In 1955 at the age of 62, after a string of unsuccessful careers and a failed marriage, Robert Harrill put up his thumb and hitchhiked two hundred and sixty miles to Fort Fisher North Carolina. He set up a simple home in an abandoned World War II era bunker near the Cape Fear River along a salt marsh and quickly became known to the locals as the Fort Fisher Hermit. The Fort Fisher Hermit was not a hermit in the truest sense of the word. Harrill was far from isolated, and in fact had many visitors every year. His guest registry, a notebook held down by sea shells, recorded a total of over...