Who was breaking into homes in a small town in northern Maine. Teenagers? Animals?
For decades, the residents of this small town in Maine lived in fear. Someone, or something, was breaking into their homes to steal random food and supplies. New locks and alarms were installed but nothing seemed to hold them, or it, at bay.
The mysterious culprit became the stuff of legend. The locals began assuming that a recluse living in a nearby forest was probably responsible. They nicknamed him “The North Pond Hermit” and some folks left notes for him on their front doors, asking him not to break into their homes, but to instead leave a list of things he needed, which they would leave out for him. They never received a reply.
The identity of the hermit remained a mystery until the night of April 4th, 2013. A local police sergeant named Terry Hughes can become obsessed with putting an end to the robberies, and when a motion detector sounded an alarm in the kitchen of a nearby summer camp, Hughes raced to the scene. There he found Christopher Thomas Knight trying to flee with a backpack full of candy. Hughes arrested Knight and interrogated him. Knight claimed that he had been living in the woods for years. How long? Knight wasn’t sure, but he did think that he’d gone native sometime around the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
Knight explained that, in 1986, at the age of 20, he decided to give up on society and live in a tent in the woods outside of North Pond. In the years that followed, he routinely broke into buildings around town to steal whatever he needed to survive. In all that time, he said that he had only briefly spoken to a single human being, a hiker he once encountered in the forest. On the night of his arrest, he spent the night in a nearby jail, the first time he had slept indoors since the mid-’80s.
According to one claim, Knight committed over 1,000 burglaries during his 27 years of isolation. He was sentenced to seven months in prison in October of 2013 and has since struggled to readjust to life in the modern world.