noises heard at night such as rattling, bangs, thudding, and moans or screams that could not be explained, doors that slammed open or shut on their own, and a guard’s spirit who walks the halls dragging his nightstick along the cell’s bars and other sightings of the shambling apparitions of the dead, to the point that several crazed prisoners tried to escape just to get away from all of the damn ghosts. It was not even only prisoners who experienced this, but guards as well. One story tied to the prison is that of a guard who one time gave pursuit to what he thought was a fleeing prisoner trying to escape, but when he caught up to the suspect, he found that it was actually “something not of this world,” which would turn out to have been so upsetting to the guard that he apparently killed himself not long after. Witnesses visiting the crumbling site to this day have reported shadow figures, strange lights and noises, footsteps, shadows, whispers, screaming, and banging on the bars.

The Coiba prison has been long since abandoned, devolving into weed-choked feral ruins being reclaimed by the jungle, and although the government has tried to make this into a sort of ecotourism destination, the dark reputation of its past and the various poachers and drug runners that operate from there have made this a tough sell. The island has sat pretty much uninhabited ever since, the echoes of its dark and sinister past still reverberating through it today. It is a marriage of natural beauty and spooky tales of the paranormal that sits out there past the reaches of civilization, its old prison disintegrating to the point where one day it might all be forgotten. Coiba continues to be an essential wildlife preserve and natural wonder, but considering its reputation as a haunted place it is difficult not to think about what else other than the wildlife might lurk about on this island paradise. Does the pain and violence this place has suffered hold certain forces to it? There is no way to know, and it remains a remote and little known supposedly haunted place  we may never truly understand.

Other islands seem to not only have a dark past but almost seem to be infused with paranormal energy to the point that they are considered cursed forsaken places. Lying out off the southern coast of Alaska is the Kodiak Archipelago, a group of pristine forested islands surrounded by gray, storm-lashed frigid seas. Among these islands is one at the extreme southern end, shaped sort of like a webbed duck’s foot, called Chirikof Island, which is itself a presently uninhabited treeless expanse of 33,000 acres of desolate grassland, populated by little more than ground squirrels, introduced foxes brought here for fox farming, and a herd of feral cattle brought here in 1867 by the Alaska Commercial Company. Although once a base of operations for fox farming and holding a colony of settlers living a sustenance life, the village would later be abandoned in the late 19th century, after which it would be the location of a beef farming operation from 1925 to as late as the 1980s, which was inevitably doomed due to shipwrecks, plane crashes, unruly feral cattle, unfulfilled contracts, and stringy, inedible meat, which all conspired to make the operation extremely unprofitable and it was abandoned. The island is also known for its stories of the paranormal and has acquired quite the reputation for being a forsaken cursed place.

The main ghost stories surrounding this remote, desolate place revolve around an alleged Russian penal colony that supposedly once existed here. The author and explorer Henry Wood Elliott first wrote of this place in his book Our Arctic Province: Alaska and the Seal Islands, describing a cruel and treacherous place where Russian Czars sent the worst of the worst criminals and exiles to wallow in filthy conditions. Although he was accused of perhaps making much of this up, Elliot was not the only person to make mention of the notorious penal colony here, and in 1908 a seasoned skipper by the name of Captain E.L. West would also write of this spooky place, saying:

There is one island in Alaskan waters on which the foot of man, white or red, is never placed. Chirikof Island, south of the Semedi Group, is inhabited beyond doubt by the spirits of former Russian exiles, and they will permit no intrusion of their haunts by earthly inhabitants. The Aleut Indians, who are the most intelligent of their race, realize this fact, and neither love nor money can induce them to step foot on the island or go near it in their canoes or boats. Years ago, before Alaska was purchased, Russia made use of the island as a prison for her criminal exiles. Murderers, thieves and other convicts of the worse class were shipped there under life sentences. And as the exiles were there for life, there was no incentive to keep them alive.

