According to the widely told account, Don Julian Santana Barrera — the island's sole inhabitant beginning in the 1950s — found the body of a drowned girl in the canal near his island. Shortly after, a doll floated by in the water. He hung it on a tree to appease the girl's spirit. Then he began collecting more dolls, hanging them from trees, stringing them on fences, nailing them to buildings. Over 50 years, the island became covered in hundreds of decaying, weathered, insect-colonized dolls — eyeless heads, limbless bodies, discolored plastic faces staring from the trees.

Don Julian reportedly heard the dolls whispering to him, and he believed the girl's spirit was never fully appeased. In 2001, he was found drowned in the same canal where he said he had found the girl's body — a detail that elevated the story from eccentric folk art into genuine urban legend.

The island sits in the canals of Xochimilco, which are remnants of the chinampas (floating garden) system built by the Aztecs. The layering is remarkable: a pre-Columbian agricultural landscape, an Aztec spiritual geography that understood water as a liminal space between worlds, and a modern folk shrine created by one man's encounter with death and obligation. The island is creepy in the most literal sense — it makes the skin crawl. But it is also a profoundly Mexican site, expressing the culture's unique relationship with death, obligation, and the persistence of the dead among the living.