WILLIAMSBURG, Va. — Tom and Tammy Mace hurried over to the two wooden statues in the front lobby of Williamsburg, Va.'s Ripley's Believe It or Not! museum late last month.

They stood for a few minutes conferring with one another, grabbed some brochures and slowly reached out to touch them — first, the 5-foot-tall male with his long beard and sword, then the female and her baby, whose head is discolored from being rubbed by thousands of hopeful couples.

More than 2,000 women have credited their pregnancies to the African fertility statues since their first international tour in 1996, and after eight years, the statues are back on the road.

The Maces, who live in Newport News, Va., have been trying to conceive for years but a series of fertility tests and treatments hasn't worked so far.

Tammy, who is 35, said she learned about the statues from the "Ripley's Believe it or Not!" television show and asked Tom, 38, if they could travel to see the statues in Florida.

"We've tried everything else so why not this?" she said. "It's fate that we're close enough to use it."

Although the statues are Ripley's most popular exhibit, they were originally acquired in 1993 for use as office decorations at their Orlando headquarters. Within 13 months, 13 employees became pregnant. When the news spread, women flocked to the headquarters. Since then, Ripley's has collected thousands of letters confirming statue-assisted births, capitalizing on the phenomenon by offering keepsake certificates and blankets to "Ripley babies."

According to the museum, both 70-pound statues were carved from heavy ebony wood by Baule tribesmen on the Ivory Coast of Africa some time in the 1930s.