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This resource features an interactive map of Maine.  This site allows the reader to observe the environment that Knight lived in.

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Wikipedia page devoted solely to the "North Pond Hermit" aka Christopher Knight.

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Wikipedia page devoted solely to the "North Pond Hermit" aka Christopher Knight.

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Christopher Thomas Knight (born 7 December 1965), also known as the North Pond Hermit, is a former hermit who lived almost without human contact for 27 years in the woods in Maine.

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Brief description of The Stranger in the Woods via its publishing company.

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Q: How did you verify the hermit's story? What kinds of fact-checking did you do to confirm the details in the book?
It was vitally important to me, on a personal and professional level, to tell the story of Christopher Knight as accurately as possible. Knight's story has so many elements that verge on the utterly unbelievable - no fire for 27 winters? never a severe illness? not one conversation? a thousand burglaries? - that it was essential to try and present the tale just as it happened, free of embellishment or exaggeration.

Also, there was my prior incident with The New York Times Magazine. In 2001, while writing a story about child labor in West Africa, I combined several interviews together to create a composite character. I was caught for my deception and banned from writing for the Times. My previous book, True Story, is partly about this incident (and also about a murderer who briefly stole my identity).

To verify all of the information in The Stranger in the Woods, I hired two professional fact-checkers ‑‑ Riley Blanton and Max Thorn, both of whom work for GQ Magazine, where I had previously published an article about Chris Knight.

Blanton and Thorn spent hundreds of hours affirming quotes from people I interviewed for the book, re-reading material I gathered to write the narrative, and examining every notebook I filled while interviewing Knight in jail. There are no pseudonyms used in this book and no identifying details have been changed.

Knight himself is the chief source of material for The Stranger in the Woods. Every word of his that I've used in the book was said to me directly, was written in a letter, or was spoken during a court hearing.

Could Knight himself have misrepresented his story? This idea is addressed - and rejected - in the book. Knight's story is certainly unique. Many people in Maine still cannot comprehend how he was able to survive so long in such brutal conditions.

And yet not one person who spent time with Knight - including the two officers who arrested him and both his defense attorney and the district attorney - had any doubts about the veracity of his story. Every psychologist I spoke with who reviewed Knight's tale felt that Knight was telling the truth. I also fully believe him.

There is not one shred of compelling evidence that refutes any aspect of his tale. Meanwhile, the evidence in his camp, including clotheslines that have been in place so long that trees have grown around them, and no signs of a fire pit, show that Knight, as difficult as it is to believe, really did live alone in the woods of Maine for nearly three decades.

Q: What made you feel compelled to tell Knight's story? Do you worry about drawing more attention to a man who wants to remain anonymous?

From the moment I learned about Christopher Knight, in a newspaper article published shortly after his capture, I was riveted. I couldn't stop thinking about Knight's solitude, and what he had to say about it, what he experienced, how he survived, what he learned.

Every detail that emerged about Knight - like the ingeniousness of his hidden camp, or his proclivity for stealing books - only increased my curiosity. Combined with my own love of the outdoors (especially cold places), and the fact that I'd recently had three children and was now living a mostly indoor, noise-filled existence, deluged with domestic responsibilities, I was obsessed.

It turns out that I wasn't alone. According to Knight's attorney, approximately 500 journalists attempted to contact Knight. For reasons that remain somewhat mysterious - Knight said that he simply felt pleased by the words in my handwritten introductory letter - I am, I believe, the only one who received a reply from him.

Knight was aware, from my initial letter, that I was a journalist, and during each of our jailhouse meetings, I openly took notes. Still, of course, I was concerned about bringing attention to a man who clearly wanted as little publicity as possible. But it was always Knight who had control of our interactions - he chose to mail me letters and cards, a total of eight times, and he had the power to reject any jail visit, but accepted all nine of my visits.

I believe that Knight realized he might be endlessly hounded to tell his story, and that if he told it once, and allowed it to be made public, he might be able to have more privacy going forward.

When Knight and I had our final long visit, in his backyard, it seemed that he was somewhat looking forward to having the book written. He even called me his "Boswell," referring to James Boswell, the 18th century Scottish writer best known for The Life of Samuel Johnson, one of the more famous biographies in all of literature. When I told Knight that my plan was to write a very short book, he seemed disappointed to hear this, and actually implied that he was hoping I'd write a long book about him.

At the very end of our time together, Knight did mention that he'd said all he wanted to say, and that it was now time to leave him alone. And I have.

Q: Why do you think Knight's story has resonated so deeply with so many people?

I think that nearly everyone, from time to time, has had the notion to just chuck everything and get away from it all - from the constant demands of work, from the incessant emails and texts and calls, from pressing responsibilities. We may take a vacation for a week or two, but virtually no one ever really escapes the pressures of modern life.

Knight did. And depending on your perspective, Knight's time in the woods represents either a warning or an ideal. On one hand, he suffered so greatly, and gave up so much, that his case can be used to prove the folly of quitting society. On the other hand, he lived with more freedom and more unscheduled leisure time than virtually any of us will ever have.

Either way - and perhaps precisely because Knight's feat cannot be easily categorized - his story is fascinating and resonant with so many people. Most of us pass our entire lives without spending a single day completely alone, without really examining our own selves. I believe that many of us, on some level, recognize this lack of true self-knowledge. We yearn for some time alone but feel trapped in the daily hustle, burdened by the constant need to earn money and seek distraction, and frequently feel overwhelmed.

Knight lived a life so far beyond the mainstream that we can look on with awe or disgust, but hardly with indifference.

Q: How do you reconcile your admiration for Knight's retreat from society with the fact that he stole - more than a thousand times - from his neighbors? Is he a thief?

Of course Knight is a thief, as he will be the first to tell you. And I don't believe there has to be a reconciliation between the admirable aspects of Knight's experience and the unsavory ones. It's that very tug of war, between the amazement and the disappointment, between the fortitude and the criminality, that helps to make Knight such a compelling person.

Knight himself said, "I don't want people trying to justify my bad behavior in an attempt not to sully what they admire in me. Take the whole package, good and bad. Judge me on that. Don't cherry-pick."

Q: Knight craved solitude while at the same time enjoying the products of civilization, like packaged foods, books, and radio. Is he a "true" hermit?

Christopher Knight, I believe, is the truest of all hermits. A very strong case can be made that Knight is the most solitary known human being who has ever lived.

Every other hermit in recorded history, as far as I can tell (and I spent months upon months researching recluses), had some form of regular interaction with others.

The extreme Christian hermits of the early centuries A.D., known as Desert Fathers, who lived in caves along the banks of the Nile River, held communal gatherings once a week. Even the most extreme of the Buddhist monks had teachers come check on them, and people to deliver food. The anchorites of the Middle Ages all had assistants, and welcomed conversations with passers-by. Other hermits shared their poems or writings or artwork or scientific discoveries with the world.

No one I could find in my extensive research lived as deeply secluded, for nearly as long, as Knight. To pull off such an extreme feat of solitude required some law-breaking. Knight was never comfortable with the decision, but to be completely cut off from everyone else in the world - to be the truest hermit possible - he concluded that he had to steal.

Q: Where is Chris Knight now? When did you last speak to him or hear from him?

Knight, as far as I know, is still living with his mother and sister in the house where he grew up. I'm not certain of this because we never had another real conversation after the intense meeting in his backyard. I attempted to visit him the day after, and again one more time, but both times he immediately shooed me away. And he has not written me a word since his elegiac letter with the flower doodle at the bottom.

It is very clear that Knight does not wish to communicate with me any further, and I have respected his wishes.

Q: You plan on sending Knight a copy of the book to read. Are you hoping to hear from him, and how do you think he'll react?

Yes, Knight will receive a copy of The Stranger in the Woods.

I have written the book with openness and honesty and obsession and care, and I hope - I believe - that Knight will respect my dedication and genuinely accept my efforts as reasonable and fair.

But I suspect that I will never be sure of this. I'm always hoping to hear from Knight - I'd be delighted to see one of his letters in my mailbox - but Knight's reaction to the book, I assume, will likely remain unknown. From the man who redefined silence I expect to hear nothing but silence.

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The Stranger in the Woods by Michael Finkel | PenguinRandomHouse.com

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Q: How did you verify the hermit's story? What kinds of fact-checking did you do to confirm the details in the book? It was vitally important to me, on a personal and professional level, to tell the story of Christopher Knight as accurately as possible.

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The official website of Michael Finkel, than man in charge of writing The Stranger in the Woods.

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Many people dream of escaping modern life, but most will never act on it. This is the remarkable true story of a man who lived alone in the woods of Maine for twenty-seven years, making this dream a reality - not out of anger at the world, but simply because he preferred to live on his own.

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Many people dream of escaping modern life, but most will never act on it. This is the remarkable true story of a man who lived alone in the woods of Maine for twenty-seven years, making this dream a reality - not out of anger at the world, but simply because he preferred to live on his own.

