With the approach of Halloween, which is celebrated every year on October 31, from the US to Europe the appetite for the paranormal and enigmatic places is increasing. Many days before and after Halloween, people feel more drawn than ever to the inexplicable and to things they might otherwise think less of. The Hoia-Baciu Forest in Romania is one of the places that continues to arouse interest, more than six decades after a case related to the UFO phenomenon was documented in the area.
The British from The Guardian made a report about the Hoia-Baciu Forest, which they call the “Bermuda Triangle” in Transylvania. This forest is also said to be “one of the main pilgrimage sites in the world for lovers of the paranormal”.
To unravel the mysteries of the place, the director of the report, Daniel Stables, who is the author of a successful book in the United Kingdom “Fiesta: A Journey Through Festivity”, turned to a tourist guide in the area, who explained to them the reasons why the place is also called the “Bermuda Triangle of Transylvania”.
“So many people have disappeared here, some say it’s a portal to another dimension,” said Marius Lazea. The journalist from Briançon chose to see with his own eyes the wonders he had learned about over time and decided to go for a night walk through the forest.
The haunted forest, explored at night
“Marius leads me through what is often described as the world’s most haunted forest: Hoia-Baciu, a square mile of centuries-old native forest on the outskirts of the Romanian city of Cluj-Napoca. He has been coming here three nights a week for the past 12 years, but even he seems a little uneasy as he arcs his flashlight like a searchlight over the knotty walls of elms and beeches that hug us on all sides, looking so though it might be the border of the known world. Marius points to a few pairs of slender beech trees, with their branches intertwined in arches, you might speculate. “Many have entered here and never left,” he adds, turning to me with a grin 100%””writes the British.
The report also mentions that reports of strange happenings here date back centuries and that the forest is named after a local shepherd who is said to have disappeared in the distant past along with 200 of his sheep. “But Hoia-Baciu came to international attention in 1968, when a military technician named Emil Barnea photographed what he described as a UFO hovering over a circular clearing in the center of the forest. In the decades since then, Hoia-Baciu has attracted yogis, shamans, ufologists and paranormal investigators from around the world, curious to experience the strange energies said to reverberate through the forest“, adds the quoted source.
A forest endangered by the expansion of the city
The British write that the forest, which is one of the main places of pilgrimage in the world for lovers of the paranormal, would be threatened. “The western suburbs of Cluj-Napoca – a modern technology center with over 400,000 inhabitants, described as the Silicon Valley of Eastern Europe – are encroaching on the area, and developers insist on getting permission to clear the trees to build blocks of flats. Except for a few hectares that harbor locally rare Mediterranean oaks, the forest is not officially protected, but Marius hopes that the company he co-founded – The Project Hoia-Baciu – will help change this situation by encouraging the authorities to recognize the value of the forest as a tourist attraction. The company offers day and night walks in the forest, yoga sessions, lectures on the paranormal, treasure hunts and escape games – and even, for the particularly intrepid, overnight camping.”writes the British.
And also here some of the stories related to the forest and which give shivers are remembered. A famous story describes a five-year-old girl who disappeared during a family picnic, only to reappear five years later with no memory of what had happened to her. More common accounts describe mobile phones and camera equipment inexplicably stopping as they enter the forest, while emotional reactions range from utter fear to states of ecstasy. Some people report seeing strange rashes on their skin, hearing disembodied whispers in the trees, or feeling hands grabbing or pushing them, even when they’re sure they’re alone.
“Marius pulls an iPad from his backpack and shows me the UFO images that catapulted Hoia-Baciu to international attention in the 1960s. Grainy and monochrome, they appear to depict a button-like flying saucer hovering above the trees. He flips through dozens of other photos taken in previous years and since, of similar saucer-like objects, glowing spheres, or ghost-like apparitions. Enigmatic photos like this have been a staple of paranormal research for more than a century, not being of much use as evidence, but it’s worth noting that Barnea didn’t profit from the publication of his photographs – on the contrary, he lost his job in the army, the communist government not taking kindly to anything with a supernatural tinge“, he also writes in the report.
Enigmas upon enigmas
The place is truly an enigmatic one, and science has few answers. For this reason the few scientists who have studied the area have not been able to agree or explain the phenomena there.
“Although many of the stories may be unverifiable, there are many things before my eyes that are undeniably strange. All around are trees whose trunks are bent and twisted into fantastic shapes. Some bulge outward at the base, their crowns disappearing into the black night, so that they look like gigantic meat hooks suspended from the sky. Others bend like melted candles or are bent into strange patterns, Spiraled. Various suggestions have been offered to explain the deformation of the trees: hurricane winds may have bent the saplings or naturally high levels of radiation in the soil account for their crooked growth. But scientific investigations have turned up no satisfactory evidence.“
At the end, the author claims that he did not see with his own eyes any paranormal phenomena during his time in the forest. However, Transylvania remains, in his opinion, generally a place that stirs the imagination, where the line between reality and folklore is blurred. And it is one of the most mysterious Romanian provinces.
“Bram Stoker’s famous vampire Count Dracula is forever associated with Transylvania, and Bran Castle – a Saxon monolith perched on a rocky outcrop in the Carpathian Mountains, about four hours’ drive south of Hoia-Baciu – is enthusiastically advertised as ‘Dracula’s Castle’. Although it bears little resemblance to the dark ruin described as Dracula’s home, and there is no evidence that it inspired Stoker, it is nonetheless a major attraction for fans of all things gothic and macabre – especially around Halloween when the castle hosts costume parties,” he also writes.
His conclusion is that “even the mythic Transylvania – literally, ‘the place beyond the forest’ – seems solid and predictable compared to these strange forests, which seem, for radioactive, atmospheric or simply folkloric reasons, to be a nexus for human imaginative power.”
