Christopher Knight, the North Pond Hermit, abandoned human contact for nearly three decades during his solitary, yet criminal, hermitage in the woods of Central Maine. He has refused nearly every request a for a tell-all interview since his arrest.
Except for one.
The 205-page “The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary story of the Last True Hermit,” by journalist Michael Finkel is due to be published in March by Knopf, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
Finkel is the only journalist who has ever extensively interviewed Knight. His 2013 GQ article, “The Strange and Glorious Tale of the Last True Hermit,” was culled from jailhouse interviews with Knight in 2013, and is one of the magazine’s most-read stories of all time.
[ Download the North Pond Hermit Song]
Knight slipped into the woods in 1986 when the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster occurred (the only time element he recalled) and never came out. His makeshift home in the woods was as rudimentary as they come. He never lit a fire. Soaring eagles, a transistor radio and stolen books were his only companions.
Knight captured national headlines when a rrested in 2013 after 27 years in the woods of Rome, Maine, where he subsisted on stolen food and supplies from campers.
Knight pleaded guilty to 13 counts of theft and burglary and served seven months in Kennebec County Jail. He’s now on probation and likely still living under the radar in Maine, according to his attorney Walter McKee.
The GQ article began with the night he was arrested. Knight was on a routine, for him, raid of Pine Tree summer camp in Rome and “threaded through the forest, rock to root to rock, every step memorized. Not a boot print left behind,” Finkel wrote.
When he arrived, “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,” he wrote.
A new alarm system set up by a game warden who had been hunting the hermit for years sealed his fate. When state troopers showed up and questioned him, “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,” Finkel wrote.
While in prison, Knight wrote letters to Finkel and eventually they met in person. Their correspondence forms part of the book.
Since Finkel — whose contract with the New York Times Magazine was canceled in 2002 for fabricating parts of a story — is the only person who has interviewed Knight at length about his solitary life, the book has the makings of a best seller.
The book comes out March 7, when Finkel will be in Portland giving a reading at Space Gallery, 538 Congress St. The full list of his Maine tour locations can be found here.
