Stuff

by Gail Steketee

  Stuff

  Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things

  Randy O. Frost and Gail Steketee

  * * *

  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT

  BOSTON NEW YORK

  2010

  * * *

  Copyright © 2010 by Randy O. Frost and Gail Steketee

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,

  write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,

  215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Frost, Randy O.

  Stuff : compulsive hoarding and the meaning of things / Randy O. Frost

  and Gail Steketee.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-0-15-101423-1

  1. Obsessive-compulsive disorder. 2. Compulsive hoarding.

  I. Steketee, Gail. II. Title.

  RC533.F76 2010

  616.85'227—dc22 2009028273

  Book design by Victoria Hartman

  Printed in the United States of America

  DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  * * *

  Our work on hoarding began more than fifteen years ago with our first study of people struggling with this problem. Work on this book began more than seven years ago when we met and gained the cooperation of the people portrayed here. We dedicate this book to all of these people for their willingness to open their lives to us. We remain in contact with many of them. We have changed identities and details not germane to their stories, while striving to represent their struggle with hoarding as we understand it from their narratives. It is ironic that those who struggle the most with hoarding and its sometimes severe consequences have helped us so much to comprehend their experience and record it as best we can. Our hats are off to all of them, whether their stories appear here or not. They have helped us more than they can know, and we hope that through this book others will understand their plight.

  * * *

  CONTENTS

  Dead Body in the Collyer Mansion: A Prologue to Hoarding 1

  1. Piles upon Piles: The Story of Hoarding 17

  2. We Are What We Own: Owning, Collecting, and Hoarding 44

  3. Amazing Junk: The Pleasures of Hoarding 63

  4. Bunkers and Cocoons: Playing It Safe 83

  5. A Fragment of Me: Identity and Attachment 99

  6. Rescue: Saving Animals from a Life on the Streets 118

  7. A River of Opportunities 134

  8. Avoiding the Agony 152

  9. You Haven't Got a Clue 169

  10. A Tree with Too Many Branches: Genetics and the Brain 188

  11. A Pack Rat in the Family 216

  12. But It's Mine! Hoarding in Children 238

  13. Having, Being, and Hoarding 262

  Reference List 281

  Acknowledgments 291

  * * *

  DEAD BODY IN THE COLLYER MANSION: A Prologue to Hoarding

  Here, too, I saw a nation of lost souls,

  far more than were above: they strained their chests

  against enormous weights, and with mad howls

  rolled them at one another. Then in haste

  they rolled them back, one party shouting out:

  "Why do you hoard?" and the other: "Why do you waste?"...

  Hoarding and squandering wasted all their light

  and brought them screaming to this brawl of wraiths.

  You need no words of mine to grasp their plight.

  —Dante Alighieri, The Inferno

  On Friday morning, March 21, 1947, the police in Harlem received a call. "There's a dead body in the Collyer mansion," reported a neighbor.

  The call resembled many others the police had received over the years about the eccentric Collyer brothers, Langley and Homer, who lived in a three-story, twelve-room brownstone in a once fashionable section of Harlem. They dutifully checked it out.

  The police arrived at the brownstone at 10:00 A.M. When they failed to get in through the front door, the crew used crowbars and axes to force open an iron grille door to the basement. Behind the door was a wall of newspapers, tightly wrapped in small packets and too thick to push through. The rear basement door was similarly blockaded with junk. A call to the fire department produced ladders, allowing the patrolmen to try windows on the second and third floors. Most were barricaded and impassable. By this time, the commotion had attracted hundreds of curious onlookers. Finally, two hours later, Patrolman William Barker squeezed through a front window on the second floor. What he found inside shocked him.

