Petrified wood curse is a phenomenon often associated with superstitions and folklore, especially in cultures that have a strong belief in supernatural elements and the power of curses. Petrified wood, which is a fossilized form of wood, is believed by some to possess cursed energy or negative spiritual vibrations. According to the belief, when a person comes into contact with petrified wood that is cursed, they may experience a series of unfortunate events or a string of bad luck. This curse is thought to be particularly potent if the person intentionally takes or disturbs the petrified wood without proper permission or respect. The origins and reasons behind this curse vary across different cultural beliefs. Some believe that it stems from the anger or resentment of the spirits or entities associated with the petrified wood.
HNZ owns the mineral rights to commercial quantities of petrified wood in both Navajo and Apache Counties, Arizona. Petrified wood resources on HNZ Mineral lands occur in a discontinuous band that surround the southern end of the Petrified Forest National Park (PFNP). In general, HNZ's petrified wood resources in Navajo County occur on HNZ mineral lands, and those in Apache County occur on HNZ surface and mineral lands.
And in almost every case I think we ve done over 200 photo pairs we ve only been able to find one pairing that shows any kind of resource damage, Smith told Thompson. So impressive and picturesque is the forest that it was used as the backdrop for the 1936 romantic thriller The Petrified Forest, starring Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart.
Some believe that it stems from the anger or resentment of the spirits or entities associated with the petrified wood. Others attribute the curse to the inherent energy imbalance caused by the removal or disturbance of a natural object from its original resting place. People who claim to have experienced the petrified wood curse often share stories of misfortune, accidents, or unexpected calamities that occurred shortly after their encounter with the cursed object.
Letters of the Damned: Exorcising the Curse of the Petrified Forest
A sign at Petrified Forest National Park photographed by Ryan Thompson.
The letters came from everywhere—Verona, Italy; Littleton, Colorado; Oakland, California; Augsburg Germany; Sherrodsville, Ohio; Springfield, Massachusetts; Bronx, New York. They were written by children, teenagers, and adults, and while some were just a few words, others filled pages with detailed life stories. But they all shared the same sentiment: Please take back the rocks we stole. We’re sorry; we shouldn’t have done it.
“I saw the letters, but I didn’t believe it and I took the rocks anyway. And now I’m cursed.”
In 2011, during a chance trip to Petrified Forest National Park in northeastern Arizona, a couple of these letters caught the eye of artist and educator Ryan Thompson. At the time, the Rainbow Forest Museum included a small exhibit of correspondence sent to the park by people who’d surreptitiously taken petrified wood during their visit, and later felt guilty enough to return it. A steady stream of these so-called “conscience letters” (nobody’s quite sure who coined the phrase) have been archived by the national park’s staff since 1934, albeit inconsistently. Today, the park has more than 1,200 conscience letters in its archive.
Fascinated that the park had even saved these letters, Thompson connected with the park’s museum curator, Matthew Smith, to learn more about the archive’s history. Thompson’s curiosity gained him access to many of the archived letters, and in 2014, along with Phil Orr, he published the book Bad Luck, Hot Rocks, chronicling a portion of the conscience letters and some of the the rocks they accompanied.
A conscience letter from 1968.
Typically, these conscience letters indicate remorse for the theft and attribute bouts of misfortune to the ill-gotten petrified wood. Writers who describe their troubled lives often hope that by returning the stolen goods, their bad luck will disappear as well. So how did rocks from the Petrified Forest become tied to calamity and misfortune?
Arizona’s petrified forests formed nearly 200 million years ago during the late Triassic Period, when fallen logs washed into a river system and were buried by sediment and other debris, isolating the logs from oxygen and slowing the decay process over centuries. The porous wood slowly absorbed various minerals, including silica from volcanic ash, which crystallized over thousands of years, replacing the organic material as it broke down. Eventually, the logs and branches were transformed into colorful pieces of nearly solid quartz.
Western explorers first documented these ancient stone forests in the 19th century, and in 1906, the park was formally established as a National Monument to protect the area from human development and destruction. Though the park’s creation has generally been a great success at protecting its unique landscape, over the century since its founding, a small minority of visitors have continued to steal specimens from the park.
A fragment of rock returned via mail to the Petrified Forest. Photo by Ryan Thompson.
When Thompson inquired about the bad-luck mythology, he spoke with multiple people who pointed him to a ranger at Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park during the 1940s. Supposedly, this ranger claimed there was a curse on visitors who took lava rocks off the island, possibly linked with Pele, the native goddess of fire said to have formed the Hawaiʻian Islands.
“That rumor somehow made it back to the mainland,” Thompson explains, “and depending on who you talk to, they’re more or less likely to attribute the beginnings of the bad-luck associations with rocks to that park ranger specifically. But these kinds of phenomena are in effect all over the world, so it’s difficult to trace for certain.”
Regardless of how the rumor of a curse got started, during the 20th century, the staff at Petrified Forest National Park accidentally fueled visitor’s perceptions of a curse. “At the museum, they had a small display of letters that had been sent over the decades talking about the bad luck,” Thompson says. “Of course, the park wasn’t necessarily saying this is true, or that there’s some kind of curse, but inadvertently by showing these letters, they were reinforcing this belief.”
