10 Deserted Islands With Bizarre and Forgotten Histories

Deserted islands are history’s junk drawers: you open them expecting seashells and maybe a lighthouse, and instead you find quarantine wards,
secret military experiments, abandoned apartment towers, and the occasional “how did this even happen?” footnote that never made it into your textbook.
When an island loses its permanent residents, the storytelling doesn’t stopnature just takes over as the new editor, crossing out roads with vines and
rewriting skylines with seabirds.

Below are ten mostly-uninhabited (and often off-limits) islands with past lives so strange they feel fictionalexcept they aren’t. Think of this as a
guided tour through the world’s weirdest “closed for business” signs, where the receipts are still scattered on the floor.

1) North Brother Island (New York, USA): A Ghost Hospital in the Middle of the City

The bizarre backstory

New York City is not exactly known for “peace and quiet,” which is why North Brother Island feels like a prank. This little patch of land in the East River
once hosted Riverside Hospitalused for quarantining people with contagious diseasesand it’s famously associated with Mary Mallon, better known as “Typhoid Mary.”
While Manhattan kept sprinting into the future, North Brother became a place where the city hid the things it didn’t want to look at too closely: outbreaks, isolation,
and the uncomfortable truth that public health often comes with hard choices.

Why it’s forgotten now

Today, it’s uninhabited, closed to casual exploring, and claimed by nesting birds and collapsing brickwork. The eerie part isn’t that it existsit’s that it exists
here, within sight of one of the busiest cities on Earth. North Brother is a reminder that “island escape” sometimes meant “island exile,” and the difference
is about one court order and a locked ferry ride.

2) St. Matthew Island (Alaska, USA): The Reindeer Boom That Went Bust

The bizarre backstory

St. Matthew Island sits remote in the Bering Sea, windswept and (for humans) wildly inconvenient. During World War II, reindeer were introduced as a living emergency
food supply for a small Coast Guard presence. Then humans left, and the reindeer stayedthriving spectacularly in what looked like an all-you-can-eat buffet of lichens.
The result became one of ecology’s most famous cautionary tales: population explosion followed by collapse when food couldn’t keep up and harsh conditions hit.

Why it’s forgotten now

There’s no ruined city skyline to photograph herejust tundra, cliffs, and the kind of quiet that makes you hear your own thoughts (which is honestly rude). But the story
lingers because it shows how quickly a “simple solution” can spiral into a decades-long experiment. It’s an island-sized reminder that ecosystems don’t read memos.

3) Hashima Island (Japan): The Concrete “Battleship” That Ran Out of Coal

The bizarre backstory

Hashimaoften nicknamed “Battleship Island” because its seawall silhouette looks like a gray warshipwas once packed tight with miners and families. A coal mine drove
the whole operation, and the island was built up into a miniature city: dense apartment blocks, schools, and infrastructure stacked onto a tiny footprint.
When the mine closed in the 1970s, the island emptied out fast, leaving behind a dramatic concrete shell that pop culture later borrowed for villain-lair vibes.

Why it’s forgotten now

Hashima’s ruins are famous in photos, but the lived reality can get lost behind the aesthetic. Abandonment isn’t just “cool decay”it’s jobs disappearing, communities
dissolving, and a place going from overcrowded to empty in a generation. Nature is now working on a slow demolition permit, with vegetation nudging through cracks while
salt air chews at rebar.

4) Poveglia (Venice, Italy): The Island That Became a Rumor

The bizarre backstory

In the Venetian lagoon sits Poveglia, an island whose name tends to travel with a dramatic whisper. Historically, it was used as a quarantine outpostan “isolate it over
there” solution during disease scaresand later became associated with institutional use, including a mental hospital in the modern era.
The island’s reputation ballooned into ghost stories and urban legends, partly because quarantine history makes people uneasy, and partly because abandoned buildings
invite imagination like open doors invite mosquitoes.

