Hoarding

Famous hoarders

Written by Karen Kingston Friday, 09 January 2009 21:23

In my Clear Your Clutter book, I explain that some people have so much clutter they have what amounts to a serious obsessive-compulsive disorder. I have met people who save every till receipt, every plastic bag, every newspaper and every everything else because of the paralysing fear of what could happen if they didn’t. The clinical name for this condition is disposophobia, and over the years I’ve heard of a number of instances where people have died in their own homes and not been found for some time because they were buried under their clutter.

One famous example of this is the Collyer brothers, who lived in a house in New York’s Fifth Avenue in the early part of the 20th Century. Known as eccentrics, the two brothers hoarded so much stuff and became the subject of so much local and media attention that they set up booby traps around the home to deter burglars who broke in hoping to steal cash and valuables that were rumoured to be kept there.

In March 1947, police were alerted to a bad stench coming from the house and broke in to find Homer Collyer, aged 70, dead in his bed with no sign of his brother. As they began the arduous task of removing 103 tons of junk from the house, it took a full 18 days for them to discover the decomposed body of Langley Collyer, just 10 feet from where they had found Homer, buried under piles of junk that had fallen on him when one of his own booby traps went off. Blind and paralyzed for many years, Homer had died of starvation without his brother to feed him.

The wide variety of junk included over 25,000 books, 14 pianos, the chassis of a Model T Ford, countless newspapers and magazines, long lengths of unused fabrics, pickled human organs in jars, eight live cats and passbooks to 34 bank accounts totalling $3000 in savings.

So famous is this story that I'm told New York firefighters often call houses that are crammed with junk 'Collyer mansions'. And I found a quote on the internet from someone who said, "When I asked a retired firefighter what his biggest fear was when going into a burning apartment, it wasn't drug dealers or weapons or anything that one would think. It was pack rats."

More about this story: Article in the New York Sun
Useful website for hoarders: www.squalorsurvivors.com
Youtube video: Help for hoarding syndrome

Copyright © Karen Kingston, 2009

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