Alcatraz Island

Thirty-six men tried to leave in fourteen documented attempts; nearly all were caught or killed. The roster is in the FBI's own case file: Al Capone, George "Machine Gun" Kelly, Alvin "Creepy" Karpis — the first Public Enemy No. 1 — and Robert Stroud, the Birdman of Alcatraz, who kept no birds at Alcatraz, spent seventeen of his fifty-four prison years there, and was considerably less grandfatherly than Burt Lancaster.

The island's bloodiest entries are dates. In 1939, Arthur "Doc" Barker was shot dead in an escape attempt — afterward the Bureau hardened D-Block into the 42-cell Treatment Unit, where inmates ate in their cells, showered twice weekly, and stared at the Golden Gate through the cold. In May 1946, the Battle of Alcatraz left two guards and three inmates dead in a failed breakout; visitors still report phantom gunfire in the corridor where it happened. On June 12, 1962, the morning bed check found three heads made of plaster. The last man out, Frank Weatherman, boarded the boat with the file's best exit line: "Alcatraz was never no good for nobody."

Guards on the island reported phenomena while the prison still ran — sobbing and moaning in empty stretches of cellblock, terrible smells with no source, and a recurring entity the staff called the Thing, described as a presence with glowing eyes. The story goes that an inmate in the D-Block hole screamed all night that a glowing-eyed creature was in the cell with him and was found dead at dawn; the file notes this as legend, not record.

Other reports: a figure in nineteenth-century prison dress seen walking beside the Strip Cells by a 1940s guard; clanking and muffled knocking around cell 14D; and — the detail every account repeats — sporadic banjo music in the shower room, attributed to Capone, who played banjo in the prison band and is said to have practiced there, out of reach of other inmates.

The prison closed in 1963 on cost grounds; the National Park Service runs it now, past the 1969-71 Native American occupation that left its own mark on the walls, to roughly 1.5 million visitors a year. The archive keeps the two ledgers separate: one of documented discipline, escape and death, and one of reported voices in a building engineered to produce silence. The first is why Alcatraz was built. The second is why the boats are full.