A L C A T R A Z

A  SHIVERY  ACCOUNT  BY  A  FIRST  TIMER  TO  THE  ISLAND

“ The penitentiary is rumoured to be haunted by tormented souls; that even  Native Americans claim it is the energy portal where evil spirits are allowed to come through and  is whispered to be the last stop before entering hell.”

      As a writer of ghost stories and strange tales  the eerie stories and dark mystique  behind the world’s infamous penitentiary had always fascinated me and so when the opportunity to see the place  came,  I decided to see the island up close.

       I am a regular visitor of the United States, vacationing long stretches of time with my maternal relatives who are residents of California  and yet  for  some reason  I missed historic San Francisco in my forays to the scenic, historic and interesting places in the area. So as early as September of last year after I had made up my mind to visit them again,  I asked my sister who was to be my companion  to immediately book us on a December tour of San Francisco in order to  avail of the marked down prices. And one of the places  included  in our tour of the Bay Area was the infamous Alcatraz Prison.

     It  was stormy weather  in San Francisco but the  tour pushed through as scheduled..  The strong wind and icy rain in the Bay Area however, did not stop us  from taking pictures of the Golden Gate and other  interesting structures within the proximity of the bay.  It was not easy keeping the rain from our  faces and camera while holding on to an umbrella that was being ripped off our hands by the blustery wind. The pictures I took turned out to be blurry but printable.   But shooting from the ferry boat ride to Alcatraz Island was a different story -  the heaving sea, the lashing rain and the howling wind made picture taking almost impossible.  And added to the motion problem were the grimy glass windows that made it very difficult  to get a clear view of the island.

       It took almost an hour for the wind and rain to subsided.. This time, a ferry attendant, prodded by an irate passenger to clean the smudged glass windows hurriedly took a sqweegee and scraped the glass panes for clearer vision. But it was a trifle too late. We were now returning to the wharf and “The Rock” was fast disappearing behind us. My sister, however, managed to get some pictures from her precarious post outside the safety of the covered Passengers Area.

      As we neared the dock, I overheard an elderly stranger across us tell his companions  that the Island also sported another name -  “Hellcatraz”, and rightly so, he stressed because “ the place is rumoured to be haunted by tormented souls; that even  Native Americans claim it is the energy portal where evil spirits are allowed to come through and  is whispered to be the last stop before entering hell ;  that even for the living,  the  fatal confrontations between fellow prisoners, guard beatings, and failed escapes already made life within its walls hell on earth.

      This got me interested and so I introduced myself .  He turned out to be a friendly and loquacious guy, a retired Professor of Humanities and  the three guys he was with were relatives from his old country., Sweden. When he learned I was a writer from the Philippines, our conversation became even more animated as the three of them shared their experiences with the occult. The professor confided:   

     “As you step off the boat, immediately goose bumps take hold and the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. With so many deaths that occurred in the island, you lose your soul to it. Alcatraz is here for one thing, to punish the bad. That is why when you walk around the place,  it is the dark energy of all the souls that got beaten and left in their own squalor for days in the dark dungeons and all the murders and deaths by illness that happened in the condemned island that takes hold of you.”

      I jotted down eerie  bit and pieces of  information about the notoriously haunted penitentiary made famous by Hollywood  block-buster movies :  

          Numerous investigators and psychics together with their paranormal teams have sought to contact spirits at Alcatraz and a lot of stories about phantom encounters had been recorded.  One of the areas of the prison most often claimed active with paranormal activity is a utility corridor where certain inmates were pummelled   with bullets after a failed prison escape. Cell 14D is also believed to be very active with spirits. An gruesome tale from the  1940s tells of a  prisoner that was locked inside screamed throughout the night that a creature with glowing eyes was killing him. The next day the guards found the man strangled to death in the cell. And yet, when doing head count, some of the guards claimed to have seen the dead convict in line with the other inmates but only for a second before he vanished.

            Fifteen inmates were reported to have died of natural causes within the prison’s maximum security wall, eight people were murdered by other inmates and five others committed suicide. And so, the prison is brimming with ghost stories. Considering all the terrible things that must have happened at Alcatraz over the years, it is perhaps not surprising that the sounds of crying and moaning are often heard and cell doors can sometimes be heard clanging shut on their own. Guards and police officers reported seeing and hearing strange apparitions hile they guard the deserted rooms.

      Among those who served time at the maximum-security penitentiary were the notorious gangster Al “Scarface” Capone, and murderer Robert “Birdman of Alcatraz” Stroud. Other infamous Alcatraz inmates were George “Machine Gun”  Kelly who spent 17 yrears in prison on a kidnapping conviction and gangster  Alvin “Creep Karpis” Karpowizc , listed as Public Enemy No. 1 by the FBI who spent 25 years behind bars there.  Although so many attempts were made to escape “” The Rock” – the most famous of which involved 36 inmates resulted in a battle in May 2-4 in 1946 – resulted to 26 of them captured, six were shot and killed, two drowned and 5 went missing and were presumed dead.  The chilly and shark infested waters that surrounded the island was just too much even with the best swimmer to handle. No inmate has ever escaped the penitentiary.

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SHADES OF DARK TOURISM

In a recent in-flight magazine, the kind that publishes glossy pictures of exotic and intriguing places on a airlines route , passengers are tempted with a feature on the “joy of prison museums”. The article opens by reassuring readers that a taste for touring former places of suffering and death is nothing to be worried about.. After all, sites such as the Roman catacombs have been respectable tourism spots for centuries. Defunct penal institutions “give us a thrill” but these sites also provide matchless opportunities for spiritual and political reflection: “ once we can imagine these deprivation, we can learn to cherish freedom. In sum, touring old places of punishment maybe gruesome but is also good.” (Dobbs, 1999-35).

A tour ALCATRAZ, anyone?