 On Mystery Monday of this week, we spoke about the missing island of Bermeja. And during my research on Bermeja, I discovered quite a few interesting islands with interesting stories attached to them. Since the beginning of time, many cultures have spoken of cursed land, and one island in particular in New York might just be cursed land. But before we go any further, you know what to do. Please hit that subscribe button and give us a like. As always, a very, very special thank you to all of our patrons and producers. I absolutely could not do this channel without your help. Now, as of late, I have received a ton of emails that I am trying to work through. So if you're a patron and you have not heard from me yet, please go ahead and reach out to me and let me know about yourself, about what stories you want me to cover, and all the good stuff. I try not to miss anyone, but in case I have missed you because of the influx of emails I have come in, please, please, please do reach out to me. Welcome to SOTaric Atlanta. My name is Bryce, and today we're going to be talking about Bannerman Island. Once again, with my bedroom filming today, this is not my favorite place to film. However, my boyfriend does have something going on out in the main room, so I'm trying to accommodate him. I hope that you guys don't mind. Bannerman Island is also known as Palo Pelo Island. It is 50 miles north of New York City and 1,000 feet from the Hudson Rivers Eastern Bank. The whole island itself is about 6.5 acres of mostly rock. Now, the Native Americans believed that this island was cursed, and it wasn't long before the Dutch settlers in the area also believed that the island was cursed. They claimed to see ghost walking on the island. Now, the island is in the Hudson River, which is named after the explorer who started exploring the area in 1609. Francis Bannerman was born on the 24th of March in 1851. He immigrated to the United States in 1854. He was of Scottish heritage. The Bannerman family moved to Brooklyn in 1858, and they began a military surplus store. Young Francis learned really quickly the value in military equipment, and after the Civil War, he started to purchase old military supplies. You see, because his father decided to join the cause, he signed up to be a part of the Union Army. This left young Francis in charge of his family's business. This would go on to make the Bannerman family a very, very wealthy family in the New York area. Over time, the Bannerman family business became the world's largest military supply shop. In 1897, Bannerman opened up a whole block radius for his store at 501 Broadway. He then helped supply equipment to Americans who were signing up for the now Spanish American War. Bannerman also had a mail order catalog with over 300 pages worth of merchandise. Bannerman would go on to marry an Irish woman named Helen, whom he met when he was over in Ireland for business. They would have three sons together, and it was Bannerman's son David that would be the first person to notice the island. Because of the product that Bannerman was selling in his store, there were concerns about accidents happening in New York. And so, Bannerman needed a location outside of the city where he could store his surplus inventory. And around the turn of the century in 1900, Bannerman bought the Palo Pelo Island from Mary Taft for a whopping $600 to start then moving his inventory to the island. While the warehouses were being built on the island, Bannerman decided that he wanted to create a residential area there for him and his family. Thus he started to build a castle that looked like a Scottish castle. This is so Bannerman could show some veneration for his own heritage. This was also a marketing ploy, because on the side of the castle, Bannerman had a billboard painted. It said Bannerman's island arsenal. And this billboard was so big that you could see it from the coast of the Hudson River. In the early 20th century, both state and the federal government of the United States started to put more legislation around. This, of course, caused Bannerman's sales to decline. The government also became quite suspicious of Bannerman. You see, Bannerman started to supply equipment to the United States government during World War I. Now I'm not going to get into the whole fiasco that ensued with the United States government and Bannerman, because we have a more modern story that we need to get to regarding this island. But suffice it to say, Bannerman died in 1918, and the castle itself on the island was never completed. The curse of Palo Pelo Island seemed to be in full force. Bannerman had no problems with the United States government until he bought that island. To make matters worth with this cursed island two years after Francis Bannerman died, in 1920 the island caught on fire. Two hundred pounds of explosive kept on the island in storage blew up, and this destroyed a massive part of the buildings. It must have been pretty eerie for onlookers on the Hudson River to see a half-built castle with dilapidated buildings. Again, the curse of the island seemed to be living on. And then in 1950 the ferry boat that went back and forth from the mainland to the island randomly sank. At this point the island became vacant, a proverbial ghost town. And in 1967 the state of New York bought the island from the Bannerman family. Very quickly the state started to offer tours of the island. But on the 8th of August 1969 another fire broke out on the island, and this severed all the tours, leaving