The Crooked Forest

Voices, past, present, and future brings to you a forest that seems mythilogical in nature but in reality exists and remains a mystery.

A grove of 400 oddly shaped pine trees planted around 1930, near the town of Gryfino, West Pomerania in Poland.

At the base, these pine trees grow at a 90 degree sharp bend northward, but then actually curve back to grow straight up in the sky. These trees bend three to nine feet sideways, but they are generally healthy trees that grow to be 50 ft. tall.

There are several theories as to why this happens, although keep in mind that there is no evidence to support these theories.

• Some hypothesize that it’s a gravitational pull in this particular area, but this does not hold water in the scientific world as gravity pulls things downward and not at a curve.
• It can be suggested that due to the heavy snowfall in the area, the trees were weighed down as they were sprouting, again this does not explain why other groups of pine and assorted vegetation in the same area were not affected.
• Another idea, theory, is that the trees were grown for the rims of wooden cartwheels, as the grain direction would make for very tough wheels.
• A likely explanation is that the local farmers planted and manipulated the trees when they were planted, but it is estimated that the trees were seven to ten years old when the trees experienced whatever force that resulted in the trunk curvature.

The explanation for what happened to these trees probably lies with the people who were there before World War II. The people abandoned the area in the early stages of the war until around the 1970’s and are probably long gone.

The ideas that lie within the mystery of The Crooked Forest may never be known.