👻 HAUNTED PLACE · EXP. Nº9046
ACTIVE
Hoia Baciu Forest
Roughly 300 hectares of working periurban wood on the western edge of Cluj-Napoca, Hoia-Baciu has an open-air ethnographic museum inside it, a sports base beside it and a city bus that stops at its treeline.
Where is Hoia Baciu Forest?
- Location
- Cluj, Romania
- Type
- Forest / nature
- Coordinates
- 46.762, 23.49
- Last updated
LOCATION
Why is Hoia Baciu Forest said to be haunted?
The English label it travels under — the most haunted forest in the world — is younger than most of the people who repeat it, and the Romanians who studied the place wrote about lights and unidentified objects. The shepherd who supposedly walked in with two hundred sheep and never came out belongs to the legend, and Monitorul de Cluj told it as one in 2021; the etymology of the name is uncertain, and baci is simply the Romanian for a head shepherd. What is documented starts in July 1953, when Alexandru Sift, then a student and later a biologist, reported a grey object shaped like a V lying on its side at the edge of the wood, and spent the rest of his life on it. Even the twisted trees have a named academic answer: Tibor Hartel, of Babeş-Bolyai University, told Monitorul de Cluj in 2021 that hornbeam, lime and maple cut repeatedly over generations grow back exactly like that.
What is the history of Hoia Baciu Forest?
Hoia-Baciu is a working periurban wood of roughly 300 hectares on the western edge of Cluj-Napoca, on the slope known as Dealul Hoia. It has an open-air ethnographic museum inside it, a sports base beside it and a city bus route that stops at its treeline. The label attached to it in English — "the most haunted forest in the world" — is younger than most of the people who repeat it; the Romanians who studied the place wrote about lights and unidentified objects.
The folkloric account of the name is the one every guide tells: a shepherd called Hoia is said to have walked in with two hundred sheep and never come out, and the wood became "the forest where Hoia the shepherd was lost". Monitorul de Cluj told it in 2021 under the words "Legenda spune", the legend says. The etymology is uncertain; Baciu is also the name of the neighbouring commune, and baci is the Romanian word for a head shepherd.
The documented story begins in July 1953. Alexandru Sift (1936-1993), then still a student and later a biologist, was at the edge of the wood when he reported seeing a grey object shaped like a V lying on its side. That sighting turned into a lifetime's obsession. According to Vasile Surcel, writing in Jurnalul Naţional in 2004, Sift criss-crossed the area for some three decades and took more than 60,000 photographs, convinced he was recording structures invisible to the naked eye. Sift's frame was ufology and anomalous physical phenomena, and it stayed that way.
Then came 18 August 1968. Emil Barnea, a 45-year-old military technician, was spending a weekend in the wood with Zamfira Matea and two friends who kept their anonymity. Around one in the afternoon, at the clearing known as the Poiana Rotundă, he photographed an object moving low and silently over the trees. The solidly documented part is the aftermath: on 18 September 1968 AGERPRES, the Romanian state news agency, announced the observation and photographing of a UFO in the Baciu forest about a month earlier. The images were interpreted by the engineer Florin Gheorghiţă and, according to Descoperă.ro, were presented at the international ufology congress held in Acapulco in 1977. They have been called the clearest UFO photographs ever taken in Romania, a superlative the Romanian press has repeated for half a century.
From the mid-1970s the work passed to Adrian Pătruţ, professor of chemistry at Babeş-Bolyai University in Cluj and president of the Romanian Society of Parapsychology. His group added some 15,000 photographs of its own and in 1995 he published the monograph Fenomenele de la Pădurea Hoia-Baciu with the Dacia press, reproducing what survived of Sift's archive — most of which vanished after Sift's death in 1993. Pătruţ described short-lived, shape-shifting "plasmatic" structures with an almost Brownian motion, and built a unifying theory he called a global polymorphic phenomenon. His own conclusion, as the Cluj county library's documentation of the book quotes it, was that a conclusion is extremely difficult to formulate, and that "the only certainty is that THESE PHENOMENA EXIST".
So the entire Romanian tradition — 1953 to 1995, two researchers, 75,000 photographs, one monograph — is about lights, plasmas and unidentified objects. The ghosts arrive in English. Syfy's Destination Truth filmed in the wood for an episode broadcast on 9 September 2009; Travel Channel's Ghost Adventures built a Transylvania special around it in 2013, with Pătruţ himself on camera in the clearing; night tours became a fixture, with guide Marius Lazin running walks three nights a week for more than a decade; and in October 2025 a Guardian travel feature by Daniel Stables put the phrase in a headline — "World's most haunted forest". The reputation is real, and its English-language form dates from those two television episodes of 2009 and 2013.
