As much as I believe in ghosts and have had experiences throughout my entire life, I'll be honest... When my family and I got to Alcatraz in the middle of the day during our vacation to San Francisco, I didn't expect much of anything to happen. Especially not since it was absolutely swarming with people, being the 75th anniversary of the prison (at least I think, they had posters mentioning this when we walked in and were selling shirts saying as much), and you really couldn't go anywhere and be alone in the entire complex-inside or out. That was fine by me though, I was just excited to get a chance to explore the buildings and island, and as much of a paranormal enthusiast as I am, it didn't really bother me to think that I might not have any sort of ghostly encounter there.
Obviously since I'm telling my story here, I was wrong in my doubting. But, what happened on that vacation was something I was happy to experience no matter the fact it definitely creeped me out in the moment, mostly because I have always wanted to visit this prison and it was a great memory, better than any other souvenir I could have bought at the gift store.
Things went pretty much as expected for a while. We decided to take the self-guided audio tour and look around, like everybody else was doing. As usual I was going ahead of my family, since my parents and brother had my little sister with them, and my grandmother was stopping every few minutes to take a ton of pictures for memories. At one point I got far enough ahead of them that I decided to wait, and I really wish I had been paying attention to which cell block I was at so that I could look up more stories and history of the prison to see if anybody else had the same experience, but I leaned up against one of the cells in a block that had less people than the others, to wait for the rest of my family to catch up.
While I was there I felt something grab onto the back of my coat with enough force to pull the back of my bra strap with it. Followed by a low, husky male voice saying "Hey". The voice was actually pretty loud and that, combined with my bra strap pulling away from then snapping back against my skin, startled me enough to jump away from the cell and spin around to look. Nothing was there, of course. The pulling and voice weren't really malicious or suggestive in any way, it seemed and felt more like somebody trying to get my attention... But it sure surprised me. And then after it, I thought that was just the coolest thing ever and was overjoyed to have gotten a paranormal experience my first time at Alcatraz, since it's so far away from where I live.
I really wish I could share this experience with my family, but my father is a huuuuge skeptic, my brother doesn't have any interest in the paranormal after telling my parents of his own experiences and having my father telling him to stop being so ridiculous, my mother believes but pretend she doesn't in my dad's presence... And my grandmother, I'm not sure. I know she's experienced things, but she also gets really preachy on the matter sometimes. So I'm eternally grateful a site like this exists, where I can share my stories with like minded people, and/or skeptics who are a bit more open minded than my family.
I'm really curious if anybody else had something happen at Alcatraz that was similar to my experience, though. If you have, please tell me!