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They say that ghosts inhabit Alcatraz, or perhaps it is just cursed.

In the waning years of the 19th Century, the US military imprisoned a group of Hopi Native Americans on Alcatraz due to their refusal to get along to go along with the country’s final westward push toward Manifest Destiny.

A generation later later, members of the Hutterite faith, a religious group committed to absolute pacifism as expressed by the teachings of Jesus Christ, also found themselves behind the bars of Alcatraz due to their refusal to participate in the draft of the World War One-era.

Once Alcatraz shut down as a prison in 1963, a political and civil rights movement calling itself Red Power overtook the island, and found its leader in the charismatic Richard Oakes. During the Native American occupation of Alcatraz, Oakes’s teenage daughter died after a tragic accident on the island. Oakes left Alcatraz, though he continued to organize protests advocating for Native American issues. He would be fatally shot by a white man in northern California. Oakes was thirty at the time of his death.

They say that ghosts inhabit Alcatraz, or perhaps it is just cursed.

If Alcatraz is indeed cursed, perhaps this curse has a statute of limitations.

As of this writing, Alcatraz has been a national park for fifty-plus years, a longer stretch of time than its duration as a federal prison.

San Francisco experiences a marine climate where the overall spectrum of weather options throughout the year doesn’t fluctuate much. But time can be measured on Alcatraz by the bird migrations. Spring marks a panoply of birds arriving: cormorants, peregrine falcons, egrets, herons, geese, and sea gulls.

Summer is hatching time where the baby sea gulls announce themselves with squeaks and they look like they were birthed from the ’80s video game, Q-Bert.

In the autumn the birds evaporate seemingly overnight as if they’re obeying the orders of an offstage director. The birds depart but leave a legacy of bones and flies; enough flies to make the island feel like a three-day old battlefield.

Then come the winter rains, the one distinct element of an otherwise monotonous weather year, but as the rains arrive, the flies depart, and the cycle will repeat.

Visitors from around the world arrive daily, too. Whereas Alcatraz was once an isolated Siberia cast off within viewing distance of a major city, Alcatraz in the present serves as a magnet for international crowds. In the course of ten minutes, ten different languages can be heard within its corridors.

The Alcatraz staff are American, but many claim different countries as their place of birth: the Philippines, El Salvador, Poland, Nepal, Colombia, the United Kingdom, Vietnam, and South Korea. Thousands of visitors arrive daily, and the Alcatraz staff make the whole process work smoothly. At the end of the day everyone marches down the same hill and gets on the same boat to go back to the mainland. No one here brokered any grand peace accords, but an Alcatraz ranger helped a French couple locate their missing child, a staff person reminisced with some Canadians about a long-ago trip to Toronto, and a different staff person practiced their faltering Japanese slang with a different set of visitors.

The staff punched out, marched down the hill into the angled sunlight, and the Alcatraz migrations will repeat the next day.

They say that ghosts inhabit Alcatraz, or perhaps it is just cursed.

Perhaps this curse has a statute of limitations.

-Brian Stannard