It is illegal to take anything from a national park, even a small rock. That's because in centuries past, tourists would ruin natural wonders and monuments by taking a piece home as a souvenir. But maybe nature has something to do with the "hands off" policy, too. When people visit the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona, they are tempted to take a piece of petrified wood home with them. Many later regret the theft, and send the rocks back to the park with apologies. This mail became known as "conscience letters," and they come from all over. During a visit in 2011, Ryan Thompson became fascinated with these letters and eventually wrote a book called Bad Luck, Hot Rocks, chronicling the best of them.
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.
“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.”
Many of the letter writers describe the bad luck that followed them after picking up the illegal rocks, as if the petrified wood is cursed. Read how that story got started, and see some of the conscience letters and returned rocks at Collectors Weekly.
As humans, we're hardwired to look for patterns and correlation; it's what allowed our ancestors to hunt and survive. It's time to evolve past that, it's ridiculous what some believe now to be real.