👻 HAUNTED PLACE · EXP. Nº9046
ACTIVE
Călugăreasca Forest
Călugăreasca Forest is a location reputed to be haunted in Ialomița, RO. Its reputation comes from reported apparitions, unexplained phenomena and eyewitness accounts gathered over time.
Where is Călugăreasca Forest?
- Location
- Ialomița, RO
- Type
- Forest / nature
- Coordinates
- 44.56, 26.89
- Testimonies
- 0
- Last updated
LOCATION
Why is Călugăreasca Forest said to be haunted?
Călugăreasca - the monks' wood - is a block of oak and black locust of about two hundred hectares in the Bărăgan plain of Ialomița County, Romania, between the village of Sălcioara and the hamlet of Copuzu. Local telling holds that a monastery once stood among its oaks, that Ottoman troops killed the monks and levelled it, and that the last monk's dying curse trapped his killers' souls in the thickets; a whitewashed stone cross cut with the year 1831 leans in the middle of the wood, and smaller crosses along its edge are said to keep the spirits from getting out. The written record tells a quieter story. Nineteenth-century state gazetteers know the place as Odaia Călugărului - the monk's stock-farm - an 850-hectare estate of Căldărușani monastery with 130 hectares of woodland, let out by the Romanian state after Alexandru Ioan Cuza secularised monastic property in 1863. The monks of the Călugăreasca skete were still there in 1848, when they began building the church that survives at Copuzu, and the inscription inside it dates its own end as a monastery to 1864. The oldest printed telling of the haunting that can be dated is from 2007.
What is the history of Călugăreasca Forest?
The wood lies on the right bank of the Ialomița, under the yellow clay ridge the villagers call the coastă, a short walk from Piscu Crăsani, the Getic fortified settlement excavated in the 1920s and described by Vasile Pârvan in 1926 as the point where the Greek-Getic road of the water crossed the Iranian road of the steppe.
The settlement below the wood appears in writing under the name Cervenia. Ștefan Grigorescu, a local historian who has published the inscriptions of Ialomița County, dates that attestation to a deed of 1621; the parish priest of Copuzu, quoted a year later by the Orthodox daily Ziarul Lumina, gives 1578 and the reign of Mihnea Turcitul instead. I have not seen the deed and cannot decide between them.
Who owned the land is not in doubt. The Copuzu estate became the property of Căldărușani, the monastery Matei Basarab founded in 1638 in the Vlăsia forest north of Bucharest, and a skete was raised on it. Until the middle of the nineteenth century that skete stood some seven kilometres south of the village, inside the wood that is still called Călugăreasca; it was then moved down beside the village to be nearer the river and its water. Early in the nineteenth century the monks put up a church at Copuzu, probably of wood, of which nothing survives. Between 1848 and 1856 they built the brick church that still stands in the cemetery, dedicated to the Ascension. Its dedicatory inscription says so in as many words: this holy church was raised in the years 1848-1856 as a monastery, by the monks of the Călugăreasca skete; in 1864 it was turned into a parish church.
That last clause is the end of the monastery. Alexandru Ioan Cuza's law of 1863 secularised monastic property across the country and the estate passed to the state. The Marele Dicționar Geografic al României registers the result twice. In volume II (1899) the commune of Copuzu covers 8,550 hectares, 115 of them wood, and is made up of four estates, two of them state property "formerly belonging to Căldărușani monastery": Copuzul-Săpunari, and "Copuzul or Odaia-Călugărului", 850 hectares, let for the decade 1885-1895 at 20,100 lei a year. Volume IV (1901) gives Odaia-Călugărului an entry of its own: an estate in the commune of Copuzu, of Căldărușani before the secularisation, 850 hectares, "with a wood of 130 hectares".
Around 1864 shepherds from the Făgăraș country, who wintered their flocks in the plain, received land under Cuza's agrarian reform and settled beside the old monastic hamlet; the present village took shape from that mixture between 1864 and 1870. German occupying troops used the church as an animal shelter from the end of 1916 until 1918. The parish repaired it several times, last between 1996 and 2001, when Teodor Păltinean restored its painting; Damaschin, bishop of Slobozia and Călărași, reconsecrated it on 21 October 2001. Under the porch of its belfry stands a wooden cross of 1834, raised, its inscription says, in honour of the archimandrites, whose names are no longer known. Grigorescu calls it the oldest monument of its kind preserved in Ialomița.