  The house was packed with junk—newspapers, tin cans, magazines, umbrellas, old stoves, pipes, books, and much more. A labyrinth of tunnels snaked through each room, with papers, boxes, car parts, and antique buggies lining the sides of the tunnels all the way to the ceiling. Some of the tunnels appeared to be dead ends, although closer inspection revealed them to be secret passageways. Some of the tunnels were booby-trapped to make noise or, worse, to collapse on an unsuspecting intruder. A cardboard box hung low from the roof of one tunnel, and when disturbed it rained tin cans onto any trespasser. More serious were booby traps in which the overhanging boxes were connected to heavier objects such as rocks that could knock someone out.

  Patrolman Barker had to push his way over an eight-foot-high wall of stuff in a room with a ten-foot ceiling. In a small clearing in the center of the room, he found the body of sixty-five-year-old Homer Collyer in a sitting position with his head on his knees. Barker leaned out the window and called out, "There's a dead man here!" The emaciated body was covered only in a tattered bathrobe. Homer had not been seen by anyone for several years, and over the past few decades there had been numerous reports of his death. Many of the neighbors believed he had been dead for years, but the autopsy revealed that it had been only about ten hours.

  Homer had been blind since 1933 and was nearly paralyzed with rheumatism. His brother, Langley, fed and cared for him. Langley once told the neighbors that since their father was a doctor and they had an extensive medical library, they had no need of doctors and could care for Homer's problems with a combination of diet (one hundred oranges each week) and rest (Homer kept his eyes closed at all times). The autopsy indicated that Homer died of a heart attack, probably brought on by starvation. Homer's body had to be lifted by stretcher down the fire ladder from the second-story window.

  Despite the commotion, there was no sign of Langley. He'd last been seen several days earlier sitting on the steps of the run-down brownstone. Neighbors suspected he was still in the house, perhaps hiding. The Collyer brothers' lawyer, John McMullen, insisted that if Langley were in the house, he would come out. But by Saturday afternoon, there was sufficient concern over Langley's whereabouts that the police department issued a missing person alert. The hunt for Langley became so intense that on one occasion, after a sighting on the subway, the train was stopped just outside the station so that police could search all the cars. Several newspapers put up rewards for information on Langley's whereabouts. In the meantime, the police worried that Langley was indeed hiding somewhere inside the house.

  In the days following the discovery of Homer's body, all the New York papers carried the story on the front page. "The Palace of Junk," read the Daily News on March 22. "'Ghost Mansion' Yields Body" read another headline. The Collyers quickly became household names.

  When Langley failed to appear after three days, the police led an intensive search of the house. Thousands of spectators gathered to see what sort of mysteries would unfold. The house was in such deplorable condition that the Department of Housing and Buildings announced that it would have to be
demolished or undergo extensive renovations to be habitable. Leaks from the roof had destroyed most of the upper floor. During inspection, the city building inspector fell through the third floor and was saved only by a conveniently placed beam.

  The search and cleanout began in the basement, but after several days city engineers determined that without the tons of stuff supporting them, the walls of the building would not be able to sustain the weight of the contents of the upper floors. They insisted that the excavation begin on the top floor. Police had to force their way in through a skylight. The room was packed to within two feet of the ceiling, and workmen could only crawl in the narrow space. They began emptying the room by throwing things out the window into the rear courtyard. A gas chandelier, the top from a horse-drawn carriage, and a rusted bicycle were among the first things to come crashing down, along with an old set of bedsprings and a sawhorse. The crowds swelled to witness the spectacle and to see if the rumors of a house filled with treasures were true. In the first two days, workers removed nineteen tons of debris. All possessions deemed to have value were stored in a former schoolhouse nearby. Each day of cleaning brought new and strange discoveries: an early x-ray machine, an automobile, the remains of a two-headed fetus. For the police who were involved in the search, the whole affair was a nightmare. Roaches and rats thrived in the mess, alongside more than thirty feral cats that lived in the building.

