Sightings - Ghosts of Alcatraz: California, 1959
Episode Date: March 24, 2025On the notorious island that no one can escape, one inmate is about to discover that some prison sentences truly do last forever. Sightings is a REVERB and QCODE Original. Find us on instagram @sight...ingspod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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There's perhaps no prison more infamous than Alcatraz, the rocky island in the cold
waters of the San Francisco Bay.
It's a place steeped in history and suffering, but what if the walls that held America's
most dangerous criminals now harbor something far more sinister?
Sometimes the most dangerous inmates aren't the ones who served their time.
They're the ones who never left at all.
Welcome to Sightings, the series that takes you
inside the world's most mysterious supernatural events.
Each week we bring you a thrilling story
that puts you at the center of the action,
followed by a discussion that dives into the accounts
that inspired the story and our takes on them.
I'm McCloud.
And I'm Brian, and today we're heading to the Rock itself.
What terrifying mysteries lurk within its rocky shores?
One unsuspecting prisoner is about to learn for himself.
Find out how on this episode of Sightings. My name's Lee Filson.
I'm 43 years old and I've been in Alcatraz for 6 years, 8 months and 17 days.
Not that I'm counting or anything.
When I first got sent here in 53,
I figured I could handle it.
I'd done time in hard places, sure, but nothing like this.
Because this isn't just a prison.
It's a concrete tomb.
Of course, they don't tell you that when you first arrive,
but I could feel it right away.
The moment I got off the boat, this weight pressing down on me like the whole island
was trying to swallow me whole.
I think the seagulls felt it too, screeching non-stop like tortured souls as guards marched
me up the hill in shackles.
Then they stripped me down, hosed me off, and tossed me in my cell.
Yeah, welcome to the Rock.
I figure just about everybody says this, but I used to be somebody, you know?
Had a life running numbers back in Detroit, and for good money too.
At least until the Feds got wise and set me up.
So next thing I knew, I was looking at 20
for tax evasion of all things.
But that feels like ancient history now.
I still remember my first night here.
My cell was so small I could touch both walls
with my arms outstretched.
Everything was damp from the bay air
and there was this smell, not just normal prison smell but
something older deader but the worst part was the sounds see sound does
strange things on Alcatraz the walls are so thick they swallow most noise but
then there's the other sounds sounds that shouldn't be there at all sounds
that almost feel alive.
You'll be lying in your bunk at night and suddenly hear footsteps when there's no one walking.
Or voices having conversations that make no sense.
The guards say it's just the way sound carries from the city across the water.
But I've been here long enough now to know better.
Because this place...
It wears you down.
Makes you just another number in a jumpsuit.
Another ghost walking these cold halls.
And speaking of ghosts...
You know, I can't believe I just said that.
I never used to believe in that kind of thing.
But after six years...
Yep, after six years things changed, I guess.
And for me...
It happened in the hole.
That's what we call solitary. These windowless cells under D block where they put you when you act up.
These windowless cells under D-block where they'd put you when you agged up. No bed, no light, just you in the dark and the cold, seeping up through the concrete floor.
And yeah, a guard made a crack about my mother and I lost it.
So there I was in cell 14-D.
Worst of the bunch, they say.
And I quickly realized why because well something's
down there something not human look I know how that sounds but I was alone in
that pitch-black cell when I felt those icy fingers on the back of my neck and
when I was trying to sleep I heard whispers, words I couldn't
quite make out. And then I woke up to this feeling, this absolute terrifying certainty
that something was in there with me, right next to me, breathing on me. I screamed until
the guards came, told them I was having an appendicitis attack. They took me to the hospital
wing, realized I was lying, so
they sent me back down there but to a different cell, thank God. After that I
knew I had to get out of here. Out for good. And that's where Jackie G came in.
Jackie was doing 25 to life for armed robbery, but he wasn't your typical con. Used to be an engineer before
he went bad, and he knows things, notices things. Like the fact that the bars and block B were
corroding from the salt air, or that guard Matheson always took an extra five minutes for his smoke
break on Tuesdays. So we started talking during yard time,
careful like, and Jackie told me he had a way past the locks, the guards, the walls,
all of it. A way off the island for good. All he needed was time to work out the
details. I of course reminded him that nobody escapes Alcatraz. And you know what Jackie
said? That's just cause no one's done it yet.
Of course we both knew about the 46 attempt. Coy, Kretzer and Hubbard were the prisoners
names. They had it all planned out. Take control of a cell block, get to the recreation yard,
over the fence, down to the water, but they couldn't
find the key to the yard door.
