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.
Further reading
Adrian Patruţ, De la Normal la Paranormal [From
Normal to Paranormal], Vol. 1, Cluj-Napoca:
Dacia, 1991.
Adrian Patruţ, De la Normal la Paranormal [From
Normal to Paranormal], Vol. 2, 2nd ed., Cluj-Napoca: Dacia, 1993.
Adrian Patruţ, Fenomenele de la Padurea Hoia-Baciu [The Phenomena of the Hoia-Baciu Forest], Cluj-Napoca: Divia, 1995.
Alan Murdie, ‘The Hoia-Bacu [sic] Wood,
Romania’, Fortean Times, issue 216,
November 2006, p. 24.
Chris Hill, ‘Fortean Traveller 116 –
Hoia Baciu: Romania’s Haunted Forest’, Fortean
Times, issue 382, August 2019, pp. 32-36.
Sophie Buchan, ‘Hoia Baciu: Inside the
creepiest forest in Transylvania’, The Independent, 3 September 2021.
