The Mysterious Crooked Forest

Imagine a bright summer evening where the sun is shining bright.  You promptly decided to stroll towards a forest you just saw. To make your day more fun and entertaining, you decided to prepare a lunch basket so that you could enjoy your lunch next to the lake inside the forest. But as soon as you entered the forest you see all the trees are crooked to a 90-degree bent angle. Did this sight spook you out? Does it seem as if the forest is straight cut out from a horror move’s scene?

Well, this is what most people feel when visiting the Crooked forest or Krzywy Las, near the town of Gryfino in Poland.

The forest has about four hundred crooked trees that age around seventy-five years. It is estimated that they were planted around 1943. The crookedness of the trees can be seen to start at the bottom of the trunk of the tree. The bend or the crookedness starts just 10 to 50 cm off the ground and the curve to around 9.8 metres in length. The crooked trees are found in small clusters in the entire forest.

Though people all over the world have scratched their brains and searched every page of every book to find the right answer but has miserably failed to find the correct answer that could explain the true reason behind this crookedness. Though you can hear the various assumption that people feel could be true.

One of the most spread reasons around the town is that the local foresters are behind the bent shape of the trees.  They planted these trees in 1925-28 hoping to use the trunk of the trees to mould furniture out of them for sale purposes. Therefore, they disturbed the natural growth of these trees when they were hardly ten years old. 

Due to aggressive chopping and badgering, they didn’t let the trees take their natural form that heavily impacted their growth. One more reason that is also extremely common among the locals is that the trees were subjected to a heavy snowstorm.  The snowstorm led the trees to be flattened for a long period while they were still young. The thick layer of snow on the trunk of the trees while the trees experienced a growth spurt. But this reason has been called unlikely by most people over the world as the crooked forest has numerous pine trees surrounding it that didn’t undergo any weird growth spurt. Therefore, to interpret that only certain sections of the forest experienced the crookedness or bent structure is extremely odd.

According to some people, during the invasion of Poland in World War II, the extremely heavy war tanks ploughed through the forest. This flattened the trees to such an extent that they grew back crooked. Though, this reason is also said to be not entirely true. As once again this was only experienced by certain sections of the forest and not the entire forest. Though, as we know that the trees age around 80 years, there is a slight chance of this event to have been occurred.

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