Three square kilometres of woodland west of Cluj-Napoca that gets called the most haunted forest in the world, mostly on the strength of a 1968 photograph and a great deal of television since. The honest position is the sceptical one: the stories make good entertainment and there is no testable evidence behind them. What is genuinely here is older and more interesting. At the north end of Valea Lungă, archaeologists working between 1960 and 1994 found the oldest Neolithic settlement in Romania, a Starčevo-Kőrös-Criș site established around 6500 BC. The forest is also an ordinary, well-used recreation area with a bike park, paintball and archery, right next to the open-air section of the Transylvanian Ethnographic Museum. Go for the woods and the Neolithic, and enjoy the atmosphere for what it is.
Cluj-Napoca, Romania
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