Romanian Urban Legend - The Haunted Forest of Hoia Baciu

Hoia Baciu is a forest situated in Cluj, a major city in Romania, and it's the site for many major paranormal sightings and activities.

There isn't just one story surrounding this place, it is a mixture of different stories and sightings that together form the legend of Hoia Baciu.
I cannot pinpoint when the first story about Hoia Baciu was born, but I can confirm that these stories have been surfacing for decades with the peak being around 2008.

As mentioned above, different sightings and experiences have been reported from hundreds of people who dared to adventure deep into the forest. These sightings happened mostly during the night but to everyone's surprise a lot of creepy and unexplainable things happened during the day as well.

Most people reported seeing human-like shadows appearing when shining their flashlights around the forest, some of them even claiming that multiple of these shadows would run towards them and even chase them. These shadows were almost always accompanied by what sounded like muffled and indistinctive speech between people who weren't there and in some extreme cases the screeches and screams of distant women, coming from the heart of the forest. 
The shadows seem to have hid during the day but the unforgiving screams and screeches did not shy away from scaring off the ones who went too far into the forest.

Among the claims of shadows and disturbing screams and sounds, there were many claims of an unknown human-like creature living in that forest. It was described to be very agile, running mostly on all fours, very thin with shiny eyes. Kind of like a Romanian version of the Chupacabra.

This legend was and still is so popular that even Romanian TV news channels did an investigation on it and they claim to have captured the creature on camera.
Here's a screenshot of that creature, I do not claim by any means that it is real nor that it's an actual being in the picture:

One thing that can be said for sure, and that makes me feel like there's something truly wrong with that place, is the fact that there is one specific part of the forest, somewhere in the middle, that hosts very strange looking trees. They look very unnatural, unnerving, unsettling... What is even more unsettling is that nobody ever managed to find an explanation of why those trees ended up looking this way.

A thing I forgot to mention is that, besides the shadows, screams and the alleged creature, it is claimed that the middle of this forest was used in the very distant past for magic rituals by witches.
Maybe that explains why the trees look the way they do...

Here's a picture:

I hope you enjoyed the read.

Please subscribe to my blog and leave some feedback in the comments if you enjoyed it!
Kudos are always appreciated!