  After nearly three weeks, workmen in the room where Homer was found stumbled on Langley's body, not more than ten feet from where his brother died. While crawling through one of the tunnels to bring Homer some food, Langley's cape, a staple of his odd fashion, had accidentally triggered one of his own booby traps. He was crushed beneath the weight of bales of newspapers and suffocated, trapped between a chest of drawers and a rusty box spring. Rats had chewed away parts of his face, hands, and feet. Langley apparently died first, and Homer, unable to see or move, died sometime later, perhaps knowing what had happened to his brother. At this point in the cleaning, workers had removed 120 tons of debris, including fourteen grand pianos and a Model T Ford. In the end, they removed more than 170 tons of stuff from the house. In all of the searching and clearing of the house, they never found where Langley slept. There appeared to be no place other than the tunnels for him to lie down.

  Langley and Homer Collyer had not always lived this way. They came from a distinguished and wealthy New York family. The brothers' great-grandfather, William Collyer, built one of the largest shipyards on the East River waterfront. A great-uncle, Thomas Collyer, ran the first steamboat line on the Hudson River. Homer and Langley's mother was a Livingston, a member of another esteemed clan. They once received the gift of a piano from Queen Victoria—one of the fourteen found among the hoard. Dr. Herman Collyer, Homer and Langley's father, became a noted obstetrician-gynecologist, and their mother, Susie Gage Frost Collyer, was an opera singer and a renowned beauty. But the pair were first cousins, and their marriage scandalized the socially conscious Collyer and Livingston clans. Most of the family ostracized them.

  Herman and his wife moved to the Harlem brownstone in 1909. Dr. Collyer used to paddle a canoe down the East River to Blackwell's Island (now Roosevelt Island), where he worked at City Hospital, and carry it back to the brownstone every night. Like so much other family memorabilia, the canoe was among the debris found in the Collyer mansion.

  Susie Collyer insisted that her sons receive the finest education and helped assemble their library of more than twenty-five thousand books. Both studied at Columbia, where Homer was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He went on to obtain several law degrees and become an admiralty lawyer, but he practiced law only for a short time. Langley studied engineering and graduated from Columbia but never worked as an engineer, though by all accounts he was gifted: he built a generator out of parts of an automobile kept in the basement, and his elaborate tunnels were no doubt a reflection of his engineering skills. He did, however, become a concert pianist of some renown, playing professionally until his debut in Carnegie Hall. Langley would play Chopin for Homer after he went blind and also read the classics to him.

  Even before their parents' deaths in the 1920s, the brothers began having less and less contact with the outside world. In 1917, they disconnected their telephone. In 1928, they shut off their gas. Sometime in the 1930s, they had their electricity turned off. Langley told Claremont Morris, a real estate agent who worked with him, that they had simplified their lives by getting rid of those things: "You can't imagine how free we feel." They never opened their mail, and their only contact with the outside world was a crystal radio set that Langley built himself.

  The last time Homer was seen outside the house was in early 1940, when Police Sergeant John Collins saw the brothers carrying a tree limb into their basement. Langley did not deny the clutter. Despite the appearance of slovenliness or laziness created by the condition of the house, Langley was always busy and often complained of not having enough time to do the things he needed to do. One of those things, Langley told the police on several occasions, was clearing and organizing his home. He claimed to be saving things so that he and his brother could be self-sufficient.

  The Collyers were frequently at odds with the courts for exercising their "freedom." Their failure to pay taxes, mortgage bills, and utilities, as well as neglected bank accounts, brought on injunctions, evictions, and foreclosures. In 1939, after repeated failure to get a response at the door, Consolidated Edison got a court order to break in and remove the company's unused electric meters. When they broke down the door, they found a wall of newspapers and boxes, sacks of rocks, logs, and rubbish blocking their way. An irate Langley, his long white hair partially covered by a bicycle cap, called angrily from a second-floor window that they had no right to break into his home. Reluctantly, however, he allowed the men to take the meters.

