America is hot for hoarders! The morose topic of people with a compulsion to accumulate stuff has inspired not one, but TWO shows on competing networks. One is A&E's "Hoarders" (my personal fave); the other is TLC's "Hoarding: Buried Alive." The fact that there is enough real life content to fill two one-hour weekly shows tells us just how common hoarding is: according to research, nearly 5 million Americans suffer from it. In some ways, there's a little bit of a hoarder in all of us. Who hasn't been reluctant to let go of a book that sits unread on a shelf, or an old piece of clothing that may hold sentimental value? People like their crap. But to reach the highest level on the hoarding scale—Level V—your possessions have to fully take over your space, swallow up the floor and the stove (which you will never use), the bathroom (where you will never shower), and transform your home into a barely inhabitable, condemnable cesspool of trash.
It's the kind of hoarding that A&E and TLC feature: The old lady that shits in bags because her plumbing has been out of order for 2 years. Or the father who shares a twin bed with his 8-year-old daughter (yes, creepy) because they have run out of space; a woman in Milwaukee with two refrigerators overflowing with rancid, expired food that she can't bring herself to let go. "The smell is so aggressive, it just burns the hair out of your nose," says one clean-up specialist at a particularly ghastly scene.
This is riveting "entertainment." Each episode is more transfixing than the one before. But there is one episode that you will never see, and it's the best one by far. In fact, it will never be made because its subjects have long been dead and the house which they inhabited razed to the ground.
The house was at 2078 Fifth Avenue in Harlem, New York. It was March of 1947, and someone had made an anonymous phone call reporting a dead body there. Two recluse brothers in their 60s, Homer and Langley Collyer, were living at the address—the same one where they grew up with their wealthy parents. For the last three years, though, Homer stopped emerging from the house completely, having been blinded as a result of a stroke. Langley only left after midnight once a week to collect food. (He fed Homer a diet of 100 oranges a week, black bread and peanut butter, a self-devised combination that he was convinced would help his brother regain his vision).
Kids threw rocks at the windows, and eventually instead of replacing them, the brothers boarded up every window completely. Electricity, gas and water had been cut off for almost two decades, and the brothers used a kerosene lamp for heat.
When authorities showed up to investigate the dead body, they found themselves in a place where time stood still, where there was neither night nor day, and where two men managed to fill every square inch with over 25,000 books, 14 pianos (both grand and upright), hundreds of yards of unused silk and fabric, half a dozen toy train sets, the folding top of a horse carriage, an armory of weapons and other miscellaneous junk. 100 tons of it, to be exact—about a third of the weight of a Boeing 747. Convinced that Homer would one day see again, Langley had been saving every single newspaper that was published, daily for three years straight, so that his brother would read the news he had missed.
After hours of making their way through the labyrinth of debris, police found the dead body. It was Homer's. He had died of starvation and dehydration. Apparently Langley had stopped bringing him his oranges. But where was Langley, everyone asked. He was missing. A massive, three-week search was launched, reaching as far as Atlantic City. Then, one day, in the process of clearing the seemingly endless amount of junk, Langley finally showed—squashed under one of his own booby traps and gnawed on by rats—just a few feet away from his brother. He had died first, and without a caretaker, Homer soon followed.
Eventually, the house was cleaned out. Despite their rumored wealth (which was the reason for all of the Langley-constructed booby traps around the house, to keep thieves out), the salvageable possessions sold at auction for a measly $1,800.
Locals who knew the Collyer brothers had a nickname for Langley: "The ghostly man," because he was only seen in the deep of the night like a phantom. But it's a title that can be applied to all extreme hoarders, for in their obsession to hold on to objects, they lose the most important possession of all: themselves.
