dearwatson About fifty years ago, a man left his wife and young daughter, and moved to a small island on a lake in the Xochimilco Canals in southern Mexico City. He became the caretaker and sole inhabitant of the island, and not long after he arrived, things got weird. Some say he heard tell of a young girl who had drown in the lake, while other stories say that that he reported finding the body himself, and some suggestthat he only imagined the whole thing. Whatever the case, he became so haunted by the idea of her, that one day after finding a doll abandoned and floating in the canal and hung it from a tree in hopes of pleasing the girl's spirit and preventing any other tragedies from taking place on his island. But he didn't stop there. In an ongoing effort to quiet and ease his mind, the man continued to fish out dolls and doll parts from the canals. Before long, he was scavaging them from trash bins in the city, or trading his homegrown fruits and vegetables in exchange. Each one, he would take back to the island, and without cleaning them or repairing them, he would hang them up in whatever shabby state they were found in. Dolls that weren't hung were kept at his cabin, adorned in headdresses, necklaces, sunglasses. In 2001, the man passed away. He drowned in the same canal that fifty years prior, he had said the little girl had drowned in.

@poprox and I went on a little getaway last week, and we chose to go explore this place that has been a morbid fascination of mine for as long as I can remember and it was every bit as haunting, sad, creepy, and even a little bit heartwarming as I could have hoped it would be.

... Emphasis on the "creepy".

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