He Disappeared for 27 Years. Then They Found Him.

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:00]Imagine deciding that you're done with society.

[00:00:05]Not for a weekend, okay? And not for a week, not for a month, you know, not even for just a year, but for 27 years, okay? No phone, no job, no family, no friends, no conversations of any kind at all. Just complete drop out of society.

[00:00:28]Imagine that for a minute.

[00:00:31]That's exactly what a man named Christopher Knight did. And there's a book I just finished. I stayed up late reading it. In fact, I couldn't put it down. Uh it's called The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit by Michael Finkele.

[00:00:50]Absolutely fascinating book. It's one of the strangest non-fiction books that I've ever read. In fact, my name's Randy Ray. This is the literate Texan. It's my show on YouTube where I broadcast from Driftwood Ranch.

[00:01:04]Talk about literature and books.

[00:01:06]Highbrow books, lowbrow books, everything in between. We try not to be snobbish here, but we do try to focus on really good quality books, and that's what I'm going to do today. Uh, this is a book review. Steve Donnie, you suggested that I do more book reviews on my channel, and he's right. I should do more book reviews on my channel. One of the things that I think is important to do during a book review is to give the book a chance to speak for itself. So, I'm going to punctuate the various sections of this book review with excerpts from the book that I'm going to read out loud. Not going to be full of spoilers or anything except those minor spoilers, but you are going to get a feel for the writing of, you know, The Stranger in the Woods. You're going to get a feel for what you're getting into if you decide to read it.

[00:01:50]Chapter one. The trees are mostly skinny where the hermit lives, but they're tangled over giant boulders with deadfall everywhere like pickup sticks.

[00:02:00]There are no trails. Navigation for nearly everyone is a thrashing, branch snapping ordeal. And at dark, the place seems impenetrable.

[00:02:12]This is when the hermit moves. He waits until midnight, shoulders his backpack and his bag of breakin tools, and sets out from camp. That's how that book opens. Okay. So, what is this book? It's a non-fiction book by a journalist named Michael Finkele. It tells the story of Christopher Knight who uh drove into the woods in Maine, abandoned his car, walked out in the woods, and didn't come back out of the woods for 27 years. And even then, he didn't mean to come out of the woods. Okay. Um yeah, he got caught. He supported himself in the woods by burglarizing nearby cabins and other camps. He's uh living near North Pond. That's where his campsite was. And he eventually got caught. But he had committed hundreds, maybe thousands of burglaries up until that point before he finally got caught.

[00:03:12]And he stole everything because he didn't have a job. Obviously, he was, you know, living alone in the woods. So, he stole food, he stole batteries, he stole stole books, um all kinds of supplies from nearby cabins. and he became something of a local legend. If you owned a cabin in the area, chances are at some point he had broken into your cabin and stole something. In fact, some people felt really unsafe because of uh the hermit. They called him the north pond hermit was one of his names.

[00:03:46]Other people, you know, wanted to help him out. They knew that he was out in the woods all alone living in the elements, you know, and they wanted to leave bags of food for him or care packages. All of which he refused, by the way. He was only interested in stuff that he could steal. Part of it was caution on his part. He was afraid somebody might try to poison him. But yeah, the reactions of the people who lived in the area was one of the more fascinating parts of the book for me.

[00:04:09]Anyway, so the book tells the story of his life in the woods and what it was like for him out there. In over the course of 27 years, he only spoke one word to one person. He ran into someone out doing a hike one day and he said hi and the hiker said hi and they both went on their way. And for 27 years that was it.

[00:04:33]That was the only human contact that he had. Now he listened to the radio, he read books, but he didn't have any actual contact with any other human beings at all for 27 years. And the question that that brings to my mind, the fascinating question to me is what kind of person lives like that? What kind of person wants to live like that?

[00:04:54]You know, the premise alone was enough to make me want to pick the book up.

