A stolen rock weighs more than a regular rock. It drags on the guilty soul without remorse or end. And if it was stolen from Arizona’s Petrified Forest, it might very well be cursed, bringing with it all manner of maladies, misfortunes, and bad luck, from cancer to pets dying to business woes, even, in the ultimate irony, kidney stones.
People have been stealing petrified wood from the forest since it was protected as a national monument in 1906, and they’ve been returning it at least since 1934, when the National Park Service received the first of more than 1,200 pages of letters from the regretful, the contrite, and the paranoid. “Please put this back so my husband can get well,” wrote ‘Distrout Wife’ on April 5, 1983. “I tried to keep him from taking it.”
Sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, the letters bear witness to the calamities of the human race and its existential need to atone, ask forgiveness, and beg the gods for appeasement. A few are
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