Tourists who take home pieces of rock from Uluru, Australia’s sacred Aboriginal rock, may be jinxed. Rangers at the Uluru National Park say they’ve received thousands of pieces of the rock which have been returned to them because they brought the senders bad luck. “It’s just a weird phenomenon,” says park manager Brooke Watson. “They come from all over and they just keep coming every day.”
Uluru is a huge red rock in the middle of the Australian desert which is also known as Ayer’s rock. It’s an important religious site for Aborigines, who don?t like tourists climbing it, and it’s against Australian law to remove pieces of it. It’s visited by around half a million tourists every year.
Last year a German tourist mailed back a 16.5 pound piece. “It must have cost them a fortune to send it,” Watson says. Most of the returned rocks are destroyed, due to Australia’s strict quarantine laws. But sometimes the park rangers and local Aborigines hold ceremonies and put some of the pieces back.
Returning the rocks doesn’t seem to remove the jinx. “I haven’t had anyone write and say, ‘Since I returned the rock we won the lotto’ or anything,” says Watson.
It sounds like Aborigines know something about psychic self-defense.
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