Romanian Notebook: The ‘Haunted’ Hoia-Baciu forest, Transylvania

Looking into what Romania has to offer in the way of paranormal phenomena, I quickly came across Hoia-Baciu forest. Close to Cluj-Napoca, it has acquired a reputation over the years which has led to it being dubbed ‘the Bermuda Triangle of Transylvania’. A website devoted to its mysteries describes it as ‘the world’s most haunted forest’, though how one makes such comparisons is a mystery in itself. There is a generally uncanny atmosphere, and some of the trees grow in unusual shapes with no obvious reason found to explain it.

The phenomena claimed to have occurred there are many and varied, suggesting it is a ‘window area’, or paranormal hotspot. There is a supposedly old legend of a shepherd who went missing, which wouldn’t be particularly noteworthy except his 200 sheep went with him. He is said to have given his name to the forest. One may be slightly sceptical of the thought of a shepherd in charge of 200 sheep inside a forest.

Its spooky reputation can certainly be traced to the early 1960s when a researcher, biologist Alexandru Sift, said he saw peculiar shadows among the trees and disc-shaped objects above them; unfortunately much of his evidence was lost after his death in 1993. That reputation really took off in the 1970s, with a number of UFO sightings reported down the years after the publication of a photograph featuring a blob-like, or one could say water-droplet-like, shape by Emil Barnea in 1968 (shown above).

More recently reports have expanded in scope to include apparitions, faces appearing in photographs that were not visible when the image was taken, electromagnetic anomalies, batteries discharging (commonly reported in poltergeist cases), electronic devices malfunctioning, and lights, often orange or red and with no apparent source, being seen. EVP samples have been captured.

Individuals have suffered unexplained scratches, rashes and burns, nausea, migraines, a feeling of oppression and anxiety, and the sensation of being watched by a ‘presence’. Many phenomena are thought to centre on a clearing, the poiana rotundă (round glade), where nothing grows – except grass. This is where Barnea took his UFO photograph in 1968. Photographs later found to contain human-like shapes are claimed to have been taken at the site.

As the Bermuda Triangle tag suggests, there are said to have been many disappearances – one source puts the figure at over 1,000. A few people have allegedly disappeared and later been found dead, the cause determined to be suicide. A popular story is of an unnamed five-year old girl. No trace of her could be found, yet she reappeared five years later, wearing the same clothes which were in good condition, with no memory of what had happened in the intervening period. If one wonders about a now-ten-year old child dressed in the clothes of a five-year old, she had not aged so was the same size she had been when she vanished. There are cases of missing time, visitors not realising how long they have been inside the forest.

A theory has it that the area is haunted by murder victims who are angry at being trapped there, or it is some kind of portal to a malign dimension. A parallel dimension is a theory held by Dr Adrian Patruţ, a chemist at Babeş-Bolyai University in Cluj, president of the Romanian Society of Parapsychology and an associate member of the Parapsychological Association. He has written extensively on the paranormal, including the forest, and collaborated on a documentary.

Alan Murdie in his Ghostwatch column in the November 2006 issue of Fortean Times summarises a paper about Hoia-Baciu Patruţ had given to a conference held at Sinaia, Romania, in May that year (although Murdie does not name the event, it was the symposium of the Transylvanian Society of Dracula, at which he also presented a paper). Patruţ’s paper, ‘The phenomena of the Hoia-Baciu wood, in Transylvania’, described phenomena that, in Murdie’s words, ‘suggest a cross between a UFO window area and a giant natural séance.’ These included ‘strange lights, flying objects with regular geometry and fast-moving apparitions at ground level.’ Of greater concern, Patruţ said that microwave bursts and gamma and beta radiation had been detected, though Murdie adds some of the radiation claims were dismissed by another delegate, Professor Sorin Comorosan (not a Nobel physics laureate as Murdie states).

Patruţ was a prime mover in establishing the forest’s reputation with extreme but unsubstantiated assertions. In an interview reported by Antena 3 in 2013 he tells of a student in a group with him who, sometime after 1989 (such vagueness does not encourage confidence), had a weird experience. According to his account they were standing at the edge of the trees, looking at the city. Suddenly the student went into a trance for an hour and when she woke up she said she had been walking through Cluj as it appeared before and during the war.

