10 Haunted Houses That Have Murdered People

1. Nobody Escapes From Alcatraz

Nowadays Alcatraz is best known as a tourist attraction, or the setting for that Michael Bay film The Rock (obligatory YTMND nod). But when it was in operation it was one of the most formidable, barbaric federal prisons in the United States - which, by the standards of the American justice system, is saying something. In a time before widespread reporting on abusive guards and the like, though, Alcatraz was hell.

One of the many dehumanising practices the island - which, remember, was literally cut off from the outside world by a huge body of water - was its equivalent of solitary confinement. Putting someone in a tiny room with no light or human contact for weeks at a time wasn't enough for Alcatraz. They had The Hole.

It was solitary confinement by a factor of ten, with inmates sent their for minor infractions for weeks, forced to sleep without a mattress in pitch black. Many died there. Some from vicious beatings from the guards, but just as many died under mysterious circumstances - reported as suicides or heart attacks, usually, but often they were preceded by the inmate screaming at somebody who wasn't there, clearly terrified out of their skulls.

Did the isolation get to them? Or is it the alternate explanation: that sitting in the dark, in a room where countless had died before them, they were tormented as much by loneliness as they were by a restless spirit, suggesting the prisoner take the same way out as them...