The Stranger in the Woods

One line takeaway

An unbelievable true story of one man’s desperate attempt for solitude.

Snapshot

The Stranger in the Woods by Michael Finkel tells the true story of Christopher Knight, who walked into the Maine woods in 1986 at age twenty and lived alone for twenty-seven years, surviving by stealing from nearby camps.

The book follows his arrest in 2013, his conversations with journalist Michael Finkel, and explores what drove him to make such a choice.

The book also follows the aftermath of his capture and how he adjusted to the world he’d left behind.

Summary

A quiet kid trying to find a way out

In 1986, in Massachusetts, twenty-year-old Christopher Knight stood at a social tipping point. Since childhood, he’d been shy, intelligent, and socially awkward.

Being in gym class made me feel like I was trapped in Lord of the Flies. Can you really expect to see me playing volleyball?” (Page 79)

After finishing technical school, he took a job installing home alarms. But as a loner, he struggled immediately to fit in with his job, with other people and with life itself.

He was desperately trying to find a way out.

The decision to disappear

He finally made the decision and left Massachusetts for Maine, telling no one, not even his family.

He took a road trip through the South and drove back to Maine. Somewhere around North Pond in Rome, Maine, his car ran out of gas.

He left the car with the keys inside and walked into the woods. No goodbyes, no explanation, he just disappeared.

No one, not even Knight himself, could think of a reason why he made this decision.

Knight said that he didn’t really know why he left. He’d given the question plenty of thought but had never arrived at an answer. “It’s a mystery,” he declared. There was no specific cause he could name—no childhood trauma, no sexual abuse. There wasn’t alcoholism in his home, or violence. He wasn’t trying to hide anything, to cover a wrongdoing, to evade confusion about his sexuality. (Page 83)

This was 1986. He’d later say “hi” to a hiker in the 1990s. And that, for the next twenty-seven years, was the only word he exchanged with another human until his arrest in 2013 at age forty-seven.

The world of the hermitage

Knight set up camp in the extremely dense forest near North Pond, Rome, Maine.

His campsite sat so close to civilization that it took only a couple of minutes to walk from his tent to the seasonal camps and vacation cottages nearby.

Knight lived so close to others that he couldn’t even sneeze aloud. There’s fine cell-phone reception at his site. Civilization was right there, hot showers and creature comforts just steps away. (Page 70)

Reading this, I naturally wondered why no one found him for twenty-seven years.

As Finkel points out, Knight found the perfect hiding spot for two reasons. First, he camped on private property, so no one would naturally visit. Second, and more importantly, the campsite sat hidden behind boulders and surrounded by thick underbrush that made it nearly invisible to the outside world.

In his campsite, he survived through all four seasons, including brutal Maine winters, even without a fire, because a fire would have given away his location.

And he never moved. He lived in this campsite for twenty-seven years.

The survival strategy

But Knight faced a huge problem: supplies.

There’s no way he could harvest food or gather other supplies like tools, clothing, and shelter materials without running into other people, which defeated the whole point.

So he made a decision. He’d steal.

He started stealing from nearby camps and cottages, taking only what he needed to survive. Over twenty-seven years, he committed roughly one thousand burglaries, about forty per year. He stole food (including meat, coffee, and Marshmallow Fluff), propane tanks, batteries, radios, books, magazines, clothing, and toiletries.

Another question came to mind reading this part: why wasn’t he caught earlier? Why did it take the police twenty-seven years to find him?

The answer sits in the quantity he was stealing.

He’d only steal small amounts of food or supplies, so small that, for the longest time, people didn’t bother reporting them.

It wasn’t funny enough to be a joke, and it wasn’t serious enough to be a crime. It occupied some unsettling place between. Maybe your kids took the flashlights. You did put those steaks in the freezer, didn’t you? After all, your TV was still there, as was your computer, your camera, your stereo, and your jewelry. No windows or doors were broken. Do you call the police and tell them there’s been a burglary, that all your D batteries and your Stephen King novel are gone? You do not. (Page 31)

Even with all the supplies, Knight says, the winters were extremely hard to endure.

On top of the chilling cold, which often dropped below twenty degrees, he couldn’t light a fire without giving away his location.

On such winter nights, he’d wake up and pace his camp to stay warm and avoid freezing to death.

He spent most of his other days reading stolen books and magazines, listening to a small radio, and sitting in silence.

