Triassic Park | Criminal Podcast | Forensic Files

Petrified Forest National Park Orientation Video: Today, Petrified Forest National Park
is a barren land. But 225 million years ago, this landscape was much different. Huge trees reached into the skies 200 feet.
And below, the first dinosaurs roamed the land. Come explore the Petrified Forest, America's very real Triassic park.
Phoebe Judge: Four hours northeast of Phoenix, in what can only be called the middle of nowhere,
sits the Petrified Forest National Park. What we're hearing is the orientation video from the visitor center.
Petrified Forest National Park Orientation Video: What separates these lands from all
others is petrified wood, bejeweled with quartz crystals, agate, jasper, amethyst, and other
semiprecious gems. Nowhere else is there such a great collection of exposed, colorful fossil trees.
Phoebe Judge: Petrified wood isn't actually wood. It's rock, the fossilized remains of trees that fell millions of years ago.
So it's wood that's turned into rock. And this park in Arizona has the greatest concentration of petrified wood on the planet,
125,000 acres full of beautiful looking 200 million-year-old stuff. And not surprisingly, sometimes people take a piece home with them, a little souvenir.
Petrified Forest National Park Orientation Video: The temptation to possess a piece of
petrified wood has decimated this irreplaceable resource. Park Protection Officer (in video): Can I have you step over to the car please?
Petrified Forest National Park Orientation Video: Taking anything from the park is illegal.
It is a federal offense punishable by fines and or imprisonment. Phoebe Judge: The park estimated they were losing one ton of petrified wood each month,
most of it smuggled out in people's pants. Melissa Holes: I am the ruiner of vacation.
We've actually joked about making T-shirts. My job is to ruin some people's vacation, is what they claim.
Phoebe Judge: This is Melissa Holes, a protection officer for the park. So when was the last time you caught someone trying to steal wood?
Melissa Holes: 45 minutes ago — Phoebe Judge: Is it — Melissa Holes: ... was the last time I caught someone taking petrified wood.
Yes. Phoebe Judge: So it happens all the time? Melissa Holes: All the time. Phoebe Judge: So what do you do?
I mean, are you, like, secretly watching them, or do you get a call? Melissa Holes: Yes.
Phoebe Judge: You're secretly watching? Melissa Holes: Yes. [Laughing.] Sometimes we're in plainclothes.
Sometimes we're in uniform. But we do a lot of foot patrol. So we are an active presence on the trails.
But we are also up on hilltops with binoculars watching for specific human behavior that
guilty people exhibit. Phoebe Judge: What is guilty petrified-wood-stealing behavior?
Melissa Holes: Guilty behavior. Let's see. Most people when they're hiking on a trail don't look around them, front and back, and
then bend over really slowly [laughter] and drag something from the ground up their pant
leg and put it in their pocket. Phoebe Judge: [Laughing.] So it's they're trying to be really sly about it?
Melissa Holes: They're trying to be sly. Keyword is trying. Phoebe Judge: Park staff set up checkpoints so no car could leave the park without an
inspection. They instituted fines, $250 for anyone caught with wood, no warnings.
Still, the wood theft continued. And park staff found themselves taking it kind of personally.
They didn't want to be the mean park, the surveillance park, the park begging you to
please behave like an adult and just not steal the petrified wood. But, apparently, we're all a bunch of toddlers.
And when we're told we can't have something, we want it so much more. I'm Phoebe Judge.
This is Criminal. [Music.] What happens when you see the father with his little kids who has taken the wood and
you have to go up and say, "Excuse me, sir," and there are like kids there? Melissa Holes: Unfortunately, in my experience, it's not the kids doing it.
It's daddy taking it and blaming it on the kids because he doesn't think I'm going to
cite the 5-year-old, which I'm not. But then I have to pull the father aside and say, "Why don't you try being a parent and
stop blaming this on the kid? I know the kid didn't do it." Phoebe Judge: The superintendent of Petrified Forest National Park is Brad Traver.
He says they try to give visitors plenty of opportunities to do the right thing.
Brad Traver: We put a sign on the road as you approach the exit station saying that
there would be an inspection ahead. That's a relatively passive thing for us to do.
And we still collect pieces of petrified wood between that sign and the entrance station
every month. Phoebe Judge: Do people just say, "Oh no, there's going to be inspection," and then
they get it out of their car? Brad Traver: They throw it out the window. Yeah. Phoebe Judge: Really?
So — Brad Traver: Oh, yeah. Phoebe Judge: So you have a lot in this one little stretch?
Brad Traver: Yes. In that little hundred yards or whatever it is, there isn't any petrified wood that occurs
naturally. So anything that's sitting on the ground there is thrown out the window.
Phoebe Judge: Park staff was working very hard to scare and shame visitors into doing
the right thing. And you could say that their tactics did end up working. Just not in the way they'd intended.
Matt Smith: So like last week for whatever reason was kind of a heavy week. I think we got four or five packages of wood and letters returned.
