The Bermuda Triangle of Transylvania: What the Record Really Says About Hoia-Baciu
Drive west out of Cluj-Napoca for ten minutes and the city simply stops. The apartment blocks give way to a low hill carrying a wood of roughly 250 hectares of beech, oak, hornbeam and wild cherry. This is Hoia-Baciu: a municipal forest with a bus stop at its foot and a bike park inside it. It is also, according to a small library of books, television specials and travel features, the most haunted forest on Earth.
The wood takes the second half of its name from Baciu, the commune on its northern side. The Romanian word baci happens to mean shepherd, and that coincidence feeds the best known local story: a shepherd is said to have walked into the trees with a flock of some two hundred sheep and never walked out again. No parish register, no police file and no chronicle records the event. It survives purely as oral tradition, and it is the template for almost everything that followed.
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