Alcatraz tickets and tours

Officially, nobody ever escaped from Alcatraz. Unofficially, many people believe that Frank Lee Morris – a lifetime criminal – achieved the impossible in 1962 after two years as a prisoner at Alcatraz. His amazing story was made into the famous 1979 Clint Eastwood movie Escape from Alcatraz.

Morris had already escaped from a number of prisons when he arrived on The Rock in 1960. With a few other convicts, he began to collect materials to make tools that would be used to dig into the prison’s ventilation system. The group also fabricated rafts from raincoats, lifelike dummies, and even an electric drill from a vacuum cleaner motor.

On the day of the escape, Morris’s group emerged from a vent on the roof and climbed down a pipe. Nobody saw any of them again. Some say that the men drowned in the cold waters of San Francisco Bay, though no bodies were definitively identified. A ship did report seeing a corpse wearing prison-style clothing, but this emerged only months later and the FBI concluded that the escape attempt had failed.