Over 60 years since the barred doors of the infamous island penitentiary shut for good, President Donald Trump has announced plans to reopen an ‘enlarged and rebuilt’ Alcatraz.
Trump took to Truth Social last week, saying he wants to use the notorious Californian lockup – once home to vicious criminals like gangster Al ‘Scarface’ Capone and George ‘Machine Gun’ Kelly – to ‘house America’s most ruthless and violent offenders’ and, perhaps, those in the country illegally.
‘We will no longer be held hostage to criminals, thugs, and Judges that are afraid to do their job and allow us to remove criminals, who came into our Country illegally. The reopening of ALCATRAZ will serve as a symbol of Law, Order, and JUSTICE,’ wrote Trump.
The maximum-security prison, located on a small, rocky island just off the coast of San Francisco, opened in 1933, but by 1963 its facilities were crumbling and, with an estimated cost of $5 million for repairs, the government decided it was too expensive to maintain and shut it down.
In the years since, it has become a gruesome attraction, drawing flocks of tourists from around the world who are eager for a peek behind the bars.
But as Trump considers opening ‘The Rock’ as a fully operational prison once again, a deeper look at its haunting history suggests that it may indeed serve as a terrifying deterrent to crime.
Horror behind the bars
‘Alcatraz was very isolating… you only had about 280 prisoners at the island,’ Alcatraz expert, author and historian Michael Esslinger told the Daily Mail. ‘The purpose was to strip these public enemies from the headlines.’
Alcatraz was known for its notoriously abysmal living conditions if prisoners dared to disobey the prison rules.
Some inmates were sent to solitary confinement as the ‘most extreme’ form of punishment, where they were held in completely dark cells for days.
Once on the island, the men were almost completely cut off from the outside world, but the view of San Francisco through their window was a constant reminder of what they were missing.
Prisoners enjoyed the privileges of a private cell and ‘very good’ food, according to interviews Esslinger conducted with former prisoners, but the second they broke any of the stringent prison rules, all such ‘luxuries’ were stripped away.
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As the Federal Bureau of Prison describes it: ‘At Alcatraz, a prisoner had four rights: food, clothing, shelter, and medical care. Everything else was a privilege that had to be earned.’
According to the BBC, prisoners maimed or even killed themselves while incarcerated due to the ‘unrelenting conditions’ of the penitentiary, which also saw a deadly uprising in 1946.
‘The most extreme punishment was they had six cells which were dark isolation cells and in the early years they even had the dungeon cells below the prison,’ Esslinger said.
‘This was in the basement, completely isolated from any light, they didn’t have bathroom facilities, they had to use a bucket to relieve themselves, in the pitch black,’ he added. ‘And they were put on restrictive diets, with just bread and water, for up to 19 days.’
Esslinger explained that prisoners, ‘would carve tick marks into the cement wall showing how many days they had been underground.’
While locked up on the island, prisoners’ view of San Francisco was a constant reminder of the outside world they were missing. Here, the view of the Bay Area from Alcatraz is pictured.
The facility is located off the shore of San Francisco.
The situation was worse for those inmates with mental health difficulties, he noted, ‘There’s a lot of documents that show some of these prisoners had mental health issues, and a lot of them were paranoid schizophrenics who were on the island. They were hallucinating about their food being poisoned and [being] fed radioactive messages.’
‘During that era of time, they weren’t knowledgeable about mental health. A lot of those patients weren’t receiving any treatment of any kind.’
One of the last surviving prisoners of Alcatraz, Charlie Hopkins, who is now in his nineties, served 3 years of his 11-year sentence on ‘The Rock’ for participating in a robbery ring responsible for car jackings.
‘When I was on Alcatraz, a rat couldn’t survive,’ he once recalled.
Cursed Corridors
It’s not just the living inmates Trump will have to worry about if he re-opens Alcatraz.
There have long been reports of mysterious supernatural events behind the bars of ‘The Rock,’ thought to be thanks to the gruesome history of the prison and its most infamous inhabitants.
The prison – with its history of high profile inmates, tales of violence and a mysterious escape – has earned a reputation for being haunted.
Now a tourist attraction, visitors have claimed they have had paranormal encounters on the prison grounds.
Visitors report feeling chills rush through them as they walk the corridors, screams echoing down the halls and fingernails scraping on the walls.
‘Each time I stopped and looked at the cell, I had the feeling that someone was staring at me. That some kind of spirit would come out of the wall,’ one visitor wrote on his blog.
Al Capone was one of the notorious convicts held at Alcatraz. Rumor has it, the strums of the gangster’s banjo still echo in the halls.
Last year, a team of researchers building a 3D map of Alcatraz spent three weeks sleeping inside the prison.
They were staying in D-block, the infamous living quarters said to be the most haunted part of the prison. D-block – home to inmate Robert Stroud, a murderer known as the Birdman – was just down the hall from the bare tiled cells where prisoners with mental health issues were held.
One researcher, who slept in the mug shot room, claimed he awoke suddenly in the night to the sound of a crowd of people in the room above him.
According to a CBS report, he said ‘ghosts’ were moving furniture around and a non-existent piano began to play, prompting him to grab his belongings and leave. He refused to return to the room.
Visitors have long reported the haunting sound of mysterious musical instruments – particularly a banjo, said to belong to Al Capone, who led a prison band during his stay on the island and taught himself to play.
Despite the stories, Esslinger has never had any ghostly run-ins on the island.
‘I’ve stayed the night, been there in the late hours, never seen anything paranormal,’ he said. ‘It’s a spooky place because you hear a lot of odd sounds.’
But he has a much more mundane explanation: ‘The sewage was dumped directly into the water in the bay, so you can hear the wind and the water whooshing through the pipes.’