Eventually, Thompson points out, letter-writers began mentioning earlier correspondence they had seen when visiting the Petrified Forest. “As you go through the decades in the archive, you see more and more letters that reference the curse because someone saw earlier letters at the park,” he says. “They’ll write, ‘I saw the letters, but I didn’t believe it and I took the rocks anyway. And now I’m cursed. Please add this to your collection, and if you’re reading this, please believe it—you don’t want to be cursed like me.’ So for that reason, they stopped showing the letters in the museum as well.”
A piece of rock from the conscience pile. Photo by Ryan Thompson.
The absence of conscience letters in the museum doesn’t mean the bad-luck rumors have ceased. Earlier this year, for example, an episode of the Netflix show “Dead to Me” alluded to the curse of the Petrified Forest, and Thompson says the volume of conscience letters suddenly increased. The park saw a similar spike after his book was first released in 2014.
Unfortunately for folks who think they’re doing the right thing by mailing in rocks, these specimens won’t ever return to the Petrified Forest’s natural landscape. Although previous park staff sometimes responded to letters and returned rocks to where a visitor described finding them, that practice ended decades ago. “Because of their unknown provenance,” Thompson writes in his book, “these specimens can not be scattered back in the park; to do so would be to spoil those sites for research purposes.”
Instead, mailed fragments of petrified wood become part of the “conscience pile” near a private service road that visitors do not have access to. Park staff believe there have been a few different locations used to dump stones sent via mail, and are unsure when the current site was first used.
Even rocks returned with specific location descriptions cannot be put back without potentially disrupting the park’s geologic history. This letter also indicates the sender may have stolen artifacts from a cultural site in violation of the Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979.
“The conscience pile, to me, is really one of the more interesting parts of the whole phenomenon,” Thompson says. “It’s this weird purgatory for these rocks. Visitors are trying to make these atonements or set something right in their lives and for the world, and ultimately, ironically, they’re unable to.”
“I feel strongly that that’s probably the best way to handle this wood,” curator Matthew Smith explained in an interview with Thompson for his book. “In part, not only because of it being displaced from its context and taken out of its little fabric of time and space—it’s gone on this weird journey and come back and we have no way to put it back in its proper place; but also because you may have noticed that a lot of the letters in the conscience archive aren’t written from the first person perspective.”
The conscience pile sits by a private service road in Petrified Forest National Park. Photo by Ryan Thompson.
Many letters describe rocks supposedly taken by family or friends, yet the stones included are either completely foreign to the area or they’ve been cut and polished, meaning they were clearly purchased at a gift shop somewhere. “You have a lot of citizens out there who mean to be doing the right thing in returning all this wood, but in all likelihood it was legally obtained by their grandparents at some curio shop and there is no reason to return it,” Smith told Thompson.
Though park staff now downplays rumors of the curse, they’ve struggled with the best way to deter theft in the first place. For many years, officials incorrectly believed several tons of rock were being removed, and so the park featured such dire warnings on signs and brochures. The rerouting of roads through the park also caused confusion for some repeat visitors to the Petrified Forest: Many who came as children believed the larger deposits of wood they remembered had been pilfered over several decades, when in reality, the main roads were just moved further from those sites to protect them.
An anonymous letter attributing “pure havoc in my love life” to rocks from the Petrified Forest.
“Inadvertently, I think they’ve encouraged people to take rocks at various times,” Thompson says, “because some of the signage said things like ‘This is a protected resource’ or used language that communicated to people that the petrified wood was scarce, and they should get some before it completely disappeared.” Eventually, staff realized that it didn’t help to warn visitors that massive amounts of petrified wood were being stolen, because it made theft seem commonplace and expected.
More recently, park officials studied the efficacy of certain messaging and interpretive materials, including giving out small samples of rock at the entry gates to dissuade guests from taking their own. “But they’ve also moved away from that,” Thompson says. “When I was there in 2014 or ’15, they did give out a flier that said you could be fined some amount of money if you’re caught taking a rock out of the park.”
Smith says they no longer hand out those “Don’t make a costly mistake” fliers, either. Today, they simply give visitors a verbal warning about poaching specimens and provide labels for any rocks or fossils visitors happen to arrive with and bring into the park.
A very short conscience letter.
After Superintendent Brad Traver took over in 2011, staff began comparing photos from the present day with those documenting the park a century ago to verify whether or not popular sites were losing petrified wood to theft. “And in almost every case—I think we’ve done over 200 photo pairs—we’ve only been able to find one pairing that shows any kind of resource damage,” Smith told Thompson. “Essentially what we realized is that for all intents and purposes, when it comes to the camera’s eye, what you and your great-grandparents were seeing is basically the same. Rock for rock, down to things that are the size of your fist.”
Today, the park is pushing ahead with plans for wayside signage that will show photographic comparisons of rock formations from a century ago with contemporary views to show visitors how similar they appear. Overall, the park has also expanded its focus from the more narrow topic of the petrified forests to the region’s larger historical record, geologic and otherwise. “They’ve been working over the past decade to pivot toward telling a more rich and complete story of that place,” Thompson says.
