For 27 years, Chris Knight lived in a tent in the beautiful and peaceful Maine woods. When the freezing winter temperatures came he never left his campsite, fearful his tracks in the snow would lead to his capture. He never spoke to, or interacted with other humans. The last word he addressed to another human was when he passed a hiker in the woods “sometime in the ’90s.” He recalls that he said “Hi.”
Born in 1965, Knight was still a young man when he went to live in a tent in the woods in 1986. Despite repeated questions from investigative journalist Michael Finkel for GQ, he never explained what prompted his disappearance. But he describes Thoreau, who lived in the New England woods on Walden Pond for two years, as a dilettante.
“The North Pond hermit” became the stuff of legend in Kennebec County. Neighbors around the lake knew somebody was stealing mostly food from them, but nobody ever saw him or knew anything about him. He was their very own Big Foot.
So what did the hermit learn from his time in the woods? Finkel quotes Knight: “With no audience, no one to perform for, I was just there. There was no need to define myself; I became irrelevant… I never felt lonely. To put it romantically: I was completely free.”
Michael Finkel did an admirable job researching and writing this fascinating story, meeting a number of times with Knight while he was imprisoned and even going so far as to spend several nights in the area of Knight’s campsite. Take a few minutes and read the full, fascinating story of his capture, imprisonment and release. See images of Knight and his campsite here, and video of what’s left of his alleged campsite here. There’s even a documentary about him, titled “The Hermit.”