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Clip of Christopher Knight pleading guilty to multiple charges of burglary, after agreeing to forgo jail time in favor of community service and therapy.

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'North Pond Hermit' pleads guilty to burglary, theft

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Christopher Knight, the man known as the North Pond Hermit, pleaded guilty on Monday and will be entered into a special program. WMTW News 8's Aly Myles reports.

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This news clip details Christopher Knight's capture and arrest after being suspected of over 1000 counts of burglary.

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Story of Christopher Knight: Man lived as hermit in woods

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Story of Christopher Knight: Man lived as hermit in woods In the 27 years he lived in the Maine woods, Christopher Knight said a single word. Because he never spoke to himself and avoided humanity with the guile of a samurai, he went decades without using his voice.

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A look into Knight's compound that he built in the woods.

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A look into Knight's compound that he built in the woods.

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Tour of North Pond Hermit's Campsite - April 13th, 2013

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A tour of the campsite of the "North Pond Hermit" in Rome, Maine -- the site where a man had lived for nearly three decades undetected.

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Knight's attempt at camouflaging his campsite. 

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Knight's attempt at camouflaging his campsite. 

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A photo of Knight from his high school yearbook; one of the last photos taken of him before he moved into the woods.

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A photo of Knight from his high school yearbook; one of the last photos taken of him before he moved into the woods.

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One of the few items that remained after Knight's camp was dissembled.

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One of the few items that remained after Knight's camp was dissembled.

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A view inside Knight's living quarters. 

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A view inside Knight's living quarters. 

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The author of The Stranger in the Woods, Michael Finkel, briefly describes his interactions with Knight in this article.

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For nearly thirty years, a phantom haunted the woods of Central Maine. Unseen and unknown, he lived in secret, creeping into homes in the dead of night and surviving on what he could steal. To the spooked locals, he became a legend-or maybe a myth. They wondered how he could possibly be real. Until one day last year, the hermit came out of the forest

The hermit set out of camp at midnight, carrying his backpack and his bag of break-in tools, and threaded through the forest, rock to root to rock, every step memorized. Not a boot print left behind. It was cold and nearly moonless, a fine night for a raid, so he hiked about an hour to the Pine Tree summer camp, a few dozen cabins spread along the shoreline of North Pond in central Maine. With an expert twist of a screwdriver, he popped open a door of the dining hall and slipped inside, scanning the pantry shelves with his penlight.

Candy! Always good. Ten rolls of Smarties, stuffed in a pocket. Then, into his backpack, a bag of marshmallows, two tubs of ground coffee, some Humpty Dumpty potato chips. Burgers and bacon were in the locked freezer. On a previous raid at Pine Tree, he'd stolen a key to the walk-in, and now he used it to open the stainless-steel door. The key was attached to a plastic four-leaf-clover key chain, with one of the leaves partially broken off. A three-and-a-half-leaf clover.

He could've used a little more luck. Newly installed in the Pine Tree kitchen, hidden behind the ice machine, was a military-grade motion detector. The device remained silent in the kitchen but sounded an alarm in the home of Sergeant Terry Hughes, a game warden who'd become obsessed with catching the thief. Hughes lived a mile away. He raced to the camp in his pickup truck and sprinted to the rear of the dining hall. He peeked in a window.

And there he was. Probably. The person stealing food appeared entirely too clean, his face freshly shaved. He wore eyeglasses and a wool ski hat. Was this really the North Pond Hermit, a man who'd tormented the surrounding community for years-decades-yet the police still hadn't learned his name?

Hughes used his cell phone, quietly, and asked the Maine State Police to alert trooper Diane Perkins-Vance, who had also been hunting the hermit. Before Perkins-Vance could get there, the burglar, his backpack full, started toward the exit. If the man stepped into the forest, Hughes understood, he might never be found again.

The burglar eased out of the dining hall, and Hughes used his left hand to blind the man with his flashlight; with his right he aimed his .357 square on his nose. "Get on the ground!" he bellowed.

The thief complied, no resistance, and lay facedown, candy spilling out of his pockets. It was one thirty in the morning on April 4, 2013. Perkins-Vance soon arrived, and the burglar was placed, handcuffed, in a plastic chair. The officers asked his name. He refused to answer. His skin was strangely pale; his glasses, with chunky plastic frames, were extremely outdated. But he wore a nice Columbia jacket, new Lands' End blue jeans, and sturdy boots. The officers searched him, and no identification was located.

Hughes left the suspect alone with Perkins-Vance. She removed his handcuffs and gave him a bottle of water. And he started to speak. A little. When Perkins-Vance asked why he didn't want to answer any questions, he said he was ashamed. He spoke haltingly, uncertainly; the connection between his mind and his mouth seemed to have atrophied from disuse. But over the next couple of hours, he gradually opened up.

His name, he revealed, was Christopher Thomas Knight. Born on December 7, 1965. He said he had no address, no vehicle, did not file a tax return, and did not receive mail. He said he lived in the woods.

"For how long?" wondered Perkins-Vance.

Knight thought for a bit, then asked when the Chernobyl nuclear-plant disaster occurred. He had long ago lost the habit of marking time in months or years; this was just a news event he happened to remember. The nuclear meltdown took place in 1986, the same year, Knight said, he went to live in the woods. He was 20 years old at the time, not long out of high school. He was now 47, a middle-aged man.

Knight stated that over all those years he slept only in a tent. He never lit a fire, for fear that smoke would give his camp away. He moved strictly at night. He said he didn't know if his parents were alive or dead. He'd not made one phone call or driven in a car or spent any money. He had never in his life sent an e-mail or even seen the Internet.

He confessed that he'd committed approximately forty robberies a year while in the woods-a total of more than a thousand break-ins. But never when anyone was home. He said he stole only food and kitchenware and propane tanks and reading material and a few other items. Knight admitted that everything he possessed in the world, he'd stolen, including the clothes he was wearing, right down to his underwear. The only exception was his eyeglasses.

Perkins-Vance called dispatch and learned that Knight had no criminal record. He said he grew up in a nearby community, and his senior picture was soon located in the 1984 Lawrence High School yearbook. He was wearing the same eyeglasses.

For close to three decades, Knight said, he had not seen a doctor or taken any medicine. He mentioned that he had never once been sick. You had to have contact with other humans, he claimed, in order to get sick.

When, said Perkins-Vance, was the last time he'd had contact with another person?

Sometime in the 1990s, answered Knight, he passed a hiker while walking in the woods.

"What did you say?" asked Perkins-Vance.

"I said, 'Hi,' " Knight replied. Other than that single syllable, he insisted, he had not spoken with or touched another human being, until this night, for twenty-seven years.

Christopher Knight was arrested, charged with burglary and theft, and transported to the Kennebec County jail in Augusta, the state capital. For the first time in nearly 10,000 days, he slept indoors.

News of the capture stunned the citizens of North Pond. For decades, they'd felt haunted by...something. It was hard to say what. At first, in the late 1980s, there were strange occurrences. Flashlights were missing their batteries. Steaks disappeared from the fridge. New propane tanks on the grill had been replaced by old ones. "My grandkids thought I was losing my mind," said David Proulx, whose vacation cabin was broken into at least fifty times.

Then people began noticing other things. Wood shavings near window locks; scratches on doorframes. Was it a neighbor? A gang of teenagers? The robberies continued-boat batteries, frying pans, winter jackets. Fear took hold. "We always felt like he was watching us," one resident said. The police were called, repeatedly, but were unable to help.

Locks were changed, alarm systems installed. Nothing seemed to stop him. Or her. Or them. No one knew. A few desperate residents even left notes on their doors: "Please don't break in. Tell me what you need and I'll leave it out for you." There was never a reply.

Incidents mounted, and the phantom morphed into legend. Eventually he was given a name: the North Pond Hermit. At a homeowners' meeting in 2002, the hundred people present were asked who had suffered break-ins. Seventy-five raised their hands. Campfire hermit stories were swapped. One kid recalled that when he was 10 years old, all his Halloween candy was stolen. That kid is now 34.

Still the robberies persisted. The crimes, after so long, felt almost supernatural. "The legend of the hermit lived on for years and years," said Pete Cogswell, whose jeans and belt were worn by the hermit when he was caught. "Did I believe it? No. Who really could?"

Knight's arrest, rather than eliminating disbelief, only enhanced it. The truth was stranger than the myth. One man had actually lived in the woods of Maine for twenty-seven years, in an unheated nylon tent. Winters in Maine are long and intensely cold: a wet, windy cold, the worst kind of cold. A week of winter camping is an impressive achievement. An entire season is practically unheard of.

Though hermits have been documented for thousands of years, Knight's feat appears to exist in a category of its own. He engaged in zero communication with the outside world. He never snapped a photo. He did not keep a journal. His camp was undisclosed to everyone.

