Two more entries from Life on haunted places ahead of Halloween.
The first is on the Dakota apartment building in Central Park West, Manhattan, New York City. It’s where John Lennon and Yoko Ono moved in in 1973 and knew the building was rumored to be haunted. The building was completed in 1884 for Singer Sewing Machine president Edward Clark in a part of the city that was then rural (it is hard to believe now). It is a German Renaissance construction. Lennon was murdered there in 1980, and Ono still lives there. I don’t really know why Lennon’s assassin killed him, but I think Lennon was doing so much heroin that he didn’t understand death threats about his atheism/egotism were serious. The building is also the differently named site of the 1967 novel Rosemary’s Baby, a place where “canabalism, witchcraft, satanism, and murder” occur. Supposedly, elevators in the building move on their own, footsteps are heard mysteriously (see Beckett’s Footfalls), rumblings are heard in the walls, “and the past seems to coexist with the present.” The building’s basement seems to be the source of many of its problems, which is called “kind of creepy.”
The other entry is for the “paranormal prison” of Alcatraz, where in 1946 six prisoners overpowered guards on the the island in San Francisco Bay. Over the next two days, two prison officers were killed and 18 injured; three prisoners were killed. A reporter about the incident spoke of a “tremendous feeling of anger” there from the place where three men from the attempted outbreak died. Men in the prison were called “The Incorrigibles,” and it was said if you even step on their toes, a death results. Al Capone spent time in the Alcatraz prison before retiring to Florida to die insane before reaching 50. The island continues to have a reputation of being “haunted.”
Two thoughts. I am a bit surprised the entry doesn’t mention the 1979 film based on a non-fiction book, Escape from Alcatraz, about a 1962 prison break that appeared to have actually worked. Three men got out. Sometimes imprisoned people don’t deserve their punishment. The other is that Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot was very popular when performed in San Quentin prison in California. Institutionalized people aren’t necessarily stupid. Sometimes they are paying for sins of people in the outside world.