Some in the party were naturally sceptical but when she went to pay her bus fare she found in her pocket a silver 100 lei coin bearing the head of King Michael (the last king of Romania), indicating something more going on than retrocognition. Patruţ does not seem to have been concerned at someone being in a trance for an hour. One yearns to know more about this incident, and the research the professor undoubtedly did to follow up the student’s time-travelling perambulations by interviewing her and comparing her descriptions with the historical records. He stated he had not told anyone this before, which is remarkable, nor would it seem had the student said anything.

Patruţ has been most fortunate in the range of his experiences. In 1975 he had taken a large number of photographs at ruins in the middle of the forest in the company of a group of friends. Returning a fortnight later, the ruins were nowhere to be found and were never seen again. Moreover, after some years the images of the ruins dematerialised from the photographs!

Hoia-Baciu’s reputation is making it a popular area with tourists and investigators (none of whom has been reported missing, thank goodness). Its champions suggest it is starting to compete with the Dracula legend as a lure for enthusiasts to visit Transylvania, though that has to be wishful thinking. There are organised paranormally-themed tours, and like any ghost walk the wilder stories do business no harm. Its reputation in that regard was further burnished by its appearance on a Hallowe’en special edition of Ghost Adventures which aired in 2013. Not all visitors are there in the hope of experiencing a frisson of fear: it is allegedly popular with Wiccans, and some individuals believe there is an energy which can be harnessed to positive ends.

What to make of all this? As this is Transylvania, with all its cultural associations, one might be forgiven for thinking the forest is a vast, remote place. In fact it is small, only about a square mile in size, and very close to Cluj, no more than a 20-minute drive. People from the city picnic and go walking or cycling in it. This is not the wild Carpathians by any stretch. In fact ‘Hoia-Baciu wood’ would be a more appropriate name, as Murdie indicates in the heading of his Ghostwatch coverage, though it doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

Some of the reported incidents can be put down to the usual misperception, coincidence and expectation. Missing time could be people losing track of how long they have been there. Woods can often generate the creepy feeling that walkers are being watched, an effect that would be enhanced by the peculiar shapes of some of the trees. Other aspects are doubtless made up – what are the names of the thousand people said to have disappeared? A small child reappearing unchanged after a gap of five years suggests kidnap by fairy folk, but spinning a yarn sounds more likely. The name of this youngster is never provided, even though she would surely have become an instant celebrity.

Lights could reasonably be people with torches glimpsed through the trees, either inside or outside the wooded area, vehicles on nearby roads or aeroplanes landing at Cluj airport (you can fly direct from Luton). EVP can be captured in all sorts of places, and they possess the same degree of evidentiality wherever they are made. Photographs of flying geometric shapes could be insects. Patruţ’s various anecdotes are just that – unsupported anecdotes – so need to be treated with caution, and not taken at face value. Having said which, the Romanian Society of Parapsychology’s files still sound worth a look as according to Patruţ they contain a number of poltergeist cases unknown outside Romania.

As for the poiana rotundă, forest clearings are not particularly rare and are explainable in environmental terms; anywhere else and it would not be thought odd at all. Patruţ himself has said that ‘The Hoia-Baciu forest is known for its very, very dry vegetation’ (‘Pădurea Hoia-Baciu e cunoscută pentru vegetaţia ei foarte, foarte uscată...’); he mentioned this in connection with an experience which occurred around Easter 2000 (again maddening vagueness) when with another (unnamed) researcher he witnessed large amounts of sap flowing copiously from ‘thousands of trees’ (‘mii de copaci’) and pooling around their roots. The following day there was no evidence of this liquid.

Promoters of the mystery say the poiana rotundă is a perfect circle, suggesting an unnatural origin, but a glance at an aerial photograph shows it is not. This kind of relaxed approach to the evidence is typical of accounts dealing with Hoia-Baciu. In sum, the contention that it is the world’s most haunted forest (or wood) evaporates on closer inspection, in much the same way Patruţ’s sap did.

