Some of us have a habit of keeping whatever we can get our hands on. We are reluctant to throw them away even when we do not need them. Rarely, however, does this entertainment turn into a dangerous state of mind. The Collyer brothers are two people who have made history with this character. They kept about 120 tons of garbage in the house. Eventually, the habit led to their own death.
The outside world finds out about this through a phone call to the police. In March 1947, local police received a complaint that a vacant house smelled bad.
Accordingly, the officers who arrived at the scene saw an unexpected sight. It was a house full of all sorts of things. It was piled high so that they could not even go inside. Eventually, the police officers, who saw no other way, broke the window and went inside. Police also found the body of one of the brothers, Homer Collier, while clearing trash inside. According to postmortem reports, Homer died of starvation and heart disease. The body lay unattended for ten hours. Homer's body was found after a five - hour search. Therefore, the officials decided to continue the search there.
Police have also launched an investigation into the disappearance of his brother Langley Collyer. Langley could not be found anywhere. Meanwhile, police found all sorts of strange objects in the house. Police found a horse's jaw, an early X - ray machine, several guns, more than 25,000 books, human organs in bottles, eight live cats, unused silk, fourteen pianos, and countless newspapers and magazines. More than two thousand people gathered around the house to witness the grandeur of the cleanup. It took three weeks to remove the debris from the collier apartment. But the shocking thing is that the body of Langley Collier was eventually found by police in the rubble. It lay ten feet away from Homer's body. At post-mortem, it was confirmed that Langley Collier had died two weeks earlier. No one knew about the deaths of those brothers who had no contact with the outside world. Two weeks after Langley's death, Homer died of starvation. Homer was a lawyer and a Langley engineer.
The police investigated their history and found some very painful things. In 1932, their lives reached a turning point. Homer lost his sight. This forced Langley to quit his job and take care of his brother. The two brothers had been confined to their homes all day. This caused him to withdraw from the community. Langley prepared a diet plan for his brother that included 100 oranges, bread, and peanut butter per week. He believed that this diet could completely cure his brother's blindness. He would read books and read the classical piano to pass the time to his brother.
This modest life of theirs fascinated people. Some children in the neighborhood once threw stones at their windows to harass them. This forced them to close their windows and withdraw from the world. Their closed doors have never been opened before anyone. When that happens, another disaster strikes. Homer had rheumatism and was completely paralyzed on one side. Still, they refused to seek medical help. Lack of jobs wiped out all their sources of income. Their water and electricity were cut off as they could not pay the bills. But engineer Langley made his own generator. A small kerosene heater was also built to heat the house. They relied on local parks for water.
Langley, who never left the house during the day, would go out at midnight and bring home all the interesting things he could find. He kept unused items, books and textiles at home. After his brother regained his sight, he would put bundles of newspapers at home to read. These unusual traits made them famous. The New York Times once offered them $ 125,000. But they turned it down. At the same time, no one knew that their hoarding was a state of mind. In 2013, hoarding was first defined as a state of mind. It is estimated that two to five percent of adults have the disease.