There may have been others like Knight, whose commitment to isolation was absolute-he planned to live his entire life in secret-but if so, they were never found. Capturing Knight was the human equivalent of netting a giant squid. He was an uncontacted tribe of one.

Reporters across Maine, and soon enough across the nation and the world, attempted to contact him. What did he wish to tell us? What secrets had he uncovered? How had he survived? He stayed resolutely silent. Even after his arrest, the North Pond Hermit remained a complete mystery.

I decided to write him a letter. I wrote it by hand, pen on paper, and sent it from my home in Montana to the Kennebec County jail. I mentioned I was a journalist seeking explanations for his baffling life. A week later, a white envelope arrived in my mailbox. The return address, printed in blue ink in wobbly-looking block letters, read "Chris Knight." It was a brief note-three paragraphs; 272 words. Still, it contained some of the first statements Knight had shared with anyone in the world.

"I replied to your letter," he explained, "because writing letters relieves somewhat the stress and boredom of my present situation." Also, he didn't feel comfortable speaking. "My vocal, verbal skills have become rather rusty and slow."

I'd mentioned in my letter that I was an avid reader. From what I could tell, Knight was, too. Many victims of Knight's thefts reported that their books were often stolen-from Tom Clancy potboilers to dense military histories to James Joyce's Ulysses.

Hemingway, I wrote, was one of my favorites. It seemed that Knight was shy about everything except literary criticism; he answered that he felt "rather lukewarm" about Hemingway. Instead, he noted, he'd rather read Rudyard Kipling, preferably his "lesser known works." As if catching himself getting a little friendly, he added that since he didn't know me, he really didn't want to say more.

Then he seemed concerned that he was now being too unfriendly. "I wince at the rudeness of this reply but think it better to be clear and honest rather than polite. Tempted to say 'nothing personal,' but handwritten letters are always personal." He ended with: "It was kind of you to write. Thank you." He did not sign his name.

I wrote him back and sent him a couple of Kiplings (The Man Who Would Be King and Captains Courageous). His response, two and a half pages, felt as raw and honest as a diary entry. He was suffering in jail; the noise and the filth tore at his senses. "You asked how I sleep. Little and uneasy. I am nearly always tired and nervous." In his next letter, he added, in his staccato, almost song-lyric style, that he deserved to be imprisoned. "I stole. I was a thief. I repeatedly stole over many years. I knew it was wrong. Knew it was wrong, felt guilty about it every time, yet continued to do it."

We exchanged letters throughout the summer of 2013. Rather than becoming gradually more accustomed to jail, to being around other people, Knight was deteriorating. In the woods, he said, he'd always carefully maintained his facial hair, but now he stopped shaving. "Use my beard," he wrote, "as a jail calendar."

He tried several times to converse with other inmates. He could force out a few hesitant words, but every topic-music, movies, television-was lost on him, as was most slang. "You speak like a book," one inmate teased. Whereupon he ceased talking.

"I am retreating into silence as a defensive move," he wrote. Soon he was down to uttering just five words, and only to guards: yes; no; please; thank you. "I am surprised by the amount of respect this garners me. That silence intimidates puzzles me. Silence is to me normal, comfortable."

He wrote little about his time in the woods, but what he did reveal was harrowing. Some years, he made it clear, he barely survived the winter. In one letter, he told me that to get through difficult times, he tried meditating. "I didn't meditate every day, month, season in the woods. Just when death was near. Death in the form of too little food or too much cold for too long." Meditation worked, he concluded. "I am alive and sane, at least I think I'm sane." As always there was no formal closing. His letters simply ended, sometimes mid-thought.

He returned to the theme of sanity in a following letter. "When I came out of the woods they applied the label hermit to me. Strange idea to me. I had never thought of myself as a hermit. Then I got worried. For I knew with the label hermit comes the idea of crazy. See the ugly little joke."

Even worse, he feared his time in jail would only prove correct those who doubted his sanity. "I suspect," he wrote, "more damage has been done to my sanity in jail, in months; than years, decades, in the woods."

His legal proceedings were mired in delays, as the district attorney and his lawyer tried to figure out how justice could be served in a case entirely without precedent.

After four months in jail, Knight had no clue what punishment awaited. A sentence of a dozen or more years was possible. "Stress levels sky high," he wrote. "Give me a number. How long? Months? Years? How long in prison for me. Tell me the worst. How long?"

In the end, he decided he could not even write. "For a while writing relieved stress for me. No longer." He sent one last, heartbreaking letter in which he seemed at the verge of breakdown. "Still tired. More tired. Tireder, tiredest, tired ad nauseam, tired infinitum."

And that was it. He never wrote me again. Though he did finally sign his name. Despite the exhaustion and the tension, the last words he penned were wry and self-mocking: "Your friendly neighborhood Hermit, Christopher Knight."

Three weeks after his final letter, I flew to Maine. The Kennebec County jail, a three-story slab of pale gray cinder blocks, permits visitors most evenings at six forty-five. I arrived early. "Who you here to see?" asked a corrections officer.

"Friend," I answered unconfidently. He didn't know I was here, and I had my doubts he'd see me.

I sat on a bench as other visitors checked in. Beyond the walls of the waiting room, I could hear piercing buzzers and slamming doors. Eventually an officer appeared and called out, "Knight."

He unlocked a maroon door and I stepped inside a visitors' booth. Three short stools were bolted to the floor in front of a narrow desk. Over the desk, dividing the booth into sealed-off halves, was a thick pane of shatterproof plastic. Sitting on a stool on the other side of the pane was Christopher Knight.

Rarely in my life have I witnessed someone less pleased to see me. His lips, thin, were pulled into a downturned scowl. His eyes did not rise to meet mine. I sat across from him, and there was no acknowledgment of my presence, not the merest nod. He gazed someplace beyond my left shoulder. He was wearing a dull green overlaundered jail uniform several sizes too big.

A black phone receiver was hanging on the wall. I picked it up. He picked his up-the first movement I saw him make.

I spoke first. "Nice to meet you, Chris."

He didn't respond. He just sat there, stone-faced. His balding head shone like a snowfield beneath the fluorescent lights; his beard was a mess of reddish brown curls. He had on silver-framed glasses, different from the ones he'd worn forever in the woods. He was very skinny. He'd lost a great deal of weight since his arrest.

I tend to babble when I'm nervous, but I made a conscious effort to restrain myself. I recalled what Knight wrote in his letter about being comfortable with silence. I looked at him not looking at me. Maybe a minute passed.

That was all I could endure. "The constant banging and buzzing in here," I said, "must be so jarring compared with the sounds of nature." He shifted his eyes to me-a small victory-then glanced away. His eyes are light brown. He scarcely has any eyebrows. I let my comment hang in the air.

Then he spoke. Or at least his mouth moved. His first words to me were inaudible. I saw why: He was holding the phone's mouthpiece too low, below his chin. It had been decades since he'd used a phone; he was out of practice. I indicated with my hand that he needed to move it up. He did. And he repeated his grand pronouncement.

"It's jail," he said. There was nothing more. Silence again.

I shouldn't have come. He didn't want me here; I didn't feel comfortable being here. But the jail had granted me a one-hour visit, and I resolved to stay. I settled atop my stool. I felt hyperaware of all my gestures, my expressions, my breathing. Chris's right leg, I saw through the scuffed window, was bouncing rapidly. He scratched at his skin.

My patience was rewarded. First his leg settled down. He quit scratching. And then, rather shockingly, he started talking.

"Some people want me to be this warm and fuzzy person. All filled with friendly hermit wisdom. Just spouting off fortune-cookie lines from my hermit home."

His voice was clear; he'd retained the stretched vowels of a Down East Maine accent. And his words, when he deigned to release them, could evidently be imaginative and entertaining. And caustic.

"Your hermit home-like under a bridge?" I said, trying to play along.

He presented me with an achingly long blink.

"You're thinking of a troll."

I laughed. His face moved in the direction of a smile. We had made a connection-or at least the awkwardness of our introduction had softened. We began to converse somewhat normally. He called me Mike and I called him Chris.

He explained about the lack of eye contact. "I'm not used to seeing people's faces," he said. "There's too much information there. Aren't you aware of it? Too much, too fast."

I followed his cue and looked over his shoulder while he stared over mine. We maintained this arrangement for most of the visit. Chris had recently been given a mental-health evaluation by Maine's forensic service. The report mentioned a possible diagnosis of Asperger's disorder, a form of autism often marked by exceptional intelligence but extreme sensitivity to motions, sounds, and light.

Chris had just learned of Asperger's while in jail, and he seemed unfazed by the diagnosis. "I don't think I'll be a spokesman for the Asperger's telethon. Do they still do telethons? I hate Jerry Lewis." He said he was taking no medications. "But I don't like people touching me," he added. "You're not a hugger, are you?"

I admitted that I do at times participate in embraces.

"I'm glad this is between us," he said, indicating the glass. "If there was a set of blinds here, I'd close them."

