5 people who left civilization behind to live alone

1. In 1996, loggers in the western state of Rondônia, Brazil began spotting a lone man in the forest. Evidence of his existence was found: a hut with a hold dug in the center of the floor. As government agents closed in, he’d move huts, always one step ahead of the searchers. When one rescue workers got too close, the man fired an arrow into his chest. To protect him, as well as others, the government declaired a thirty-mile radius of land surrounding him to be a no-trespassing zone. The man now in his mid-40s, still lives uncontacted and unaffiliated to this day.

2. Mauro Morandi has lived alone on Budelli Island for 28 years.
While drifting in a boat with a busted engine, Morandi’s catamaran came ashore on the tiny island. When he learned the caretaker of the island was leaving his post in two days, Morandi immediately decided to take his place.

Speaking to National Geographic, he said that he will never leave the island.

Winters on Budelli are particularly beautiful. Morandi endures long stretches of time—upwards of 20 days—without any human contact. He finds solace in the quiet introspection it affords him, and often sits on the beach with nothing but the operatic sounds of the wind and waves to punctuate the silence.

“I’m sort of in prison here,” he says. “But it’s a prison that I chose for myself.”

3. Christopher Knight, The Maine Woods Hermit
For nearly thirty years, a legend about a hermit in North Pond in central Maine was told over campfires. The story was that a man lived alone in the woods and burglarized homes for food and supplies. But the folktale was real.

In April 2013, forty-seven Christopher Knight was caught by a state game warden in mid-theft. He had gone into the woods at age nineteen and during the thirty years as a hermit, spoke to one person, a hiker, he came across on a train in the 1990s. Though he apologized for stealing, authorities said he may have been responsible for more than a thousand burglaries over the years. He was prosecuted for theft, and served a week in prison.

Speaking to journalist Michael Finkle, Knight said that “solitude bestows an increase in something valuable, …my perception. But…when I applied my increased perception to myself, I lost my identity. There was no audience, no one to perform for…To put it romantically, I was completely free.”

4. Richard Proenneke lived alone in a small cabin he built by himself high in the Alaskan mountains in a place called Twin Lakes. There, he crafted a life of solitude, writing journals, and living off the land for thirty years. Over the course of his time alone, he would venture to out occasionally to see family, but he spent the vast majority of time alone with his own thoughts, in his spot in Alaska.

He was a self-taught naturalist, studying his surroundings with a keen eye and documenting everything he saw. Those documents were later made into a PBS documentary called “Alone in the Wilderness.”

At age 82, Proenneke returned to civilization and lived the rest of his life with his brother in Hemet, California. He died of a stroke on April 20, 2003 at age 86. He left his hand-built cabin to the National Park Service where it remains a popular visitor attraction.

5. Emma Orbach, an Oxford graduate, lives in a mud and straw hut she built herself in Wales. She produces her own food, produces her own power, and lives without social restraints. She interacts with people very rarely, such as when she ventures to nearby shops for chocolate.

She has children who are now in their 20s and 30s who are forbidden from bringing in modern technology when they visit.

“This is how I want to live,” Orbach says, “This lifestyle makes me feel really happy and at peace and this is my ideal home.”