Not all of our minisodes need to be from listeners. In fact, places or lesser known cases can sometimes take us to Dark Realms.

Hello everyone and welcome back to another edition of Dark Realms. Dark Realms, of course, being an offshoot for the main show, The Dark Paranormal,

which is a podcast available wherever you get your podcasts.

If you are listening to this on audio, you can pop over to YouTube, go to YouTube.com

forward slash the dark paranormal, and there you will find this.

Or should I say you won't be seeing

this so the video version of this episode and of course on dark realms we

take listener suggestions of places which are reputedly haunted and we take a

deeper look at those places and some of the more infamous hauntings surrounding that place.

And this week we've got a big thanks to our listener, Shinita, who suggested this very

dark realm. And as dark realms come, I always find there's nothing more dark than when

human beings set out to humiliate, embarrass, torture, destroy

other human beings. That will obviously leave a dark stain on that place or that building,

or indeed, that island. Because what we're going to look at today is an island. It's located between Australia and New Zealand,

and if you're looking on a globe or a map, etc., it's a blink and you'll miss it type of island.

The island in question is Northak Island.

Northak Island is positioned in the beautiful South Pacific. It has amazing vistas, and is mostly idyllic, but its past is drenched in cruelty, in isolation and in death.

First spotted by Captain James Cook in 1774, the British later would go on to establish a settlement there in 1788, just weeks after founding Sydney.

It would initially be used as a support colony to provide food, and also to provide other materials like flax and pine for naval use,

and of course to keep other nations from claiming the land.

But the island's real infamy began, when it became a penal colony.

That first settlement was abandoned in 1814 due to extreme hardship.

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