In culture after culture, people believe that the soul lives on after death, that rituals can change the physical world and divine the truth, and that illness and misfortune are caused and alleviated by spirits, ghosts, saints ... and gods.

STEVEN PINKER, How the Mind Works


Friday, January 27, 2012

Heayweights of the Paranormal - Alcatraz Island


San Francisco has many a said haunted location from buildings to cemeteries and the most famous hot spot of mystery is Alcatraz Prison. The now closed prison the ghosts are not so quiet, sounds of ghostly footsteps and the real sounds of cell doors opening and closing also echo throughout the empty haunted corridors. Visitors, Tour guides, and paranormal investigators and workers have all reported feeling many localized "cold haunted ghost spots" in certain common areas, and the feeling that they are not alone.

The prison on Alcatraz Island, a lonely outcropping in the middle of San Francisco Bay, was opened in 1933 as a maximum-security facility for America's most dangerous criminals. Among its most celebrated internees were Chicago crime boss Al Capone and Robert "Birdman" Stroud. Life on Alcatraz was hard: Inmates were lucky to spend one hour a day outside their cells, and those so favored usually spent the time breaking rocks.

 Violating prison rules could mean months of solitary confinement, sometimes in the Hole, a tiny cell with no light. The prison was shut down in 1963, and Alcatraz Island became a national park site. But the building still stands, and some of the poor souls that served time and died there seem to be locked forever behind its dank walls.

Several visitors have reported hearing moans, agonized cries and chains rattling in cell blocks A, B, and particularly C. A psychic who visited the site claimed to identify the unruly spirit of a man named Butcher inhabiting the place. Prison records confirm that Abie Maldowitz, a mob hit man nicknamed Butcher, was killed by a fellow inmate in the laundry area of cell block C. The D cell block is supposedly haunted as well, with visitors reporting cold spots and the sound of phantom banjo music coming from rooms that once housed Al Capone.

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