  In 1942, the bank foreclosed on their house for failure to pay a mortgage note of $6,700. No payments of any kind had been made on the mortgage for eleven years, since shortly after Susie Collyer's death. Because it now legally owned the house, the bank was ordered by the health department to make repairs to the crumbling façade. When the workmen arrived, Langley appeared and ordered them off. A few months later, the bank and city officials appeared at the house to take possession of the property and evict the brothers. They broke down the door with hatchets, but a solid wall of papers stopped their progress. A large crowd gathered, as it always did when things happened at the "Ghost House." The bank officials decided to enter through a second-floor window. After three hours of work, they were only two feet into the house. The sounds of the excavation finally alerted Langley, who demanded to see his lawyer. John McMullen had been the brothers' lawyer for some time and knew of their peculiarities. He was quite frail and elderly; nonetheless, he crawled up the fire ladder and through a tunnel in the parlor to find Langley hiding behind a piano. When McMullen told him that the only way they could avoid eviction was to pay the $6,700, Langley handed him a wad of cash, borrowed a pen, and signed the papers saving his house.

  In the fall of 1942, a rumor began spreading through the neighborhood that Homer was dead. It finally reached Sergeant Collins of the 123rd Street Station, who knew the brothers well. The sergeant went to the Collyer house and persuaded Langley to allow him inside to verify that Homer was alive. It took them thirty minutes to traverse the sea of possessions and avoid the booby traps. Finally, they emerged into a small, dark clearing. When Collins turned on his flashlight, he saw Homer, a gaunt figure sitting on a cot and covered by an old overcoat. Homer spoke, "I am Homer L. Collyer, lawyer. I am not dead. I am paralyzed and blind." That was the last time Homer spoke to anyone other than Langley. The next day, Langley lodged a complaint with the police about the incident.

  THE COLLYER BROTHERS' house was demolished in July 1947. The salvaged belongings were sold at auction but netted less than $2,000. The lot on which the house stood was sold in 1951, and in 1965 a small park was fashioned there. Parks commiss
ioner Henry Stern named it the Collyer Brothers Park. In 2002, the Harlem Fifth Avenue Block Association took on the challenge of increasing the use of the park. The first order of business, they decided, was to change its name. The president of the association argued that the Collyers "did nothing positive in the area, they're not a positive image." She wanted the name changed to Reading Tree Park. The board turned down her request. Parks commissioner Adrian Benepe commented, "Sometimes history is written by accident. Not all history is pretty, but it's history nonetheless—and many New York children were admonished by their parents to clean their room 'or else you'll end up like the Collyer brothers.'"

  The Collyer brothers' behavior was bizarre and mysterious, but not unusual. It is now known as hoarding, and it is remarkably common. Although few cases are as severe as the Collyers', for a surprising number of people the attachments they form to the things in their lives interfere with their ability to live. Since we began our research on hoarding, we've received thousands of e-mails, letters, and phone calls from relatives and friends of hoarders, public officials grappling with the public health and safety aspects of hoarding, and hoarders themselves. When we speak to professional audiences including psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and other human service workers about hoarding, as we often do, we usually ask for a show of hands in response to the following question: "How many of you know personally of a case of significant hoarding—yourself, a family member, a friend, or someone who is not one of your professional clients?" Over and over again, at least two-thirds of the people in the room raise their hands. All are a bit shocked by the numbers. Afterward, many come up to admit that the topic attracted them because they have begun to realize they have a problem that is out of control and not going away soon.

  Chances are you know someone with a hoarding problem. Recent studies of hoarding put the prevalence rate at somewhere between 2 and 5 percent of the population. That means that six million to fifteen million Americans suffer from hoarding that causes them distress or interferes with their ability to live. You may have noticed some of the signs but have never thought of it as hoarding. As you meet the people in this book, you will begin to see hoarding where you did not recognize it before. And while hoarding stories like the Collyers' may sound unusual, the attachments to objects among people who hoard are not much different from the attachments all of us form to our things. You will undoubtedly recognize some of your own feelings about your stuff in these pages, even if you do not have a hoarding problem.