Update 23 July 2019: ‘Hoia Baciu: Romania’s Haunted Forest’

The cover story in the August 2019 issue of Fortean Times is an entry in the magazine’s regular Fortean Traveller section by Chris Hill, devoted to the three-hour visit he made to Hoia Baciu. It has, he writes, ‘become Romania’s Roswell,’ a startling epithet the article does little to justify, but he does demonstrate why the place is still worth seeing if the chance arises: specifics were less important than the opportunity to soak up the atmosphere.

Following a quick run-down of the region’s complex political history, Hill recounts his experience in the forest. His guide was Alex Surducan who, with his business partner Marius Lazin, makes part of his living escorting tourists to Hoia-Baciu. Naturally they have an interest in pressing the case for its paranormal aspects, despite Surducan’s declaration ‘that as a physicist he approached the forest with a scientific eye, allowing speculation in only when all material reasoning had been exhausted.’

Unsurprisingly Surducan knows Patruţ, but these days Patruţ is reluctant to discuss the forest and required some persuasion to talk to Surducan. Patruţ has moved away from his geophysical ideas, as expounded at the 2006 conference, to a more ‘mystical’ approach involving ‘supernatural accountancy’, with the forest a ‘psychic battery’ fulfilling visitors’ desires.

Surducan pointed out to Hill that conditions in the poiana rotundă were accounted for by the poor soil, despite which he had witnessed both white and black magicians and Christian exorcists engaging in rituals there (perhaps they cancelled each other out). There has not been much in the way of UFO activity in the forest (contrary to Patruţ’s claim that there was in 2006, according to Murdie’s Fortean Times report) and, drunk teenagers aside, reports in general come from visitors rather than locals, suggesting the role of expectation.

The forest’s use as a general leisure destination is prosaically indicated by the beer tins and vodka bottles Hill saw. About the only oddities he experienced were a localised breeze rustling in the trees and what he considered undue draining of his camera battery, but he still had a nice time. As the existence of his article proves, he did not disappear.

Update 5 September 2021:

‘Hoia Baciu: Inside the creepiest forest in Transylvania: Forget Count Dracula’s castle; Transylvania’s really frightful place is ‘haunted’ forest Hoia Baciu. Sophie Buchan goes for a night-time stroll.’

Sophie Buchan produced an article for the Independent travel section on 3 September 2021. She joined a group led by Alex Surducan on a nocturnal tour of the forest and he was full of his usual stories, starting with ‘“Once when I came here,” says Alex, our guide, “I found 60 people from Bucharest trying to open a gate into another dimension.”’ One wonders how they got on.

Buchan does not challenge the image of the forest as a creepy place where unexplained events happen. She recounts the usual phenomena hyped-up visitors report, while Alex tells her that ‘ectoplasms’ are ‘routinely’ seen by joggers, though no further details are provided. Of the photos of ‘shadowy figures’ Alex shows the group, one is a man wearing traditional Romanian dress, so not too shadowy perhaps.

Alex, she decides, while distancing himself from the more ridiculous claims is not immune from the stories. When she suggests they camp overnight, he makes an excuse about the cold weather. He tells her he had camped out there, but he and his friends kept hearing the noise of a hoof, which stopped every time they put their heads outside the tent. Perhaps he wanted to maintain the forest’s mystique, and it might have been dispelled by locals engaged in more mundane activities.

Referring to Emil Barnea, Buchan notes he had nothing to gain by publicising his UFO photograph and much to lose as he was sacked from his job, which would have made his life difficult. We also learn Alex and Marius are big in Japan as the result of a 2015 documentary about Hoia Baciu shown there.

The article concludes with travel advice and the information that Alex Surducan’s night-time tours cost £25. Alex says when he and Marius decided to start their business in 2013 their friends told them they were mad, because they thought tourists wouldn’t want to go into the spooky forest. With prices like that, the friends must be annoyed they didn’t think of the idea first.

Romanian Notebook

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28 May 2018

The ‘Haunted’ Hoia-Baciu forest, Transylvania