Timeline: the documented record of Hoia Baciu Forest
- July 1953 Alexandru Sift, then a student, reports seeing a grey object shaped like a V lying on its side at the edge of the wood. Over the following three decades he takes more than 60,000 photographs of the area, framing the case as ufology rather than haunting.
- 18 August 1968 Emil Barnea, a 45-year-old military technician, photographs an object over the Poiana Rotundă at about one in the afternoon. He is accompanied by Zamfira Matea and two friends who remain anonymous.
- 18 September 1968 AGERPRES, the Romanian state news agency, announces the observation and photographing of a UFO in the Baciu forest roughly a month earlier. The images are later interpreted by the engineer Florin Gheorghiţă.
- 1977 Barnea's photographs are presented at the international ufology congress held in Acapulco, the moment the case leaves Romania.
- 1993 Alexandru Sift dies. Most of the photographic archive he had built over some thirty years disappears; Romanian press accounts say it was taken away and pulped, leaving the Romanian case without its evidence base.
- 1995 Adrian Pătruţ, professor of chemistry at Babeş-Bolyai University, publishes the monograph Fenomenele de la Pădurea Hoia-Baciu (Dacia), reproducing what survived of Sift's archive and concluding that a conclusion is extremely hard to formulate.
- 9 September 2009 Syfy broadcasts "Haunted Forest / Alux", the third-season opener of Destination Truth, filmed in the wood. It is the point at which an anglophone paranormal-TV audience meets Hoia-Baciu.
- 2013 Travel Channel's Ghost Adventures devotes a Transylvania special to the forest, with Adrian Pătruţ himself filmed at the clearing telling the crew it is at least two hundred years old and that he has found no explanation for it.
- February 2019 Business Magazin reports that logging has opened a new forest road and damaged vegetation around the Poiana Rotundă; guide Alex Surducan says part of the clearing's wall of vegetation has already been destroyed.
- 30 October 2025 The Guardian publishes Daniel Stables's travel feature headlined "World's most haunted forest", built around a night walk with local guide Marius Lazin, who has been running them three nights a week for over twelve years.
Is there a rational explanation for Hoia Baciu Forest?
There are three pieces of physical evidence, and each has a mundane answer or no evidence base left at all.
The twisted trees. This is the image that sells the forest, and it has a named academic explanation. Tibor Hartel, a professor at Babeş-Bolyai University, told Monitorul de Cluj in February 2021 that the answer is silvicultural: the species involved — hornbeam, lime, maple — were cut repeatedly over generations, at the base and at various heights, and they regenerate by resprouting into a great many shapes, spirals included. To the cutting Hartel adds the conditions of the site — slope, wind, the presence of other trees. In his account the contorted trunks are the product of that traditional cutting. His own position: he would keep the forest for its legends as well as for its nature, because the mythic dimension gives the place value.
The clearing. The Poiana Rotundă is genuinely odd-looking — a near-circular opening where the grass stays low and trees do not take. The most striking datum comes from the believer's side. When Adrian Pătruţ took the Ghost Adventures crew there in 2013, what he told them was that the circle is at least two hundred years old and that he had never found an explanation for it.
The photographs. Sift took more than 60,000 images and Pătruţ's group some 15,000. Most of Sift's were stolen by unknown people a few days after his death in 1993 and sent for pulp, according to Transilvania Reporter in 2017, and the few that survived went into Pătruţ's 1995 book. Pătruţ himself, in the Cluj county library's account of his work, held that at most 5 per cent of reported cases deserve investigation and the rest are optical illusions of people who "want to see something". Reviewing the whole file in January 2026, Tom Hale and Holly Large wrote in IFLScience that they could find "no peer-reviewed evidence to back up any of these claims", adding that even reliable media reports were hard to identify, and that Barnea's images "are not too convincing to the modern observer".
And the label. "Most haunted in the world" is a travel-media superlative with no measurement behind it. It sits on top of a night-tour economy: on 6 October 2026 one operator listed a three-hour private tour from Cluj with a hike of about four kilometres, flashlights and rain ponchos included, at 96 euros a head for two people. Monitorul de Cluj put the Romanian view plainly in 2021: there is no proof that any of the myths circulating about the forest has any real basis.
Can you visit Hoia Baciu Forest?