They held that block three days before the Marines were called in, and they fled to a
utility corridor where instead of freedom, they got grenades.
Some say you can still hear them in the corridor at night.
They say they're trapped there, forever trying to escape.
Jackie laid out the plan over a few weeks. He analyzed guard routines, the timing of
lighthouse sweeps, all of it. And he said we'd need tools, spoons from the mess hall,
sharpened to cut through the mortar surrounding the ventilation shaft behind my cell. Then, well, we just needed the time to pull it off.
Two months of chipping away, hiding our work, finding a way into the utility quarter,
the same one where Coy and the others died.
And after that, a drainpipe led straight to the bay, and then we'd swim like hell.
Even though I knew the water would be cold,
I'd been on the swim team in high school,
one of the few straight things I ever did.
And despite the currents, I knew I could make it to shore.
So that was the plan.
And until last night, the whole thing went off
without a hitch.
I was in my cell as usual,
running the timeline through in my head.
I closed my eyes, tried to sleep.
When I felt it again, that same feeling I'd had in the hole.
Presence.
My eyes shot open, but there was nothing in my cell.
Nothing but me in an unusual chill I couldn't quite put my finger on. But eventually the cold receded, and it drifted off into sleep.
Into nightmare.
I'm running through D-Block.
Alarms blaring, lights flashing.
The escape is on, somehow, but something's wrong.
Jackie's not with me.
I'm all alone, desperately searching for a way out,
as guards shout all around me.
I'm cornered, and the only escape route is down,
down to the hole.
I take the stairs two at a time, plunging into darkness.
But as I reach the bottom, that feeling hits me again.
That feeling, I'm not alone.
And sure enough, down at the far end of the pitch-black
corridor, two cold blue eyes gleam in the dark, and I can hear whatever it is dragging itself
along the floor, its breath rattling as it gets closer, closer. I screamed. In the dream, I screamed until
my throat was raw. Until I woke myself up. Except I wasn't the only one
screaming. The cell block was in chaos and somewhere down the row a man was
screaming in complete unhinged terror. The scream of a voice I'd know anywhere.
It was Jackie, and he was going on about eyes in the dark, about someone watching him, and
the guards were trying to talk him down, but he was hysterical.
Soon enough they dragged him away to the hospital wing, and he was still screaming until those
big iron doors closed behind him and the block went eerily quiet.
And just like that, our perfect plan was shot to hell.
But I couldn't stay here another night.
Couldn't risk another trip to the hole.
Couldn't risk facing whatever had scared Jackie so bad.
So I decided I was going.
Come hell or high water.
Because if I could just get out of here, just reach the bay, I could make it.
Little did I know I wouldn't be getting off this island as easily as I thought.
In this prison I thought I knew...
It was about to get a whole lot worse.
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I decided to make my move come Nightfall.
I still had the sharpened spoons we'd been using to chip away at the mortar.
Still knew the route we'd mapped out.
The only thing I didn't have was Jackie's perfect timing.
I'd have to wing that part.
So after lights out, I waited until Brenner made his rounds.
Brenner was like clockwork.
Down the block at 9.15, back at his station by 9.20.
And the moment his footsteps faded, I slipped the last bit of mortar away from the vent cover and pulled it free.
The open was small, barely big enough for a grown man, but I squeezed through, feeling the rough edges scrape against my jumpsuit,
and lowered myself into the narrow space between the walls.
It was pitch black in there, and the smell, musty, decayed with a hint of something metallic.
I thought of blood, but pushed it away and started inching forward, using my memory of
Jackie's map to guide me.
The space widened after about twenty feet, opening into a maintenance tunnel that ran
beneath D-Block.
I could stand up, which was a relief, and I was sweating despite
the cold, worried the guards could hear my every move, every heartbeat. But there was
no alarm, no shouts, just the distant hum of generators and the steady drip of water
from somewhere ahead. So I followed the tunnel, counting my steps in the dark just like Jackie taught me, left at fifty,
right at thirty more, moving ever closer to the utility corridor, the same one where Coy,
Kretzer and Hubbard met their end. The ancient door was heavier than I expected, but it gave
way with the low groan that froze me in place. I waited, listening for any sign that someone had heard,
but there was still nothing.
The corridor was narrow but tall,
with pipes running along the ceiling and walls.
I just needed to follow it to the end,
where a drainage pipe would lead straight to the water.
So I moved quickly, counting my steps again,
and as I neared the spot in the dark I started
feeling for the opening.
But there was nothing.
No pipe.
No hole.
Nothing.
I felt along the wall more carefully, thinking I'd miscounted.
Still nothing.