[00:05:00]So, why did I read it? I love books about unusual lives. Um, I love reading about interesting characters and I like life stories. I like biographies and I am interested in people who don't fit in the ordinary society. And you want to talk about somebody who didn't fit into ordinary society. Not only did he not fit into ordinary society, he dropped out and he dropped out in a big way. You know, the car that he was driving had been co-signed by his brother. He was not proud of this, but he abandoned the car in the middle of the woods. It's probably still there. And his brother wound up having to pay the car off. You know, you learn this as you you go along in the book.

[00:05:41]Like I said, there going to be some minor spoilers here, but but but no major spoilers. I don't know how to talk about a book without spoiling at least some of it. So, you're just going to have to bear with me. If spoilers are important to you and you think this is a book that you want to read, but you want to read it unspoiled, you should probably go read it and then watch my review of it afterwards.

[00:06:00]But yeah, you know, all of us fantasize about getting away from it all, quote unquote, getting away from it all. All of us think about just dropping out of society and leaving our cares behind. I saw an episode of The Office one time where Michael Scott was going to get on a train and become a hobo. Uh yeah. So I mean it's the and the idea is attractive. You know, I've thought about dropping out of society before or at least getting away from my current life and starting a brand new life somewhere else with a whole different set of people and maybe even isolating and not talking to people. The idea of spending a week in a cabin alone without other human contact sounds pretty good to me actually. A week sounds pretty good to me. 27 years does 27 years sounds terrible to me, but I'm an extrovert. It didn't sound terrible to uh Christopher Knight at all.

[00:06:52]But when I heard about the book, these are the questions I asked myself. This is what I wanted to know. This is what I wanted to get out of the book. Why did he do it? First of all, was he happy?

[00:07:03]And what kind of person would choose to live like this?

[00:07:08]Because I guarantee you, someone who chose to live like this is going to be different. It's going to be interesting.

[00:07:17]Those are the questions that kept me turning the pages. Now, I just want to say a word about the author. This was written by a journalist named Michael Finkele. He's a journalist and uh author of non-fiction books. when he was young, when he was in his early 20s, he worked for the New York Times magazine and he was kind of a hotshot young reporter and he was under pressure to to write another big story and he made a mistake.

[00:07:42]He committed an error. He fabricated some stuff for a story. He got caught and he was disgraced and let go. But eventually, you know, he got, you know, he went off to Montana and and, you know, did some soul search, you know, whatever for a while, but eventually got back into journalism and writing. He's written several non-fiction books. This is the only one from him that I've read so far, but I liked it well enough that I'm going to read more books by Michael Finkele. Great writer.

[00:08:10]One of the interesting things about Michael Finkele too is that he was one of the he was the only journalist who got any kind of access to Christopher Knight to begin with because Knight's obviously an intensely private individual. You don't go off and become a hermit for 27 years if you like talking to people. The fact that Finkele was able to win him over enough to get him to talk to him as much as he did says something special about the guy.

[00:08:39]One of the things that I like about the book was that Michael Finkele doesn't come into the book judging Christopher Knight at all. He does come into the book wanting to understand the subject.

[00:08:53]He wanted to understand Christopher Knight as a person. And I thought that was fascinating because that was what I wanted to get out of the book, too. I wanted to understand what kind of person Christopher Knight was.

[00:09:04]But yeah, the book's less about survival in the wilderness and more about the psychology of a very unusual man. And I think that was by design on Michael Finkele's part. And I think that's what made me keep turning the pages. I think I would have gotten bored. In fact, if it had been just a wilderness adventure, and if that's what you're looking for, if you're looking for something that's got a lot of wilderness adventure, if you're looking for some kind of Swiss Family Robinson thing, but but solo, that's not what you're going to get in this book. It's uh it's if it were a work of fiction, I would say this is not plot driven, it's character- driven.

[00:09:38]And just while I'm on the subject of the author, Michael Finkel, I'm going to read another excerpt from the book. At one point, Finkele went to a meditation retreat in India. This is what he had to say about the meditation retreat. There were people at the retreat in India who had completed months of silent withdrawal, and the calmness and placidity they radiated made me envious.

