Alcatraz

From the cell blocks of Alcatraz, on certain nights, the inmates could hear the city.

San Francisco is only about a mile and a quarter away across the bay. When the wind blew the right way, especially on New Year’s Eve, the sounds of parties, laughter, music and car horns drifted across the water and in through the barred windows. Men serving long sentences on the Rock said it was the cruelest part of the punishment: to lie in a five-by-nine-foot cell and listen to the rest of the world having a good time, so close they could see its lights.

Many of them said Alcatraz was haunted long before anyone thought to put it on a ghost tour.

The Island

The island got its name from Spanish explorers, who called it La Isla de los Alcatraces — the Island of the Pelicans. In the nineteenth century, the U.S. Army built a fortress there to guard the entrance to San Francisco Bay, and later turned it into a military prison. Confederate sympathizers were held there during the Civil War, and later, Hopi men who refused to send their children to government boarding schools.

In 1934, during the gangster era, the federal government took it over and turned it into something new: a maximum-security, minimum-privilege penitentiary for the most dangerous and escape-prone prisoners in the federal system. The idea was simple. Put the worst of the worst on an island surrounded by cold, swift currents, where no one could escape.

The Residents

Over its twenty-nine years as a federal prison, Alcatraz held about 1,500 men. Some of them were the most famous criminals in America.

Al Capone arrived in 1934, already convicted of tax evasion. On Alcatraz, his money and influence counted for nothing. He worked in the laundry and the shower room, played banjo in the prison band, and slowly declined from the effects of untreated syphilis. He was transferred off the island in 1939.

George “Machine Gun” Kelly, the Depression-era kidnapper, spent seventeen years there. Alvin “Creepy” Karpis, once named Public Enemy Number One, spent more time on Alcatraz than anyone else — about twenty-six years. Robert Stroud, the “Birdman of Alcatraz,” spent seventeen years there — though, despite his famous nickname, he was never allowed to keep birds on the island. He had done his bird research earlier, at Leavenworth.

The rules were strict. Silence was enforced at times. Inmates were allowed one visit a month, if they’d earned it. They were counted twelve or more times a day. And for those who broke the rules, there was D-Block.

The Hole

D-Block was the isolation and solitary confinement unit. Its worst cells — numbered 9 through 14 — were called “the Hole.” They had a solid steel door that blocked out all light. Inmates were sometimes held there stripped, on a cold concrete floor, with no bed, fed only bread and water, for days at a time.

The most frightening stories about Alcatraz come from the Hole, and especially from Cell 14-D.

According to a story told by former guards and repeated in many books, an inmate was once thrown into 14-D and began screaming almost immediately. He shouted that there was something in the cell with him, a creature with glowing eyes. He screamed for hours. The guards ignored him. The next morning, they opened the door and found him dead, strangled, with marks on his throat that could not have been self-inflicted, according to the story. The next day, at the count, there was one inmate too many in the line — and the guards say they saw the dead man’s face among the prisoners before he vanished.

That story cannot be confirmed in the prison’s records. But visitors and park rangers today report that Cell 14-D is often unnaturally cold, even on warm days. Some say they feel intense, overwhelming emotion when they stand inside it.

The Battle of Alcatraz

The deadliest episode in the prison’s history began on May 2, 1946.

A bank robber named Bernard Coy, who had studied the prison’s routines for months, managed to overpower a guard, climb to the gun gallery, and spread the bars apart with a homemade bar spreader. He seized rifles, pistols and keys. Along with five other inmates, he planned to break out of the cell house, take hostages, and escape by boat.

The plan went wrong almost at once. The inmates couldn’t find the key to the door leading to the yard. Trapped inside, they took guards hostage. For two days, the cell house became a war zone. Marines were brought in. They dropped grenades through holes drilled in the roof.

When it was over, two guards — Harold Stites and William Miller — were dead, and more than a dozen were wounded. Three of the inmates, including Coy, were killed. Two others were later executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin for their role in the killings.

Former guards and visitors say they still hear the echoes of the battle in C-Block: gunfire, shouting, the clang of metal.

The Escape

Over the years, thirty-six men made fourteen escape attempts from Alcatraz. Officially, none of them succeeded. Most were caught. Several were shot and killed. A few drowned in the bay.

But the most famous attempt remains a mystery to this day.

On the night of June 11, 1962, three inmates — Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin — crawled out through holes they had chiseled in the backs of their cells with sharpened spoons and a homemade drill. They left behind papier-mâché heads in their beds, with real human hair from the prison barbershop, to fool the guards. They climbed up through a utility corridor to the roof, scrambled down to the shore, and paddled into the dark bay on a raft made from more than fifty stolen raincoats.

They were never seen again.

The FBI concluded that they probably drowned in the cold, fast-moving waters of the bay. But no bodies were ever found. Over the years, there have been tantalizing hints: a postcard, a reported sighting, a photograph that some believe shows the Anglin brothers in Brazil in the 1970s, and a letter received by the San Francisco police in 2013, supposedly from John Anglin, saying they had survived. Authorities have never confirmed any of it. The U.S. Marshals Service still keeps the case open.

Capone’s Banjo

Alcatraz closed as a prison in 1963. It was too expensive to run; everything, even fresh water, had to be shipped to the island. In 1969, a group of Native American activists occupied the island for nineteen months, claiming it under an old treaty — an occupation that became an important moment in the American Indian rights movement. In 1973, it opened to the public as part of a national park.

Since then, park rangers, staff and visitors have reported many strange experiences.

In the old shower room, where Al Capone used to practice his banjo, people say they have heard banjo music drifting faintly through the empty room. In the hospital wing, where inmates were treated and some died, visitors describe moans and the sound of footsteps. In the cell blocks, people report hearing the clang of cell doors closing and the murmur of men talking, especially at night.

And the guards’ families who once lived on the island told of something else: a sense, especially in the fog, of being watched — and of the cold, constant sound of the water all around.