Case file · Haunting
The headless gentlemen of La Isabela
Bartolomé de las Casas reported that after Columbus's first town on Hispaniola was abandoned, passers-by saw a line of finely dressed Spanish gentlemen who, when greeted, took off their hats and their heads came off with them.
1527 CE · 19.89, -71.08 · status: legend
The account
La Isabela was founded in 1494 and abandoned by about 1498 after hunger and disease killed many settlers. Las Casas, writing his History of the Indies from the 1520s, said people no longer dared to pass the ruins. It is one of the earliest European ghost stories set in the Americas; the year is the start of his writing.
The sceptical view
Las Casas told it as hearsay; it reads as a moral tale about the Spanish nobles who died there.