But still, the letters keep coming, usually a few each month. And the conscience pile grows larger.
(For more conscience letters, check out Thompson’s book, “Bad Luck, Hot Rocks.” You can find more of Thompson’s work at his website, Department of Natural History. If you buy something through a link in this article, Collectors Weekly may get a share of the sale. Learn more.)
7 comments so far
- July 30th, 2019 at 9:38 am Greg Says: When I was a child we visited Petrified Forest, this was early 70s or late 60s. They sold bags of petrified wood in the souvenir shop, my dad bought me one, maybe that’s why I’ve had bad luck. But we didn’t steal it; it was sold to us. Unfair! :P Wish I knew where it was now so I could return it…
- August 11th, 2019 at 5:16 pm Miles Says: Many years ago when I was 13 my family took a driving trip out west from western Texas to Las Vegas, stopping at near every national monument and park on the way. Petrified Forest National Park was the one I found the most awe-inspiring. All these once-living plants transformed into a beautiful rainbow shining in the high desert sun, all because a series of very specific and highly unlikely events had happened. So imagine my dismay when we were coming back to the car a saw a group of elderly crackers loading GIANT CHUNKS of petrified wood into their old RV with Mass. plates. I immediately told my mom & dad who phoned the rangers on their car phone. A while later when we had left the park and gone a few miles I was overjoyed to see the same camper pulled over to the side of the highway surrounded but not only ranger vehicles but state troopers and local police with the perpetrators in handcuffs. In one of the proudest moments of my young life as we drove by the scene I locked eyes with the oldest man there, skinny and balding with a tank top and horrible golf shorts, gave him the biggest sh*t-eating grin I could muster and flipped him the bird.
- October 6th, 2019 at 10:54 am Ray H Says: Stopped by this awesome National (Heritage) Park, I was questioned if I was carrying any rocks, I had a ‘chock rock’ for my trailer, they gave me a post-it to assure on my exit it was not stolen. It occurred to me while visiting that sometime in my childhood, I was taught that these her age sites are priceless and any destruction is only hurting future generations. I never once thought having a piece of the park was important at all.
Teach your children well, and appreciation will be their choice. - November 16th, 2019 at 9:32 pm Bill Smith Says: I know I shouldn’t, but I laughed so hard at the “Dateless and Desperate” letter. In fact, I’m still giggling as I type this.
Thank you for a most interesting article.
I am long time aficionado of human psychology.
This is interesting, bordering on amazing.
P.S. To the National Parks Service:
In the long run, where those rocks end up doesn’t really matter. Nature should, in theory continue to scatter them. That is, if you believe in entropy.
Peace - December 2nd, 2020 at 11:27 am Connor Says: I want to go now just to see if it’s real! But I have lots of family and I wouldn’t want anything to happen to them… but it sounds like an adventure!
- February 24th, 2021 at 6:47 am Emma-lee Says: I recently took my daughter there and we saw someone pick up some wood and now that I have been reading this I feel bad for him.
- June 24th, 2021 at 12:43 pm Ric Carter Says: I have been through PFNP many times and was never tempted to steal a specimen, having found pieces elsewhere on unprotected public lands. My luck in life has mostly been good. Coincidence, or fate? ;)
Leave a Comment or Ask a Question
If you want to identify an item, try posting it in our Show & Tell gallery.
These stories may be attributed to coincidence, psychological effects, or the power of suggestion, depending on one's beliefs. To remove or avoid the curse, various rituals and practices are sometimes performed. These rituals can include offerings or apologies to the spirits or entities associated with the petrified wood, returning the object to its original location, or seeking the assistance of a spiritual practitioner or healer. It is important to note that the belief in the petrified wood curse is not universally accepted or supported by scientific evidence. While there may be cultural and personal anecdotes that seem to support the existence of such curses, it is ultimately up to individuals to decide whether or not they believe in the power of petrified wood curses..
Reviews for "Petrified Wood Curse: Unexplained Disasters and Strange Occurrences"
1. Sarah - 2 stars - The Petrified Wood Curse was a huge disappointment for me. I found the storyline to be predictable and lacking in originality. The characters felt flat and cliché, leaving me feeling disconnected from the story. The pacing was also a major issue, with slow and dragging scenes that made it difficult to stay engaged. Overall, I felt underwhelmed by this book and would not recommend it to others.
2. John - 1 star - I couldn't even finish reading the Petrified Wood Curse. The writing was not engaging and failed to capture my attention from the start. The plot felt disjointed and poorly developed, making it hard for me to follow and stay interested. The dialogue was stilted and unnatural, leaving me cringing at the awkward interactions between characters. Sadly, I was thoroughly unimpressed with this book and would not waste my time on it again.
3. Emily - 2 stars - The Petrified Wood Curse was a letdown for me. The world-building was lacking and failed to fully immerse me in the story. The magic system was underdeveloped and left me with more questions than answers. The romance subplot felt forced and lacked chemistry, making it difficult for me to invest in the characters' relationships. Overall, I found this book to be mediocre and not worth the hype it received.