again the island vacant. The vacant island was now owned by the New York office of Parks, Recreation, and Historical Preservation. However, in 2009 another part of the castle collapsed. After this time the state of New York with their Parks and Recreation office worked with volunteers from the city who wanted to go out and try to maintain the beauty of the island. Yes, technically the island was off limits for tours, but helpful citizens could go there and garden. One of these helpful New York citizens to go to the island to help keep it beautiful was a woman named Angelica Grasswald. Angelica Grasswald had immigrated to the United States from Latvia in 2000. She came here to be a nanny to go to school, and she also worked as a bartender. Not only did Angelica love working on the premises of this island, but she also was an avid kayaker. And at the age of 34 while working her bar shift she met Vincent Viafort, or Vinny, as his loved ones called him. Vinny was 44 years old at the time, an Italian-American boy who loved life, and he also loved kayaking. Vinny had been married before, and with his ex-wife they had discovered kayaking. Well, Angelica and Vinny hit it off. You could say it was love at first sight. Very soon after the relationship began, Angelica moved in with Vinny, and pretty quickly after she moved in with Vinny, she quit her bar job and took up the hobby of photography and started to dip her toes in yoga. Angelica was living the housewife life, although she wasn't yet his wife. Angelica was completely dependent upon Vince as she was living off of him. Vince also added Angelica to his health insurance plan as a domestic partner so that she could be covered. And he added her to his life insurance policy. His life insurance was valued at about half a million dollars, and it was Angelica, Vinny's mom, and Vinny's sisters who were all now beneficiaries of this policy. I don't know about you guys, but in a healthy relationship if you were added to a life insurance policy, it's a policy that I would suspect you would hope you would never have to use. The whole point of life insurance policies is that if one of the person dies, then the person remaining will be able to maintain life without this person around, at least for a small time being before the remaining partner gets back on his or her feet. This is especially common with couples who have children. If one of the spouse's dies, especially the breadwinner dies, then a life insurance policy is provided so that the other partner can help get things in order while they're mourning and grieving the loss of their loved one. Some life insurance policies are just small enough to cover funeral expenses for the deceased person, but a half a million life insurance policies is quite a big sum of money. And it's quite a big sum of money to be assigning to someone as a benefactor in the early stages of a relationship. My boyfriend and I have been together for a very, very, very long time. In fact, we might actually be considered common law by the state of Georgia, but I'm not sure. And we have had discussions in the past about finances and business stuff if one of us were to die unexpectedly since our lives are so intertwined together. However, again, this is peculiar because Angelika and Vinny had not been together for that long of a time for her life to be so impacted by the possibility of him not being around. On Sunday, April 19, 2015, Angelika and Vinny decided to go on a late afternoon kayaking trip out to Bannerman Island. Again, Angelika was a gardener on the island. She knew all the ins and outs of the island. And as an amateur photographer, she wanted to go and take some pictures on the island at sunset. According to Angelika, both Vinny and herself were very hung over from their Saturday night shenanigans. And I know most people watching have probably been hung over at some part in their lives. And when you are hung over, it is fair to say you are not thinking clearly. They left from Plum Point along the coast of the Hudson River and kayaked out to Bannerman Island, no problem. They got to the island around 4.15 in the afternoon and proceeded to take photos. As it started to get darker, the couple decided it was time to return back to the mainland. From what I understand, this whole trip from Plum Point to the island probably took about 40 minutes on a kayak. By the time they left Bannerman Island, the weather started to shift. It was a chilly day outside. The water itself was about 46 degrees Fahrenheit, which is extremely cold. As the weather shifted, the water began to act up. It got choppier and choppier and choppier and choppier. And according to the 9-1-1 call that Angelika made, the wind and the choppiness of the river tipped over Vinny's kayak. Angelika claimed that Vinny did not have a life vest on because he never wore a life vest, although she did. And in the Frantic 9-1-1 call, it sounded like she was literally watching the love of her life drown in front of her eyes. Because of the weather and a choppiness of the water, there was no way for Angelika to get to her drowning boyfriend. The very next day, nobody turned up. However, Vinny's kayak did. And there was something missing on the kayak, a plug, a plug that had been removed. If the plug had stayed on the kayak, then water would not have been able to get into the kayak, forcing the kayak to go under. Now obviously, if you're a kayaker, you probably are pretty well equipped at swimming. Most kayakers are extremely fit and are probably used to falling