petrified

The first recorded incident of petrification was documented in the Journal of Science in February 1963 about a ten-year-old girl from Kalamazoo, Michigan, who lived at home with her mother, father and twin brother. The researchers noted in the publication that “the female child had without known cause ceased aging by all scientific measures.” After her parents had noticed no change in her growth patterns after two subsequent years, they took her to a research hospital at the University of Michigan where the doctors were unable to diagnose a cause.

Still healthy by all medical standards, she was sent home and told to update them if the problem persisted. Then, a year later, after the girl’s father was tragically killed in an automobile accident and the family moved out of state, the girl miraculously began to age again. No cause was postulated by any medical professional at the time.

There would not be another reported incident for some twenty years when in 1981 a family of children, all at once together, ceased growing older. The children had been raised in a rural part of Utah and were homeschooled by their mother and father in a strictly religious household. They rarely made contact with anyone outside the family, instead choosing to grow vegetables and raise livestock on their small farm. It wasn’t until a neighbor saw the youngest boy wandering down the road without shoes that any attention was paid to them. Social services were called to investigate and immediately took the children into the custody of the state when they found credible evidence of physical and emotional abuse.

Doctors evaluated the children and discovered that while the children were malnourished, they were otherwise in perfectly good health, surprisingly so given their environment. The seven siblings were soon split apart and placed in different foster homes, though the state continued to monitor them. Each of the siblings eventually began aging properly again, and it was one of the social workers who hypothesized that the petrification may have been the result of extreme trauma the children had experienced. It was never investigated further.

It wasn’t until the early 1990s that an increasing number of cases were reported, and rigorous studies into the cause began at various universities. The first such study was conducted at the University of California, Berkeley, and involved fifteen participants. The study was criticized for its lack of diverse participants, largely drawing for a well-to-do cross-section of the Bay Area. However, further studies across the country would draw increasing awareness to the problem and as one researcher at the University of Texas stated: “It is undeniable that large swaths of adolescents across the country are experiencing age petrification across wide socio-economic, racial, and geographical sections. What is common among all of the afflicted is consistent and pervasive emotional and/or physical trauma.” 

The specifics of these traumas were never explicated in depth, but it became clear that in order to resolve the effects of petrification, the trauma internalized by the victim needed to be sufficiently released through their systems. That was to say that these patients would remain unaged as long as their trauma persisted.

Petrification could be the result of various traumas but the signs were often slow and it wasn’t until looking back in retrospect did one realize it ever began. It also became the prerogative of many families to hide away children who had suffered from the condition as it soon became a federal requirement to investigate the families of any patients afflicted, for obvious reasons. 

There soon came to be a face of petrification in the late 1990s. She was not a real person, but the invention of a campaign to raise awareness of the issue. Largely she was pre-pubescent, blonde, blue-eyed. She was America’s daughter, and she was a victim. She was worthy of America’s devotion and sympathy. She had no name but she soon became known as Kitty. She became a vessel for the pain of many women across the country who had been abused by men. But while Kitty became a symbol of the effects of trauma on young women, she was hardly the most common case of it.

By proportion young brown and black boys suffered most cases of petrification, due in large part to the circumstances of their upbringings. Some neighborhoods had many children afflicted with the condition that the CDC characterized as a public health crisis. An entire division of social services was tasked with finding ways to minimize the effects of the widespread problem, but it was quickly deemed that such endemic and complex factors contributed to the trauma experienced by these youngsters that it was nearly impossible to solve the problem without a complete overhaul of the entire system. 

This was characterized most adeptly by a government report that stated: “It is without a doubt that the cause of petrification among inner city youth is man-made and disproportionate. But the causes of and circumstances surrounding these cases are so woven into the fabric of their environment that it would practically impossible to separate. It would mean a fundamental and complete transformation of the lives of these young boys and girls, raising their standard of living with regard to education, housing, food, medical care, and safety.”

This, needless to say, would require billions of tax dollars and so the project was abandoned and the government left these neighborhoods to deal with the effects themselves.

It wasn’t until a decade later, when a research biologist at Columbia University discovered a beneficial link between petrification and treatment of a variety of other diseases, that the public at large began to pay attention. Petrification, it was soon revealed, granted the afflicted with fortified antibodies in addition to anti-aging characteristics. Soon enough, private medical research institutions began contracting the victims of these into studies to find what was internally codenamed the “fountain of youth.” 

It’s well known that people had sought ways since the beginning of time to extend life, to make it less painful, to preserve it in its optimal state. But it wasn’t until the anomalous condition sprung up throughout the country that scientists had a credible means to develop such treatments. These companies, rightfully knowing that many of the afflicted came from economically dire circumstances, offered their trials as a social welfare program for those who were willing to enlist.