[00:10:01]Night had seemingly surpassed all boundaries, plunging to the bottom of the well, to the mysterious deep. Then there was the matter of books. Knight clearly loved to read. He stole, according to news reports, a lot of science fiction and spy novels and bestsellers and even harlequin romances, whatever was available in the cabins of North Pond. But one person also lost a finance textbook, a scholarly World War II tome, and James Joyce's Ulisses.

[00:10:33]During his arrest, Knight mentioned his admiration for Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe lived on his island almost exactly as long as Knight lived in the woods, although he had his man Friday for several years. Also, that story is fictitious.

[00:10:49]Megan Maloney, the local district attorney, said that Knight was now reading Gullerville's travels in jail.

[00:10:55]Two of life's greatest pleasures, by my reckoning, are camping and reading, most gloriously, both at once. The hermit appeared to have the same passions on an exponentially grander scale. This is something I can relate to. Now, I've had health issues that prevent me from spending a lot of time outside these days. I haven't been camping in years and I really miss it. But one of my favorite things to do was when I'd go on camping trips with my friends would be to get there a day or two early with a stack of books that I would read. And I've had some of the most wonderful reading experiences of my life reading at a campsite all by myself. I read uh Walden this way. I read Travels with Charlie this way. I read Desert Solitire by Edward Abby this way. Uh it's a really wonderful way to read a book. And so the author having this in common with the hermit, you know, I have that in common, too. So, so I thought that was really neat. I want to talk a little bit about the plot.

[00:11:57]There's not much to tell beyond what I've already said. Uh Christopher Knight was in his early 20s in 1986. He drove his car into the woods of Maine. He got out, walked off into the woods, and never came back out. and he found himself a campsite.

[00:12:14]Put one together out there and the campsite itself was pretty interesting because it was a clearing and it was surrounded by brush and woods. You couldn't really see this clearing. There was an entryway to the clearing between two giant rocks, but the ch two giant rocks were set up so that unless you knew about it and were close up on top of them, you wouldn't realize they were two rocks. you thought they were just one rock. So that was like an entryway into this clearing which basically became Christopher Knight's home for 27 years. It's where he survived these winters where it got 20° below and and the story about that surviving those winters was absolutely fascinating. His uh adventures, man versus nature are definitely part of the book. They're not like the major part of the book. You know, like I say, mostly the book has a lot to do with his psychology, but it is not an insignificant piece of the puzzle here at all.

[00:13:16]And Knight was really good at burglarizing cabins. Um, he had worked at a security company, so he knew how security systems worked. The thing is, over the 27 years that he lived in the uh woods there, security technology had improved dramatically. He was bound to get caught eventually. It was just a question of when. But from 1986 to 2013, he didn't get caught. He finally got caught. But uh you know, and of course, having committed hundreds, maybe thousands of burglaries, he had to stand trial. And that's one of the interesting parts of the book, too, is the trial and the players. You know, the law enforcement officer that was obsessed with him and trying to catch him for all those years finally did catch him. You know, the district attorney was an interesting character. The his defense attorney was one of the most interesting characters in the book. You know, one of the weaknesses of the book I felt was I didn't get more of his defense attorney.

[00:14:15]I thought that character was absolutely fascinating. I want to read a whole book about that guy. I'm not even going to reveal much about him other than Well, for one thing, he came to the office every day at 3:15 in the morning. That's when he started his workday. He got up at 3:00 a.m. and was in the office at 3:15 a.m. I want to know about this guy, you know, but a book's only going to have one subject, right?

[00:14:40]So, what other books will I compare this to? There's a whole list of books in the back of this book. I'm not going to go into that big list of books, but I am going to suggest Walden by Henry David Thorough is something to think about.

[00:14:53]Desert Solitire by Edward Abby would be something to think about. If you like either of those books, you probably be interested in this. And then there's a book called Into the Wild by John Krakau. And uh I'm not sure I'm pronouncing that author's name correctly, but if you like those books, then you might be interested in this book as well.

