The ghosts of Alcatraz
http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/journalgazette/news/17095793.htm?source=rss&channel=journalgazette_news

The ghosts of Alcatraz
By John M. Glionna
Los Angeles Times

Gregory Johnson, an officer with the U.S. Park Police, patrols a
cellblock at what was once known as the Rock and America's Devil's
Island.
Alcatraz Island is a tourist attraction operated by the National Park
Service. The former prison in the San Francisco Bay often seems haunted
to park police officers who handle security there.
Johnson watches the day's first ferry pull up to the island's dock. He
works 3 p.m. to 9 a.m.

ALCATRAZ ISLAND, Calif. ? Each day at sundown, when the last tour boat
departs this desolate, wind-swept outpost, one lonesome soul is left
behind. He's the night watchman of Alcatraz.
Guided by the beam of his flashlight, Gregory Johnson inches down the
gloomy infirmary ward of this retired prison, once home to the nation's
most malicious killers and psychotic criminal malcontents.

"Hey, what's that noise?" he asks, throwing the light against the
half-open door of a solitary confinement cell.
He pauses, shrugging off another unexplained Alcatraz phenomenon.
"Man," he whispers, "I couldn't imagine being out here at night without
my gun."
Until the first boat arrives after dawn, the U.S. Park Police officer
spends the night battling both his nerves and imagination, patrolling
the place once known as America's Devil's Island.

Lore of desperate men
Over the years, Alcatraz was the dreaded last stop for 1,576 murderers,
mobsters and the nation's most-wanted crooks.
Known as "the Rock," the 12-acre penal island was notorious for cramped
cells and rigid discipline that at times demanded silence. Decades after
the prison closed March 21, 1963, with inmate Frank Weatherman's
valediction, "Alcatraz was never no good for nobody," all that remains
is the lore of the desperate men once locked up here.
"I don't believe in ghosts, per se," says Johnson, 38. Holding a shackle
of keys, he cautiously makes his moonlit rounds across the island.

He walks the old cellblocks that once housed bank robber and gangster
Arthur "Doc" Barker and kidnapper Alvin "Creepy Karpis" Karpavicz, a
former Public Enemy No. 1.
He checks the medical ward where Robert Stroud, "the Birdman of
Alcatraz," spent 17 years.
He peers into the laundry room where Chicago mobster Alphonse "Scarface"
Capone hustled among the industrial washers.

He patrols the office of wardens nicknamed Saltwater, Gypsy, Cowboy and
Promising Paul.
Now and then, the old prison plays tricks on his mind. One night, as the
buoy bells clanged and the foghorn moaned, he swore he heard clinking
glasses, as if a toast were being made. He hears mice skitter on
cellblock floors. The wind howling often seems like crazy laughter.
"This is one creepy place after dark," he said. "It can make the hair on
the back of your neck stand up straight."

Cruel mind games
For years, ferry company employees were assigned to the island's night
shift. Last fall, when the National Park Service, which runs Alcatraz,
changed ferry services, park police took over until the new contractor
begins work.
Officers watch both the ferry docks and federal facilities, mindful of
pranksters or protesters. American Indians fighting for civil rights
once occupied Alcatraz for 19 months, starting in November 1969.
Johnson initially balked at the duty he shares with other officers.

"I like to be scared, but not that scared," he said. "I had to remind
myself, 'There's no one out here but me. So just put that stuff out of
your mind.'?"
Between 1934 and 1963, the Civil War-era military fortress turned
penitentiary provided inmates with the hardest time they ever did, in
part because San Francisco's cityscape reminded them of the freedom they
had lost.
George DeVincenzi, a guard at Alcatraz from 1950 to 1957, said the
proximity of the California culture drove prisoners nearly insane.
"Yachts circled the island, and men on the third tier of C and B blocks
could see girls in bikinis drinking cocktails," he said. "It was so
near, and yet so far."