Timeline: the documented record of Călugăreasca Forest
- 1621 The settlement below the wood is attested in writing as Cervenia, according to the local historian Ștefan Grigorescu. The parish priest of Copuzu gives 1578 and the reign of Mihnea Turcitul instead; the deed itself has not been consulted here.
- 1831 The year cut into the head of the great stone cross that stands, whitewashed and leaning, in the middle of the wood. It is the only date the object itself carries; the rest of its lettering was already illegible under the lime when it was described in 2007.
- 1834 A wooden cross is raised in honour of the archimandrites, whose names are not recorded. It survives under the porch of the Copuzu belfry and is, for Grigorescu, the oldest monument of its kind preserved in Ialomița County.
- 1848-1856 The monks of the Călugăreasca skete build the brick church at Copuzu, dedicated to the Ascension. Its dedicatory inscription names them as its builders and records that in 1864 it became a parish church.
- 1863 Alexandru Ioan Cuza's law secularises monastic property throughout Romania. The Odaia Călugărului estate passes to the state and the skete's church becomes the parish church of Copuzu the following year.
- 1885-1895 The state lets the former monastic estate, 850 hectares including 130 of woodland, for 20,100 lei a year. The lease is recorded in the national geographical dictionary under the name Copuzul or Odaia-Călugărului.
- 1901 Volume IV of the Marele Dicționar Geografic al României gives Odaia-Călugărului its own entry: an estate of Căldărușani monastery before the secularisation, 850 hectares, with a wood of 130. It records no legend, no massacre and no cross.
- End of 1916 to 1918 German occupying troops use the Copuzu church as an animal shelter. The damage is repaired by the parish over the following decades.
- 21 October 2001 After repairs begun in 1996 and the restoration of the painting by Teodor Păltinean, the church is reconsecrated by Damaschin, bishop of Slobozia and Călărași.
- 2007 Horia Țurcanu publishes a signed reportage on the wood in the weekly Formula AS, with four named local informants. It is the earliest printed telling of the haunting that can be dated, and every later account descends from it.
- 22 July 2010 Ziarul Lumina, the daily of the Romanian Patriarchate, prints the parish priest Nae Ion's flat denial that the crosses of Copuzu walked there: they were carted down when the church was built.
- 20 October 2012 România TV retells the legend as belonging to Dor Mărunt in Călărași County and describes a forest of walnut and mulberry. English Wikipedia translates the page two years later, and the mulberry wood and the wrong county enter the databases.
- 3 January 2016 A Wikidata editor attaches the label Călugăreasca Forest and the description reportedly haunted forest to the item for Pădurea Călugărească in Olt County, a protected oak reserve 190 kilometres away. Its coordinates travel with the legend from then on.
Is there a rational explanation for Călugăreasca Forest?
The story runs the wrong way round. Every version in circulation ends with Ottoman troops killing the monks and levelling the place. The documents end it differently: the skete was moved, of its own accord and for water, in the middle of the nineteenth century, and it was Cuza's secularisation of 1863 that closed it. Its monks were still building at Copuzu in 1848, and the church they finished in 1856 carries an inscription that dates its own conversion into a parish church to 1864.
The name points the same way. In Wallachian usage an odaie is not a cell but an isolated stock-farm with byres, a sheepfold; the historical dictionary of Romanian records that sense for both Moldavia and Wallachia. "Odaia Călugărului" is what a monastic estate office was called, and the nineteenth-century state gazetteer uses it as the administrative name of the property until after 1900. It is not a rare name: the same dictionary lists a second Odaia-Călugărului, a twenty-hectare oak wood at Lupșani in the same county, and today the Romanian map carries at least five separate woods called Pădurea Călugărească or Pădurea Călugăreasca, three of them in Olt County alone.
That gazetteer is also the cleanest negative available. Its two entries for this estate give surface, ownership, lease price and hectares of wood, and not one word about monks, Turks, a curse or a cross. The same dictionary is not squeamish about folklore: legends and traditions are cited more than two hundred times across the two volumes consulted. It simply had nothing of the kind to record here.
The earliest printed telling of the haunting that I have been able to date is from 2007: a signed reportage by Horia Țurcanu in the weekly Formula AS. Its own informants place the stories in their childhood, in the 1930s, a century after the date on the cross. Everything later derives from it or from the church paper's follow-up of 2010.