Why had the numbers of those afflicted with the condition reached such alarming numbers? It was hard to say. Some said it was a number of conditions that allowed it to rise. Stress had been at all time highs. Preservatives in food had been used for decades. Antibiotics, radio signals, smartphones, satellites. There were theories that implicated any and every form of new technology. In combination with widespread and systemic inequity in the country that preserved and often exacerbated abuses of the most vulnerable, scientists saw petrification in larger and larger numbers.

Big pharma for decades tried to study these children to little success. Their search for a single pill to increase the body’s own defenses to fight disease and maintain youthfulness all but failed. But their research also enlightened the scientific community to the nuances of the condition. In one case, a fifteen-year-old boy from northern Washington, D.C., had witnessed the deaths of several of his classmates from gun violence.

The scientists discovered that the antibodies had begun to build up over time. With each new trauma, the boy had begun to slow in aging and finally when his body had reserved enough of the antibodies, he had completely frozen in place. It seemed then that the trauma could be built upon itself in small events. 

Another child, a newborn baby, failed to grow from her infancy. Her mother had been sexually abused by her boyfriend for several years leading up to the girl’s birth. Scientists concluded that trauma could then be passed from mother to child. 

In some cases there were large groups of children who simultaneously became petrified. The now infamous school shooting at a Midland, Texas, elementary school saw more than fifty schoolchildren become petrified for several months. 

Some desperate patients sought blood transfusions in the hopes of repairing their own immune systems. But doctors found no efficacy in the transfer of antibodies via transfusion of blood. The antibodies were immediately eradicated by the new host.

Millions of dollars, if not more, were funneled into creating a viable method that replicated what happened in the bodies of these children, yet no treatment was successfully developed. Publicity around the trials led to watchdog groups and social movements against the exploitation of these adolescents, and soon the big pharma companies deemed the public relations risk too great to continue enlisting them. The trials all but dried up after nearly a decade of fruitless work. 

Some psychologists began to work with the children to help them through trauma, but so little was understood about the condition that they found few results. What psychologists realized soon enough was that like all conditions developed through experiences of an entire life and the associated traumas, the untangling of the effects of them was nearly impossible. Only time could effectively lessen the suffering of the afflicted, and for some relief might never come.

Support groups arose, often led by those who had themselves worked through their own petrification. These groups offered those suffering from the condition something that medical trials had never been able to give them: a group of people with a shared experience. Sometimes, that was enough to make it bearable. Sometimes, having another person listen was enough to kickstart their recovery. What most people failed to recognize was the all consuming effect of trauma. For some, the trauma became so all consuming that it was nearly impossible to separate the person from it. Their life became a time and place from the past, impossible to move on from it.

And still despite the widespread acknowledgement of the problem, most ordinary people went on about their daily lives, choosing instead not to give them a second thought. Some did this because they believed it was not their problem. Some believed that these victims had brought it upon themselves. But in truth most people cared but lacked the emotional bandwidth to take on the trauma of other people. It was well understood that the world’s trauma was entirely too much for any single person to carry with them. As a means of self-preservation, most had to turn a blind eye to what was happening. In effect they were powerless to do anything to help. 

The truth was that there was never any medical treatment for petrification. To fix something so woven into the fabric of our society, one would have to dismantle the entire machine. It would mean the collapse of the foundation that had given them steady ground, a system which had uttered them into existence and given their own power of self will. To cede any ground would be to ignite an avalanche of change that might leave them with less.

And every day there were more victims, coming from all over the country, from rural towns and urban centers, from low-income neighborhoods and country clubs. There were unspeakable traumas. There were victims of the same abuse. And there were those who ended it for themselves, because it was the only sense of control they had. 

Like the girl from Kalamazoo who was first reported with the condition. Years later, she hung herself from the rafters of her shed. In her suicide note, she spoke of the sexual abuse she suffered at her father’s hands, that even decades after she had ceased de-aging, she still carried it with her, describing it like stepping off a ship after a life at sea, that even on land, she could still feel the waves inside her bones and in her blood and in every muscle fiber, because, as she put it, she had “become the sea.”

To be stuck in time was not what people had glorified it to be, to be young forever, to be immune from the effects of aging. 

To be stuck in time was to hold one’s breath indefinitely, to wait for it to be safe to come up for air, never knowing when that day might come, to hold onto a single moment, good or bad, until that moment became everything and nothing else in the world or in the vastness of time mattered. It was to be held under by the cruel hands of circumstance and eventually succumbing to its grasp.