So even if it isn’t haunted, it seems Trump will have enough work on his hands… fixing the plumbing.
Eerie Escapes
Perched on an isolated island and surrounded by high walls, steep cliffs and freezing, shark-infested waters, Alcatraz was once seen as an inescapable fortress.
In fact, in the 29 years that it was open, nearly all of the 36 inmates who tried to escape were caught or perished in their attempt, except for three men.
President Trump said he wants to reopen Alcatraz as a fully operational penitentiary, despite the prison now being a tourist attraction and a historical landmark.
Career criminals Frank Morris and brothers Clarence and John Anglin vanished from the prison under the cover of night on June 11, 1962. It was one of the most elaborate escape plans ever hatched – immortalized in the 1979 Clint Eastwood film ‘Escape from Alcatraz.’
Morris, who boasted a rap sheet of armed robbery and prison breaks, conspired with the bank robbing Anglin brothers and Allen West, a car thief who did not make it out despite his involvement in the plot.
The quartet reportedly knew each other from previous stints in lock-up elsewhere, and their neighboring cells on ‘The Rock’ made it easy to devise an escape plan.
The men spent months preparing for their elaborate getaway, collecting spoons and even fashioning a makeshift drill from a vacuum motor to burrow through their concrete cell walls until they made an opening large enough to slip through to an unguarded utility corridor behind their cell block.
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Each night, they made their way in shifts to a secret work room where they would labor for hours preparing the tools they would need for their escape before the guards called for lights out.
They crafted dummy heads out of plaster, flesh-toned paint and real human hair to leave in their beds to fool the night guards and painstakingly crafted a raft and life preservers out of 50 prison-issued, World War II-era raincoats and built wooden paddles. They even modified a musical instrument to use to inflate the raft.
When they were finally prepared to execute their escape, they shimmied out of the holes – which were concealed by pieces of cardboard and suitcases – up a ventilation shaft to the prison roof, down the façade of the building and over barbed fences to get to the shore.
There, they set sail on their shoddy raft into the tempestuous waters, never to be seen again.
Three convicts – Clarence Anglin, John Anglin and Frank Morris – escaped Alcatraz, but law enforcement could not definitively determine that they perished in the frigid waters.
The inmates whittled away at the cement walls, eventually chiseling a hole big enough to slip through to an unguarded utility corridor behind their cell block.
The prisoners used the passageway to escape. Here, an officer is pictured examining the hole leading to the corridor.
The men also crafted dummy heads to fool the night guards and used human hair to make the mannequins look as realistic as possible.
When they were discovered missing the next morning, the prison went into lockdown and an intensive ten-day search of the surrounding waters began.
Federal investigators swiftly downplayed the incident, concluding that the homemade raft must have failed, or was overturned by a wave, and they perished in the frigid San Francisco Bay.
Their evidence included a sealed bag containing addresses and numbers found in the water near the Golden Gate Bridge – presumably the contacts to their friends and family dropped when their raft supposedly sank – as well as a paddle and scraps of the raft. A Norwegian ocean liner also reportedly spotted a body floating near the bridge, apparently wearing prison clothes.
After a 17-year investigation, the FBI insisted in a statement that ‘no credible evidence emerged to suggest the men were still alive, either in the US or overseas.’
Esslinger agrees. ‘We know that they made it into the water but after that, there’s no concrete evidence yet that would prove they survived,’ he told the Daily Mail. ‘There’s been a lot of theories, conspiracies, about the potential of them making it to Mexico and going to Brazil.’
‘But as much as I would want to believe they survived… I’ve looked at all the evidence and it’s never really panned out to be true,’ he added, ‘at the end of the day, I think it’s more likely they drowned.’
Still, some believe they made it to freedom.
Here, the FBI displays the dummy heads from the prisoners’ bunks. Officials also recovered a paddle, pieces of raincoats used to make the raft and the contact information for the men’s loved ones in the nearby waters.
The men concealed the massive holes in their walls with items in their cell.
Shortly after the escape, the San Francisco Chronicle hired a professional swimmer to determine whether the men could have made it across the bay.
‘It’s not too difficult a swim,’ Olympic Club Coach Earl Geneck concluded at the time.
‘It could be done by inexperienced swimmers if they condition themselves by taking cold showers.’
Others said the Anglins’ mother kept receiving flowers on special occasions for years with no card attached, and when she died in 1978, two men dressed as women were said to have attended her funeral in Florida.
‘I think probably the brothers lived… but there’s a chance that all three of them could have lived and they just split up once they left,’ Mike Dyke, the Supervising Deputy of the US Marshals Service said in a 2011 interview with CBS.
‘They came across an oar, a paddle, right off the coast, about 50 yards from the shore of Angel Island,’ he added. ‘They determined the oar was made on Alcatraz. There was one oar left behind and this one was an exact match.’
There were also reports, he told the Los Angeles Times, that a car was stolen on the night of June 11 by three unidentified men in Marin County, California – which encompasses the Bay Area.
There were alleged sightings of the brothers in Brazil, and in 2013, San Francisco law enforcement received a letter allegedly signed by John Anglin, who claimed the trio made it to mainland and had survived ‘but barely.’ A handwriting analysis proved to be inconclusive.
The Anglin brothers’ nephews – David and Ken Widner – are convinced the fugitives did not perish, previously telling the Daily Mail that the Anglins were strong swimmers who could have successfully survived the strong currents.
‘If they really believed that my uncles didn’t make it, they would have stopped looking for them,’ said David who points out that the case looking into his uncles’ disappearance is still open.
‘Why would you be looking for someone you believe to be dead?’