There was a part of me that was perversely charmed by Chris. He could seem prickly-he is prickly-but this was merely a protective cover. He told me that since his capture, he'd often found himself emotionally overwhelmed at unexpected moments. "Like TV commercials," he said, "have made me teary. It's not a good thing in jail to have people see you crying."

Everything he said seemed candid and blunt, unfiltered by the safety net of social niceties. "I'm not sorry about being rude if it gets to the point quicker," he told me.

That's fine, I said, though I expected to ask questions that might kindle his rudeness. But I started with a gentle one: What was your life like before you went into the forest?

Before he slept in the woods for a quarter century straight, Chris never once spent a night in a tent. He was raised in the community of Albion, a forty-five-minute drive east of his camp; he has four older brothers and one younger sister. His father, who died in 2001, worked in a creamery. His mother, now in her eighties, still lives in the same house where Chris grew up, a modest two-story colonial on a wooded fifty-acre plot.

The family is extremely private and did not speak with me. Their next-door neighbor told me that in fourteen years, he hasn't exchanged more than a word with Chris's mom. Sometimes he sees her getting the paper. "Culturally my family is old Yankee," Chris said. "We're not emotionally bleeding all over each other. We're not touchy-feely. Stoicism is expected."

Chris insisted that he had a fine childhood. "No complaints," he said. "I had good parents." He shared vivid stories of moose hunting with his father. "A couple of hunting trips I slept in the back of the pickup, but never alone and never in a tent." After he'd disappeared, his family apparently didn't report him missing to the police, though they may have hired a private detective. No one uncovered a clue. Two of Chris's brothers, Joel and Tim, visited him in jail. "I didn't recognize them," Chris admitted.

"My brothers supposed I was dead," said Chris, "but never expressed this to my mom. They always wanted to give her hope. Maybe he's in Texas, they'd say. Or he's in the Rocky Mountains." Chris did not allow his mother to visit. "Look at me, I'm in my prison clothes. That's not how I was raised. I couldn't face her."

He said he had excellent grades in high school, though no friends, and graduated early. Like two of his brothers, he enrolled in a nine-month electronics course at Sylvania Technical School in Waltham, Massachusetts. Then, still in Waltham, he took a job installing home and vehicle alarm systems; valuable knowledge to have once he started stealing.

He bought a new car, a white 1985 Subaru Brat. His brother Joel co-signed the loan. "I screwed him on that," Chris said. "I still owe him." He worked less than a year before he quit. He drove the Brat to Maine, went through his hometown without stopping-"one last look around"-and kept driving north. Soon he reached the edge of Moosehead Lake, where Maine begins to get truly remote.

"I drove until I was nearly out of gas. I took a small road. Then a small road off that small road. Then a trail off that." He parked the car. He placed the keys in the center console. "I had a backpack and minimal stuff. I had no plans. I had no map. I didn't know where I was going. I just walked away."

It was late summer of 1986. He'd camp in one spot for a week or so, then hike south, following the natural geology of Maine, with its long, glacier-carved valleys. "I lost track of where I was," he said. "I didn't care." For a while, he tried foraging for food. He ate roadkill partridges. Then he began taking corn and potatoes from people's gardens.

"But I wanted more than vegetables," he said. "It took a while to overcome my scruples. I was always scared when stealing. Always." He insists he never encountered anyone during a robbery; he made sure there was no car in the driveway, no sign of anyone inside. "It was usually 1 or 2 A.M. I'd go in, hit the cabinets, the refrigerator. In and out. My heart rate was soaring. It was not a comfortable act. I took no pleasure in it, none at all, and I wanted it over as quickly as possible." A single mistake, he understood, and the outside world would snatch him back.

He roamed about for two years before he discovered the campsite he would call home. He knew at once it was ideal. "Then," he said, "I settled in."

The majority of North Pond residents I spoke with found it hard to believe Knight's story. Many insisted that he either had help or spent the winters in unoccupied cabins. As the time allotted for our visit wound down, I challenged Chris myself: You must, I said, have had assistance at some time. Or slept in a cabin. Or used a bathroom.

Chris's demeanor changed. It was the only time in our meeting that he held eye contact. "Never once did I sleep inside," he said. He never used a shower. Or a toilet.

He did admit to thawing meat in a microwave a few times during break-ins. But he endured every season entirely on his own. "I'm a thief. I induced fear. People have a right to be angry. But I have not lied."

I trusted him. I sensed, in fact, that Chris was practically incapable of lying. I wasn't alone in this thought. Diane Perkins-Vance, the state trooper present at his arrest, told me that much of her job consisted of sorting through lies people fed her. With Chris, however, she had no doubts. "Unequivocally," she said, "I believe him."

Before he hung up the phone, Chris added that if I could see where he lived and how he survived, I'd know for sure.

It was my plan to find his camp. Afterward, I said, I'd like to return to the jail. Could we meet again?

His answer was unexpected. He said, "Yes."

The Belgrade Lakes area, where Knight lived, is cow-and-horse rural, nothing like the vast North Woods of Maine, wild and unpeopled. Knight's camp was located on private property, just a few hundred feet from the nearest cabin, in an area crisscrossed by dirt roads.

When I saw Knight's woods myself, I understood how he could remain there unnoticed. The tangle of hemlock and maple and elm is so dense the forest holds its own humidity; one step in and my glasses fogged.

But what made navigation truly treacherous were the boulders-vehicle-sized glacier-borne gifts from the last ice age-scattered wildly and everywhere. I thrashed about for an hour, wrenched a knee between two moss-slick rocks, then gave up and retreated to a road.

Before Chris was jailed, he'd led Hughes and Perkins-Vance to his camp; I knew roughly where it was located, but my second attempt was also a failure. There was no hint of a trail. Mosquitoes swarmed. Finally, reduced to slogging in a gridlike pattern, I squeezed around a boulder and there it was.

My goodness. Chris had carved from the chaos a bedroom-sized clearing completely invisible from a few steps away, situated on a slight rise that allowed enough breeze to keep the mosquitoes away, but not so much as to cause severe windchill in winter. It was surrounded by a natural Stonehenge of boulders; overhead, tree branches linked to form a trellis-like canopy that masked his site from the air. This is why Chris's skin was so pale-he'd lived in perpetual shade. I ended up staying there three nights, watching the rabbits by day, at night picking out a few stars behind the scrim of branches. It was as gorgeous and peaceful a place as I have ever spent time.

The police had dismantled much of his camp, but during my next visit with Chris, and several after that, he described his living space in meticulous detail. In total, Chris and I met at the jail for nine hours.

He slept in a simple camping tent, which he kept covered by several layers of brown tarps. Camouflage, he felt, was essential; he didn't want to risk anything shiny catching someone's eye, so he spray-painted, in foresty colors, his garbage bins and his coolers and his cooking pot. He even painted his clothespins green.

The breadth of his thievery was impressive. He'd fled the modern world only to live off the fat of it. Inside his tent was a metal bedframe he'd removed from the Pine Tree Camp; he had hauled it across the pond in a canoe. He didn't steal the canoe. He just borrowed one, as he often did, from a lakeside cabin-"there's a wide selection"-then returned it, sprinkling pine needles inside to make it seem unused. He also stole a box spring and mattress and sleeping bags.

He stole toilet paper and hand sanitizer for his bathroom spot. He took laundry detergent and shampoo for his wash area. There was no fire pit, as he'd insisted. He cooked on a Coleman two-burner stove that he connected to propane tanks. He stole a tremendous number of tanks, pillaging gas grills along the thirty-mile circumference of the pond. He never returned them. He buried the tanks-possibly hundreds of them-in his dump at the camp's edge.

He stole deodorant, disposable razors, flashlights, snow boots, spices, mousetraps, spray paint, and electrical tape. He took pillows off beds. He kept three different types of thermometers in camp: digital, mercury, spring-loaded. Knowing the exact temperature was mandatory. He stole watches-he had to be sure, while on a raid, that he could return to camp before daybreak.

Deeper into the forest, in his "upper cache," as he called it, he'd stashed plastic totes filled with enough supplies-a tent and a sleeping bag, some warm clothes-so that if he heard someone approach his camp, he could instantly abandon it and start anew. He was committed.

His diet was terrible. "Cooking is too kind a word for what I did," Chris told me. He'd not been sick in the woods, and his worst accident was a tumble on some ice, but his teeth were rotten, and no wonder. I dug through his twenty-five years of trash, buried between boulders, and kept inventory: a five-pound tub that once held Marshmallow Fluff, an empty box of Devil Dogs, peanut butter, Cheetos, honey, graham crackers, Cool Whip, tuna fish, coffee, Tater Tots, pudding, soda, El Monterey spicy jalapeño chimichangas, and on and on and on.

