The Stranger in the Woods_ The - Michael Finkel

Early in the lake season, before Memorial Day, there was usually a rash of break-ins, then another flurry
late, after Labor Day. Otherwise it was always midweek, particularly on a rainy night. None of the full-time
residents ever seemed to be victimized, and he didn’t steal food items that had already been opened. One
family had a running joke—“He won’t date the skinny girl”—because no matter how many times their
liquor cabinet was raided, he never touched the Skinnygirl margarita drink.
Ten years passed. It was the same story: almost no one could stop him, and the police couldn’t catch him.
He seemed to haunt the forest. Families returned from a quick trip into town wondering if they were going
to encounter a burglar. They feared he was waiting in the woods, watching. He searched your cupboards and
rummaged through your drawers. Every walk to the woodpile provoked a goose-bumpy feeling that
someone was lurking behind a tree. All the normal night sounds became the noises of an intruder. A few
friends quietly discussed putting rat poison in food and leaving bear traps in the leaves, though they never
went through with these ideas.
Others said it was obvious that the hermit was harmless—just let him have your spatula and milk crates.
He was hardly more trouble than the seasonal houseflies. Maine has always been a quirky place, stocked
with odd characters, and now North Pond had its own folklore of a mysterious hermit. At least two kids
wrote school papers about the legend.
But then the crimes became more brazen. One family loaded frozen chickens in a freezer for a party and
lost them all at once. At a North Pond home owners’ meeting in 2004, nearly fifteen years into the mystery,
the hundred people present were asked who had suffered break-ins. At least seventy-five raised their hands.
Then, at last, there was seemingly a breakthrough. As the price and size of motion-sensing security
cameras decreased, several families installed them. At one cabin, where the camera was hidden in a smoke
detector, there was success: the hermit was captured on film, peering into a refrigerator. The images were
confusing. The thief’s face wasn’t in focus, but they appeared to show a clean, well-dressed man who was
neither emaciated nor bearded—highly unlikely to have been roughing it in the woods. He didn’t appear
nimble, or strong, or even outdoorsy. “Mr. Ordinary,” one person called him. It was probable, people
deduced, that this so-called hermit had been a neighbor all along.
No matter. With these first photos, and then others, the police were confident that capture was imminent.
The images were hung in shops, post offices, town halls. A couple of officers went from cabin to cabin.
Maddeningly, nobody could identify the man pictured, and the burglaries continued.
Another decade elapsed. The break-ins at Pine Tree increased in both frequency and quantity of goods
stolen. By this point, a quarter century in, the whole thing was absurd. There was the Loch Ness monster,
the Himalayan yeti, and the North Pond hermit. One man, desperate for an answer, spent fourteen nights
over the course of two summers hiding in his cabin, in the dark, holding a .357 Magnum and waiting for the
hermit to break in. No luck.
The general consensus was that the original thief must be retired or dead and the latest break-ins were
copycat crimes. Maybe there was a second generation of that teenage gang, or a third. Kids who’d grown up
with the hermit now had kids of their own. Most people resigned themselves to the idea that this was the way
it would be; you’d just replace your boat battery and propane tank each summer, and go about your life.
The couple who’d lost the backpack and mattress was now missing a new pair of Lands’ End blue jeans—
thirty-eight-inch waist, with a brown leather belt.
Finally, the most unexpected thing of all happened. The Loch Ness monster didn’t emerge from the lake;
the yeti wasn’t caught strolling around Mount Everest. There are no little green men from Mars. But the