I had recently moved from Ireland to the United States, specifically the North Carolina

Tennessee border.

I'm going to spare you a lot of the details because I would be riding for days.

To protect my sister, her family, and home, I will keep her location vague,

but it's basically sitting on a woodland and forest expanse that continues on to the Cherokee

National Park. I will try to keep to the most significant encounters and how everything played out.

It's hard to even know where to begin because so much has happened.

I began to notice strange things a week or two after I arrived.

I was settled into my new environment and in all of everything around me.

Ireland is a bubble compared to this place.

It was early July, hot and humid, and there was a dead heat in the air. I was sitting on the back

porch, laying on a swing, chatting with a friend over the phone. I felt like I was melting in this heat. I hung up the phone

and gathered my thoughts before I went in that evening. I heard bangs coming from just inside the

tree line about half a football pitch distance away. It sounded like someone hitting a tree hard

with the flat of a hurley or something harder.

It was wood on wood, loud bangs as loud and sudden as gunshots.

Startled and confused, I scanned the area, but I saw nothing.

Strange, I thought, and I went back inside. Someone is back in the woods

cutting timber or something I told my sister. I'm hearing loud bangs from the woods. She looked

confused and said there shouldn't be anyone on or near the property, even in the woods outback,

especially not cutting timber.

We walked outside and across the yard to the fence, and we listened for a few minutes.

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