[00:15:12]And sometimes this book does feel like it's nature writing. Sometimes it feels like you're reading a true crime story.

[00:15:19]But most of the time the book feels like you're reading a psychological profile.

[00:15:24]I just want you to know what you're going to get into if you read the book.

[00:15:27]I thought it was fascinating. I couldn't put it down. I read it in like two or three sittings. And like I say, I stayed up till over well past 3:00 a.m. last night finishing the book because I wanted to know what happened next. So, I say it was a plot driven and it's not a thriller, okay? It's not it's not a true crime story. It's not an action story at all, you know? But it was interesting to me to find out what happens, you know. I wanted to know what happened when he came out of the woods. what happened with with him in jail and what his return to life outside of his campsite in the woods. I wanted to find out what that was like for him.

[00:16:06]But yeah, the big question about this book is why would somebody want to choose complete solitude? That's so alien to my way of thinking most of the time. I just I just can't even imagine.

[00:16:17]I like being surrounded by friends. If you've ever been to my house, you'll know I'm I'm seldom here alone, okay?

[00:16:24]I've almost always got visitors over here. Used to be out and about quite a bit. I've had some medical problems that have kept me home for the last year and a half or so. I've been basically a shut in, but I have company almost every single day. That kind of thing would drive Christopher Knight crazy. He would absolutely hate having company every day. He would probably having company once a month.

[00:16:48]Here's another excerpt from the book.

[00:16:50]But this excerpt from the book includes an excerpt from another book. It's it's an excerpt from the Daq Ching. The Daq Ching says that it is only through retreat rather than pursuit through inaction rather than action that we acquire wisdom. Those with less become content, says the Dao. Those with more become confused. The poems still widely read have been held as a hermit manifesto for more than 2,000 years. I think that's wonderful. I think that's absolutely fascinating that he worked the D changing in air. So, what is it that made this book so interesting?

[00:17:26]First of all, there's the um there's this whole fantasy of disappearing.

[00:17:30]Okay, everybody's thought about it. You know, I think everybody has thought about dropping out of society, but nobody does it. Okay, people imagine it, but nobody does it. Christopher Knight actually did it. What was that like? Uh, something else that made the book so interesting was the contrast between solitude and loneliness.

[00:17:52]Are they the same thing? Is being alone the same as being lonely? You might be surprised at Christopher Knight's conclusions when it comes to that. And he can be pretty cryptic as a subject.

[00:18:06]You know, like I say, he's he's pretty private person and he's he's pretty guarded about what he says, even to Thinkle, who manages to earn his trust in a very limited way. But, uh, but that was one of the things that I thought was really interesting about it, too. Um, and then the contradictions. He wanted to be left alone, but the society that he wanted to drop out of is what he depended on for his his ex very existence. Okay? Yeah, he dropped out of society, but he lived off their leftovers. You know, these are major contradictions. I think one of the other fascinating things about the book is the descriptions of silence. And I didn't mark any of those to read. I'm going to leave those for you to find. But it is fascinating to think. Actually, I do have an excerpt about the silence that I'm going to read. But first, I want to talk about it for a second. Okay. Silence.

[00:18:59]You know, I live in a small town, Denton, Texas. a small city. Okay, it's bigger than a town, but it's it's not as big as a city.

[00:19:10]And there's constant noise here. You don't even notice it, but it's a vibration coming from the city that your brain is constantly exposed to, whether you realize it or not. Those little three little bones in your ears are vibrating all the time. Okay? You're not accustomed to real silence. Okay? And it has a definite effect on your brain. But I can remember when I lived in Dallas in 2001 after September 11th, they grounded all the planes. I don't if you're old enough to remember that, great. But at the time, I would go for a three-mile walk every morning. And I remember how eerie it was to go for these walks, how quiet it was when there were no planes in the sky. And I had never noticed how much noise, ambient noise, there was just because of the airplanes in the sky until one morning I was out for a walk and they had ungrounded the planes finally and a plane flew overhead and it was so loud and it was so startling. And that's when I realized how much noise I lived with on a day-to-day ba basis. And that's to say nothing of all the sounds of the uh the traffic.