According to West, the convicts were ruthlessly tortured and often executed for no reason, sometimes in the cruelest of ways, such as being buried alive or being starved to death. The prisoners were always weighed down with heavy balls and chains around their ankles, and it was apparently all quite the hell on earth. It is perhaps no wonder that the place would gain a reputation as being haunted, with various skippers passing the island to hear the ghostly wails and screams of these long-dead prisoners, as well as the loud clinking of chains, and those brave few who dared to venture ashore would often find the macabre scene of skeletons of the prisoners strewn about. West would say:

On still nights the pitiful shrieks and cries of anguish from the dying men tortured the ocean air for miles around. A few white men have had the temerity to set foot on the bleak shores of Chirikof, but they quickly left there with shattered nerves, vowing never to return. They bring skeletons of men with chain and ball bound to the ankle and wrist bones. Other skeletons are to be found there with the ribs broken... others with the skull, forehead or jaws crushed into an indistinguishable mass. There are on every hand evidence of the terrible brutality of the fiendish keepers to the helpless men in their charge-- some of them too horrible to mention.

West would give a very spooky account that he had heard from an old Scottish man by the name of Philip Graham, who went to Chirikof Island to build a cabin and would soon learn to regret it. Graham claimed that when he was on the island, he was tormented every night by the sounds of screams, stomping feet, the rattle of chains, the noise of earth being shoveled, and the sickening sound of flesh being pounded and smacked by heavy objects in gruesome thuds. He would claim that one night he had dared to venture outside to look around when he saw a ghostly procession of skeletons marching along in the moonlight, a terrifying sight that made him rarely venture out from the confines of his crude cabin. He eventually abandoned the cabin altogether and never went back, apparently leaving all of his possessions behind to go swimming out into the freezing sea to swim towards a passing ship, deliriously ranting about screaming skeleton ghosts. Others who have passed the island have also claimed to have seen spectral skeletons roaming about on shore, as well as mysterious orbs of light in the dark, and there have been an inordinate number of shipwrecks and plane crashes in the area, which along with the fact that no one has ever been able to stay here for long has led to the idea that the island is not only haunted, but cursed as well. Then there are the stories of the feral cattle here acting almost like zombie-killing machines.

There have long been tales that the cows here are rather odd, to say the least. They not only don’t herd normally but they are often seen swimming out into the water and will aggressively attack visitors to the island. They also show an unsettling apparent ability to communicate and coordinate with each other, leading to the idea that the cattle are actually possessed by some supernatural force. A strange account was given in the 1930s by a woman named Kay Barker, who visited the island with her friend Mesha and said:

Mesha and I had gone to the island to take pictures. We soon spotted a small herd but they ran as we approached. However, we found they had gone for the 'army', which advanced in charge of a big white bull... I was busy taking pictures as they got near and circled around us. Suddenly, as though at a signal from the white bull, they charged. Mesha grabbed me by the arm and we ran to the shore where we had a boat waiting.

According to Barker, the mad, bloodthirsty cows actually swam out into the water and tried to chase their boat as they escaped. These “Hell Cows” might be one of the reasons for why a good number of people who have ventured to the island have disappeared without a trace. What is with this place? Is there some paranormal force permeating this island or is this all just spooky rumors and urban legend cropping up around a decidedly creepy and isolated spot? The mystery remains, and for now, that cold, windswept island lurks out there on the periphery, drawing around it dark legends and tales we may never be able to peer through.

Not all haunted islands are remote phantoms lying out past civilization. The bustling, teeming city of New York City, in the United States, may seem like it should be the last place one would expect to find a lost, abandoned, and by some accounts haunted island, yet here in the East River among vast concrete jungles lies one such place lost to the ravenous gnawing of time, largely forgotten by the masses, and steeped in dark history. North Brother Island is a 20-acre speck of land that sits nestled in a turbulent area of the East River between The Bronx and Riker’s Island, ominously named “Hell’s Gate.” The island is clearly visible there amongst the urban jungle and towering buildings around it yet at the same time seems to be a mostly forgotten no-man’s land that few people ever pay much attention to, as if almost lurking in a parallel dimension invisible to the modern day. Yet this unassuming, ignored slash of trees and rock has a spooky, at times harrowing history that few are aware of.

North Brother Island was first inhabited in some form in 1885, although these early inhabitants most certainly did not go there by choice. The first building constructed here this year was the notorious Riverside Hospital, which was put there to serve as a quarantine zone for people afflicted with smallpox, who wallowed in its cold grey structures as the staff and workers commuted by ferry to and from the doomed and diseased every day. It was not long before the hospital was opening its doors to others with a range of severe, infectious diseases, such as tuberculosis, scarlet fever, diphtheria, typhus, venereal diseases, and even leprosy, who all lived in either the hospital itself or the ramshackle huts, pavilions, tents, and cottages that sprung up around it like weeds.

