On March 21st, 1947, the 22nd Police Precinct received a phone call from an anonymous tipster informing them of a dead body in a house belonging to Homer Collyer and Langley Collyer. Upon investigation, officers found themselves faced with the Herculean task of sifting through decades of hoarded stuff to try and find the occupants of the house, or at least what was left of them.
The story of the Collyer brothers is a tragic one. The siblings came from a rich and affluent family, both studied and earned degrees in different fields and in 1923, they lost their father, leaving them with a big empty house in New York.
But that house didn’t stay empty for long. Neither brother seemed eager to interact with the outside world and after their mother’s death in 1929, the two brothers sank further into their reclusive lifestyle.
The Collyer brothers began to fill their home
According to a blog from christopherroosen.com, Homer stopped working in 1932 after going blind. Langley seemingly never held a job. Of course, they came from a rich family so employment wasn’t exactly a necessity.
Years would go by with the siblings almost exclusively remaining inside their family home. Langley would often sneak out to collect things he and his brother loved such as books, musical instruments and other such items. However, as more time passed the things Langley would bring home became more and more bizarre. Tin cans, phone books, random fabrics and even human organs in jars were all added to this collection.
Langley became a full time hoarder, bringing home anything and everything. All in all, the brothers collected roughly 140 tons of random stuff. It was genuinely pretty impressive with around 25,000 books, 14 pianos, and thousands of cans among other things.
Reclusiveness turned to paranoia after a few break in attempts which resulted in Langley turning the house into a labyrinth complete with traps made from all that he had collected. He would also only leave the house at night so as to avoid people. By this point Homer was fully blind and did not leave whatsoever.
On several occasions the authorities got involved. One time the bank tried to repossess the property for failed mortgage repayments which Langley promptly paid off, making use of his savings. Another time the city council tried to enter to clean the property after receiving complaints. As you’d expect, they did not gain the entry they sought.
The hoarding becomes too much
Anyways, this takes us to March 1947, with officers trying to figure out if either of the brothers were alive in the house after receiving that anonymous tip. The mess was so much it reportedly took seven officers to just clear a path to the door.
Homer’s body was found first, sitting in a chair surrounded by piles of newspapers that went up to the ceiling. It took almost a month to find Langley who had died only ten feet away from his brother. It appears he had fallen victim to one of his own traps, crushed underneath his own collection of hoarded items while on the way to feed Homer. His brother, unable to move, died of starvation in the days that followed.
In the end the Collyer house was deemed unsalvageable. Decades of neglect for maintenance had left the city council no choice but to raze it to the ground. It’s sad to think that after a lifetime of collecting there would be nothing left to show for it after Langley and Homer passed away.
