Christopher Thomas Knight was born in Maine in 1965 and graduated from
Lawrence High School in
Fairfield, Maine. After completing an electronics course at Sylvania Technical School, Knight took a job installing home alarms in
Waltham, Massachusetts. In 1986, Knight abandoned his job and took a road trip throughout the
South before abruptly driving back up to Maine, stopping only when his car ran out of gas. At only 20 years old, he entered the woods, saying goodbye to no one. His parents never reported him
missing to the police. In an interview, Knight said, "I had good parents," and "We're not emotionally bleeding all over each other. We're not touchy-feely. Stoicism is expected." At the time of his notoriety, neighbors who lived near Knight's childhood home reported that for 14 years, they had exchanged no more than a few words with Knight's mother. Knight survived the bitterly cold Maine winters, with temperatures regularly falling below , by waking up during the coldest part of the night and pacing his camp until warm. He
stockpiled supplies to remain in his camp from November to March to avoid revealing his location by footprints on snow-covered ground. A few residents interviewed by
The Boston Globe have expressed doubt at Knight's outdoor survival skills, saying he might have broken into and taken refuge in vacant cabins.
Encounters with others during seclusion At the time of his arrest, Knight claimed that only one time during his 27 years of solitude did he speak with another human; at some point in the 1990s, he exchanged the word
hi with a
hiker whom he encountered on a lightly traveled path. In the summer of 2012, Knight broke into a cabin where a man was sleeping. There was no car in the driveway, so Knight thought the building was empty. Neither man saw the other, but the man in the cabin shouted, “Get the hell out of here!", after which Knight ran out. Knight reportedly never returned to that particular cabin. Biographer Michael Finkel later reported that around February 2013, a fisherman named Tony Bellavance (along with his son and grandson) discovered Knight in his camp, two months before he was apprehended by police. Knight later admitted to having been discovered by the fishermen but did not mention it to police at the time of his arrest because the group swore a pact not to tell anyone of their meeting (after the
anglers learned that Knight simply wanted to be left alone). ==Capture and aftermath==