The facilities here were not voluntary, and the quarantine was for the most part forced. At the time, New York City was experiencing a rapid influx of new immigrants, and to keep the city clean, safe, and sanitary, those with communicable diseases were quickly rounded up and forcibly taken to the island, where they mostly lived in squalor. Although patients were able to opt for a private clinic, few of the patients sent off to North Brother Island were wealthy enough to afford such facilities, and so they had no choice but to come here to languish in the notoriously hellish conditions. The living conditions here were described as very unsanitary, to say the least, the medical care was crude and unsophisticated, and there were frequent food shortages and horrifically cold conditions in the winter with a lack of heating.

As a result of all of this, the mortality rate for those who were banished here was very high, to the point that being sent to North Brother Island was seen as practically synonymous with a death sentence. Since the bedraggled patients were not allowed to leave until they recovered and these were the days before telephones, many of the people left for North Brother Island never to return, their friends and families never hearing from them or knowing what had become of them. This island that sat just offshore of the rapidly growing city around it quickly became a black hole that relentlessly drew in death and disease, and it was greatly feared by the general populace, who refused to go anywhere near it. Even the ponderous ferries of the river gave it a wide berth.

By far the most well-known patient to have lived on North Brother, indeed probably the only patient from here anyone would know of or care to remember, was Irish immigrant Mary Mallon, also ominously known as Typhoid Mary. Mallon was the first person ever recorded in the United States to be an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid fever, meaning that she did not develop symptoms herself but was able to pass the deadly pathogen on to others. During her career as a cook in the New York area, death seemed to follow her around as people in the affluent families she worked for seemed to always come down with typhoid fever. She was finally identified as a carrier and forcibly confined to North Brother Island in 1907.

Mary did not take this confinement against her will lightly, adamantly insisting that she was in no way responsible for infecting those around her and claiming that she was being persecuted for being an immigrant. So convinced was she that she did not carry typhoid fever that she refused removal of her gall bladder, which was seen as a major factor in the spread of the disease. In 1910 her wish to be freed was granted on the condition that she sign an affidavit stating that she would stop working as a cook and take proper hygienic measures to stop spreading the disease.

Although Mary agreed to these terms and was allowed to return to the mainland, she worked briefly as a laundress before changing her name and resuming the better-paying work as a cook, which not surprisingly led to more infections of typhoid fever wherever she went. The worst outbreak she was directly responsible for was at Sloane Hospital for Women in New York City, where she worked in 1915, and which resulted in 25 people coming down with the disease and two dying from it. After this, authorities arrested Mary and she was sent back to North Brother Island, where she would spend the next two decades languishing until her death at the age of 69, on November 11, 1938, from pneumonia. Ultimately, Typhoid Mary unintentionally infected a total of 53 people with typhoid fever during her life and still believed she was not responsible at the time of her death.

Disease was not even the only death associated with the island, as North Brother Island was the scene of what remains the worst maritime disaster ever recorded in New York history, and which was the single worst loss of life in the city in general until the specter of the tragic 9/11 terrorist attacks. On June 15, 1904, the passenger steamship General Slocum was carrying a large number of German immigrants from St. Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church on their way to a church picnic when the ship somehow caught fire. The burning, flaming ship eventually sank, and when the smoke cleared around 1,021 of the 1,342 people on board had died, either from the fire or from drowning. The wreck remained ensconced within its watery grave until it was salvaged to be converted into a barge, Maryland, which strangely enough would also sink into the depths of the Atlantic Ocean in 1911 while on a voyage to deliver a load of coal.

Starting from the 1930s, with the spread of more and more medical care facilities throughout the city, an increased quality of medical treatment, and changing attitudes on the mainland against quarantining large numbers of people against their will, the hospital on North Brother Island experienced a period of slow decline until the 1940s, when it was finally shut down. It was at this time that the island went through a sort of rebirth and resurrection into a new life as a housing development for veterans of World War II and their families. During this period of renewal, the dark past of the island was paved over with roads, tree-lined avenues, and well-manicured lawns, and new buildings were constructed to replace the old. For all appearances the island seemed to become a normal suburban development just like any other, the only reminders of its sinister past the morgue for disease victims and a building called the Tuberculosis Pavilion looming over the landscape.