He stole radios and earphones and hid an antenna up in trees. For a while, he listened to a lot of conservative talk radio. Later he got hooked on classical music-Tchaikovsky and Brahms, yes; Bach, no. "Bach is too pristine," he said. He went through a spell of listening to television shows on the radio; "theater of the mind," he called it. Everybody Loves Raymond was a favorite. But his undying passion was classic rock: the Who, AC/DC, Judas Priest, and above all, Lynyrd Skynyrd. We covered hundreds of topics while chatting in jail, and nothing received higher praise than Lynyrd Skynyrd. "They will be playing Lynyrd Skynyrd songs in a thousand years," he proclaimed.

He also stole the occasional handheld video game-Pokémon, Tetris, Dig Dug-but the majority of his free time was spent reading or observing the forest. "Don't mistake me for some bird-watching PBS type," he warned, but then proceeded to poetically describe the crunch of dry leaves underfoot ("walking on corn flakes") and the rumble of an ice crack propagating across the pond ("like a bowling ball rolling down an alley").

He stole hundreds of books over the years; his preference was military history-he named William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich as his favorite book-but he took whatever was available. Magazines were more common. When he finished them, he'd create bricks of magazines, bound with electrical tape, and bury them in the ground to level out his camp. Beneath his tent area were dozens of these bricks.

I unearthed a stack of _National Geographic_s with the dates still legible: 1991 and 1992. I also saw People, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, and Vanity Fair. There was even a collection of _Playboy_s. One book Chris never stole was the Bible. "I can't claim a belief system," he said. He celebrated no holidays. He meditated now and then but did not pray.

With one exception. When the worst of a Maine winter struck, all rules were suspended. "Once you get below negative twenty, you purposely don't think," he told me. His eyes went wide and fearful from the memory. "That's when you do have religion. You do pray. You pray for warmth."

Chris lived by the rhythms of the seasons, but his thoughts were dominated by surviving winter. Preparations began at the end of each summer as the lakeside cabins were shutting down for the year. "It was my busiest time," he said. "Harvest time. A very ancient instinct. Though not usually associated with crime."

His first goal was to get fat. This was a life-or-death necessity. "I gorged myself on sugar and alcohol," he said. "It's the quickest way to gain weight, and I liked the inebriation." The bottles he stole were signs of a man who'd never once, as he admitted, ordered a drink at a bar: Allen's Coffee Flavored Brandy, Seagram's Escapes Strawberry Daiquiri, something called Whipped Chocolate Valley Vines (from the label: "fine chocolate, whipped cream red wine").

As the evenings began to chill, he grew his beard to the ideal length-about an inch, long enough to insulate his face, short enough to prevent ice buildup. He intensified his thieving raids, stocking up on food and propane. The first snow usually came in November. Chris was always fearful about leaving a single boot print anywhere, which is impossible to avoid in a blanket of snow. And so for the next six months, until the spring thaw in April, Chris rarely strayed from his clearing in the woods.

I asked him if he just slept all the time, a human hibernation. "Completely wrong," he replied. "It's dangerous to sleep too long in winter." When seriously frigid weather descended, he conditioned himself to fall asleep at 7:30 P.M. and get up at 2 A.M. "That way, at the depth of cold, I was awake." If he remained in bed any longer, condensation from his body could freeze his sleeping bag. "If you try and sleep through that kind of cold, you might never wake up."

The first thing he'd do at 2 A.M. was light his stove and start melting snow. To get his blood circulating, he'd pace the perimeter of his camp. His feet never seemed to fully thaw, but as long as he had a fresh pair of socks, this wasn't a problem. "It's more important to be dry than warm," Chris said. By dawn, he'd have his day's water supply. "Then, if I had had food, I'd have a meal."

And if he didn't have food? There were, he said, some very hard winters-desperate winters-in which he ran out of propane and finished his food. The suffering was acute. Chris called it "physical, emotional, and psychological pain." He hinted to me there were times he contemplated suicide.

Why not just leave the woods? Chris said he thought about it. He even kept a whistle in his camp. "If I blew on it in sequences of three, help might come." But he never used it. Rather, he made a firm decision that unless forcibly removed, he was going to spend the rest of his life behind the trees.

When he heard the song of the chickadees, he told me, he could finally relax. "That alerted me that winter is starting to lessen its grip. That the end is near. That spring is coming and I'm still alive."

The cold never got easier. All his winter-camping expertise felt offset by advancing age. "You should have seen me in my twenties," he boasted. "I was lord of the woods. I ruled the land I walked upon. I was tough and clever." But over time, like an aging athlete, his body began to break down. The biggest issue was his eyesight. "For the last ten years, anything beyond an arm's length was a blur. I used my ears more than my eyes." If he saw a pair of glasses during a break-in, he always tried them on, but was unable to find a better prescription. His agility faded; bruises took longer to heal. His teeth constantly hurt.

The victims of his thefts, after years of waiting for a police breakthrough, eventually took matters into their own hands. Neal Patterson, whose family has owned a place on the pond for fifty years, began hiding all night in his dark house with a .357 Magnum in his hand. "I wanted to be the guy that caught the hermit," he said. He stayed up fourteen nights one summer before he quit.

Debbie Baker, whose young boys were terrified of the hermit-to quell their fears, the family renamed him "the hungry man"-installed a surveillance camera in their cabin. And in 2002, they captured a photo of Knight. The police widely distributed the photo and figured an arrest was imminent.

It took eleven more years. After a robbery in March of 2013 at the Pine Tree Camp, Sergeant Terry Hughes, who often volunteered there, contacted the border patrol for advice. "It had gone on long enough," said Hughes. He installed a motion detector that sounded an alarm at his house and practiced dashing from his bed to the camp until he had it down under four minutes. Then Hughes waited for the hermit to return.

Following his arrest, the court of public opinion was deeply divided. The man who wanted to live his life as invisibly as possible had become one of the most famous people in Maine. You could not walk into a bar in the Augusta area without stumbling into a debate about what should be done with Christopher Knight.

Some said that he must immediately be released from jail. Stealing cheese and bacon are not serious crimes. The man was apparently never violent. He didn't carry a weapon. He's an introvert, not a criminal. He clearly has no desire to be a part of our world. Let's open a Kickstarter, get him enough cash for a few years' worth of groceries, and allow him to go back to the woods. Some people were willing to let him live on their land, rent-free.

Others countered that it wasn't the physical items he robbed that made his crimes so disturbing-he stole hundreds of people's peace of mind. Their sense of security. How were they supposed to know Knight wasn't armed and dangerous? Even a single break-in can be punishable by a ten-year sentence. If Knight really wanted to live in the woods, he should've done so on public lands, hunting and fishing for food. He's nothing but a lazy man and a thief times a thousand. Lock him up in the state penitentiary.

On October 28, 2013, Chris appeared in Kennebec County Superior Court and pleaded guilty to thirteen counts of burglary and theft. He was sentenced to seven months in jail-he'd already served all but a week of this, waiting for his case to be resolved. The sentence was far more lenient than it could have been, though even the prosecutor said a long prison term seemed cruel in this case. Chris was ordered to meet with a judge every Monday, and avoid alcohol, and either find a job or go to school. If he violated these terms, he could be sent to prison for seven years.

Before his release, I met with Chris again. He said he'd be returning home, to live with his mother. His beard was unruly-"my crazy hermit beard," he called it. He was alarmingly skinny; he itched all over. We still didn't make much eye contact.

"I don't know your world," he said. "Only my world, and memories of the world before I went into the woods. What life is today? What is proper? I have to figure out how to live." He wished he could return to his camp-"I miss the woods"-but he knew by the rules of his release that this was impossible. "Sitting here in jail, I don't like what I see in the society I'm about to enter. I don't think I'm going to fit in. It's too loud. Too colorful. The lack of aesthetics. The crudeness. The inanities. The trivia."

I told him I agreed with much of his assessment. But, I wondered, what about your world? What insights did you glean from your time alone? I had been trying to ask him these questions every visit, but now I pushed the point harder.

Anyone who reveals what he's learned, Chris told me, is not by his definition a true hermit. Chris had come around on the idea of himself as a hermit, and eventually embraced it. When I mentioned Thoreau, who spent two years at Walden, Chris dismissed him with a single word: "dilettante."

True hermits, according to Chris, do not write books, do not have friends, and do not answer questions. I asked why he didn't at least keep a journal in the woods. Chris scoffed. "I expected to die out there. Who would read my journal? You? I'd rather take it to my grave." The only reason he was talking to me now, he said, is because he was locked in jail and needed practice interacting with others.

"But you must have thought about things," I said. "About your life, about the human condition."

Chris became surprisingly introspective. "I did examine myself," he said. "Solitude did increase my perception. But here's the tricky thing-when I applied my increased perception to myself, I lost my identity. With no audience, no one to perform for, I was just there. There was no need to define myself; I became irrelevant. The moon was the minute hand, the seasons the hour hand. I didn't even have a name. I never felt lonely. To put it romantically: I was completely free."

That was nice. But still, I pressed on, there must have been some grand insight revealed to him in the wild.

