Utah Park Visitors Claim Ancient Curse Very Real

Do you believe in curses?  If you believe in a god you may as well, because both require faith, not evidence.  After all, no one has actually seen god, or Jesus, or angels or demons.  No one has come back from the dead to tell us hell is hell or heaven is heaven so it’s hard to believe in such things. Regardless, millions and millions do believe in religious mythology, and it’s likely many of them believe in ancient curses.  Many of those whose stole from a Utah State Park will tell you that they are definitely believers.

It’s against the law to remove any bit of nature from a state park, but those who remove a chunk of petrified wood from Utah’s Escalante Petrified Forest State Park risk something darker: an alleged ancient curse that visitors claim is the real deal.

The park manager tells KSL that each year people return as many as a dozen pieces of petrified wood—which time has turned to stone quartz—typically accompanied by an apology in the hope that good fortunes will return to the one-time plunderer. One man wrote that he “thought the warnings were phony. Since that time, I have had three accidents” involving broken bones—plus a motor home fire and a dead car engine.

Another wrote of three years of bad luck: “I hope with this act of restitution (the) Lord will have mercy upon me. I apologize and beg your pardon.” It’s an alleged curse not unique to Utah: In 2012 the Daily Sun looked at the “conscience rocks” mailed back to the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona, which claims the most petrified wood of any location on Earth. It sees as many as six letters a month, and has a 1,200-page archive of such letters that dates to the 1930s—when the story of the park’s curse was believed to have been started.

Still, the rumored curses haven’t stemmed the thefts: In the case of Escalante, visitors now have to hike a mile into the park to even encounter the wood because the areas closest to the parking lot have been cleaned out; the National Park Service suspects as much as a ton of petrified wood is removed each month from Arizona’s 220,000-acre park.