Baffling “Crooked Forest” Is Populated With 400 Bent Trees

Jun 15, 2020 by apost team

In a wooded area in Western Poland, not far from a town called Nowe Czarnowo, you will find one of the modern world's great unsolved mysteries. Nearly 400 strangely and inexplicably curved trees make up a patch of wilderness dubbed the Crooked Forest.

No one is sure how or why they became weirdly curved. The sight stands in stark contrast to the perfectly normal pines around them, which just adds to the air of mystery and intrigue.

Sometime around eight decades ago, these trees were young, pliable saplings. At that time, they could have been easily bent and they were in some way that still puzzles people today.

Trees have a tremendous capacity to adapt to strange forces and carry on. They will grow through fences such that they have to be cut if you wish to remove the fence. In some cases, if they are knocked over by storm but not killed, they will just begin forming shoots growing out of their side at right angles to their trunk.

So the fact they are bent is understandable. Trees do weird things like that all the time. But the consistent shape and how and why it happened is the mystery here.

apost.com

The nearby town was a ghost town for a time, so none of the locals were residents at the time it happened. There are no known human witnesses that can testify as to what strange events caused this odd patch of warped trees.

Humans love a good mystery, so theories abound. Over the decades, people have proposed all sorts of bizarre and sometimes not-so-bizarre explanations.

The Crooked Forest consists of nearly 400 pine trees which were likely planted in the 1930s. Roughly seven to ten years later, something interfered with their growth, causing them to bend at a right angle near the base. They compensated, as trees do, and eventually righted themselves such that this resulted in a "bump" or large curve near the base, after which they continued on upwards as normal.

Yet, trees in the larger forest around them were unaffected. 

According to DW, some people think the saplings were grown and then covered in snow which affected their growth. Other theories have suggested that there is a unique gravitational pull force in this town, but neither ideas have been completely proven. 

The most likely explanation is human intervention. It's possible that people did this intentionally to create curved timbers suitable for shipbuilding on a large scale.

Humans are known to do this sort of thing. You can find references to it, but it's usually done on a much smaller scale. However, maybe they were trying to build a large fleet of wooden ships for use in World War II. Humans have also been known to bend trees for the purpose of art, or even bridge building, as seen in countries such as India.

What do you think about this forest mystery? Forward this to your favorite mystery-loving friends and see what they think.