Panic rising, I pulled out my contraband match and struck it against the wall, and the sudden
flare of light showed me what Jackie couldn't have known.
Where there should have been a pipe, there was now solid metal,
a circular outline sealed with fresh welds.
The match burned down to my fingers, and I dropped it with a curse.
This couldn't be happening.
Jackie had sworn the pipe was open, had mapped it even.
And of course that's when I heard it.
The distinct sound of a siren wailing across the island.
They knew I was gone.
They were looking for me.
And I was trapped in a dead end.
I've been in here for half an hour now and the walls feel like they're getting closer by the minute.
The alarms are still blaring, of course, but...
But it's not the usual bells.
I don't know, it feels like the whole prison is howling.
I can hear the guards boots all around me running, searching. And those damned seagulls, screaming now more than ever.
Enough to drive you mad.
I know I have nowhere to go.
No option other than to retreat back through my cell, and I'm sure they'll find their
way in soon enough.
If not via my route route then with brute force
Yeah, and there it is the sound of an arc welder
They're trying to cut through the wall
It sounds like screaming or or maybe it's just those seagulls still I I don't know it's hard to tell everything just
echoes wrong in here
No, I know I should run, hide, anything.
But I can't stop staring at the wall.
In the dim light I can make out these marks.
They look like bullet holes, but too big.
Almost like something exploded in here.
Like grenades.
There's other marks too, long scratches in the concrete, like someone tried to claw their
way out of here.
If I didn't know better, I'd say they look fresh, but that's impossible.
No prisoner's been here since 46, right?
Damn, I screwed this up good, didn't I?
When they find me, they'll drag me to the hole and forget me until I go crazy like Jackie.
And maybe that's what I deserve.
Maybe that's what this whole place is, just one big hole they throw bad men into and forget
about.
Wait, wait, I've still got one of those sharpened spoons in my pocket, and I'm wondering if
I can use it.
On the guards?
Or no?
On myself?
Yeah.
Yeah, just one sharp jab to the throat should do.
I can't, because every time I reach for it, I feel those icy fingers on the back of my neck again. I feel that breath that isn't breath at all.
on the back of my neck again. I feel that breath that isn't breath at all.
The corridor's gone quiet.
I can't hear the guards anymore.
Or the welder, or the birds.
It's like someone threw a switch and turned off the world.
No sound at all.
Except...
Wait. There it is. No sound at all. Except... Wait...
There it is.
That dragging...
The one from my dream...
It's getting closer.
What is that?
Whispers...
Forming words I still can't quite make out, but they're clearer now.
Closer.
The temperature has dropped so low I can see my breath.
No, not my breath.
Cause I'm holding it.
I know what's behind me.
Know what I'll see if I turn around?
Those cold blue eyes, floating in the dark.
The eyes of men who tried to escape and failed.
Men trapped here forever.
Just like I'm about to be.
The whispers are words now.
Clear as day.
And they're saying my name.
Over and over.
Calling me to join them.
Promising me that the pain will stop if I just give in.
That I'll never have to go back to the hole.
Never have to feel alone again.
Maybe they're right.
Maybe this is where I belonged all along.
Oh, God.
It's right there.
Right behind me.
I can feel it reaching for it.
Sightings will be back just after this.
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Just like that. Welcome to the rock.
You had to go there.
I had to go there.
Welcome back, everybody.
Alcatraz, so cool.
Because I'm, Brian, I'm, you know, I'm familiar with the notion.
I've never been to Alcatraz.
Have you? I have. I have. You have?'m, you know, I'm familiar with the notion, I've never been to Alcatraz.
Have you?
I have.
I have.
I have.
A couple of times, actually.
It's a really cool place to visit if you haven't been.
It's kind of, and it's also kind of terrifyingly creepy.
So did you feel the vibes like this guy was feeling?
Well, not as much because it's all been a little bit poly.
You know, it's kind of hard to feel those vibes when you're surrounded by tourists,
rather than being a prisoner alone in a cell kind of thing.
But I think the whole atmosphere of the island is just creepy in the sense that it's in the
middle of the bay.
There's almost always fog obscuring part of the island.
So that naturally gives us super creepy vibe.
Kind of creepy vibe, yeah.
It's also just rocky and there's not ornamentation and it's not a pretty island by any means.
And then the buildings, a lot of them are kind of dilapidated and falling apart and
stuff like that.
And it sounds like a lot of them were dilapidated and falling apart back in the 30s too when
the island became a federal penitentiary.
Before that, there's a whole history of the island that we can get into.
But yeah, it just seems like a natural place to have creepy ghost stories
flying around.
And the sounds, was your experience, did it have an odd sound to it?
