➡ Sam and Amy share their experiences exploring the western deserts of the United States, particularly the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. They discuss the park’s history, its unique petrified wood, and a curse associated with taking pieces of this wood. Many visitors who have taken wood as souvenirs have reported experiencing bad luck, leading to a collection of returned wood and apology letters at the park’s museum. Despite the curse, the park remains a popular destination for its beauty and historical significance.
➡ The text talks about a belief that taking petrified wood from a national park can bring bad luck or a ‘curse’. However, buying the same wood from the park service or nearby businesses doesn’t carry this curse. The curse is linked to a Navajo legend about a giant creature, Ye So, whose bones are considered sacred and are believed to be the petrified wood. So, the advice is to not take the wood without paying to avoid the curse.

Quiet on the set! Sound production take one. I’m Sam. I’m Amy. We’re from California, and this is Jailbreak. Nice. Thank you, ladies. You’re welcome. Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time in the deserts out in the western part of the United States of America. It is a very unforgiving landscape, and it’s arid, it’s hot, and it appears that everything that lives out there, plants and animals included, are poisonous, venomous, and trying to kill you. And that’s what attracts me, for whatever reason. I also love the fact that if you search hard enough, you can literally find messages carved in stone known as petroglyphs that were carved by the indigenous people that came before we did.

And I find that incredibly amazing. Also, there’s caves. Caves all over the place, some of them going down way further than my skill set will allow. But I have found myself with a flashlight strapped to my forehead, a GoPro in my hand, way underground. Nobody knows where I am poking around, looking for ancient burial sites and ancient sacrificial sites as well. And I have found them. So with all that being said, out in the desert, I had stumbled across a national forest that many people have found. And I never, ever understood or realized that this place had a curse.

And when you hear the word curse, you think of child’s play, wives’ tale, so forth, so on, you know, nothing to see here, keep it moving. But apparently, the curse of the petrified forest is very, very real. And I’m going to explain it to you because I’ve done a video at the petrified forest. And I’ve actually, I won’t say I’ve engaged in this curse bringing activity, but I know somebody that has. Let’s leave it at that, shall we? At any rate, let’s turn tires and head towards the petrified national forest located in Arizona, shall we? So this is the real life curse of the petrified forest national park.

So about three years ago, I did a video on the petrified forest and I talked about all the different points of view people had on this particular area. But I had never heard about this particular curse, quote unquote. And after looking through some of the evidence, it seems that people worldwide have been affected by this curse after visiting the petrified forest and walking away with a souvenir, we’ll call it, grabbing a small piece that they found on the ground, maybe chipping a piece off of a quote unquote petrified log. They took these things away and apparently the curse was activated.

So let’s start at the beginning. When visiting the petrified forest national park in Arizona, people are enamored by the beauty and uniqueness of the petrified wood. It’s been that way for centuries since the first explorers came through the area. The first routes were blazed through the region in Arizona in the mid 1800s and up until today. Travelers have long carried off pieces of the petrified forest as keepsakes. And in the past, wagons and trucks were filled to the brim with petrified rocks, trees, et cetera, and hauled away to be sold. But since the forest became a national park, it’s illegal to remove any of these specimens.

Today, theft and petrified wood can result in a fine, but that doesn’t stop people from removing a piece of history from the park. However, many who thought no one would notice that one little rock missing or were absolutely sure they hadn’t been seen often found out later, it wasn’t really a good idea. Evidently, they were unaware of the curse of the petrified forest. Over 200 million years ago, large trees and rich vegetation flourished in northeast Arizona. The region was a tropical wetland with abundant streams and rivers. During heavy rains, the waterways would flood, sweeping falling trees into the sandy flood plains.

Later, volcanic lava destroyed the forest and the remains were embedded into sediment comprised of volcanic ash, mud, and water. Trees are transitioned to stone by criminalization, a process of fossilization in which the organic material are replaced with minerals such as quartz, making a cast of the original organism. Millions of years later, the petrified logs were revealed by erosion. The petrified forest area was designated a national forest in December 8th, 1806. The painted desert was added later and on December 9th, 1962, the whole monument received national park status. Today, the park covers 93,533 acres. That’s a lot of acres.

And December 8th is my father’s birthday, so that’s kind of cool. And John Lennon got shot. But I digress. So back in 1930, visitors to the park began to report that after taking a piece of the petrified wood from the park, they were seemingly cursed with bad luck. And clearly, the curse continues today and is now part of the park’s history. In fact, there is a room dedicated to these hundreds of cursed thieves in the Rainbow Forest Museum at the Petrified Forest National Park. From being divorced, which doesn’t necessarily sound like bad luck, but whatever, to being jailed, jailbreak overlander, medical conditions to car problems, unemployment to generally terrible lives, and even death.

The Petrified Forest National Park has received bucketloads of confessions, tales of tragedy, and returned petrified wood from those who lived to regret it. Like the curse of the Hope Diamond or the allegedly ruined lives of those who tampered with Egyptian pharaohs, bad luck comes to those who possess stolen petrified wood from the park, prompting thousands to send it back. Now, that sounds ridiculous, but they’ve got the receipts to back this up, so it is what it is. For decades, the Petrified Forest has received pilfered samples in the mail returned by visitors who regret having stolen them.

