Every time he stole supplies from an empty vacation house, Christopher Knight felt bad.

“My heart rate was soaring. It was not a comfortable act,” he told GQ in 2014. “I took no pleasure in it, none at all, and I wanted it over as quickly as possible."

Over the course of 27 years, Knight committed an average of 40 robberies a year — or almost 2,000 break-ins in all. Stealing wasn’t something he wanted to do; it wasn’t part of his nature, or, as he said, his “scruples” to do such a thing. But he had to.

As a modern-day hermit living alone in the woods of central Maine, there were certain resources and materials that he simply couldn’t glean from nature. Food and propane tanks, which he used to fire up his Coleman two-burner stove, were the most common items he stole.

His trash — which he stashed over the years between two boulders — revealed the unhealthy contents of his pilfered diet: a 5-pound tub of Marshmallow Fluff, bags of Cheetos, cans of tuna fish, packages of spicy jalapeño chimichangas.

Knight also stole household items and kitchenware, toiletries and mouse traps. Even though he lived in the wild, interacting with a human being only once back in the 1990s when a hiker passed by his camp and he said “Hi,” Knight kept up a number of his earlier ingrained habits.

He stole disposable razor blades to shave his beard and used purloined tissue paper despite lacking a toilet. He washed his dirty clothing using others’ hijacked laundry detergent, washed his hair with their shampoo. Pretty much everything he owned hadn’t originally been his. Even his underwear used to be worn by someone else.

Knight was 20 years old when he decided to forsake society for the woods. It was 1986, or, as he remembered it, the year of the Chernobyl nuclear-plant disaster. He’d graduated high school a few years prior and then taken a job installing alarm systems in homes and cars, gathering knowledge and skills that would prove valuable when he started stealing later on.

After his disappearance, Knight’s family never reported him missing. And it seems as if Knight never gave his disappearance much thought either. He simply drove his car into the forest, as deep as he could, until he almost ran out of gas. Then he parked, left the keys in the center console, and set off into the woods.

“I had a backpack and minimal stuff,” he told GQ. “I had no plans. I had no map. I didn’t know where I was going. I just walked away.”

He moved around often in the beginning, but eventually settled on a well-hidden spot where he set up the nylon tent that would serve as his home for nearly three decades. Savvy and constantly in fear of being discovered, he developed a series of rules and regulations that governed the way he lived, looked, slept, and ate as a modern-day hermit.

Because of the smoke, Knight never once lit a fire, and he spray-painted every item he owned, especially the shiny things, in camouflage colors. In the fall, he gorged on sugar and alcohol to fatten himself for the colder months. In the winter, he grew his beard long for insulation and slept odd hours, waking up at 2 a.m. — when the temperature is the lowest — to prevent freezing to death. When the chickadees started singing again, he knew spring was right around the corner.

In his years living as a modern-day hermit, Knight lost touch with society. He didn’t know if his parents were still alive or what the internet was. He’d never seen a text message or sent an email. If you’d have asked him what Facebook was, he probably would have guessed it was a novel.

The only connections Knight had to the outside world were through items he stole during his raids, things like books and magazines, radios and an antenna.