Estimated read time: 3-4 minutes
ESCALANTE — There are beautiful trails and a storybook lake at the Escalante Petrified Forest State Park near Escalante, along with plenty of campsites and a luxurious bathroom facility — the floor is heated and there is wall-to-ceiling tile.
Of course, there are the famous petrified pieces of trees that have transformed into rock, making this a unique place in Utah to look in wonder at the thousands of samples of petrified wood, a fossil in which the plant material has been replaced by minerals over hundreds of millions of years.
Chad Jones, park manager, said you can actually put a specimen under a microscope and still see the cellular structure of the tree.
On one particular trail, you wind through lava flows amid thousands of pieces of petrified rock. They're beautiful to look at, but park officials warn that should be as far as it goes; don't pocket them lest you invoke the curse.
Jones has a shoebox full of letters penned by chagrined thieves who didn't heed the curse and experienced the crush of bad luck that follows someone who slipped a piece into their pocket, purse or backpack.
"So for as far back as it's been a park, we've been getting letters from people who have taken a piece of petrified wood from the park and then just had nonstop bad luck. And, you know, it can be as bad or as simple as I tripped and fell and hit my head or whatever."
How nasty is this curse?
The handwritten letters are full of apologies and confessions of how they obtained the rock and simply want it returned to the park to shed the curse.
"We took these rocks. We've had them for X number of days or years, or, you know, however long it is. Some of them (say) I inherited this rock from my aunt or my grandma, who had it for years, and since I've got it," bad luck has been a constant companion.
Like Jones said earlier, some of the bad luck involves something like a trip and fall. Others are much more serious.
"Some of them are as bad as brain cancer and car accidents or their house burned down when they got home, and all these different things. One of the recent ones that I remember getting said that they had this piece of petrified wood, and they put it in their fish tank, and all of their fish died."
That was one letter writer who had the misfortune of inheriting the treasure from a relative.
So the breadth of the curse runs the gamut: very minor things, rather silly, Jones said, or devastatingly tragic events that have happened to people.
Jones said for some time he did not like to talk about the curse because it was self-perpetuating, an invitation of sorts to continue the mischief.
But time won't undo the legend of the curse and it continues to persist.
"We get a couple letters, like a couple a month, but it's a steady enough stream that it is definitely part of our park and culture."
The shoebox, Jones said, is full of the letters that are legible and worth reading while many others have been tossed. The park has kiosks that warn people against taking property from the park, but the thefts continue. Technically, the park could charge people with some sort of crime but trying to put a monetary value on the petrified wood is difficult because Jones view them as priceless.
What does Jones think about the curse?
"You know, whether it's just coincidence or not, or confirmation bias, there's enough anecdotal evidence that it seems like it has some merit."
He said since with the opening of the park, the myth has continued in the decades since.
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