It's the time of year people start heading south to Mexico to escape the winter blues. About two years ago I took my first trip to Mexico too, but I went to the Mexico City and Puebla instead of a beach-front destination. While preparing for my trip to Mexico I remembered that Xochimilco is just south of the Mexico City, and that this Venice-like community was home to the famous "Island of the Dolls."

I've written about my time to the island before so I won't go into too many details in this article. Instead, in honour of my almost two-year-anniversary of my trip to one of the creepiest places in the world, I put together a list of my Top 10 Creepiest Dolls From The Island of the Dolls.

(I would say "enjoy", but c'mon now, you know this is going make your skin crawl.)

I didn't want to write this article. I wanted to write something fluffy like "5 Places to Visit in Canada in the Winter" or something interesting like "7 Lesser Known Religions". I wanted to write an article that would take people's minds away from the shootings and bombings in Paris, Beirut and Baghdad. I wanted to talk about something other than the long failed "War on Terror" and the Syrian refugee crisis. Out of everything I had planned to write this week, I didn't want to write this.

But I had to.

The world is reeling from the attacks around the globe, and people are pointing fingers at the Syrian refugees that are making their way through Europe via the Schengen Area. The attacks in Paris were committed by Daesh (frequently called Islamic State), a radical extremist group born in the lawless void of Syria and Iraq. It is this barbaric group of 7th Century ideology that is sending millions fleeing into Turkey, filtering through the Balkans and into the Schengen. Because many of the Syrians are Muslim, and the perpetrators were Islamic extremists, many around the world are afraid that there could be terrorists inside the refugees looking to feed off the kindness of other countries and commit more attacks.

While the newspapers screamed of war overseas, the real war was just beginning back home.

After four long years of grueling trench warfare, thousands of Canadian soldiers left Europe in 1918 to return home. As they disembarked from trains across the country, they unknowingly helped spread the Spanish Flu, the deadliest flu to ever occur in human history.

From 1918 to 1920, the Spanish Flu reached every corner of the globe. In the north it wiped out complete Inuit communities, and in the South Pacific whole countries were infected. Worldwide, the Spanish Flu killed between 20 and 100 million people. Canada was fortunate, but we still lost between 30,000 and 50,000 people, a number only slightly lower than that of the war.