THE GHOSTS OF ALCATRAZ

As icy cold winds blow up San Francisco bay you can hear shutters banging away, filling the air with that clang, clang noise that always comes with something deserted and with roof iron shrieking and steel nuts corroding with rust, The Rock sits all alone waiting for progress to come along and rejuvenate it once again.

The correction facility that has housed thousands of criminals over its one hundred and fifty years is now deserted, left to the sea birds to roam the grounds looking something of value to feed their empty gullets. A lot of men died here, trying to flee the island only to find that the elements were their biggest hurdle leaving them frozen to death or drowned like rats at high tide.

The first occupants of Alcatraz in 1859 were military prisoners and up until 1933, the island was controlled by the United States Army to house dangerous inmates. It wasn’t until 1908 that the main building was built by the war department and with the new building came new ideas, education, and reforming of soldiers, and many were returned to active service.

In 1933, the cost of transporting goods and materials brought the army service to a close making it a prison for the Department of Justice to confine the most dangerous prisoners from escaping to the main land. So began Alcatraz, the rock as the prisoners use to call it, a place where it was something big time to escape the treacherous conditions that the prisoners found themselves in when they were brought across the bay to begin their time of reform.

There were numerous attempts to escape the island but most cases ended up with the prisoner drowning or being shot. The ones that disappeared were never seen again making the disappearances a cold drowning end to what ever intentions the prisoners had. They tried all sorts of ways to beat the water to the mainland but the icy waters combined with the fast flowing tide made death a certainty. Two escapes were tried out with a large bread vat and a large washing vat but they both were captured. One prisoner saved up army uniforms until he had enough clothes so that he could fool the guards and when a tour of guards came over to the island, he blended in with the people on board. When a count was done, it showed that he was missing and the boat searched when it reached the mainland. He was captured and taken back to the island. There were thirteen counts a day to make sure that no one went missing and this count lead to a lot of escape attempts being stopped.

A lot of attempts were stopped by the guards who fired on prisoners that tried to escape, many who died and their spirits were left to roam the hallways at night.

This was a maximum security prison, if you were sent here to do your time, you were to do it, not escape into civilization to make more trouble for the citizens of the world in general.

Today, Alcatraz sits all alone with no inmates, the prison complex shut down by Robert Kennedy in 1963 because of the rising costs. It was the cost of raw materials to the islands upkeep which was the deciding factor to close it down, cracking falling cement, rusting bars and bolts affected by the misty waters of San Francisco bay that did the most damage.

Do ghosts roam at night? Who knows but there are times when the islands workers feel sudden chills that come over them, their bodies giving them the creeps. The island is now a national park looked after by the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy.