The Lone Stranger
Residents of North Pond, Maine, knew they had a thief living in their forest. But was the hermit a folk hero — or a menace to society?
The Stranger in the Woods The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit by Michael Finkel Knopf
FOR 27 years, the North Pond Hermit was to rural Maine what the Loch Ness Monster is to Scotland: lore, myth, legend, a perverse point of local pride. Those convinced of his existence regarded him with admiration and fear, the latter more common among his victims.
The hermit, also known as the Mountain Man and the Hungry Man, was believed responsible for decades-long break-ins in North Pond cabins. These crimes had a pattern, spiking before Memorial Day and after Labor Day, and the items stolen ranged from batteries to packaged food to skillets to paperback novels. The hermit loved back issues of National Geographic and Playboy and preferred Bud to Bud Light, peanut butter over tuna. He rarely stole anything of real value, save for the couple who returned for the summer to find a mattress stolen from a bunk bed — the passports they’d stashed under it left, in view, in a closet.
He was considerate that way. If the hermit had to remove a door from its hinges to get in, he’d reattach it before leaving. He’d never break a window to gain entry, never rifle through belongings, always leave a cabin as clean as he found it. When the local police made their reports, they filed the suspect’s name as “Hermit Hermit.” One noted a crime scene’s “unusual neatness,” and even law enforcement had to give him credit.
“The level of discipline he showed while he broke into houses is beyond what any of us can remotely imagine,” said Sgt. Terry Hughes. “The legwork, the reconnaissance, the talent with locks, his ability to get in and out without being detected.”
As the years passed, residents installed alarm systems and surveillance cameras. In 2013, the Pine Tree summer camp added motion sensors and floodlights — a plan devised by an increasingly frustrated Hughes, who obtained new technologies developed by Homeland Security and had the camp’s alarm signal silently routed to his home.
On an early April morning in 2011, Hughes was finally woken by that alarm and raced to the camp. He prepared himself to encounter a military veteran or a hardened criminal and was surprised to find himself face-to-face with a pale, bespectacled man, clean-shaven and well-dressed in a Columbia jacket, new jeans and quality work boots, 6-feet tall and well-fed.
He said nothing, but Hughes knew: Here, finally, was the elusive North Pond Hermit.
IN “The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit,” author Michael Finkel investigates the ways Christopher Knight, who disappeared in 1986 at age 20, was able to survive on his own in the forest — physically, emotionally and psychologically. By his own account, Knight went 27 years without ever talking to another human being. Upon his arrest, Knight became a national media story.
“Capturing Knight,” Finkel writes, “was the human equivalent of netting a giant squid.” Fascinated, Finkel began a jailhouse correspondence with Knight and eventually surprised him with an unannounced visit. Knight agreed to talk as long as the two were separated by a plastic partition; he’d always been averse to physical contact and was struggling with his shared cell. He may have been the only prisoner in North America to beg for solitary.
“Some people want me to be this warm and fuzzy person,” Knight said. “All filled with friendly hermit wisdom.” He told Finkel he was afraid the media would depict him as a freak show, and so told his story as best he could.
Knight grew up in the tiny village of Albion, Maine, where cows outnumber people by half. He was the youngest of five in “a family of brainiacs” who lived off the land; their father studied ther-
modynamics and built a greenhouse that fed the family through all seasons. His parents weren’t affectionate with the children, and Knight said his family was “obsessed with privacy.” His father taught him to hunt; he took a course in survivalism. Knight did fine in high school, though he felt ‘invisible,” and shortly after graduating took what little money he had and drove his 1985 Subaru Brat all the way up to Moosehead Lake, one of the most remote places in Maine. Once there, it was like the decision had been made for him. He knew what he was going to do but told no one, not even his mother. His family never filed a missing person’s report; they just assumed Knight went off on an adventure. When his father died 15 years after Knight vanished, he was listed as a survivor.
As to why he chose to live on his own, alone, Knight says he still doesn’t know. “It’s a mystery,” he told Finkel. “I just did it.”
