🔗 Share this article

"People refer to this location an enigmatic zone of Transylvania," explains a tour guide, his breath creating clouds of mist in the chilly dusk atmosphere. "Countless individuals have gone missing here, many believe it's a portal to another dimension." Marius is leading a visitor on a night walk through what is often described as the planet's most ghostly grove: Hoia-Baciu, an area covering one square mile of primeval native woodland on the fringes of the Romanian city of Cluj-Napoca.

Centuries of Mystery

Reports of bizarre occurrences here go back a long time – the forest is named after a local shepherd who is said to have vanished in the long ago, along with 200 of his sheep. But Hoia-Baciu gained global recognition in 1968, when an army specialist named Emil Barnea captured on film what he reported as a flying saucer suspended above a circular clearing in the middle of the forest.

Numerous entered this place and vanished without trace. But no need to fear," he continues, turning to the visitor with a grin. "Our tours have a 100% return rate."

In the time after, Hoia-Baciu has brought in yoga practitioners, shamans, extraterrestrial investigators and paranormal investigators from around the globe, curious to experience the strange energies believed to resonate through the forest.

Contemporary Dangers

It may be one of the world's premier destinations for supernatural fans, the grove is facing danger. The western suburbs of Cluj-Napoca – an innovative digital cluster of a population exceeding 400,000, described as the tech capital of Eastern Europe – are expanding, and real estate firms are advocating for approval to remove the forest to erect housing complexes.

Aside from a small area home to area-specific oak varieties, this woodland is without conservation status, but the guide is confident that the initiative he was instrumental in creating – the Hoia-Baciu Project – will help to change that, encouraging the local administrators to acknowledge the forest's value as a tourist attraction.

Chilling Events

When small sticks and fall foliage snap and crunch beneath their footwear, Marius tells various folk tales and reported supernatural events here.

• A well-known account tells of a young child going missing during a family outing, later to rematerialise five years later with no recollection of what had happened, having not aged a single day, her garments without the tiniest bit of dirt.
• Regular stories explain mobile phones and imaging devices inexplicably shutting down on stepping into the forest.
• Feelings include absolute fear to states of ecstasy.
• Certain individuals claim observing bizarre skin irritations on their skin, detecting unseen murmurs through the forest, or experience hands grabbing them, even when certain nobody is nearby.

Study Attempts

Despite several of the accounts may be hard to prove, there is much clearly observable that is definitely bizarre. Everywhere you look are vegetation whose bases are warped and gnarled into unusual forms.

Multiple explanations have been suggested to account for the deformed trees: powerful storms could have shaped the young trees, or naturally high radiation levels in the soil explain their crooked growth.

But formal examinations have found insufficient proof.

The Famous Clearing

The expert's tours enable visitors to participate in a small-scale research of their own. When nearing the opening in the forest where Barnea took his famous UFO images, he passes his guest an ghost-hunting device which measures EMF readings.

"We're entering the most active part of the forest," he states. "See what you can find."

The plants immediately cease as the group enters into a perfect circle. The single plant life is the low vegetation beneath their shoes; it's clear that it hasn't been mown, and seems that this strange clearing is organic, not the work of human hands.

Fact Versus Fiction

This part of Romania is a area which inspires creativity, where the division is unclear between fact and folklore. In rural Romanian communities belief persists in strigoi ("screamers") – supernatural, appearance-altering vampires, who emerge from tombs to terrorise regional populations.

Bram Stoker's renowned fictional vampire is permanently linked with Transylvania, and the historic stronghold – a medieval building situated on a stone formation in the Carpathian Mountains – is heavily promoted as "the vampire's home".

But including folklore-rich Transylvania – actually, "the land past the woods" – appears real and understandable in contrast to these eerie woods, which seem to be, for reasons related to radiation, environmental or entirely legendary, a nexus for fantasy projection.

"Inside these woods," Marius comments, "the division between reality and imagination is very thin."