No, not as much as it was portrayed in the, I think the reason why was I had a headset
on the entire time because it's like a guided audio tour kind of thing.
Gotcha.
Interesting thing about the birds, I brought a lot about the birds squealing and things like that.
You know, Alcatraz means island of the pelicans.
Oh.
Ironically, it's not pelicans on the island.
That was almost all seagulls.
But they make a lot of noise.
So I think that's kind of a fun, fun little thing.
Okay.
Well, so anyway, I've, you know, I've probably like a lot of our listeners heard stories
about Alcatraz being famously haunted
and about it being super difficult to escape and that supposedly maybe only one person
ever did it, allegedly?
Three people did vanish.
Three people vanished.
Yeah.
So they did, but they were never seen again, so it is presumed that they just drown in
the bay.
Right. It is notoriously difficult to swim those currents, correct?
Well, it's the currents and the cold. That water is freezing. So I don't feel great for
the prospects of our main character here. Even if he had gotten out.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. So my question for you is,
our man here, is this a specific tale?
Is this like a known ghost, like escape attempt,
or is this kind of called together
from the generalized Alcatraziness?
It's kind of a ladder.
Yeah, it's kind of a patchwork of things that are known or legends
of Alcatraz all kind of patched together.
Gotcha.
The idea of the way he was trying to escape, that's a real thing. Like the idea that there
was the mention in the story about the three people who tried to escape, went down this
utility corridor and got grenade by Marines, that happened.
That was in the 1940s, that escape attempt went real bad.
Yeah.
And the idea that there are ghosts and hearing voices and feeling things,
especially in those in the hole, that's all allegedly true.
But again, Alcatraz is kind of unique because a lot,
unlike some other haunted house stories we've done,
there's not one like ghost necessarily.
Right, there's not like the, oh,
like the ghost that does this all the time.
Yeah, but I think it kind of speaks to just the nature
of prisons in general and that there are these places
of kind of misfortune and being stuck.
And deprivation.
Exactly, and I feel like a lot of these prisoners
have unfinished business in life and probably in
death.
And it's kind of interesting when we go into some of the ghosts, some of the people who
are purported to haunt Alcatraz did not die on Alcatraz Island.
And yet they are still purported to have a presence there.
Oh, well, I can't wait to hear about that.
So before the ghosts or maybe including the ghosts,, like can you tell me a little bit about
the history of Alcatraz?
Has this always been a site of paranormal activity?
I don't know about paranormal.
It was always a spooky place, it seems like.
So you know, the island was quote unquote discovered in the 16th century by the Spaniards.
Of course, that's not taking into account the Native Americans who were already there.
And they knew about Alcatraz Island and did not go near it.
They considered it to be a place of evil spirits,
so to speak.
So it did always have spooky vibes.
Vibes, I think, rather than actual activity per se.
But yeah, it definitely scared the Native Americans,
it seemed like.
And as settlers came in and it started changing hands,
it changed hands a lot with the United States and the Spaniards and all that kind of stuff.
But by the 1850s, it had become a fortress basically.
It was the first, had the first lighthouse on the West Coast.
And it eventually, after the Civil War, became a more of a military prison situation.
And even during the Civil War, there were Civil War prisoners who were kept on Alcatraz.
But it didn't really become a prison per se.
It was more of a fortress until the 1870s.
I'm most familiar, I guess, with Alcatraz being like a federal prison.
Like, didn't they have some really famous prisoners?
Like, was Al Capone there, I think?
Al Capone was there, yeah. So in 1934, it became a U.S. penitentiary.
And that was basically because I guess the state or whoever was controlling it before
that couldn't handle the upkeep anymore.
So the feds took it over and it basically kind of served the dual purpose of being a
place that we could put our worst public enemies,
but also because it was such a scary place, kind of like a warning to criminals like don't
mess around with the US government right now.
This was right after the depression.
There was kind of a new class of criminals, kind of like organized crime-wise.
The bootleggers.
Yeah, bootleggers, organized crime, tax evaders, things like that.
It was the era of like these big, big gangsters
that the government was always trying to bring down.
And like you said, Al Capone was at Alcatraz for a while
before eventually being released.
But when it was a federal penitentiary,
it was the worst of the worst federal penitentiaries.
They made that thing as tight and sealed up as possible.
They cemented over old utility tunnels. They
built guard towers all over the place. They made tool-proof window coverings. There was
no way off this island, even though many, many people tried.
My goodness. What did you have to do to warrant being imprisoned here?
Well, Al Capone was technically in prison for tax evasion because that's all they could
pin him on.
Right, one of those things where they're just like,
we'll find something.
