So, what happened?

The Daniel Boone National Forest runs through Eastern Kentucky in the Appalachians.  It is a beautiful and diverse temperate rainforest.  It's also one of my favorite places to hike and explore.  It was in the winter in December of 2021 when I had a strange experience hiking with my mum.   My mum is British, so that's not a misspelling.  We were hiking on the Copperas Creek trail, at the bottom of the gorge.  It was off season for most hikers (usually summer and spring are more popular for hiking here), so we had the entire trail and bottom of the gorge to ourselves.  This was my very first time driving and hiking in Red River Gorge.   Driving to the bottom of the gorge is a winding, narrow road that wraps around and down through the forest.  It is a slow drive because if you drive too fast you can easily go over the edge and fall through the forest below or hit another car.  My goal was to find some hidden arches off-trail here and photograph them.  One of my hobbies is nature photography so it goes hand in hand with my hiking adventures.  Every time I drove around a bend on the way down to the gorge, my mum had a weird feeling we were being watched and got literal goosebumps.  I didn't feel anything except excitement for our hike, so I wasn't sure why she was getting eerie vibes, and I wasn't.  I dismissed it that she was being paranoid and told her that we're fine.  Also hiking enthusiasts know this, but most hiking trails, especially deep in the woods, do not have cellphone service, this is one of those trails.  Finally, we got to the parking lot below and hurried to find the trail, which is a short distance from where we parked, but not well-marked and definitely invisible to someone that is not used to rugged hiking.  So, after a few wrong trails, we found the right trail.  It was beautiful hiking in and looked like what you would expect if you were in a fairytale.  Cliffs run on both sides of the trail with caves and the creek and waterfalls and forest all around you.   I was following a map I found online for guidance on how to get to the arches because we had to go off trail in order to find them.  So basically, I was looking for landmarks like fallen down trees, etc.  With all of the fallen leaves on the ground covering the forest floor and fallen trees, that wasn't easy to do.  At one point on the trail, I thought I saw what looked like what was described to get to these arches.  I was walking ahead of my mum and leading the way when we both stopped at what was loud knocking coming from behind a huge boulder off trail, the exact off trail path that I was about to ascend.  We looked at each other and I assured her that it was probably just a woodpecker drilling away at a tree, even though we both knew it wasn't.  It was way too loud and deliberate of knocks to be that.  She told me that I knew that wasn't a woodpecker, which is true, but my mind was looking for reasons to explain the noise, which was loud, abrupt, deliberate and foreboding.  She completely stopped on the trail and told me it was time to leave.  I reasoned with her that I was just going to go up to where that boulder is because that's where I believed the arches were.  She tried unsuccessfully to dissuade me.  I started to hike up to the boulder when the knocking started again louder and more aggressively this time and immediately, I felt like I was intruding into someone's personal territory.  I stopped and agreed with her it was time to go.  We quickly and quietly left without looking back.  I grew up camping and hiking in California in the mountains so I'm very familiar with bears, woodpeckers, coyotes, owls and their sounds and behaviors.  This was definitely not a bear, and I was trying to find explanations in my mind of what it could be.  Of course, I told the rest of my family about our exciting and weird hiking encounter.  My sister has a friend that is Native American in the area that she told my story to.  He told her to tell me never to go back there, that's a wendigo and that was very dangerous.  Since this encounter I researched other stories in that area about people encountering cryptids like bigfoot and dogman.  I have gone hiking back in that area, but not by myself and not in off season.