Hoia-Baciu is a forest of about 300 hectares on the western edge of Cluj-Napoca, according to VisitCluj, the city's tourism site, which gives access as free. Its best-known spot, the Poiana Rotundă clearing, is placed by OpenStreetMap at 46.7687, 23.5076, about 6.3 km west of Piața Unirii in the city centre. The pin of this entry, 46.7617, 23.49, lies about 1.5 km south-west of that clearing, in the commune of Florești.
In an open letter reported by Monitorul de Cluj on 9 March 2026, activists asked the city hall to put to public debate the biodiversity study it had commissioned for the Hoia-Cheile Baciului site, and to declare the forest a protected natural area, a status it did not then have.
The Parcul Etnografic Naţional "Romulus Vuia", the open-air section of the Ethnographic Museum of Transylvania, is beside the forest on Strada Tăietura Turcului, about 2.8 km west-north-west of Piața Unirii and 3.8 km east-north-east of the clearing. On 23 September 2026 the museum's website gave its hours as Wednesday to Sunday from 10:00 to 18:00, last entry at 17:00, with adult tickets at 10 lei.
Night walks to the clearing are sold by local guides. The Romanian Friend listing for Alex Surducan's tour, read on 23 September 2026, offers a private tour from Cluj-Napoca that starts between 18:00 and 22:00 depending on the season, lasts three hours and covers about 4 km on foot; it quotes 96 euros each for two people and includes transport from the city, rain ponchos and flashlights. The listing presents the walk as an investigation in which visitors use "special electronic devices to do scientific measurements in this dense forest, like proper paranormal investigators". VisitCluj, for its part, lists rapid battery drain and location problems on electronic equipment among the reported phenomena.
Logging has reached the clearing. Business Magazin reported on 17 February 2019 that trees had been felled, a new forest road opened and the vegetation around the Poiana Rotundă damaged by forestry vehicles. It quoted Surducan saying that part of the wall of vegetation was destroyed and that, when he saw it with a tourist, it "looked like after a war".
Sources consulted
- Vasile Surcel, «OZN-urile «invizibile» din Pădurea Hoia-Baciu» — Jurnalul Naţional, 2004 newspaper archive
- Biblioteca Judeţeană «Octavian Goga» Cluj, «Fenomenele de la Pădurea Hoia-Baciu — fişă documentară de la monografia de Adrian Pătruţ (Editura Dacia, 1995, ISBN 973-96789-6-3)» — Memorie şi cunoaştere locală, 1995 archive
- Nicu Parlog, «Ce se află în pădurea Baciu?» — Descoperă.ro, 2009 newspaper archive
- Romulus Popescu, «Fenomenele din pădurea Baciu» — Jurnalul, 2010 newspaper archive
- Carmen Lucuţ, «Pădurea Hoia Baciu, de la legendă la adevăr. De ce copacii au forme atât de ciudate?» — Monitorul de Cluj, 2021 newspaper archive
- Sarah Gherman, «Pădurea Hoia Baciu: adevăr sau basme?» — Monitorul de Cluj, 2021 newspaper archive
- Maria Man, «Incursiune în paranormal. Există sau nu extratereştri în pădurea Hoia Baciu?» — Transilvania Reporter, 2017 newspaper archive
- Business Magazin, «Hoia-Baciu a căzut pradă tăierilor de copaci. Poiana Rotundă ar putea deveni legendă» — Business Magazin, 2019 newspaper archive
- Gândul, «Pădurea Hoia Baciu din Cluj, descrisă de The Guardian: «Cea mai bântuită pădure din lume» (sobre el reportaje de Daniel Stables, The Guardian, 30-X-2025)» — Gândul, 2025 newspaper archive
- Paranormal Pop Culture, «Ghost Adventures recap: Transylvania» — Paranormal Pop Culture, 2013 web
- TVmaze, «Destination Truth 3x01 «Haunted Forest / Alux» — ficha de emisión» — TVmaze, 2009 web
- Tom Hale y Holly Large, «Hoia Baciu Forest In Romania: Why The «Most Haunted Forest In The World» Attracts Supernatural Intrigue» — IFLScience, 2026 web
- VisitCluj, «Pădurea Hoia — información oficial de turismo» — VisitCluj, 2026 web
- Romanian Friend, «Night Tour in the Romanian Haunted Forest of Hoia Baciu — condiciones y precios» — Romanian Friend, 2026 web
Reviewed by V. Serrano on 2026-07-29 · How we verify our content
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