Dear Madame Pele,

Last year me and my husband visited Hawaii for our 20th anniversary and stayed overnight at Volcanoe House. Well, the next morning, we took one of the bus rides around the park and when we had a stop we picked up these pieces of lavarock even though the driver told us we better not because of the Curse. But we couldn't imagine that a little rock could bring us so much BAD LUCK!

BOY, WERE WE WRONG!!!!! The curse started coming true before we even got home! Our luggage got sent to Hong Kong (instead of Chicago) and it took a month to get our things back. Since then, things have went from bad to worst. We have had illness, death, and financial destruction one right after the other. Nobody can believe so many terrible things could happen to one family. Just in the last few months our cat got run over, our porch developed dry rot which cost $2,500 to repair, and my husbands 88 year old father fell off a roof which he should never have been standing on in the first place and died of a rupture.

Then the other day I was going through some things and ran across this lavarock from our trip and I suddenly realized that the legend must be true!

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE make sure it gets back to the volcanoe!!! We're sorry and we apologize for not believing. We hope now that Madame Pele and us and our family can find the peace we all so desperately need! I beg you to grant this request and send me a note in the enclosed envelope that it has been done.

Sincerely yours,

(Mrs.) Doris Root

408 Howard Avenue

Winnetka, Il 60093

With a shake of her head and a long-suffering expression on her broad, amiable face, park ranger Brenda Ho put the flowered note card down. Honestly, she thought, you didn't know whether to laugh or to cry. Every day the mailroom table was piled with these pathetic bundles of misery; sometimes only five or six, often as many as twenty. Patiently wrapped with yards of tape, or trussed up with knotted string, or bound with metal straps, all of them bulging with chunks, lumps, strands, and crumbs of lava.