Another famous prisoner was known
as the Birdman of Alcatraz.
And that's mainly because before he came to Alcatraz,
when he was in prison in Leavenworth,
he took up ornithology and started writing books
about birds, even though he seemed like to be
kind of a charlatan and a guy who could just
re-synthesize information and make it sound like it was from his own...
Observations.
Yeah, exactly. But he went into prison originally for murdering somebody. Right before he was
supposed to get out of Leavenworth, he murdered a guard, and then he got sent to Alcatraz.
Yeah.
So he ended up getting released and died a free man, it sounds like.
Oh, he got released?
Interesting.
Yeah.
But he's also now theoretically a ghost of Alcatraz in that people can hear him whistling
or attempting to communicate with birds from beyond the grave.
Huh.
But that's so bizarre.
So we mentioned this earlier. Let's, like, let's visit this notion of people,
people dying off the island, returning to Haunted.
Al Capone's another one.
Really?
Al Capone was arrested in 1931.
Eventually, he was moved to Alcatraz.
He was released in 1947.
And, but while he was at Alcatraz, he was kind of a model prisoner, actually.
But he was released and then died in 1947 as a free man.
But people still hear him.
Apparently something he did in prison was he had a banjo
and people still hear a disembodied banjo playing
in the shower room in one of the cell blocks.
So besides those two people who didn't actually die on the island,
there's lots of other people who have died on Alcatraz.
A lot of Civil War soldiers. And that seems to be kind of the brunt of the hauntings.
There are probably a lot of these earlier prisoners.
You know, interestingly, what's happening for me is kind of almost in part because this story is an amalgamation,
an aggregate story.
There's something that rings true to me,
whether it's necessarily real ghosts or kind of more of a metaphor.
Like this story feels true.
Even if it's not a true story,
it has a truth to it.
And in part, it's ghost, in part, it's the nature of, you know,
sensory deprivation and of psychosis and of desperation.
I feel like the psychosis part is what really kind of stuck out to me
because there's definitely a mental component to what I was imagining for this character.
And I imagine for a lot of the prisoners on this island,
it's a mental game trying to survive.
Yeah. And I don't doubt the experience of these men in the whole,
feeling these ghost touches or these like hearing these breathy things.
Because I think when the mind is deprived of stimulus, it creates.
Yeah, I can only imagine what it was like hallucinating or just letting your brain kind
of take over and try and fill that darkness and emptiness with stimulus of some kind or
paranoia of some kind. But what's kind of interesting about the whole in particular
is that modern day visitors to the island have seen weird things down
there and felt icy fingers on the back of their necks and things like that too.
And then another location that's really popular for paranormal activity is the laundry room.
People have seen kind of like a smoke in there, almost like there's a fire.
But then when they investigate, it kind of just vanishes.
There's whispers that people hear, people hear footsteps.
There's even rumors that before the current lighthouse, there was apparently another lighthouse
on the island and people have seen that second lighthouse.
Even though it no longer exists.
So is it calling Tormented Souls home or something?
I don't know.
Very trippy.
Very trippy.
I believe I'm a believer beaver on this one in that there's something happening on Alcatraz.
What do you think, McLeod? I'm a believer, Beaver, that there's something happening and in the kind of metaphorical
imprint that horrible things happening can have on a space.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
So, listeners, tell us what you think.
Hit us up on Instagram, AppSightingsPod, or drop us a line on comments on Spotify.
That'd be awesome.
So, Brian, break me out of this cage.
Let's escape this prison and get on to the next
supernatural event.
What you got for me?
Well, we're gonna have several supernatural events
because it's another listener story.
That's right.
We're gonna dive into three awesome new listener stories.
Keep them coming, everyone.
They are awesome.
We love them.
They're creeping me out all the time.
So I am excited to share three of our favorites.
So come back same time, same place next week,
and check them out.
Looking forward to it.
Sightings is hosted by McLeod, Andrews, and Brian Sigley.
Produced by Brian Sigley, Chase Kinzer, and McLeod, Andrewsod, Anders and Brian Sigley. Produced by Brian Sigley, Chase Kinzer and McLeod, Anders.
Written by Brian Sigley.
Story music by Madison James Smith.
Series music by Mitch Bain.
Mixing and mastering by Pat Kickleiter of Sundial Media.
Artwork by Nuno Cernatus.
For a list of this episode's sources,
check out our website at sightingspodcast.com.
Sightings is presented by Reverb and Q-Code.
If you like the show,
be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform
so you're first to hear new episodes every week.
And if you know other Supernatural fans,
tell them about us.
We'd really appreciate it.