The mind games got crueler.
"After dark, it got colder and danker," DeVincenzi said. "You could hear
the bellow of the fog horns. It was a lonely, sometimes scary sound,
even for the murderers among us."
Eight people were killed by inmates at Alcatraz. One guard was murdered
in an assault in the prison's laundry room in the 1930s, and two died
during an attempted breakout in 1946. Five inmates were killed in random
attacks. Five other prisoners committed suicide.

'Pinched on the butt'
Years after the prison shut its doors, the island's sense of seclusion
remains. Until cell phones, night watchmen relied on a ship-to-shore
phone to reach the mainland.
Erik Novencido worked the island night shift for 10 years. The worst
part was walking inside the electroshock therapy room. Once he took a
picture at night to show friends. When he developed the film, he says,
the snapshot showed a face in the room staring back at him.
He never figured out what it was.

"Sometimes I was just overwhelmed by fear," he said. "The rangers told
me stories about the things that happened here. And I'd say, 'Keep that
to yourself. I've got my sanity to keep.'?"
Veteran park ranger Craig Glassner has been afraid even during the day.
"Once on an isolated spot I heard this 'whooooo, whooooo,' like someone
blowing on a big Coke bottle," he said. "I thought, 'Do I run?' Then I
saw it was the wind blowing across the stanchions of a fence. It really
freaked me out."

Mary McClure, who spent 12 years working nights on Alcatraz, preferred
the isolation.
"It was the standard fantasy of being alone on an island," she said.
Even so, there were strange events.
"Many times, at night in the cell house, I had the distinct sensation of
being pinched on the butt," said McClure, 52, a former paramedic. "It
happened with great regularity. I have no explanation for it, and I
don't talk to people about it, because I know it makes me sound crazy."

John Banner, 83, spent four years as an inmate here in the 1950s. He
still recalls the squeal of the wind at night.
"Laying awake, listening to that wind, trying to hold on to what sanity
I had left, I always thought of the brutality of that prison," said the
convicted bank robber, who lives in Arizona.

The stuff of crime photos
When darkness comes, you don't leave Alcatraz; you flee. A ranger hands
Johnson the keys to the island ? hurrying toward a ferry that whisks
away the last of the day's 5,000 visitors.
Johnson stands amid the seagulls. The big birds are everywhere, lined up
on walls, circling like vultures. They make him uneasy.
"It's like they're watching me, to see if I'm going to crack," he says,
"like in that Alfred Hitchcock film, 'The Birds.'?"
He makes a sweep for any tourist stragglers and settles in for the long
night.
Johnson's father was a prison guard in upstate New York. He has the job
in his blood. But Alcatraz is different.

The last rays of sun gone, the island fortress becomes a grim, humorless
place, the stuff of black-and-white 1950s crime photos. Johnson plays
upbeat music on his iPod.
He earns overtime pay for his 18-hour shifts (3 p.m. to 9 a.m.), but
sometimes, in the dead of night, he says, "it seems like blood money."
At 8 p.m., his radio squawking with park police chatter, Johnson winds
his way up a switchback as birds dive-bomb from ledges. The cell house
looms like a haunted castle.
He walks cellblock rows that inmates nicknamed Broadway, Sunset Alley
and Seedy Street. He enters a solitary cell, its heavy iron door
creaking. The tiny quarters remain perfectly black even after his eyes
grow accustomed to the space.

He stops at the cell of Frank Lee Morris, whose daring breakout was
immortalized in the film "Escape from Alcatraz." Morris and two others
left dummy heads fashioned out of soap and toilet paper inside their
cells. The idea was to fool guards while they left through holes
chiseled in cell walls.
Johnson looks at a model of one fake head left in the cell as a tourist
display. He knows how the men felt: "Ten years here? I'd go crazy before
that."

By dawn, the night watchman is weary of the Rock. Passing the keys to a
ranger, he makes his own escape from Alcatraz, the sun on his face.