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.
Over the years, Alcatraz was the dreaded last stop for 1,576 murderers, mobsters, 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.
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.”
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 this month.
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.”‘
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.”‘