“Once you get below negative twenty, you purposely don’t think. It’s like there’s no atheists in a foxhole. Same with negative twenty. That’s when you do have religion. You do pray. You pray for warmth.” (Page 117)

The legend of the North Pond Hermit

Over the years, people around North Pond slowly started to realize the burglaries wouldn’t stop.

The thefts became a local legend. People nicknamed the mystery burglar the “North Pond Hermit.”

And then the media jumped on the story.

In 2005, a newspaper article covered fifteen years of these mysterious burglaries around North Pond.

In the aftermath, law enforcement, who’d been trying to catch the North Pond Hermit for years, became determined to find him and bring justice to the community.

The capture of the North Pond Hermit

In 2013, they finally caught a break when Sergeant Terry Hughes installed a hidden motion detector on a nearby camp.

On April 4, 2013, the motion alarm went off. The North Pond Hermit was finally caught after twenty-seven years.

Knight didn’t resist arrest. He answered all the questions law enforcement asked.

At this point, law enforcement had no idea that Knight had been living there for twenty-seven years with no contact with the outside world.

But from the answers Knight gave, they slowly came to realize the legend was actually true, and that this was his first real conversation since 1986.

After the arrest

After the arrest, Knight was held at Kennebec County Jail.

Without hesitation, Knight confessed to at least one thousand burglaries and helped police close open cases. He told them he was glad and relieved that his twenty-seven years of solitude had ended, though he didn’t fully explain why.

His bail was set at five thousand dollars.

Several people showed up at the jail with five thousand dollars to get him out, people who didn’t even know who Knight was.

Later, police decided he was a flight risk and increased his bail to two hundred fifty thousand dollars.

The trial and sentence

At the trial, Knight was charged with thirteen counts of burglary and theft, and he pleaded guilty to all of them in October 2013.

He was sentenced to seven months in jail, most of which he’d already served at this point.

Knight completed three years of probation and received help finding housing and employment.

After his release, Knight lived with his mother for a period. He reportedly found work at an auto shop. As of recent reports, he lives a quiet life in a small Maine town. He has his own place and continues to live under the radar.

Michael Finkel’s investigation

Journalist Michael Finkel learned about Knight’s story from news reports in 2013.

He mentions in the book that he felt a connection to Knight through their mutual interests: books and solitude.

Finkel sent a letter to Knight while he was in jail. To Finkel’s surprise, Knight responded.

Out of over five hundred journalists who contacted him, Knight agreed to speak only with Finkel.

Finkel made four trips from Montana to Maine over two months and conducted nine hour-long conversations in jail with Knight.

Finkel remarks in the book that even though Knight had agreed to talk, he was reluctant to speak face-to-face at first.

After Knight’s release, Finkel made three more trips to Maine. The more visits Finkel made, the more Knight pushed back.

Knight eventually demanded that Finkel never contact him again.

Ideas that resonate with me

Is this all true?

As interesting as this story is, there’s significant pushback on its credibility.

Some people believe that Knight had access to shelter or other resources and didn’t spend the entire time in his camp.

“Everything that came from his camp stunk,” said Steve Treadwell, the Pine Tree employee who’d observed the police interrogation of Knight and the dismantling of his site. “But he was clean-smelling. He didn’t live in the woods. His story doesn’t pass the smell test. Literally.” (Page 129)

One of the biggest reasons for this skepticism is that he never lit a fire, not even at the height of winter when temperatures dropped below zero degrees, in order not to reveal his location.

But without heat, how could someone survive, some people ask.

Knight mentioned that in the coldest winters, at night, to maintain his body temperature, he’d walk around the camp until sunrise.

Another concern is that his parents’ house was only about thirty miles from his camp.

Some people suggest that he spent most of his time at his parents’ home, not in his camp.

But this raises the question: if these accusations were true, why did he steal so much from other people, and what was the whole point of hiding himself for so long?

However, Michael Finkel insists that this story is completely true and that Knight is exactly who he says he is.

On Goodreads, Michael Finkel writes:

I want to emphasize that this is a true story, and has been thoroughly fact-checked. There are so many elements of this story that seem to defy belief (no fire for 27 years? never saw a doctor?) but I can assure you that, to the very best of my abilities, and the abilities of professional fact-checkers, this tale is completely true.

I’m of two minds about this book

On one hand, this is such a unique and compelling story. And the book is well enough written to turn the pages.

But on the other hand, the pace and context change a lot, as if I was reading multiple books. These different contexts aren’t coherent either. Here are the different stories from beginning to end.