Phoebe Judge: The wood is coming back. Matt Smith: The wood itself is incredibly heavy and dense.
And so a lot of the times, they've been tumbled around and the boxes are a little bit beat
up. Phoebe Judge: This is Matt Smith, museum curator at the park. For decades, people who've stolen wood have reported strange happenings, immediate bad
luck like getting fired or suddenly hurting yourself. They get so scared, they send the stolen wood back to the park, and they also send letters.
Matt Smith: The first letter we got was back in 1934 from a man who I believe was living
in India. And he mailed back a piece of wood and a letter and said that he had had some bad luck, and
felt guilty and thought that the wood might have something to do with it. And he sent it back.
Phoebe Judge: And they still come all the time. And it's part of Matt Smith's job to open them up and see what the person has to say.
Matt Smith: I'm just going to grab a handful here... [Sound of papers rustling.]
And pull them out. Let's see. We've got one that says, "Dear Superintendent, Please return these petrified rocks to the
forest. I took these over 20 years ago as a teenager. I'm very sorry. Thank you."
Phoebe Judge: The park took advantage of this and put the letters on display as a warning.
If visitors didn't care about doing the right thing or getting a $250 ticket, maybe they
would care about being cursed. Matt Smith: "I visited the park many years ago and read the museum bad luck stories on
display. I am not superstitious. Well, now I am. My wife purchased this rock many years ago."
[Laughing.] OK, so he bought it. That means it was legal. "I never had bad luck until I married her.
We are good people and never do wrong to anybody. But bad things keep happening to her, and thus bad things happen to me by proxy.
Unduly kicked out of college. Identity theft. Institutions lost our documents. Health problems.
Loss of pregnancy, unexplicable. Lost jobs without a real reason, just not a good fit.
And many more bad and sad things. Please restore this to its rightful place. Thank you."
And they gave their names. Phoebe Judge: Matt read us letter after letter. Listening to them, it's hard to work out why exactly people were so sorry, Or where they
would get the idea that stealing petrified wood causes bad luck... Unless they got the idea from the park itself from all of the other letters the park has
on display in its museum. So maybe people are cursed. Or maybe they just want to participate.
But with a lot of the letters, you get the feeling that the person writing isn't happy
for some reason, and this is their small way of making something right. Matt Smith: Let's see.
I've got a letter here printed in maybe 40 font or something. It's really big letters.
It says, "I found these rocks at a house I lived in and wanted to return them to where
they belong. Thanks." I remember this, and there were, yeah, two small chunks of petrified wood, but then there
was a big Ziploc bag full of shells from Florida. And it was just seashells. So I don't know how we got that.
Phoebe Judge: You might think the park staff would be heartened to see people coming to
their senses and returning the stolen wood. But when a piece of wood is returned, Rangers can't just go toss it randomly into the park.
They can't verify where it came from. And since they do receive things definitely not from the park, like a bag of seashells,
they don't take any chances. So returned wood just gets chucked into a pile, an actual pile.
Here's Park Superintendent Brad Traver. Brad Traver: So the conscience pile is a collection of petrified wood that comes to the park from
sources sometimes unknown, sometimes known, that we don't know where to put. [Laughs.]
Phoebe Judge: The conscience pile is now the size of a pickup truck and sits down a service
road at the far end of the park, like a sort of monument to guilt and superstition.
[Music.] The story we've just told was the whole story for a long time. Horrible wood theft, one ton a month.
The park was disappearing. And the steady stream of conscience letters was part of the proof.
Finally, someone said, "Hang on. Where did we get that one ton number?" Matt Smith: And then we started looking at the metrics that we had about the wood theft,
this ton a month figure. And we realized that in the vast majority, there was no evidence of large amounts of
theft. And, yeah, just all this sort of information started to not quite stack up.
And we realized that there was almost a mythology built around the wood theft. Phoebe Judge: From here, the park brought in researchers to evaluate the situation.
They pulled out archival photos of what the park looked like in the late 1800s, and then
sent a photographer to photograph the exact same places today. They did this more than 200 times.
Matt Smith: As far as the camera's eye can see, we cannot detect much of a difference
between photos taken a hundred years ago and today, and that the experiences that your
grandparents had are almost exactly like what you're having today. And, in fact, some cases, there's more wood exposed now than there was in the photographs
that your grandparents took. And when your rate of erosion exceeds your rate of resource theft, you're probably doing
a really good job. [Laughs.] Phoebe Judge: The new researchers also study the park signs and language and found that
all of the tough guy stuff was having the opposite effect. It was sending the message that the wood was disappearing really quickly, so you better
