DEADMAN’S ISLAND

Deadman’s Island is perhaps the most haunting places in the UK. Lying opposite Queenborough, Isle of Sheppey. It has long been the topic of grisly folklore with talk of dead bodies, headless skeletons and red-eyed devil dogs. The gruesome place sounds like something from a pirate film.

The Island is a small, uninspiring stretch of land that contains a dark secret. Over many generations, this abandoned, uninhabited mud bank has encouraged tales of mystical devil dogs, bodies buried without their skulls, and brain-eating phantoms to scare any local children from venturing too close to its deserted shores.

Within the Chatham region, historical records show at least ten prison hulks through the late 18th and 19th century, including the HMS Canada, HMS Cumberland, HMS Dolphin, and HMS Euryalus. Because of the squalid and cramped conditions on the prison ships, disease was rife. The hulks had filthy living conditions and were a festering ground for disease and illness. Epidemics of cholera were common, caused by eating food or drinking water polluted with Vibrio cholera, which usually resulted in death.

The inmates of the prison hulks were refused a proper burial. The authorities had to dispose of the infected corpses to avert more outbreaks, so they placed the bodies in unmarked graves in inaccessible sites on the Medway mudflats such as Deadman’s Island.

The bodies were placed there between the 1600s and 1800s. In 2016, the remains of over two hundred people were found on the island. Although there is still doubt as to each individual’s situation, it’s established that most of them died on the numerous prison hulks that were anchored nearby. It’s believed the convicts on board the hulks were there for an assortment of reasons. Though both petty criminals and more serious criminals were imprisoned there. Tt’s also alleged that many of them were French prisoners of war. Who ended up on the prison hulks after their ships were seized in the Napoleonic Wars.

At the war’s end, some of the French vessels were condemned because they were unseaworthy and repurposed and transformed into static floating prisons called hulks. Stripped of their masts, rigging and sails, their gun ports were substituted with steel bars. The gun decks were then fitted with cells to hold hundreds of convicts. Boys as young as ten were sentenced to the hulks for petty offences by the draconian penal laws of the period.

On a happier note, many of the condemned criminals that survived their punishment were frequently deported to far-flung parts, such as Australia and America, where they at least had the chance of living a better life.

It’s also been suggested that plague victims could have also been buried there as well. Primarily buried in wooden coffins below six feet of mud, coastal erosion and increasing sea levels have washed away the mud to uncover the remains at times of low tide. The island contains mainly mud banks and is uninhabited. Maintained by Natural England, it is also a Special Scientific Interest Site because of its significance as a nesting and breeding site for birds.

It’s not just visitors that are forbidden, no one lives on the island, so it remains unscathed by modern civilisation. This has urged ghostly folklore about it. Locals have cautioned travellers of hounds with glaring-red eyes that ate the heads of buried bodies, a skin-crawling atmosphere and an island only occupied by the dead.

When erosion started to expose the bodies. They were exhumed and reburied on St Mary’s Island. When the land was later required for regeneration, the bones were disinterred again and reburied at St George’s Church, now the St George’s Centre, at Chatham Maritime.