The start: introduces Knight and his capture.

The middle: answers the burning questions anybody would have: what had he been doing all this time, how did he survive harsh conditions?

The additional context: adds another layer by including some of Finkel’s research on isolation and solitude, featuring other people’s stories.

The Knight’s mind: about four-fifths into the book, Finkel shares his conversations with Knight, which I find really interesting. For someone who’d been living in the woods for many years without any human contact, he’d had a lot of time to think about things, and it shows.

The ending doesn’t converge at all. Finkel goes on talking about how he pushed his luck to get more content for the story by trying to repeatedly contact Knight at his home, which seems a bit intrusive and uncomfortable.

Finkel first wrote a GQ article in 2014, then expanded it into a book published in 2017.

I’m glad this book exists, but I wouldn’t be mad if this was just a long blog post that only included the middle parts: The middle, The additional context, and The Knight’s mind.

Where Christopher Knight is now

Knight became a somewhat cult figure after his arrest.

People have made Facebook pages, written songs, and published books about him.

Some people see him as a hero for his endurance and self-reliance, while others, especially the people he stole from over the years, resent him.

Whatever people say about him, one thing is clear: his life is turned upside down.

He wanted to get away from people and avoid all the attention, and now he finds himself at the center of it.

In the final parts of the story, Finkel shows that Knight has indeed taken quite a toll from this sudden fame and desperately needs his quiet life back.

So he decided to isolate himself again, this time in his own home.

He stopped responding to any reporters or news outlets, even to Finkel, and lives the life he always wanted to live.

The legend of the North Pond Hermit continues, but with a quieter, more private chapter.

The ethics of journalism

The way Finkel approached Knight, at times, seems too eager and problematic.

The biggest criticism about this book isn’t about the story or the writing, but about Finkel’s approach to getting the story.

Especially in the later parts of the book, Finkel talks about the uninvited visits he made to Knight’s house and all the jail visits that Knight wasn’t particularly happy about.

After all, this is a man who vanished from civilization for twenty-seven years, possibly forever if he hadn’t been found.

It’s clear he doesn’t want to be bothered.

But Finkel keeps pushing.

To Finkel’s defense, and at the risk of being ignorant about the journalism process, I’d go out on a limb to say this is how it works: any journalist eager to write a story pushes boundaries and operates at the edge of what’s comfortable.

What Finkel does differently is that he talks about it.

Even though reading the end of the book with Finkel’s attempts to contact Knight made me uncomfortable, I’m glad this book exists.

I also like how Finkel takes this criticism. It says a lot about his character. On Goodreads, he says:

I greatly appreciate all of the reviews here – even the bad ones! (Though, I confess, it’s sometimes a bit painful to read them.) There are so many books out there, I am honored that you’ve chosen to take a peek at “The Stranger in the Woods.”

Why did I pick up this book?

I heard about this book from one of Ryan Holiday’s YouTube videos and liked the elevator pitch he gave for it.

Parts that left a mark on me

“I am surprised,” he wrote, “by the amount of respect this garners me. That silence intimidates puzzles me. Silence is to me normal, comfortable.” Later he added, “I will admit to feeling a little contempt for those who can’t keep quiet.” (Page 48)

“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.” (Page 88)

He said that everything shown on PBS was “carefully crafted for liberal baby boomers with college degrees,” but the best thing he watched while in the woods was a PBS program, Ken Burns’s documentary The Civil War. (Page 106)

And anyway, when was a journal ever honest? “It either tells a lot of truths to cover a single lie,” he said, “or a lot of lies to cover a single truth.” (Page 108)

I don’t know your world. Only my world, and memories of the world before I went to the woods. What is life today? What is proper? There are blank spots in my skill set. I have to figure out how to live.” (Page 165)

How did the book change the way I think?

I think that most of us feel like something is missing from our lives, and I wondered then if Knight’s journey was to seek it. But life isn’t about searching endlessly to find what’s missing; it’s about learning to live with the missing parts. (Page 179)

Who should read it

Read this if you:

• Enjoy narrative nonfiction,
• enjoy survival stories,
• are interested in off-grid living and minimalism,
• are fascinated by unconventional life choices,
• liked the book Into the Wild,
• want to read and finish a light book in a couple of days,
• are interested in nature without heavy science or technical details, or
• are looking for a discussion-friendly nonfiction book for book club.

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