He returned to silence. Whether he was thinking or fuming or both, I couldn't tell. Though he did arrive at an answer. I felt like some great mystic was about to reveal the Meaning of Life.

He set his jaw in a way that conveyed he wouldn't be saying more. This is what he'd learned. I accepted it as truth.

"What I miss most," he eventually continued, "is somewhere between quiet and solitude. What I miss most is stillness." He said he'd watched for years as a shelf mushroom grew on the trunk of a Douglas fir in his camp. I'd noticed the mushroom when I visited-it was enormous-and he asked me with evident concern if anyone had knocked it down. I assured him it was still there. In the height of summer, he said, he'd sometimes sneak down to the lake at night. "I'd stretch out in the water, float on my back, and look at the stars."

At the very end of each of our visits, I'd always asked him the same question. An essential question: Why did he disappear?

He never had a satisfying answer. "I don't have a reason." "I can't explain why." "Give me more time to think about it." "It's a mystery to me, too." Then he became annoyed: "Why? That question bores me."

But during our final visit, he was more reflective. Isn't everybody, he said, seeking the same thing in life? Aren't we all looking for contentment? He was never happy in his youth-not in high school, not with a job, not being around other people. Then he discovered his camp in the woods. "I found a place where I was content," he said. His own perfect spot. The only place in the world he felt at peace.

That was all he had to tell me. He'd grown weary of my visits. Please, he begged, leave me alone; we are not friends. I don't want to be your friend, he said, I don't want to be anyone's friend. "I'm not going to miss you at all," he added.

I liked Chris, a great deal. I liked the way his mind worked; I liked the lyricism of his language. But he was a true hermit. He could no longer disappear into the wild, so he wished to melt away into the world.

"Good-bye, Chris," I said. A guard had appeared to escort him away, but there was time for Chris to express a last thought. He did not. He hung up the phone. No wave; no nod. He stood, turned his back on me, and walked out of the visitors' booth and down a corridor of the jail.

MORE STORIES LIKE THIS ONE

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The Strange Tale of the North Pond Hermit

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For nearly thirty years, a phantom haunted the woods of Central Maine. Unseen and unknown, he lived in secret, creeping into homes in the dead of night and surviving on what he could steal. To the spooked locals, he became a legend-or maybe a myth. They wondered how he could possibly be real.

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This article displays Knight's daily activities while he lived in the woods and exhibits pictures of his camp and

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In April 2013, Sergeant Terry Hughes caught a man breaking into the walk-in fridge of a summer camp for disabled children in central Maine. This was the end of the hunt for Maine's legendary North Pond Hermit, Christopher Knight.

It was a moment akin to catching the yeti snatching hikers off a Himalayan mountainside. Except, in this case, the yeti shaved, and some people wistfully thought they might want to live like him-to run off into the woods, hear birds sing, watch water ripple, see snow drop, and rediscover the ideal of unalloyed individualism. Knight did it for nearly 30 years. In The Stranger in the Woods ($26; Knopf), author Michael Finkel uncovers the minute and astonishing elements of Knight's story. These six made us do a double take.

He Didn't Talk to Anyone for 27 Years

Well, Knight did bump into a hiker once. That day, he looked up, nodded, and said, "Hi." Then Knight walked on, because he didn't feel like talking-and he didn't talk for the other nearly 10,000 days he spent in the woods. When people are suffering, we tell them, "You're not alone." When they feel the need to be understood, we tell them, "I hear you." When we want to punish people for extreme offenses, we isolate them. The United Nations defines that last idiosyncrasy of ours as torture, by the way. And yet Knight chose to forget the sound of human voices and let his own voice fade. The night he was captured and questioned, his sentences were "stuttery and clanky, an old engine struggling to turn over, each syllable a chore," as Finkel describes in the book.

He Was Just 20 When He Began His Seclusion

When Knight walked into the woods in 1986, he had never been on a date or even spent a night in a tent. One day, he drove his Subaru as far as roads would take him into the Maine woods, less than an hour from where he grew up. He left the keys on the dashboard and started walking south. There weren't many indicators that Knight wanted to abandon human contact so completely-he was following some sort of inner directive that worked on a level removed from logic. He told Finkel, "I had no plans when I left, I wasn't thinking of anything. I just did it." Knight had a fairly normal childhood in an unusually resourceful, slightly reclusive New England family. At the time, he was working installing alarm systems and had just bought the new car. No one expected it, not his school friends or even his brother, who had helped fund the Subaru and would be saddled with the debt for it. One day, Knight simply decided that he would live a life of his own design.

He Lived So Close to a House That He Couldn't Sneeze Aloud

For the vast majority of time he spent in the woods, Knight lived about a three-minute walking distance from the nearest cabin and a washboard road, on a 220-acre parcel of land where other simple summer homes were set in the woods along the lake. To avoid detection, he never lit a campfire and tried to avoid sneezing. He built his long-term woodland encampment in an essentially invisible clearing between two boulders, using tarps, garbage bins, and many issues of National Geographic (great for water drainage-Knight created a level platform in his living space with duct-taped bundles of magazines). He was constantly tinkering with the shelter, but no matter the adjustments Knight made, it never provided much warmth. So, in the intense Maine winters, he froze but survived. Knight would lie under a mass of blankets and force himself to wake in the coldest parts of the night. "What he did in the cold was both prosaic and profound," Finkel writes. "He suffered."

He Broke into More Than 1,000 Buildings Before Getting Caught

Though he suffered, Knight did find a surprising amount of sustenance in other people's homes. He was an expert burglar. Using skills that lingered from the alarm-installation job, Knight left no trace. Rather than break down doors, he would take them off their hinges and put them back on later. Most of his neighbors only noticed they'd been robbed when they found that food, sleeping bags, clothes, magazines, books, alcohol, or candy were missing. This kleptomaniacal mode of survival was subtle, but it was so consistent that Knight ended up creating a mood of unease in the cabin community, most of whom were seasonal residents who used the cabins for their own escapes during the summers. "All Patterson wanted from her cabin was a place to escape the pressures of daily life," writes Finkel of one of the victims. "Knight denied her that." All solitude comes at a cost, whether for the secluded or those who surround him.

There Is an Online Hermit Community That Thinks He's Overrated

Much of the hermit community objected to Knight's particularly parasitic mode of existence. Yes, there is a hermit community, with an online forum at Hermitary.com. Many of the hermits on that forum declared that Knight couldn't be considered a real hermit because he stole things. Knight himself agrees-he told Finkel that he does not consider himself a hermit but a thief. Still, many other modern-day hermits actually live in their parents' basements or analogous internet-connected pits and have meals slipped through a crack in the door while they chat online with their hermit friends. In Japan, there are more than half a million of this sort of hermit. They're known as hikikomori and are so prevalent that the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare has studied their condition.

Conceptually, it might seem weird that all these hermits, Knight among them, would choose to rely on society in some way. Actually, most of history's known hermits have interacted with their societies to varying degrees. There were the walled-off medieval anchorites who ate meals slipped through slots by servants, and then slipped excrement back out. Then there was Everett Ruess, who showed up at a shop every once in a very long while before disappearing again into the desert with his mules. Even the Unabomber sent off his explosive missives through the postal service from his woodland lair. If there were hermits who've never had to interact with society, we've never heard of them (for obvious reasons). But Knight does stand out for going the longest period without human contact.

He Hates Henry David Thoreau

When Knight was captured, a media storm broke over the Kennebec County Jail as journalists descended from around the world to rattle him like hail. All of them, including Finkel, tried to glean hermit wisdom in the process. In the end, the only major insight Knight expressed to Finkel was "get enough sleep." The pithiness and grounded practicality of that advice isn't entirely surprising. It was unlikely that Knight would ever come up with ethereal maxims, memorable aphorisms, or spiritual nuggets. He branded Thoreau a "dilettante" and said others like him who published and commodified their thoughts were false hermits. What Knight took from the woods were not grand cosmic insights, but memories of a time when he was attuned to the nature, beautiful and brutal, around him. He remembered how on the warmest days of the year, the pond would be warm and he would strip and float in it, gazing at the stars. Though he lost track of time, Knight eagerly anticipated the days around the Fourth of July. Rather than recalling gawking at fireworks with a drunken mass, Knight remembered those times because he could sit back and watch as the pitch-black forest around him filled with fireflies.

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The Secret Life of America's Last True Hermit

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In April 2013, Sergeant Terry Hughes caught a man breaking into the walk-in fridge of a summer camp for disabled children in central Maine. This was the end of the hunt for Maine's legendary North Pond Hermit, Christopher Knight. It was a moment akin to catching the yeti snatching hikers off a Himalayan mountainside.

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Theories of why Knight lived in seclusion for 27 years

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Theories of why Knight lived in seclusion for 27 years

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The author attempts to summarizes the motives that Christopher Knight may have had to move into the woods in a very psycho-analystic manner.

