10 Deserted Islands With Bizarre and Forgotten Histories

Throughout history, remote islands have become the unwitting stages for some of humanity’s strangest dramas. From desperate castaways to voluntary exiles, these isolated patches of land have witnessed extraordinary tales of survival, tragedy, and mystery. While fictional accounts like Robinson Crusoe have captured our imagination, the real stories behind these deserted islands often prove equally fascinating – and sometimes far more disturbing. These forgotten places hold secrets that reveal both the resilience of the human spirit and the sometimes dark consequences of isolation.

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10The Isle of Demons

In the frigid waters off Newfoundland lies what was once known as the Isle of Demons, where French noblewoman Marguerite de la Rocque endured one of history’s most harrowing marooning stories. In 1542, after being caught having an affair during a sea expedition, Marguerite was dumped on this desolate island by the ship’s captain, who happened to be her own relative. With only her lover and a servant for company, she cobbled together a basic shelter against the island’s brutal conditions and wildlife. Things got even tougher when Marguerite gave birth during their exile, and within 16 months, her lover, servant, and newborn all died. Against crazy odds, she managed to survive alone for two years by hunting whatever she could until fishermen finally rescued her in 1544 and took her back to Europe. Local indigenous people had named it the Isle of Demons because they believed it crawled with evil spirits – something Marguerite probably started to believe herself after all she went through.

9Más a Tierra (Robinson Crusoe Island)

Most folks know this Chilean island was home to Alexander Selkirk, the guy who inspired Robinson Crusoe, but the weird circumstances behind his abandonment aren’t as well-known. After getting into a heated argument with his captain over their ship’s condition, Selkirk basically demanded to be left on the island in 1704, thinking the vessel would sink anyway and other ships would pass by soon. Boy, did he regret that decision when no rescue showed up. During his four years alone, Selkirk’s mind started to unravel. He resorted to dancing with cats and goats just to keep himself sane. He built a couple of huts from pimento trees, hunted wild goats, and trained cats to protect him from rats that would literally chew on his feet while he slept. When an English privateer finally spotted him in 1709, the crew barely recognized him as human; he couldn’t really speak properly anymore and moved around like an animal.

8Roatan Island

This Honduran island became the unwilling home of Philip Ashton, a Massachusetts fisherman with one of history’s wildest survival stories. After being snatched by the notorious pirate Edward Low in 1722, Ashton suffered through nine brutal months of captivity before managing to escape to uninhabited Roatan. For sixteen months, he scraped by on a diet of mostly fruit and raw turtle eggs in complete isolation. His solitude got briefly interrupted when another castaway Englishman showed up and handed him some crucial supplies – a knife, gun, and powder – only to vanish mysteriously days later. Ashton’s ordeal included nasty bouts of illness, run-ins with venomous snakes, and even an attack by Spanish forces. When a British ship finally rescued him in 1724, his survival story seemed so far-fetched that many people didn’t believe him, despite his detailed account. To this day, the island is supposedly haunted by rumors of buried pirate treasure and the ghosts of treasure hunters who died looking for it.

7Elephant Island

Few places showcase human endurance like Antarctica’s Elephant Island, where Ernest Shackleton and his crew found themselves stranded during their disastrous 1914 expedition. After their ship Endurance got crushed by pack ice, the 28-man crew drifted on ice floes for five hellish months before washing up on this barren, glacier-covered rock. While Shackleton and five others set off on an 800-mile journey in an open boat to find help, the remaining 22 guys survived for over four months by flipping their lifeboats to create makeshift shelters and eating whatever they could catch – seal blubber, penguin meat, and seaweed. They kept their sanity through daily routines, including regular “cleanings” where they’d pick lice from each other’s clothes. Amazingly, despite freezing temperatures regularly hitting below -20°F and near starvation, every single man made it out alive. These days, the island remains virtually uninhabitable, with vicious winds and treacherous terrain keeping all but the most hardcore explorers at bay.

6Palmyra Atoll

About 1,000 miles south of Hawaii sits Palmyra Atoll, which has earned a reputation as one of the world’s most cursed islands. While technically uninhabited (except for a handful of researchers), this remote Pacific spot has racked up a disturbing history of weird deaths, disappearances, and unexplainable phenomena. Its creepy reputation hit peak notoriety in 1974 when the yacht Sea Wind arrived with two couples aboard – but only one couple ever left. Malcolm and Eleanor Graham were brutally murdered, their bodies never fully recovered. The surviving couple was eventually convicted of killing them, but lots of details about what really happened remain murky. Beyond this infamous case, sailors report bizarre electromagnetic anomalies that kill their equipment, compasses that spin wildly, and an overwhelming feeling of being watched. World War II soldiers stationed there experienced unusually high rates of suicide and mental breakdowns. Despite its picture-perfect tropical beauty, the island has somehow resisted numerous attempts at development, with several wealthy investors mysteriously abandoning multi-million dollar projects without explanation.

