While uninhabited islands steeped in mystery or harboring an unsettling secret have become a trope of fiction, history contains a few cases where such sites truly did exist.
YouTube user Top5s has compiled a collection of these perplexing islands and the odd stories attached to them.
One intriguing case detailed in the video is the extremely remote Bouvet Island in the south Atlantic Ocean.
Researchers who arrived on the ostensibly uninhabited island in 1956 were stunned to discover an abandoned boat sitting in a lagoon.
The presence of the still-intact vessel as well as a pile of wood near the shore was particularly vexing because the island is incredibly difficult to reach and practically inaccessible.
However someone apparently did find a way to reach Bouvet Island and, in turn, created a mystery which persists to this day, since a search of the area failed to locate the lost sailor.
A bit closer to home is the island of Bermeja in the Gulf of Mexico, which inexplicably vanished in 1921.
The puzzling disappearance of the island led to the incredible conspiracy theory that it was sunk by the United States government!
According to this hypothesis, Bermeja island served as a part of the boundary between Mexican and American territory in the Gulf of Mexico.
But once it disappeared, the virtual border was redrawn, providing the United States with a greater share of the territory that, it just so happens, is rich with oil reserves.
A modern investigation by the Mexican government into the island's disappearance suggested some chicanery was behind the event, but stopped short of accusing the United States of sinking the island.
Other locations profiled in the piece include an island where shipwrecked sailors were forced to commit cannibalism to survive and a horrific plot by Stalin to send society's 'undesirables' to live in exile on a Russian island.
So if you find yourself missing the TV show Lost, check out the complete video for a thorough look at strange island stories almost on the level of the Dharma Initiative.
Source: YouTube