out of their kayaks from time to time in rough waters. I would imagine that for experienced kayakers like Vinny and Angelika, a tip over of the kayak would not have really been that big of a deal. However, in this situation, the water was so cold that within minutes Vinny would have lost control of his fine motor skills. He literally would not have been able to use his body to try to swim back to the shore for safety. With nobody to be found, it was definitely assumed that Vinny had passed away, that he had drowned. And once that conclusion had been made, Angelika herself started to act very strange. She did not seem like the grieving girlfriend, videotapes of her doing cartwheels in her front yard, on Facebook, as well as laughing and smiling pictures with friends. At first, the police did not think that this was super weird though. If you're a police officer, you probably are very well aware that people tend to grieve differently and shock creates different responses out of different people. After all, this just seemed like an accident, a very tragic accident, one that this Angelika probably was not expecting. And like ripping off a bandaid, all of a sudden her partner was gone. And this weird reaction again was probably just the shock of having her whole life changed in a matter of a day. 10 days after the accident happened, the New York City police detectives decided to go back out to the island to see what they can find and informed Angelika that they were going to do that. And she piped up and said that she would be joining them. After all, she is a gardener on the island and she needed to go there and, you know, tend to her volunteer work. According to the detectives, once they got to the island, Angelika started to talk. She claims that she was in a very A-B-U-S-I-V-E relationship with Vinny. She claims that he required her to do very sexually uncomfortable things, including threesome. She claims that he had her caught between a rock and a hard place. After all, with no job of her own, Angelika had no way of supporting herself. According to the New York Police Department detectives who were on the case, Angelika admitted to removing the plug from the kayak, as well as removing the safety from the paddle, causing the paddle to break into two when Vinny went to use it. She said that when Vinny drowned, she felt a sense of freedom and euphoria. In fact, it is said that when they were driving back to the police station after leaving the island in the back of the cop car, she was exclaiming, I'm free, I'm free, I'm free. Now the only problem with this is that the detectives did not have their recording devices, therefore did not record this confession. Once they got back to the police station, Angelika claimed that they made up the whole story that she had not confessed to basically helping mother nature take her boyfriend out. What proceeded was an 11 hour interrogation, one where Angelika didn't seem to quite understand what was happening. When she was in the room alone, she would proceed to do yoga poses and hopscotch, definitely not displaying the actions of a woman who totally understood what was going on. Angelika was charged with Vinny's however, when it came to the court case, things got interesting. In the United States of America, every defendant is entitled to good defense. We're all entitled to our day in court, and everyone is innocent until proven guilty. Angelika's attorney was able to cripple the prosecution story. Yes, they admitted that Angelika had acted very strange after finding out her boyfriend had died, but again, human beings do all sorts of weird and strange things when they are confronted with something so shocking. And the whole idea of her being free could have been a catch 22, that yes, Angelika was in this, even though she loved Vinny, with the sudden idea that he was gone, was this sense of freedom that she didn't have to now bow down to his needs. And since, according to her lawyer, the detective made up the story that she had removed the plug and removed the safety, she actually had no intention of him dying that day. But there was one catch. The police allegedly found the plug and the safety in Angelika's car. Angelika ended up pleading guilty to second degree. She would only end up spending 32 months in jail before being released on parole. And to make matters worse for Vincent's family, she also got her portion of Vincent's life insurance. However, most of that money went paying off her legal defense team. The body of Vincent was found one month after the accident happened. His body was so ravagedly beaten up by the Hudson River that they had to actually look at his dental records to positively ID him. For my research, it's clear that Vincent's family feel like Angelika was 100% responsible for their family member's death. But many other people still aren't so sure. Was she a woman who had been mistreated by her man, then who just had a very strange response to his passing, or was she a cold blooded? Or is this just the curse of Van der Men Island? Alright guys, leave me your thoughts and your opinions down in the comment section below. Again, thank you so much to Josh McKay for doing our music. If you would like to purchase the opening song, there is a link down in the description box below. And thank you as always to Todd Roderick for helping me get this video out on the interwebs for all of you to view. I hope that you're having a wonderful day and that you're having an even better weekend to come. I will talk to you soon. Bye!