Christopher Thomas Knight

Christopher Thomas Knight (born December7, 1965), also known as the North Pond Hermit, is an American extreme survival camper and convicted burglar who lived with little to no human contact for 27years, between 1986 and 2013, in the North Pond area of Maine's Belgrade Lakes.

During his seclusion, Knight lived within of summer cabins in a crude camp he built in a well-drained woodland obscured within a cluster of glacial erratic boulders. Having entered the woods with almost no possessions, he set up a camp composed entirely of items stolen from nearby cabins and camps. He also pilfered from a local family's dairy farm adjacent to where he camped. He survived by committing around 1,000burglaries against houses in the area, at a rate of roughly 40per year, to be able to survive during the harsh winters of Maine.

Apart from the fear and notoriety his many burglaries created in the local area, Knight's unusual life also attracted widespread international media reports upon his capture. Journalist Michael Finkel wrote an in-depth story about the incident for GQ and later wrote a book titled The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit.

Life and seclusion

Christopher Thomas Knight was born in Maine in 1965 and graduated from Lawrence High School in Fairfield, Maine. After completing an electronics course at Sylvania Technical School, Knight took a job installing home alarms in Waltham, Massachusetts. In 1986, Knight abandoned his job and took a road trip throughout the South before abruptly driving back up to Maine, stopping only when his car ran out of gas. At only 20 years old, he entered the woods, saying goodbye to no one. His parents never reported him missing to the police. In an interview, Knight said, "I had good parents," and "We're not emotionally bleeding all over each other. We're not touchy-feely. Stoicism is expected." At the time of his notoriety, neighbors who lived near Knight's childhood home reported that for 14 years, they had exchanged no more than a few words with Knight's mother.

Knight survived the bitterly cold Maine winters, with temperatures regularly falling below , by waking up during the coldest part of the night and pacing his camp until warm. He stockpiled supplies to remain in his camp from November to March to avoid revealing his location by footprints on snow-covered ground.

A few residents interviewed by The Boston Globe have expressed doubt at Knight's outdoor survival skills, saying he might have broken into and taken refuge in vacant cabins.

Encounters with others during seclusion

At the time of his arrest, Knight claimed that only one time during his 27 years of solitude did he speak with another human; at some point in the 1990s, he exchanged the word hi with a hiker whom he encountered on a lightly traveled path.

Knight was largely reluctant to express any inkling of motives or insights gained through his experience, but he did offer, "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", "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". Finkel compared this observation to similar statements by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles de Foucauld, and Thomas Merton. , Knight lived a quiet life in rural Maine.