Prison Bound
I spent last night on Alcatraz.
I was hoping for some major paranormal activity. But nothing could have prepared me for this:
A bunch of us decided to sleep in D Block. I was in cell 17. D Block is said to be the most haunted place in the prison — probably because cells 9-14 were for solitary confinement, and they're nicknamed The Hole. Robert "Birdman" Stroud used to sleep in cell 42. Hey...isn't 42 the answer to the ultimate question?
When we went into Birdman's cell one of the lights started to make this weird buzzing sound...like a bug was trapped in it.
I fell asleep around 11:30 — and slept soundly until about 2:00 am when I woke from a nightmare that Al Capone (maybe he was mad that I went into his cell and sat on his toilet) was standing over me. Fell back asleep until 3:45 when three of us needed to make a bathroom run.
The bathrooms are outside of the main prison, next to the crumbling warden's house. While waiting near the bathroom, I heard a dog barking. But there were no dogs on the island. And it was not a seagull that sounded like a dog. But that barking would explain the animal tracks I discovered at 6:30 this morning in the isolation ward of the hospital.
Why was I awake so early, you ask? At 5:45 my nose detected coffee! Brilliant, I thought. Someone actually got up before me and made a pot of coffee. I sat up, swung my feet off my cot, slipped into my adidas, stepped out of my cell and quietly (so I wouldn't disturb the other prisoners) headed down the stairs, turned left, walked passed the Hole and into the library. It was then I realized that I could no longer smell coffee. I also realized that even if someone had made coffee in the staff break room, that smell would not have traveled all the way to D Block.
Ah, those wily Alcatraz spirits. It made me smile, and to no one in particular (as every other sane person in the prison was still sleeping) I said, “Nice trick, guys.”
Then I got my camera, went outside to watch the sun rise over San Francisco, and spent the next hour wandering the prison in my pajamas.