5Flannan Isles

Scotland’s remote Flannan Isles harbor one of the most baffling maritime mysteries of the 20th century. In December 1900, all three lighthouse keepers on Eilean Mòr vanished without a trace, leaving behind half-eaten meals, an overturned chair, and a clock that had stopped dead. When the relief vessel finally arrived, they found the island completely deserted, and Thomas Marshall, James Ducat, and Donald MacArthur were gone. Their logbooks described severe storms, but weirdly, one final entry stated “storm ended, sea calm. God is over all”. What makes this disappearance extra creepy is that reaching the water from the lighthouse required climbing down steep cliffs; if they’d been swept away, at least one body should have washed up somewhere, but none ever did. The island has a strange history even before this incident, with ancient structures hinting at prehistoric habitation and generations of locals flat-out refusing to stay overnight because of unexplained voices carried on the wind. Today, the automated lighthouse stands as a silent reminder of the men who simply vanished into thin air.

4Clipperton Island

This tiny, donut-shaped atoll in the eastern Pacific Ocean witnessed one of history’s most disturbing descents into madness and brutality. In 1914, about a dozen Mexican families were dropped off on the island to mine guano (bird poop) when the Mexican Revolution cut off their supply ships. As their situation grew desperate, most of the men died from scurvy and starvation, leaving the women and children at the mercy of lighthouse keeper Victoriano Álvarez, who proclaimed himself “king” of the island. For months, he subjected the survivors to horrific brutality, murder, and sexual slavery until the women finally snapped and killed him in 1917. By the time an American gunboat accidentally stumbled across the island, only three women and eight children were still alive from the original settlement of nearly 100 people. The lone coconut palm standing on the island is said to have grown from the grave of one of Álvarez’s victims. Though technically French territory today, the island remains uninhabited except for countless land crabs that have been known to swarm and devour anything that hangs around too long.

3Jure Sterk’s Ghost Island

In January 2009, Slovenian sailor Jure Sterk disappeared while trying to sail solo around the globe. His boat, the Lunatic, was found drifting and abandoned near Australia 18 months later with its engine still running and one sail raised. The really weird part? Sterk’s logbook showed entries stopping suddenly on January 1st, with zero indication of trouble or any explanation for why he vanished. His last recorded position was near some unnamed, uncharted island that showed up on his navigation charts but doesn’t appear on any official maps. When search teams tried to find this mysterious island at the coordinates he’d noted, they came up empty-handed. Some researchers think Sterk might have stumbled upon a “temporary island” – some volcanic formation that briefly popped above sea level before sinking again. Others point out the spooky coincidence that three other solo sailors have disappeared in exactly the same area over the last century, leading to theories ranging from freak rogue waves to more … otherworldly explanations.

2Ilha da Queimada Grande (Snake Island)

Just off the coast of Brazil sits an island so dangerous that the Brazilian government has flat-out banned people from landing there. Why? It’s crawling with the highest concentration of venomous snakes anywhere on Earth – between one and five snakes per square meter. The star resident is the golden lancehead viper, whose venom melts human flesh and kills 7% of victims even with treatment. The last people who tried living there were lighthouse keepers who met a grisly end in the 1920s when snakes slithered through their windows. According to local stories, they were found dead in pools of blood, covered in snake bites. Before that disaster, someone had the brilliant idea to start a banana plantation there, but workers reportedly dropped dead on their boats before even reaching the mainland. Local fishermen swear they sometimes hear human screams coming from the island at night, despite it supposedly being uninhabited, which has sparked rumors that either someone’s using it for shady purposes or those screams aren’t coming from anything human at all.

1North Sentinel Island

Probably the world’s most aggressively defended “uninhabited” island, North Sentinel in the Bay of Bengal is home to the last pre-Neolithic isolated tribe on earth: the Sentinelese. Unlike the other islands on this list, what makes this place’s history so bizarre is how incredibly determined its inhabitants are to keep everyone else out. The Sentinelese violently reject any contact with outsiders, shooting arrows at approaching boats, helicopters, and anyone foolish enough to get close. In 2006, they killed two fishermen who drifted too near, and in 2018, American missionary John Allen Chau was killed trying to convert the tribe. Despite being observed from a distance for decades, we know practically nothing about these people – not their language, customs, or even how many there are (estimates range wildly from 15 to 500). The Indian government has given up trying to make contact and set up a 3-mile exclusion zone around the island. Anthropologists think the Sentinelese might have lived in complete isolation for up to 60,000 years, making them possibly the last humans on Earth with zero knowledge of the world beyond their shores.