I am also a fan of MonsterQuest and the now cancelled UFO Hunters. There is a new show called MysteryQuest all from the History Channel.
“Transylvania. For those intrigued by things that go ‘bump in the night’ Romania’s most folkloric region will certainly peak your interest. The name conjures up images of spooky gothic castles and legends of blood sucking counts, but there is a lesser-known attraction to add to your goose bump list.
The Hoia-Baciu Forest (HBF), located a few kilometers outside of the city Cluj Napoca, is rumored to be a hot bed for unexplained activity and supernatural anomalies.
Dubbed the “Bermuda Triangle of Transylvania,” this forest first gained international attention in 1968, when biologist Alexandru Sift captured a photo of a disc-shaped UFO. Since then, UFOs, apparitions, abnormalities on photos, nocturnal lights and other unusual things are regularly reported in this area.
Ghost hunters, paranormal investigators, parapsychologists and, more recently, tourists, have taken an interest.
Paranormal tourism isn’t a new thing. Places like Roswell New Mexico, Peru’s Nazca lines and England’s Crop Circles, have drawn millions of tourists who “want to believe.”
Dr. Adrian Patrut, a chemistry professor at the local Romanian university, claims that, though there are many places around the world with unexplained phenomena, “the Hoia-Baciu Forest is one of the best due to the intensity, variety and complexity of its manifestations.”
President of the Romanian Society of Parapsychology, Adrian has been studying occurrences in the forest since the early 70’s, from unexplained splotches of light and luminescent orbs hovering in the sky. Patrut claims there are dangerous biological effects when you spend too much time in the HBF. Anxiety, insomnia, excessive thirst, nausea, vomiting and headaches are among the symptoms.
With that kind of build-up, I had to check it out for myself.
A twenty-minute drive outside of the city finds us on the fringes of the forest. Adrian and I climb up a steep grassy plain to get to the tree line. Once there, we get out our ‘ghost hunting’ tools: compass, a still camera, a video camera with infra-red sensors and a Geiger counter to measure sudden rises in radiation.
We head out into the forest in the hopes of seeing something strange.
The scene looks like something out of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. Spikey branches reach out like bony fingers; trees are gnarled and spooky. Adrian claims that these trees were normal a few years ago. Now they are warped, “a clear sign of an apparition.”
Supernatural or not, there’s something truly creepy about prowling an abandoned forest at night. A few hours of hunting left us with a bunch of mosquito bites but, sadly, no orbs or UFO sightings.
“We don’t know what these apparitions are,” says Adrian, “but we know what they are not. We believe they’re not spirits, phantoms or extra terrestrials. They don’t arrive from parallel worlds or from another time. They transcend the laws of normal physics. They are beyond what we know and can imagine,” concludes Adrian.
For those keen to try their own paranormal pilgrimages, forget the Roswell and Crop Circle tourist traps. Grab your ghost hunting gear, reach out to Adrian Patrut and test your beliefs in Transylvania. “
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