In the middle of the Hoia-Baciu Forest near Cluj-Napoca, Romania, there is a perfectly circular clearing approximately one hundred metres across where nothing grows. The trees around it are alive. The clearing is dead. Scientific analysis of the soil has found elevated radiation and unusual mineral composition. Nobody has fully explained how a near-perfect circle of dead ground came to exist at the centre of an otherwise normal forest.

In this episode of 5 Minute Strange, we cover the full documented history of the world's most haunted forest — the shepherd who walked in with two hundred sheep and never came back out, the reports of visitors becoming disoriented and emerging hours later than expected, the nineteen sixty-eight photograph of a disc-shaped object above the trees that has never been debunked, and the scientific findings that confirm some of what has been reported while leaving the rest unanswered. People who enter the forest report rashes, nausea, and faces in their photographs. The circular clearing sits in the middle of all of it, dead and silent.

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