Dead man’s Island sounds like something from a chilling Netflix series or horror film, but it’s real. It was a burial site for convicts who died aboard ‘prison ships’ more than 200 years ago – and now their remains are emerging from the mud
It sounds like something from a supernatural chiller or Stephen King novel: an island where convicts who died aboard ‘prison ships’ were buried whose remains are now emerging from the mud.
But as chilling and unreal as it sounds, Deadman’s Island is, in fact, all too real — and it’s closer to home than you’d think. Situated just off the Kent coast, not far from London, this grisly-sounding island is littered with haunting remains, an eerie remnant from its role as a burial ground for prisoners who fell victim to infectious diseases on so-called ‘prison hulks’ some centuries ago.
You’ll find it at the mouth of The Swale, opposite Queenborough on the Isle of Sheppey. But whether you can locate it on a map or not, you can’t set foot on it. No visitors are permitted due to numerous birds calling it home during breeding season rendering it off-limits.
In fact, the only signs of human habitation are wooden coffins and skeletal remains, once buried under six feet of mud but now exposed centuries later by coastal erosion. The island is owned by Natural England and leased to two private individuals, according to BBC reports.
Being noted as a Site of Special Scientific Interest and internationally recognised under the Ramsar convention, in 2017 the place got a little publicity when the BBC’s Inside Out crew was granted rare access to explore this forsaken piece of land, reports Wales Online.
Natalie Graham, the show’s presenter, shared her unsettling experience with The Sun, saying: “What I saw there will stay with me forever” followed by a rather ominous observation: “This is a really strange sight. I would imagine there can’t be anywhere on earth like this.”
Director Sam Supple said: “It is like being on the set of a horror film. It looks so surreal, it’s like an art department has designed it. There are open coffins and bones everywhere.”
The area surrounding the island has been ominously named “Coffin Bay” due to the chilling sight of open coffins and human remains scattered along its banks.
Local folklore, fuelled by the eerie atmosphere of the island, speaks of ghostly hounds with blood-red eyes that devoured the heads of the interred, contributing to the spine-tingling reputation of the place as “an island solely occupied by the dead”. A local recounted to the BBC in the documentary hearing tales of “monsters that fed on the brains of people it caught”, while another from Queenborough claimed to hear a “howl” from the island at night.
However, the real story behind Deadman’s Island is one of tragedy. In the 18th and 19th centuries, inmates were kept on ‘prison hulks’, floating jails, near the island. One such vessel bore the ominous name Retribution.
These prisoners, some as young as ten and convicted of minor crimes like pick-pocketing, were destined for deportation to Australia. But those too ill for the voyage would end their days aboard these ships anchored off the Isle of Sheppey, dying in the dark recesses of the hulks.
Diseases spread like wildfire on board the ships, leading to a grim death toll. The late naval historian Professor Eric Grove said in a BBC documentary: “A lot of crimes carried the death penalty, but as a way of being humane and also to inhabit the colonies, it was decided it would be good to transport convicts. But you tended to find that if people were not considered healthy enough to take the voyage to Australia, they would be left in the hulks.”
He went on to say: “The major problem really was you had a lot of men together, or a lot of boys together, and therefore if an epidemic began to occur, then it would spread and this was particularly important in the early 1830s, when Retribution was here, because there was the cholera epidemic.”
The bodies of these unfortunate souls were buried in unmarked graves on Deadman’s Island, with the aim of containing disease and protecting locals. Now, the island reveals its macabre history at low tide, though no one knows the identities of those interred.
Experts are facing a challenge in preserving the remains at Deadman’s Island due to the relentless sea eroding the site and scattering bones, as reported by Kent Live. Mr Supple stated: “There are memorials to other prisoners who died aboard hulks, such as one in Chatham, Kent, but these men have nothing.”