[00:20:19]There's an excerpt from the book about that. According to more than a dozen studies conducted around the world, nights camp, an oasis of natural quiet, may have been the ideal setting to encourage maximal brain function. These studies examining the difference between living in a calm place and existing amid commotion all arrived at the same conclusion.

[00:20:46]Noise and distraction are toxic.

[00:20:51]I talk a lot about distraction on this channel. If you've seen my videos about how to read more often, you'll notice that I'm talking about how we live in in an attention economy and distraction has just become a way of life for us. It's one of the reasons that reading feels so different for us now are the technologies that we're using. Of course, technology is just a tool. You can use it or misuse it, but certain technologies are designed to get you to misuse them to diffuse your attention.

[00:21:23]Silence versus noise, attention versus distraction. These are some of the things that were fascinating about the book to me.

[00:21:34]So, here's my reading experiences. This is what I expected going into it. I expected a wilderness adventure. I expected a survival story. I expected uh a mystery. What I got instead was a character study. I got a meditation on solitude and I got a surprisingly thoughtful non-fiction book about one person's psychology and I'm really glad I read it and I recommend it wholeheartedly to certain people. Okay, if you like books about interesting subjects, okay, if you like narrative non-fiction, if you like biographies, um if you like books that are fairly fast read, this was like 208 pages or something like that, um that raises interesting questions, then this might be an interesting book for you.

[00:22:21]But on the other hand, if you're like more interested in thrillers or plot- driven books or something like that, if you're looking for a real wilderness adventure, this is probably not the appropriate book for you.

[00:22:33]I don't have any big criticisms of the book other than like I say I did want to see some more of some of the other characters. I know the book was about Christopher Knight but it was very short. We could have gotten some more information about some of the quote unquote supporting characters including the lawyer that I was talking about earlier. Walter McKe is the name of the defense attorney that Christopher Knight had. I I could read a whole book about that guy by itself. that and there were some places where things tended to drag a little bit. It got a little slow even for me. Now towards the final third of the book, it wasn't slow at all. I wanted to find out what was going to happen. That was fascinating to me. You know, was he going to go to jail or not?

[00:23:16]If he didn't go to jail, what was his life going to be like? Was it going to work out? Was he going to be able to handle it?

[00:23:23]that I I desperately by the time I got to the final third of the book, I desperately wanted answers to those questions.

[00:23:31]>> Ultimately, this is not a book about a hermit. Okay?

[00:23:36]The stranger in the Woods is a book about a question. And that question is pretty straightforward. What would happen if you just dropped out of society completely? That's what this book's about. Christopher Knight actually did. He dropped out of society completely. Finkele's book doesn't completely answer this question. You're not going to be completely satisfied.

[00:24:01]Partially that's because Christopher Knight is not a particularly forthcoming subject. And I'm not even sure that Christopher Knight knows himself well enough to explain why he went and lived in the woods for 27 years and burglarized all these cabins. He knew it was wrong to commit all these burglaries. He was ashamed of it. He didn't want his family to know about it.

[00:24:22]But he did it anyway because that being alone to him was more important apparently.

[00:24:30]So, The Stranger in the Woods is a book that I recommend to certain people.

[00:24:39]Not going to work for everybody. I've talked about who it's good for, who it's not good for. Uh, I'll probably be back with another couple of book reviews very soon because I did read a couple of horror books for uh, horror mayhem in the month of May and I want to talk about those, too. But until then, I've got two requests for you. One is I want you to stay hydrated. It's so much more important than you think. I wind up in the hospital one time because I got dehydrated. That's why I always bring that up. Number two, I love you book.

[00:25:08]You guys stay sexy out there. I'll see you soon.