Today we start a two part series on the most haunted places in the world. This is the bottom 5 of the top 10. Little bit different format here with each individual place having its own haunted story and mini travel itinerary.

Hoia-Baciu Forest in Romania — a 295-hectare forest outside Cluj-Napoca where locals refuse to enter, a circular clearing where nothing grows, and fifty years of documented reports of time loss, physical symptoms, and disappearing photographs. From there we move to Bhangarh Fort in Rajasthan, India, where the Archaeological Survey of India has posted an official government sign prohibiting entry after sunset — one of the only paranormal-adjacent access restrictions at any heritage site in India — and where the ruins of a once-thriving town of tens of thousands have sat completely abandoned since the early 18th century with no adequate historical explanation.

In France, we spend time at Château de Brissac in the Loire Valley, where an eighteen-year-old woman named Charlotte de Brézé was murdered by her husband in 1476, whose killer was protected from prison by his friend the king, and who has been appearing in the castle's north wing ever since. At Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, we examine 141 years of absolute solitary confinement — a Quaker reform philosophy that Charles Dickens called torture in 1842 — and what 75,000 people left behind in those cellblocks. We close in Japan at Aokigahara Forest, the Sea of Trees at the base of Mount Fuji, examining the forest's centuries-long association with death, the documented impact of a 1960 novel on its modern history, and what it means to a search volunteer named Kenji who enters it every spring.

Part Two covers places five through one.

SOURCES

Sift, Alexandru. Field documentation of Hoia-Baciu Forest. Babeș-Bolyai University, 1960s–1970s.

Archaeological Survey of India. Official access restriction signage, Bhangarh Fort, Alwar District. Government of India, Ministry of Culture.

Abul Fazl. Akbarnama. Trans. H. Beveridge. Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1902–1939.

Commynes, Philippe de. Mémoires. c. 1490–1498.

Dickens, Charles. American Notes for General Circulation. Chapman and Hall, 1842. Chapter 7.

De Tocqueville, Alexis, and Gustave de Beaumont. On the Penitentiary System in the United States. Trans. Francis Lieber. Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1833.

Grassian, Stuart. "Psychiatric Effects of Solitary Confinement." Washington University Journal of Law and Policy. Vol. 22, 2006.

Matsumoto, Seicho. Kuroi Jukai (黒い樹海). Kobunsha, 1960.

Miyaji, Naoaki, et al. "Lava Flow History of Fuji Volcano." Bulletin of the Volcanological Society of Japan. Vol. 49, 2004.

Foster, Michael Dylan. The Book of Yokai. University of California Press, 2015.