Why it’s forgotten now

Poveglia’s weirdness isn’t just the talesit’s how quickly a real public-health function becomes folklore once the records stop being dinner-table conversation.
The island is largely off-limits, which is basically gasoline on the rumor fire. When you can’t go, your brain fills in the blanks with whatever it watched at 2 a.m.

5) Gruinard Island (Scotland): “Anthrax Island” and the Long Aftermath

The bizarre backstory

Gruinard is small, uninhabited, andduring World War IIchosen for a reason you don’t want on your tourism brochure: outdoor biological weapons testing.
Experiments with anthrax were carried out there as part of wartime research, tied to the chilling logic of “we need to know if this works.” The problem with testing
something designed to persist is that it tends to…persist. Gruinard remained restricted for decades, becoming an infamous symbol of how wartime decisions can haunt
a landscape long after the headlines move on.

Why it’s forgotten now

Even after decontamination efforts, the island’s name still feels like a warning label. What makes Gruinard especially unsettling is how ordinary it looks: green slopes,
sea winds, nothing visibly radioactive-glowing or movie-monster-ish. The scar is historical and invisible, which is arguably the creepiest kind.

6) Bikini Atoll (Marshall Islands): Paradise, Tested

The bizarre backstory

Bikini Atoll sounds like a vacation ad until you remember the mid-20th century had a habit of turning beautiful places into test sites. Between the late 1940s and 1950s,
the United States conducted nuclear tests at Bikini, including the famous Operation Crossroads series and later thermonuclear detonations.
Residents were relocated, and the atoll became shorthand for the nuclear age’s contradiction: breathtaking scenery paired with human-scale disruption so large it
still echoes across generations.

Why it’s forgotten now

“Forgotten” doesn’t mean unimportantit means the story gets flattened. People remember the swimsuit name trivia and the mushroom-cloud imagery, but not the
lived reality of displacement, long-term environmental monitoring, and the strange modern status of a place that is both iconic and largely uninhabited.
Bikini is what happens when history leaves a crater and then asks everyone to move along.

7) Clipperton Island (France): A Remote Atoll With a Real-Life Nightmare Chapter

The bizarre backstory

Clipperton is a tiny French atoll in the eastern Pacificremote enough to make “out of the way” feel like an understatement. It’s been claimed, mined, and occupied in
fits and starts, including a tragic early-20th-century episode involving a stranded settlement cut off from supplies and support. When the outside world stopped arriving,
life on the atoll didn’t become a romantic survival story; it became a pressure cooker. The episode ended with a small number of survivors finally rescued, leaving behind
one of those history footnotes that sounds fictional because it’s too bleak to feel real.

Why it’s forgotten now

Most people never hear of Clipperton because it’s not on anyone’s casual routenot trade, not tourism, not even “oops we took the wrong turn.” But the island’s story is
a sharp illustration of what isolation really means when there’s no easy exit and the supply ship simply…doesn’t come.

8) Ilha da Queimada Grande (Brazil): The Snake Island You Can’t (and Shouldn’t) Casual-Visit

The bizarre backstory

Some deserted islands are empty because people left. This one is “empty” because the wildlife basically filed a restraining order. Ilha da Queimada Grande, often nicknamed
Snake Island, is known as the primary habitat of the critically endangered golden lancehead pit viper. The island’s isolation helped shape a highly specialized ecosystem,
and authorities restrict access for good reason: it’s not a place for sightseeing-by-sandals.

Why it’s forgotten now

Snake Island lives in internet legend, which ironically makes it less understood. The real story is less “monster movie” and more “evolution, ecology, and conservation.”
It’s a deserted island that forces a different kind of respect: not for ruins, but for boundariesbiological and legal.

9) Spinalonga (Greece): Fortress Turned Last-Stop Colony

The bizarre backstory

Spinalonga sits off Crete with postcard looks and a past that isn’t postcard-friendly. Over time it served strategic purposesincluding fortificationbefore becoming
known in the 20th century as a place where people with leprosy (Hansen’s disease) were isolated. Islands have long been used as “solutions” to mainland fears, and
Spinalonga’s story fits that pattern: separation dressed up as safety.