The crosses that are said to have walked from the wood to the Copuzu churchyard are the one point where the institution answers plainly. Asked about them, the parish priest Nae Ion told Ziarul Lumina: "Nothing of the sort. They were brought here." They were carted down when the church was built, to consecrate the ground; and the reporter, looking up at the loose sand and loam of the slope above the cemetery, worked out for himself why they keep surfacing two metres down when a new grave is dug.
As for the wind that never blows, a compact block of roughly two hundred hectares of woodland standing alone in an open plain is a windbreak; the oldest man interviewed in 2007 said as much without meaning to, remembering that the plain's blizzard "struck the forest as if it were a wall".
One last correction, and it is ours as much as anyone's. In October 2012 România TV retold the legend as belonging to Dor Mărunt, in Călărași County, and described a forest of walnut and mulberry - the trees of a different wood in that other village. English Wikipedia translated that page in October 2014, filed the entry under Călărași County and made it "a forest of mulberry trees". On 3 January 2016 a Wikidata editor attached the English label and the description "reportedly haunted forest" to the item for Pădurea Călugărească in Olt County, a forty-hectare protected oak reserve some 190 kilometres away, and that reserve's coordinates travelled with the legend into databases - this one included - until they were corrected here.
Can you visit Călugăreasca Forest?
This is not a visitor attraction. Nobody charges for it, nobody guides it and there is no sign anywhere naming it.
The wood sits in the commune of Sălcioara, in the south of Ialomița County, on the boundary with Călărași. The commune has two villages, Sălcioara and Rași, and about two thousand inhabitants; the road through it is the county road DJ201B, which runs north to Ciochina and south to Lehliu-Gară, where it ends in the national road DN3A. The tree line begins barely a kilometre north of Sălcioara and the block ends some four kilometres south of Copuzu, on the other side of the valley. It is working forest, not a reserve: it carries no protection under the county's list of historic monuments, and it should not be confused with the protected oak reserve of the same name in Olt County.
There is no marked path to the stone cross and no reliable way to find it from a map; the 2007 reportage found it only with the help of the man who lived at the wood's edge. Anyone going should ask in the village, go in daylight and expect no facilities of any kind.
What can be visited plainly is Copuzu, in the neighbouring commune of Balaciu, across the Ialomița. The 1848-1856 church stands in the cemetery among the stone crosses that keep surfacing, and it is a working parish church; its feast is the Ascension, forty days after Orthodox Easter. Copuzu is a dead end. In the priest's own words to Ziarul Lumina, "only one road leads to Copuzu, and it has no signpost. It is not a village you pass through, it is the end of the road." Above the village lies Piscu Crăsani, a class A archaeological site on the national register (IL-I-s-A-14039): open ground, no facilities, and nothing to see beyond the shape of the ridge and the old excavation trenches.
Sources consulted
- Ștefan Grigorescu, «Biserica din Copuzu» — Bărăganul Ortodox, 2012 academic
- George Ioan Lahovari, C. I. Brătianu, Grigore Tocilescu, «Marele Dicționar Geografic al României, vol. II — entrada «Copuzul»» — Societatea Geografică Română, București, 1899 book
- George Ioan Lahovari, C. I. Brătianu, Grigore Tocilescu, «Marele Dicționar Geografic al României, vol. IV — entrada «Odaia-Călugărului»» — Societatea Geografică Română, București, 1901 book
- Horia Țurcanu, «Misterul din pădurea Călugăreasca» — Formula AS, nr. 778, 2007 newspaper archive
- Dumitru Manolache, «Satul subteran al crucilor de piatră de la Copuzu» — Ziarul Lumina, 2010 newspaper archive
- Dumitru Manolache, «Lăcașul vechi din Copuzu emană istorie» — Ziarul Lumina, 2013 newspaper archive
- Narcisa Tomulescu, «ROMÂNIA MISTICĂ. Tainele Bărăganului: blestemul comorilor și pădurea Călugăreasca» — România TV, 2012 newspaper archive
- Ministerul Culturii, România, «Lista monumentelor istorice din județul Ialomița» — Wikipedia în limba română, 2026 web
- Wikidata contributors, «Q18547178 (Pădurea Călugărească) — historial de ediciones» — Wikidata, 2016 web
- OpenStreetMap contributors, «Pădurea Călugărului, way 85934530 (importación CORINE Land Cover 2006)» — OpenStreetMap, 2023 web
- Academia Română, «odaie — Dicționarul limbii române, acepción 4: «tîrlă cu grajduri pentru vite; stînă»» — dexonline.ro, 1987 web
Reviewed by V. Serrano on 2026-08-21 · How we verify our content
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