Notes included with the fragments describe lives wrought with misfortune since the rock’s theft. In the letters, Filchers. Filchers. I didn’t even know that was a word, but clearly it is. Filchers plead with park officials to return the pieces to their rightful place. One visitor described a piece of petrified wood he had taken more than 10 years earlier. It was a great challenge sneaking it out of the park, he wrote. Since that time, though, nothing in my life has gone right. Another pleaded. My life has been totally destroyed since we’ve been back from vacation. Please put these back so my life can get back to normal.

Please let me start over again. Yeah. And another says, please take these miserable rocks, miserable rocks and put them back. They have caused pure havoc in my love life. So, you know, this usually doesn’t happen to me. It must be because of that damn petrified wood. No pun intended. At the southern entrance to the park is a pile of conscience rocks. And it is not the only one. There are other piles throughout the park. Unfortunately, once the rocks are moved, they cannot be put back in the park because they are out of quote unquote scientific context.

The park is is thriving for archaeological, geological and paleontological research. Moving rocks and other artifacts affects the value of scientific study. So remember that kids. The display in the Rainbow Forest Museum is called the mystery of the conscience wood. A large piece of petrified wood sits on a bench, smoking a cigarette. I’m just kidding. It doesn’t. It just sits on the bench. It doesn’t smoke. Smoking is bad. Don’t smoke. It was returned by a man who said he had stolen it 66 years ago. A three ring binder sits beneath the display that contains letters from all over the world.

Comprising more, comprising some 1200 pages of guilt written letters. Guilt written, not written. Well, they wrote them, but they’re not written. They’re written. 1200 pages of guilt written letters. The oldest quote unquote conscience letter dates back to 1935. How do you like them apples? Some of the letters say and describe the feelings and bad luck that many have experienced. One says you’re right. It’s a curse to take wood from the forest. My girlfriend of three years finished with me on the drive home. So here’s your damn wood back. Wow. Another says these miserable rocks have caused pure havoc in my love life.

By the time these rocks reach you, things should be back to normal. If not, I give up. Dateless and desperate. No, I didn’t write that. Another one says, believe me, if I would have known the curse went with any of the rocks, I would have never taken these. My life has been totally destroyed since we’ve been back from vacation. Please take these so my life will get back to normal. Let me start over again. Forgive me for ever taking these rocks. And yet another letter says when we were there, we read the letters of many people had returned wood to your to you with tales of bad luck, ruined marriages and other stories of misfortune.

At first, we didn’t believe the ramblings of such obviously superstitious people. But upon a review of the life and lack of luck that our family members have had the last 30 years, we’ve begun to wonder if possibly the legend could have some truth to it. And yet another letter says I picked up the petrified rocks about 13 years ago when I visited the National Park. I came across it today and decided I should send it back to you. I’m sorry that I took it and wish for you to have it back. Thank you. P.S. It has been bad luck to me.

It’s such a truly sad state of affairs as tourists can purchase petrified wood collected legally from the private land and several nearby businesses. These pieces are generally inexpensive and the curse doesn’t come with them. So yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s a weird thing. It’s a truly sad state of affairs as tourists can purchase petrified wood. So, so, so, if you pick one, if you pick a rock up off the ground at a park that you paid to go into, cursed, cursed forever, your girlfriend will leave you, your life life will fail, your wife will divorce you, your car won’t start, etc.

So forth. And I’m going to go with blah, blah, blah. But if you pay the National Park Service for a rock that was laying on the ground, it’s completely and utterly curse free. Isn’t that terrific? And doesn’t that make sense? That’s capitalism in action, ladies and gentlemen. But again, in this video, I’m going to digress. So with all the information I researched for this video, the one thing I had a really tough time figuring out was who placed the curse? Who cursed this land? That was really difficult to find and the best I could come up with was this.

The Navajo Indians refer to pieces of petrified wood as ye bits in, ye bits in. Traditionally, they are believed to be the bones of ye so, the largest, most powerful and most feared of the aniye or quote unquote alien gods. Now, I was going to leave it at that, but the term alien gods bothered me. So I’ve spent the last three hours reediting this and looking into this a little bit more. And it turns out that Ye So was considered a quote unquote big monster. According to Wikipedia and every other website, Ye So was a giant so large it could walk as far as a man could travel from sunrise to sunset in a single step and drink an entire lake in four gulps.

Ye So first encountered Nayen Zangi when he stumbled upon Changing Woman who hid her sons and tried to convince Ye So that it was mistaken. When questioned about the small footprints in the snow, Changing Woman replied saying in her loneliness she made the footprints herself to pretend she has company. Now, using my decoder ring, I figured out the twins that allegedly killed Ye So were the twins of this woman, Changing Woman. And she was lying about her twins because she was hiding them so he didn’t kill them. Sounds an awful lot like a story from Christianity, but all the stories all sound the same for the most part and giants are always somehow involved.

And it turns out that’s exactly what this was. So there, as they say, is that. I will leave links below if you want to look into it more for yourself. According to the Navajo, the bones of Ye So are sacred. And when unfortunate tourists walk away with pieces of his bones, they are cursed. Number one answer. There you go. So there you have it. Whether you knew it or not, this national forest is officially cursed and recognized by the National Forest Service. So if you ever go to the petrified forest, don’t steal a rock because you’ll be cursed.

Simply go inside and pay for the rock and you won’t be cursed. Seems legit to me. At any rate, if you enjoyed this video, hit that like, share and subscribe. Hit the little bell so you’re notified of all new videos. Leave a comment below and I will return the favor. I am out. [tr:trw].

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