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hristopher Knight was only 20 years old when he walked away from society, not to be seen again for more than a quarter of a century. He had been working for less than a year installing home and vehicle alarm systems near Boston, Massachusetts, when abruptly, without giving notice to his boss, he quit his job. He never even returned his tools. He cashed his final pay cheque and left town.

Knight did not tell anyone where he was going. "I had no one to tell," he says. "I didn't have any friends. I had no interest in my co-workers." He drove down the east coast of America, eating fast food and staying in cheap motels - "the cheapest I could find". He travelled for days, alone, until he found himself deep into Florida, sticking mostly to major roads, watching the world go by.

Eventually, he turned around and headed north. He listened to the radio. Ronald Reagan was president; the Chernobyl nuclear disaster had just occurred. Driving through Georgia and the Carolinas and Virginia, blessed with invincibility of youth, buzzed by "the pleasure of driving", he sensed an idea growing into a realisation, then solidifying into resolve.

All his life, he had been comfortable being alone. Interacting with others was so often frustrating. Every meeting with another person seemed like a collision.

He drove north to Maine, where he had grown up. There aren't many roads in the centre of the state, and he chose the one that went right by his family's house. "I think it was just to have one last look around, to say goodbye," he said. He didn't stop. The last time he saw his family home was through the windscreen of his car.

He kept going, "up and up and up". Soon he reached the shore of Moosehead Lake, the largest in Maine, and the point where the state begins to get truly remote. "I drove until I was nearly out of gas. I took a small road. Then a small road off that small road. Then a trail off that." He went as far into the wilderness as his vehicle could take him.

Knight parked the car and tossed the keys on the centre console. He had a tent and a backpack but no compass, no map. Without knowing where he was going, with no particular place in mind, he stepped into the trees and walked away.

hy would a 20-year-old manabruptly abandon the world? The act had elements of a suicide, except he didn't kill himself. "To the rest of the world, I ceased to exist," said Knight. Following his disappearance, Knight's family must have suffered; they had no idea what had happened to him, and couldn't completely accept the idea that he might be dead.

His final gesture, leaving his keys in the car, was particularly strange. Knight was raised with a keen appreciation of the value of money, and the car was the most expensive item he had ever purchased. Why not hold on to the keys as a safety net? What if he didn't like camping out?

"The car was of no use to me. It had just about zero gas and I was miles and miles from any gas station," he said. As far as anyone knows, the car is still there, half-swallowed by the forest. Knight said that he didn't really know why he left. He had given the question plenty of thought but had never arrived at a specific answer. "It's a mystery," he declared.

There have been hermits - also known as recluses, monks, misanthropes, ascetics, anchorites, swamis - at all times in recorded history, across all cultures. But there are really only three general reasons why people leave the world.

Most do so for religious purposes, to forge a closer bond with a higher power. Jesus, Muhammad and Buddha all spent significant time alone before introducing a new religion to the world. In Hindu philosophy, everyone ideally matures into a kind of hermit, and today at least four million people live as wandering holy men in India, surviving off the charity of strangers, having renounced all familial and material attachments.

Other hermits opt out of civilisation because of a hatred of what the world has become - too much war, or environmental destruction, or crime, or consumerism. The first great literary work about solitude, the Tao Te Ching, was written in China in the sixth century BC by a hermit named Laozi, who was protesting the corrupt state of society. The Tao Te Ching says that it is only through retreat rather than pursuit, through inaction rather than action, that we acquire wisdom.

The final category includes those who wish to be alone for reasons of artistic freedom, scientific insight or deeper self-understanding. Henry David Thoreau went to Walden Pond in Massachusetts to journey within, to explore "the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being". English historian Edward Gibbon said that "solitude was the school for genius".

Knight fit into none of these categories - he did not follow any formal religion; he was not protesting modern society; he produced no artwork or philosophical treatise. He never took a photograph or wrote a sentence; not a single person knew where he was. His back was fully turned to the world. There was no clear reason for what he chose to do. Something he couldn't quite pinpoint had tugged him away from the world with the persistence of gravity. He was one of the longest‑enduring solitaries in history, and among the most fervent as well. Christopher Knight was a true hermit.

"I can't explain my actions," he said. "I had no plans when I left, I wasn't thinking of anything. I just did it."

night's goal was to get lost.Not just lost to the rest of the world but actually lost in the woods by himself. He carried only rudimentary camping supplies, a few articles of clothing and a little food. "I had what I had," he said, "and nothing more."

It is not easy to get truly lost. Anyone with basic outdoor skills generally knows which way they are heading. The sun burns west across the sky, and from there it is natural to set the other directions. Knight knew that he was heading south. He said that he didn't make a conscious decision to do so. Instead, he felt pulled in that direction, like a homing pigeon. "There was no depth or substance to the idea. It was at the instinctual level. It's instinct among animals to return to home territory, and my home ground, where I was born and raised, was that way."

Maine is partitioned into a series of long north-south valleys, the geologic clawmark left by glaciers surging and retreating. Separating the valleys are strings of mountains, now weather-worn and bald-topped like old men. The valley floors at the time of year when Knight arrived were a summer soup of ponds and wetlands and bogs.

"I kept largely to the ridges," Knight said, "and sometimes crossed swamps going from one ridge to another." He worked his way along crumbled slopes and muddy wetlands. "Soon I lost track of where I was. I didn't care." He would camp in one spot for a week or so, then head south yet again. "I kept going," he said. "I was content in the choice I had made."

Content except for one thing: food. Knight was hungry, and he really didn't know how he would feed himself. His departure from the outside world was a confounding mix of incredible commitment and complete lack of forethought - not all that strange for a 20-year-old. It was as if he went camping for the weekend and then didn't come home for a quarter of a century. He was an able hunter and angler, but he took neither a gun nor a rod with him. Still, he didn't want to die, at least not then. Knight's idea was to forage. The wilds of Maine are monumentally broad, though not generous. There are no fruit trees. Berries sometimes have a weekend-long season. Without hunting or trapping or fishing, a person is going to starve.

Knight worked his way south, eating very little, until paved roads appeared. He found a road-killed partridge, but did not possess a stove or a way to easily start a fire, so he ate it raw. Neither a tasty meal nor a hearty one, and a good way to get sick. He passed houses with gardens, but was raised with rigid morals and a great deal of pride. You make do on your own, always. No handouts or government assistance, ever. You know what's right and what's wrong, and the dividing line is usually clear.

But try not eating for 10 days - nearly everyone's restraints will be eroded. Hunger is hard to ignore. "It took a while to overcome my scruples," Knight said, but as soon as his principles began to fall away, he snapped off a few ears of corn from one garden, dug up some potatoes from another, and ate a couple of green vegetables.

Once, during his first weeks away, he spent the night in an unoccupied cabin. It was a miserable experience. "The stress of that, the sleepless worry about getting caught, programmed me not to do that again." Knight never slept indoors after that, not once, no matter how cold or rainy the weather.

He continued moving south, picking through gardens, and eventually reached a region with a familiar distribution of trees, along with a diversity of birdcalls and a temperature range he felt accustomed to. It had been colder up north. Knight wasn't sure precisely where he was, but he knew that it was home ground. It turned out that he was less than 30 miles, as the crow flies, from his childhood home.

In the early days, nearly everything Knight learned was through trial and error. He had been gifted with a good head for figuring out workable solutions to complicated problems. All his skills, from the rigging of the tarps that formed his shelter, to how to store drinking water, to walking through the forest without leaving tracks, went through multiple revisions and were never considered perfect. Tinkering with his systems was one of Knight's hobbies.

Over the next few months, Knight tried living in several places in the area - including inside a dank hole in a riverbank - all without satisfaction. Finally, he stumbled upon a region of nasty, boulder-choked woods without so much as a game trail running through it; far too harsh for hikers. He liked it immediately. Then he discovered a cluster of boulders, one with a hidden opening that led to a tiny, wondrous clearing. "I knew at once it was ideal. So I settled in."

Still, he remained hungry. Knight was beginning to realise that is almost impossible to live by yourself all the time. You need help. Hermits across history often ended up in deserts or mountains or woodlands - the sorts of places where it was extremely difficult to find or catch all your own food. To feed themselves, some of the Desert Fathers - third-century Christian Hermits from Egypt - wove reed baskets and sold them. In ancient China, hermits were shamans, herbalists and diviners. Later, a fad for hermits swept 18th-century England. It was believed that hermits radiated kindness and thoughtfulness, so advertisements were placed in newspapers for "ornamental hermits" who were lax in grooming and willing to sleep in caves on the country estates of the aristocracy. The job paid well and hundreds were hired, typically on seven-year contracts. Some of the hermits would even emerge at dinner parties and greet guests.

Knight, however, felt that anyone's willing assistance tainted the whole enterprise. He wished to be unconditionally alone; an uncontacted tribe of one.

