Hoia-Baciu is a small wood of beech, hornbeam, ash and elm on a ridge at the western edge of Cluj-Napoca, the main city of Transylvania. It covers roughly three square kilometers, has a dirt road running through it, and on a fine weekend is full of joggers, mountain bikers and dog walkers. It is also sold to visitors as the most haunted forest in the world, a Romanian answer to the Bermuda Triangle, where people vanish, cameras fail and a flying saucer was photographed over a clearing in 1968.
What happened
Villagers in the settlements around the hill had their own superstitions about the wood long before anyone wrote about it, describing it as a cursed place that brought out a visitor’s worst fears. The most repeated modern stories are anonymous. A five-year-old girl is said to have wandered in and reappeared years later in the same clothes with no memory of where she had been. A shepherd is said to have entered with his flock and never come out. Visitors describe nausea, headaches, anxiety and a sense of being watched.
The first person to treat the wood as a research subject was Alexandru Sift, a Cluj biologist who died in 1993. According to Romanian press accounts, he started walking and photographing the forest in the late 1950s after a boyhood sighting of a gray V-shaped object, and spent close to a decade there collecting local stories and taking pictures he believed showed shadowy figures and lights.
The event that made the forest famous came on August 18, 1968. Emil Barnea, a 45-year-old technician who had served as an army officer, was picnicking in a clearing with his girlfriend, Zamfira Matea, and two friends. Early in the afternoon, as he gathered firewood, his girlfriend called him over to look at a round, silvery object moving slowly and silently above the trees. Barnea fetched his camera and took four pictures before the object, by his account, sped upward and out of sight.
The investigation
Barnea did not rush to publicize the film. In September he showed the prints to Florin Gheorghiță, a Cluj engineer who collected UFO reports, and Gheorghiță passed them to the state news agency, Agerpres. One frame ran in Romanian newspapers on September 18, 1968. The director of the Cluj astronomical observatory responded that the pictures were either a hoax or a weather balloon caught at an odd angle. Supporters say a press photographer and a specialist at the news agency examined the negatives and found no sign of tampering, and the writer Ion Hobana later interviewed Barnea and championed the case abroad. A Belgian analyst, G. Delcorps, writing in a French UFO magazine in 1971, ruled out darkroom trickery but calculated that the object in the second frame sat about 30 degrees above the horizon, not the near-vertical 85 degrees Barnea had given. No independent analysis has settled what the object was.
In the 1990s Adrian Pătruț, a Cluj chemistry professor and an officer of the Romanian Society of Parapsychology, published a book on the forest’s phenomena that framed them in terms of bioplasma and psychic energy. Television followed: Ghost Adventures, Destination Truth and other paranormal series have filmed there.
The explanations
The most thorough skeptical review is a 2016 Skeptoid episode by Brian Dunning. He searched Romanian newspaper archives and found no record of anyone disappearing in the forest, including the girl. He checked published geomagnetic survey data and found that the Cluj area shows no significant magnetic anomaly. He pointed out that the famous clearing, Poiana Rotundă, is not a barren circle at all but an irregular meadow of about 2,000 square meters, thick with grass and wildflowers, and that some widely shared photographs of a perfectly round clearing are of somewhere else. Red lights filmed at night, he noted, could have many sources in a wood ringed by roads, a television mast and the approach path to Cluj airport about ten kilometers away.
The twisted trunks that feature in every photograph are real, and the Jurnalul newspaper described trees two centuries old that grow thin and contorted. Crooked growth is common in many woods, though, and nobody has published a study showing that Hoia’s trees are unusual.
Where it stands
The 1968 photographs remain an open question in the narrow sense that nobody has proved what they show. Everything else attached to Hoia-Baciu, the vanishings, the dead zone and the magnetic field, rests on stories without names, dates or measurements. The forest is now a recreation area with a bike park, and local guides run night walks for visitors who want the atmosphere.