hurry and get yours before it's all gone forever. In the past few years, they've toned it down.
They no longer play that dramatic orientation video. They've stopped threatening to arrest people.
And the new approach is paying off. Visitors to the park are on the rise. Brad Traver: We don't want to be the park that says, "Did you steal any petrified wood?
Are you sure you didn't steal any petrified wood? Did you see anybody else steal any petrified wood?"
That's not the kind of visitor experience we want people to have when they come, when
they leave Petrified Forest National Park. We need to be, our first priority needs to be protecting the resources that we are charged
with protecting. But we don't have to do it in a way that is unpleasant. We don't have to do it in a way that's even very public.
Phoebe Judge: We should be clear, people are still stealing wood. Officer Melissa Holes deals with them every day.
Melissa Holes: I had a foreign individual who was well-endowed who was trying to get
away with putting the smaller pieces of petrified wood in her cleavage. [Laughter.]
And she did not speak a lot of English, but she was completely compliant and cooperative
when I contacted her. And I said I knew where the petrified wood was, and I needed it back.
And before I could explain how I was going to search her, she started undressing in the
middle of the parking lot to give me back the petrified wood. Phoebe Judge: [Laughing.]
Just massive amounts came down out of her chest? Melissa Holes: Yes, very much so.
[Laughs.] Phoebe Judge: But this isn't the crisis they thought it was. It's more of a nuisance.
As for the conscience letters, they aren't on display in the park museum anymore.
They've put that narrative behind them. But you and I can still see some of them, thanks to a photographer named Ryan Thompson.
Ryan Thompson: And it starts just straight away, "They are beautiful, but I can't enjoy
them. They weigh like a ton of bricks on my conscience. Sorry." Phoebe Judge: For him, the letters are artifacts that are just as interesting as the pieces
of wood. Ryan Thompson: This one has a little bit more information on it. It's also sort of yellowed from age.
It was sent, or received, sorry, on December 8th of 1982. And the park in the upper left-hand corner has written a notation that says, "Conscience
Letter 233". So this was like the 233rd letter that they've cataloged in the conscience letter collection.
And then the letter says, "This stone with misfortune abounds!!" And there's a couple of exclamation points after that line.
"To you, I am now absolved." The name has been redacted, but it was sent from Oakland, California.
Phoebe Judge: Ryan Thompson's photographs of the letters look stark and lie on all white
backgrounds next to pictures of pieces of returned wood. He collected them into a book called Bad Luck, Hot Rocks.
Ryan Thompson: It made a lot of sense with some of the research I was doing into geologic
materials, geologic ephemera events, and the way we project human emotions and thoughts
into these sorts of materials. So it just kind of bowled me over. Phoebe Judge: This is not the only place where people return rocks.
In Hawaii, there's a similar suspected curse dealing with stolen lava rocks. People mail them back with $10, and companies will do a ceremony and return the lava to
its rightful place. Matt Smith says he gets that, the ritual of return, absolving yourself of your crime.
And even if the letters aren't on display, he still receives and catalogs each one as
it arrives. The letters are so touching though — Matt Smith: They are. Phoebe Judge: ... part of them to see people feeling guilty or afraid.
Matt Smith: Yeah. Phoebe Judge: What's it like to handle those materials? Matt Smith: It's fun and beautiful.
I mean, there are certain letters where you really get a sense of the person trying to
right their lives in one way or another. You get this feeling that it's part of this bigger effort on their part to fix things
up. I've seen some letters that talk about having — that the person who's sending it has had
a scare with cancer or something like that and they wanted to clean up their lives before
they possibly passed away. Kind of getting right with their God, or whatever it is that's motivating them.
[Music.] Phoebe Judge: Criminal is produced by Lauren Spohrer and me. Special thanks to Rob Byers and Casey Herman.
Julienne Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can check them out at thisiscriminal.com.
We're on Facebook and Twitter, @CriminalShow. This week, our story "That Crime of the Month" is featured on PRX's science podcast Transistor.
Transistor features shows like ours and scientist-hosted episodes on everything from how telescopes
are like time machines to the gender biases in science that we often overlook. Find Transistor on iTunes or wherever you like to listen.
Criminal is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collective of the 13 best podcasts
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Radiotopia is made possible with support from the Knight Foundation and MailChimp, celebrating
creativity, chaos, and teamwork. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Jingle: Radiotopia, from PRX.
Petrified Forest National Park Orientation Video: Time reveals itself here. It is frozen in the rocks beneath our feet, and it flies by in the boiling clouds of a
summer thunderstorm. It is a land of timeless impressions.

The Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona has the largest collection of petrified wood in the world. The beautiful wood is more than 200 million years old, and visitors to the park often take a little piece home with them as a souvenir. But stealing the wood has serious consequences, both legal and, some say, supernatural.

See photographs of the conscience letters and learn more about Ryan Thompson’s book here. https://badluckhotrocks.com/

Criminal is a show about people who’ve done wrong, been wronged, or gotten caught somewhere in the middle. Hosted by Phoebe Judge. Part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. https://link.chtbl.com/n33u0HsA

Say hello on Twitter (@CriminalShow), Instagram (@criminal_podcast), and Facebook https://www.facebook.com/ThisIsCriminal/.

Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice https://bit.ly/accomplicenewsletter.

We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery.

Artwork by Julienne Alexander http://www.yssrs.com/.

Check out our online shop https://store.dftba.com/collections/criminal.

Episode transcripts are posted on our website https://thisiscriminal.com/.

Episode 23 originally published 7/16/2015 https://thisiscriminal.com/ep-23-triassic-park-7-17-2015/

Brief Summary

Petrified Forest National Park faces ongoing wood theft, prompting humorous and emotional responses from park staff and visitors alike.

Key points

Petrified Forest's Unique Landscape. Once a lush environment, now a barren land, the Petrified Forest holds ancient secrets.
The Reality of Petrified Wood. Petrified wood is actually fossilized rock, not wood at all.
Theft and Consequences. The park faces significant theft issues, losing tons of petrified wood monthly.
Conscience Letters. Visitors return stolen wood, often accompanied by letters expressing guilt and superstition.
Changing Visitor Engagement. The park's approach to theft has evolved, focusing on positive visitor experiences.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

Petrified wood isn't actually wood.

Phoebe Judge explains the nature of petrified wood.

1:23WatchNov 6, 2022

Tension

40/ 100Low tension

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