This new life did not last very long. Those who lived on the island grew weary of having to slog back and forth by ferry every time they wanted to go to the mainland, and the city itself deemed the whole project to be impractical. This conspired with the increasing availability of cheap housing on the mainland and the conversely expensive prices on the island to slowly cause the housing development to wither and crumble away. The island gave one last dying gasp in the form of a drug rehabilitation center for heroin addicts in the 1950s, but this too was to be short-lived and the island fell silent in 1963, when all human activity there was ceased and the buildings decommissioned and abandoned to be left behind to the ages. It then was returned back to nature, and became a protected sanctuary for colonies of numerous species of bird, which flocked here to nest among the ruins that mankind had left behind.

In the absence of mankind, the island began to succumb to the inexorable approach of nature closing in to reclaim what had once belonged to it, and it has reverted into a feral, wild place. It is hard to look at the island now and not imagine that it is like an apocalyptic landscape left behind by an extinct human race. Everywhere one looks there are signs of the unfurling fingers of civilization's failing grasp upon this place as it loses its grip to weeds, trees, and the creeping rot of entropy. Here decrepit, crumbling buildings loom up out of thick underbrush and trees like the forgotten ruins of some lost civilization in the middle of a faraway jungle. Corridors with peeling, flaking, fading walls lie strewn with the cast-off rubble and the abandoned detritus of mankind, and buckling stairwells snake upwards along with the vines that constrict and choke them. Indeed, all of the trappings of mankind are being choked out of existence here. The once quaint roads and avenues lie broken and penetrated by trees that have erupted forth from beneath. The blooming vegetation has gotten so thick in some places that it is nearly impenetrable, completely overrunning and erasing any signs of this place having ever been inhabited at all. This is a labyrinth of the fading, decaying mark of mankind struggling with and clawed at by the vibrant nature springing up to devour and absorb it.

North Brother Island in its current state is a portrait of what the world might become in the absence of humans and overlaid across the whole, haunting sight is the faint sounds of civilization wafting over the river, such as car horns, sirens, construction, and loudspeakers from nearby Riker’s Island penitentiary; all like external sounds seeping into a sleeper's dream of some past life. Considering that the island is now off limits to visitors and only accessible by people who have special permission from the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation and a handful of bird researchers, as well as the occasional urban explorer thrill seeker entering illegally, it is not hard to imagine that within a decade or so there will be no trace that humans were ever here at all. It will be as if nature has completely digested our structures and the physical signs of our civilization, leaving only the ghosts of the past untouched to wonder about the landscape. Photographer Christopher Payne, who spent 5 years exploring and photographing the island for his book North Brother Island: The Last Unknown Place in New York City, said of this place:

Most people view ruins as if they were looking into the past, but these buildings show what New York could be years from now. I see these photographs like windows into the future. If we all left, the entire city would look like North Brother Island in 50 years.

It is perhaps no surprise at all that North Brother Island, with its history of death and who knows how many unmarked graves hiding within the underbrush, is said to be lousy with ghosts. Visitors have reported various strange phenomena here, which have perhaps made them reconsider their journey to these desolate shores. Eerie sounds, phantom voices, unseen hands touching, pulling, or shoving, malfunctioning electrical equipment, and EVP phenomena, this place covers the whole spectrum of ghostly phenomena. There have even been some cases of urban explorers fleeing the island in sheer terror, vowing never to return. This is a place not only spooky in appearance but also apparently permeated by the despair and ghosts of its history. It makes one wonder if the sheer weight of pain and hardship can congeal and imprint itself onto a place just as surely as an image on film. Perhaps these are events and emotions that etch upon the fabric of reality itself. It is a creepy thought to be sure.

There are mysterious places all around us, some of them hiding in plain sight. Whether it be because they are burdened with a tragic, dark history, tormented by the memories of the long dead who suffered there, or literally haunted by the spirits of the past, these are eerie locations not necessarily confined to the isolated corners of the world. Sometimes these locales can be found right amongst us, living parallel to our thrumming cities as if on another plane of existence, forgotten echoes of a bygone time reverberating through reality. There amidst the streaks of our city lights and the tireless activity of humankind these places squat, stuck between the dreamland of dead history and the bright beacons of our burgeoning development; lost, rugged, mysterious lands in a sea of concrete.

Is there anything to these tales? Are these islands populated by ghosts or other denizens of the darkness? Or are these just legends and spooky campfire stories? Whatever the case may be, there are plenty more haunted islands out there, which I will cover in another installment of this series. For now, when you look across the water, wonder what might lie out there beyond the grasp of our understanding.