Why it’s forgotten now

Today, people visit as tourists, but nobody lives there permanently. That makes it a different kind of deserted: not abandoned in secrecy, but emptied of daily life.
The danger now is forgetting the human sideturning a complicated history into a scenic day trip without acknowledging what the walls were built to contain.

10) St. Kilda (Scotland): The Evacuation of a World Apart

The bizarre backstory

St. Kilda is an Atlantic outpost of cliffs, seabirds, and isolation so intense it shaped an entire culture. For centuries, people lived there in conditions that would
make “roughing it” influencers cry into their ring lights. But by 1930, the remaining residents requested evacuation, ending continuous settlement and leaving behind a
village that feels like a paused film setstone structures with the plot abruptly cut.

Why it’s forgotten now

St. Kilda’s abandonment wasn’t a dramatic disaster; it was a slow squeezelogistics, health, economics, isolationuntil staying no longer made sense.
That kind of ending is easy to overlook because it doesn’t come with a single explosive date that everyone memorizes. The islands now belong mostly to birds, weather,
and the occasional human visitor who arrives with reverence (and a very good jacket).

What These Islands Have in Common (Besides Being Really Bad Places to Lose Your Keys)

Put these stories side by side and a theme emerges: islands are convenient. Convenient for quarantine. Convenient for extraction. Convenient for experiments governments
don’t want near cities. Convenient for exileliteral or social. The ocean provides a natural moat, and humans have repeatedly treated water like a moral disinfectant:
“If we put it over there, maybe it won’t be our problem anymore.”

And then, once the purpose endsor the money dries up, the mine closes, the war finishes, the disease protocols changethe island is left holding the narrative.
Rust, salt, vines, and seabirds become the archivists. The weird part isn’t that places are abandoned; it’s that the reasons are often so intensely human.

of “Experience” With Deserted-Island Histories (Without Needing a Boat)

You don’t have to step onto a forbidden shoreline to feel the pull of these places. In fact, the most common “deserted island experience” is the one that happens
from a perfectly safe distance: the research spiral. You start by looking up one abandoned hospital, and suddenly it’s 1:00 a.m. and you’re reading about quarantine
policies, coal production, and why seabirds make nests in buildings that humans stopped maintaining decades ago. Deserted islands are great at turning curiosity into a
full-time jobwithout offering health insurance.

If you ever visit a place that’s accessible (some are managed as heritage sites, others allow guided tours), the first sensation is usually not “adventure.” It’s
timing. You notice how quickly life moves on elsewhere, and how slowly a closed place changes when no one is there to repaint, patch, or argue about property lines.
The soundscape does most of the talking: wind through broken windows, waves doing their patient repetition, birds using the remains of human ambition as premium real estate.
It’s like walking through a paused conversation where the speakers left mid-sentence.

The second experience is ethical. A lot of deserted islands aren’t “mysterious” so much as “complicated.” A leper colony, a quarantine station, a displaced community,
a test sitethese aren’t just spooky backdrops. They’re evidence of how societies handled fear, scarcity, and power. When you read about themor stand near themyou
start asking better questions than “Is it haunted?” The better questions sound like: Who made the decision? Who paid the cost? Who got remembered, and who became a rumor?

There’s also a strangely practical takeaway: nature doesn’t care about your narrative. On Hashima, plants push through concrete. On remote atolls, crabs and birds
can dominate the scene. On islands abandoned by people, the “main character” often becomes the ecosystemsometimes recovering, sometimes struggling with what humans
left behind. That shift is humbling in the best way. It’s a reminder that our structures are temporary, but our impacts can linger.

Finally, there’s the simplest experience of all: imagination with boundaries. Many of these islands are restricted, protected, or dangerous, and that’s not a challenge
to “sneak in”it’s a clue. The most respectful way to engage is to learn the story, support legitimate preservation when available, and let some doors stay closed.
A deserted island isn’t an invitation. It’s a mirrorheld up by the seareflecting what humans build, what humans abandon, and what the world does next.