Former Alcatraz Guard Calls Ghost Story a Myth

In June 2014 KRON 4 News in San Francisco followed up a story that had been trending on its website: a British tourist’s photograph, taken that April through a window into the visitation area of the old federal penitentiary, which she believed showed the dark figure of a woman looking back. The reporter took the ferry out to the island to examine the spot with a ranger from the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

The report lays out the case for and against. The ranger notes that records show at least two women died on Alcatraz – a 13-year-old girl killed in an accident during the Indian occupation in 1970, and the wife of the island’s physician in 1890 – but suggests the figure could simply be another visitor, since the island is crowded. She says rangers who have worked there for more than 20 years have no ghost stories of their own, and a former guard calls the hauntings mostly a myth. The reporter then restages the photograph at the same window.

This is a model of how to test a ghost photo: go to the exact spot, check the records, and try to reproduce the picture. The window has smudges and reflections, crowds move through the visitation room all day, and the recreation shows blur and dirt on glass – not a figure.

It also matches what the park’s own history suggests: most Alcatraz ghost stories come from psychics, books and TV programmes rather than from people who worked there. The prison’s real deaths – from the 1946 “Battle of Alcatraz” to illness and suicide – are documented, and they are the history the ghost stories borrow from.