Islands can serve as vacation getaways secluded from the cares of the world. They can also be sites of isolated horror!
Here are three of the worst places to spend your precious vacation days:
North Brother Island, New York: Shipwreck.
In 1904, members of a Lutheran church set off for their annual picnic, and cheerily boarded the steamship General Slocum (in their Sunday best) to sail to the picnic grounds. It took less than half an hour from this scene to go from jubilation to terror: an accidental fire engulfed the wooden ship in flames, and of the 1,358 passengers, 1,021 of them burned, drowned, or were trampled to death. After the ship hit port on North Brother Island, the (frequently charred) bodies—including those washed ashore from the ocean—were laid out along the shoreline for family members to identify. The captain was later convicted of failing to enforce proper safety measures: the ship had rotted-out fire hoses, lifeboats wired into place (wouldn’t want to lose them!), and the life vests were so decayed they actually dragged fleeing passengers under the water.
Gruinard Island, Scotland: Anthrax Testing
By 1942, England had been bombed to hell by the Germans, and the British government decided to look into the biological weapons game. Officials resettled the few inhabitants of an island off the coast of Scotland, and went to work experimenting with anthrax. To test the effects of the bacteria, officials dropped anthrax bombs (didn’t know those existed, did you?) on the island, including on a herd of about 60 (quickly deceased) sheep. Unfortunately, anthrax-infected animal corpses began washing up on Scottish shores, and of course, infecting other animals. The island was subsequently cleaned . . . with formaldehyde. Though the government deemed it safe for habitation, some experts claim the island may never be freed of its patriotic bacteria.
Solovki, Russia, Gulags.
In the 15th and 16th centuries, this remote Russian archipelago served as a monastery. But what does Russia like more than monasteries? Prison colonies! In the late 1700s Ivan the Terrible sent more than 400 prisoners there, and tasked the unfortunate monks with serving as wardens. But by the 20th century Russia was way over prison colonies, so the Soviets converted it into a concentration camp. During this phase, the islands were host to mass executions of political troublemakers. Prisoners described harrowing experiences, including guards using sea hooks to drag frozen corpses out of the camps for disposal, while prisoners fought to keep the bodies for food.
