Alcatraz

Alcatraz has carried many histories. Ohlone oral tradition, as summarised by the National Park Service, suggests the island was used for gathering eggs and sea-life, as a place of isolation for people who had broken tribal law, and later as a hiding place for those escaping the Spanish missions. From the 1850s the US Army fortified it as part of San Francisco’s harbour defences, and it soon became a military prison, holding Confederate sympathisers during the Civil War and, in 1895, a group of Hopi men imprisoned for resisting federal policies. The great concrete cellhouse that dominates the island was built by the Army between 1910 and 1912.

In 1933–34 the Department of Justice took over the island and turned it into a maximum-security federal penitentiary for prisoners who had caused trouble or tried to escape elsewhere. The first 137 men arrived from Leavenworth in August 1934; Al Capone, George “Machine Gun” Kelly and Robert Stroud, the “Birdman of Alcatraz”, were among its later inmates. Life was tightly regimented, prisoners were counted many times a day, and the isolation cells of D Block became notorious. Former prisoners described harsh conditions that tested their sanity, and several men died by violence, illness or suicide during the prison’s 29 years.

Thirty-six men made fourteen escape attempts. The bloodiest was the “Battle of Alcatraz” of 2–4 May 1946, when six prisoners seized guns in the cellhouse; two officers, William Miller and Harold Stites, were killed along with three of the inmates, and two of the survivors were later executed. In June 1962 Frank Morris and John and Clarence Anglin slipped out through a utility corridor and vanished into the bay – their fate is still unknown. Costly repairs and the fallout from that escape led to the prison’s closure on 21 March 1963.

From November 1969 to June 1971 the island was occupied by Indians of All Tribes, an occupation the Park Service credits with launching the modern Red Power movement. In 1972 the island became part of the new Golden Gate National Recreation Area, and it now draws well over a million visitors a year.

Ghost stories grew up alongside the tourism, collected in books such as Richard Winer’s Haunted Houses and Michael Kouri’s Haunted Alcatraz. The most famous concerns D Block’s isolation cell 14-D, “the Hole”, said to be far colder than its neighbours; others tell of clanging in the utility corridor of C Block where Bernard Coy, Joseph Cretzer and Marvin Hubbard died in 1946, and of phantom banjo music – Al Capone is known to have practised the banjo during his time on the Rock. In a 1992 episode of Sightings, Park Service staff described crashes, doors closing and the sense of being watched, and Ghost Adventures filmed there in 2013. The Park Service itself presents the island through its documented history rather than its ghost lore.

Reports collected by ghost writers and on television include an unnatural chill and feelings of distress in cell 14-D, clanging and voices in the C Block utility corridor, apparitions of men in prison fatigues, phantom gunfire and screams, a woman sobbing, and banjo music; Park Service staff on Sightings described crashing sounds, cell doors closing on their own, moans and a constant feeling of being watched.

D Block’s isolation cells (especially 14-D and 12-D), the C Block utility corridor and laundry room, the shower room, the hospital wing, and the west end of the cellhouse where the 1946 battle was fought.

Alcatraz is one of the most filmed prisons in the world, from Birdman of Alcatraz (1962) and Escape from Alcatraz (1979) to The Rock (1996), and it features in countless ghost-tour books and paranormal programmes. The 1969–71 occupation is commemorated each year with Indigenous Peoples’ Sunrise Gatherings on the island.