The cabins around the ponds in central Maine, Knight noted, had minimal security measures. Windows were often left open, even when the owners were away. The woods offered excellent cover, and with few permanent residents, the area would always be empty during the off-season. A summer camp with a big pantry was nearby. The easiest way to become a hunter-gatherer here was obvious.

And so Knight decided to steal.

o commit a thousand break-insbefore getting caught, a world-class streak, requires precision and patience, daring and luck. It also demands a specific understanding of people. "I looked for patterns," Knight said. "Everyone has patterns."

He perched at the edge of the woods and meticulously observed the habits of the families with cabins along the ponds. He watched their quiet breakfasts and dinner parties, their visitors and vacancies, the cars moving up and down the road. Nothing Knight saw tempted him to return to his former life. His surveillance was clinical, informational, mathematical. He did not learn anyone's name. All he sought was to understand migration patterns - when people went shopping, when a cabin was unoccupied. After that, he said, everything in his life became a matter of timing. The ideal time to steal was deep in the night, midweek, preferably when it was overcast, best in the rain. A heavy downpour was prime. People stayed out of the woods when it was wet.

Still, Knight did not walk on roads or trails, just in case, and he never launched a raid on a Friday or Saturday - days he knew had arrived from the obvious surge in lakeside noise.

For a while, he opted to go out when the moon was large, so he could use it as a light source. In later years, when he suspected the police had intensified their search for him, he switched to no moon at all. Knight liked to vary his methods. He didn't want to develop any patterns of his own, though he did make it a habit to embark on a raid only when freshly shaved or with a neatly groomed beard, and wearing clean clothing, so as to reduce suspicion on the slight chance that he was spotted.

There were at least 100 cabins in Knight's thieving repertoire. The ideal was a fully stocked place, with the family away until the weekend. He knew, in many cases, the precise number of steps required to reach a particular cabin, and once he selected a target, he bounded and weaved through the forest. Sometimes, if he was headed far or needed a load of propane or a replacement mattress it was easier to travel by canoe. Canoes are difficult to hide, and if you steal one, the owner will call the police. It was wiser to borrow, and there was a large selection around the lake, some up on sawhorses and seldom used.

Knight was capable of reaching homes anywhere along the largest pond near his hidden campsite. "I'd think nothing of paddling for hours, whatever needed to be done." If the water was choppy, he would place a few rocks in the front of the boat to keep it stable. Typically, he stayed close to shore, cloaked against the trees, hiding in the silhouette of the land, though on a stormy night he would paddle across the middle, alone in the dark and lashed by the rain.

When he arrived at his chosen cabin, he would make sure there were no vehicles in the driveway, no sign of someone inside. Burglary is a dicey business, with a low margin for error. One mistake and the outside world would snatch him back. So he crouched in the dark and waited, sometimes for hours. "I enjoy being in the dark," he said.

He never risked breaking into a home occupied year-round, and he always wore a watch so he could monitor the time.

Sometimes, cabins were left unlocked. Those were the easiest to enter, though soon other places became nearly as simple. Knight had keys to them, found during previous break-ins. He stashed each key on its respective property, typically under some nondescript rock. He created several dozen of these stashes and never forgot where one was.

He noticed when several cabins left out pens and paper, requesting a shopping list, and others offered him bags of supplies, hanging from a doorknob. But he was fearful of traps, or tricks, or initiating any sort of correspondence, even a grocery list. So he left everything untouched, and people stopped.

For the majority of his break-ins, Knight worked the lock on a window or door. He always carried his lock-breaking kit, a gym bag with a collection of screwdrivers and flat bars and files, all of which he had stolen, and could defeat all but the most fortified bolts with the perfect little jiggle of just the right tool. When he had finished stealing, he would often reseal the hasp on the window he had unlatched and exit through the front door, making sure the handle was set, if possible, to lock up behind himself. No need to leave the place vulnerable to thieves.

As the local residents invested in security upgrades, Knight adapted. He knew about alarms from his one paying job, and he used this knowledge to continue stealing - sometimes disabling systems or removing memory cards from surveillance cameras. He evaded dozens of attempts to catch him, by both police officers and private citizens. The crime scenes he left behind were so clean that the authorities offered their begrudging respect. "The level of discipline he showed while he broke into houses," said one police officer, "is beyond what any of us can remotely imagine - the legwork, the reconnaissance, the talent with locks, his ability to get in and out without being detected."

A burglary report filed by another officer specifically noted the crime's "unusual neatness". The hermit, many officers felt, was a master thief. It was as if he were showing off, picking locks yet stealing little, playing a strange sort of game.

Knight said the moment he opened a lock and entered a home, he always felt a hot wave of shame. "Every time, I was very conscious that I was doing wrong. I took no pleasure in it, none at all." Once inside a cabin, he moved purposefully, hitting the kitchen first before making a quick sweep of the house, looking for any useful items, or the batteries he always required. He never turned on a light. He used only a small torch attached to a metal chain he wore around his neck.

During a burglary, there wasn't a moment's ease. "My adrenaline was spiking, my heart rate was soaring. My blood pressure was high. I was always scared when stealing. Always. I wanted it over as quickly as possible."

When Knight was finished with the inside of the cabin, he would habitually check the gas grill to see if the propane tank was full. If so, and there was an empty spare lying around, he would replace the full one with an empty, making the grill appear untouched.

Then he would load everything into a canoe, if he had borrowed one, and paddle to the shore closest to his camp to unload. He would return the canoe to the spot he had taken it from, sprinkle some pine needles on the boat to make it appear unused, then haul his loot up through the dense woods, between the rocks, to his home.

Each raid brought Knight enough supplies to last about two weeks, and as he settled once more into his room in the woods - "back in my safe place, success" - he experienced a deep sense of peace.

night said that he couldn't accurately describe what it felt like to spend such an immense period of time alone. Silence does not translate into words. "It's complicated," he said. "Solitude bestows an increase in something valuable. I can't dismiss that idea. Solitude increased my perception. But here's the tricky thing: when I applied my increased perception to myself, I lost my identity. There was no audience, no one to perform for. There was no need to define myself. I became irrelevant."

The dividing line between himself and the forest, Knight said, seemed to dissolve. His isolation felt more like a communion. "My desires dropped away. I didn't long for anything. I didn't even have a name. To put it romantically, I was completely free."

Virtually everyone who has tried to describe deep solitude has said something similar. "I am nothing; I see all," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. Lord Byron called it "the feeling infinite". The American mystic Thomas Merton said that "the true solitary does not seek himself, but loses himself".

For those who do not choose to be alone - like prisoners and hostages - a loss of one's socially created identity can be terrifying, a plunge into madness. Psychologists call it "ontological insecurity", losing your grip on who you are. Edward Abbey, in Desert Solitaire, a chronicle of two six‑month stints as a ranger in Utah's Arches National Monument, said that being solitary for a long time "means risking everything human". Knight, meanwhile, didn't even keep a mirror in his camp. He was never once bored. He wasn't sure, he said, that he even understood the concept of boredom. "I was never lonely," Knight added. He was attuned to the completeness of his own presence rather than to the absence of others.

"If you like solitude," he said, "you are never alone."

night was finally arrested, after 27 yearsof complete isolation, while stealing food at a lakeside summer camp. He was charged with burglary and theft, and taken to the local jail. His arrest caused an enormous commotion - letters and visitors arrived at the jail, and approximately 500 journalists requested an interview. A documentary film team showed up. A woman proposed marriage.

Knight is escorted into Kennebec County Superior Court to enter pleas for multiple burglaries and thefts. Photograph: Portland Press Herald/Press Herald via Getty Images

Everyone wanted to know what the hermit would say. What insights had he gained while he was alone? What advice did he have for the rest of us? People have been approaching hermits with similar requests for thousands of years, eager to consult with someone whose life has been so radically different to their own.

Profound truths, or at least those that make sense of the seeming randomness of life, are difficult to find. Thoreau wrote that he had reduced his existence to its basic elements so that he could "live deep and suck out all the marrow of life".

Knight did, eventually permit one journalist to meet him, and over the course of nine one-hour visits in the jail, the hermit shared his life story - about how he was able to survive, and what it felt like to live alone for so long.

And once, when he was in an especially introspective mood, Knight seemed willing, despite his typical aversion to dispensing wisdom, to share more of what he gleaned while alone. Was there, the journalist asked him, some grand insight revealed to him in the wild?

Knight sat quietly but he eventually arrived at a reply.

"Get enough sleep," he said.

He set his jaw in a way that conveyed he wouldn't be saying any more. This was what he'd learned. It was, without question, the truth.
This is an adapted extract of The Stranger in the Woods by Michael Finkel, published by Simon and Schuster

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Into the woods: how one man survived alone in the wilderness for 27 years | Michael Finkel

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The long read: At the age of 20, Christopher Knight parked his car on a remote trail in Maine and walked away with only the most basic supplies. He had no plan. His chief motivation was to avoid contact with people. This is his story