“He wasn’t trying to hide anything,” Finkel writes, “to cover a wrongdoing, to evade confusion about his sexuality.”
Knight found a clearing in the woods, set up a tent and devoted himself to the Greek philosophy of Stoicism. His pre- and post-holiday crime sprees, Knight said, were about “harvest time. A very ancient instinct.” He would plump himself up for Maine’s incipient brutal win- ters by gorging on booze and sugarfilled junk food. He stole barbecue tanks to melt snow for drinking water. He hunkered down in his lair for about six months, October through April, to avoid leaving so much as a footprint in the snow.
He said he slept 6 ¹/2 hours in winter, from 7:30 p.m. to 2 a.m., wrapped in multiple sleeping bags. Knight slept no more than that, fearing that his own sweat would turn to condensation and he’d freeze to death.
“If you try and sleep through that kind of cold,” Knight said, “you might never wake up.” He had a two-burner camp stove, a gas line, a wash area, a bathroom consisting of two logs and a hole in the ground, and a bed (that stolen mattress!) with a fitted sheet and Tommy Hilfiger pillowcases. He painted his coolers and garbage cans in camouflage. He spent his days eating, cleaning and thinking, and his nights breaking and entering.
He wasn’t proud of the latter, and agreed that he deserved arrest and trial. “Every time, I was conscious that I was doing wrong,” he told Finkel. “I took no pleasure in it, none at all.”
Knight saw himself as a hermit in the grand literary tradition of Emerson, Dickinson and fellow Mainer Edna St. Vincent Millay. He quoted one of her most famous lines to Finkel: “Mycandle burns at both ends; It will not last the night,” then said, “I tried candles in my camp for a number of years. Not worth it to steal them.”
Finkel also spoke to many of Knight’s victims — some amused, others traumatized. David and Louise Proulx’s home had been broken into at least 50 times over many years, and they initially believed one of their own children was the culprit before wondering if they themselves were going crazy. Debbie Baker’s small children were terrified that the hermit would come for them.
Garry Hollands filled a bag of food and slung it over his doorknob as an offering for the hermit, whom he thought of as harmless. (Other residents followed Hollands’ lead, but Knight never took any food left for him; he feared it was poisoned.)
Neal Patterson stayed up all night for two weeks straight, sitting in the dark, gun at the ready, hoping he’d be the one to capture the hermit.
Knight claims little knowledge of how deeply he terrorized the town. He never wanted to steal, but hunger, he says, forced him. “It took a while to overcome my scruples,” he told Finkel. First he filched from outdoor gardens, then graduated to breaking into homes. He once spent a restless night in an empty cabin. “The stress of that, the sleepless worry about getting caught, programmed me to never do that again.”
KNIGHT makes the semi-convincing argument that it is mainstream society in need of help, not him. “He was confounded by the idea that passing the prime of your life in a cubicle, spending hours a day at a computer in exchange for money was considered acceptable, but relaxing in a tent in the woods was disturbed,” Finkel writes.
He spent most of his time in the woods reading, and told Finkel he considered Henry David Thoreau, who took to a cabin in the woods for two years and emerged with “Walden,” to be “a dilettante.” Unlike Thoreau, Knight never threw a dinner party, never wrote, never painted a picture or took a photo. “His back was fully turned to the world,” Finkel writes. Knight loved two works best: “Very Special People,” an anthology of unusual figures such as the Elephant Man and Siamese twins Chang and Eng, and Dostoyevsky’s “Notes from Underground.”
“I recognize myself in the main character,” he told Finkel.
Knight emerged from the woods with no grand epiphany, no guiding philosophy. He longed solely for “all the quiet I can take, consume, eat, dine upon, savor, relish, feast.”
Knight spent seven months in jail, paid $1,500 in restitution, yet his greatest punishment is ongoing: reentering society and adhering to its mores. He moved back in with his mother, and his brother gave him a job at his scrap-metal recycling plant. He knows to return to the woods would be to return to crime, but his longing is visceral and spiritual: “You’re just there,” he says. “You are.”