The Collyer Brothers.

[Spedlimp.]

I've not seen anything about these guys on here before, so I figure I'd share.

As a fore note, this isn't just a thread filled with old corpse photos, so I won't be at all shocked if you stop reading now.

Basically, Langley Collyer was some dude who hoarded a heap of shit, and turned his house into a maze of crap. He lived there with his blind brother, Homer.

Homer and Langley Collyer are names that are perhaps losing their resonance, especially outside of New York, but their junk-stuffed Harlem brownstone riveted the nation in the late 1940s. Long before Mission: Organization and How Clean is Your House?, the Collyers were the first celebrity hoarders, and their collection of junk was of epic proportions.

Born in the 1880s, Homer and Langley Collyer were the sons of a Manhattan gynecologist and a woman who traced her family roots back to the Mayflower.


Their father abandoned the family, and the boys lived with their mother until she died. They both graduated from Columbia University, Homer with a law degree, Langley with a degree in engineering. There doesn't seem to be any evidence that Langley ever actually held a job, but Homer practiced for a while as part of a firm, specializing in Admiralty law. Not for long though: one day, he just stopped showing up. By the 1920s, with both their parents dead, the Collyer Brothers had become a odd fixture in their old Harlem neighborhood.

After going blind in 1934, Homer did not leave the brownstone, but Langley would venture out at night in his endless pursuit of junk, dressed in ratty late Victorian garb and dragging a cardboard box on a rope in which to haul his treasures home.

The brothers had inherited the mansion from their parents and their reclusiveness - neither brother worked - fueled rumors of valuable stashes within the house which, in turn, led to a series of break-ins. As their eccentricity grew, the brothers boarded up the windows and began booby-trapping the house using their engineering skills.
Homer, who had previously been crippled by rheumatism, went blind in 1933. Langley devised a remedy diet for Homer of 100 oranges a week accompanied by black bread and peanut butter.

About this time, the mansion's gas, telephone, electricity and water were turned off for failure to pay bills. The brothers heated the house with a kerosene heater and attempted to convert a Model T into a device to generate electricity. Langley brought water home from a park four blocks away.




Fucking blahh. etc.

March 21, 1947: The 122nd police precinct received an anonymous call stating that there was a dead body in the Collyer Mansion. With no doorbell, telephone, and locked doors the police had a very difficult time getting in. Eventually a crew of seven men began pulling out all the junk that was blocking their way and throwing it on the street below.

Patrolman William Baker eventually broke into a second story bedroom filled with a similar array of items. After two hours of climbing through the debris, the body of Homer Collyer was found in a chair wearing a bathrobe.

The only way to bring the body out was to take it by ladder out the second floor window. The medical examiner said that Homer had been dead no more than 10 hours, and that it could not account for the stench coming from the house. Therefore, the search began for Langley.
By this time, a crowd of over 600 onlookers had gathered.



The search continued for days and over 30,000 books, a horse's jaw, a complete human skeleton, a two-headed baby in a jar, a Steinway piano, an early X-Ray machine, and uncountable bundles of newspapers were removed.
A New York City building inspector was also called in to evaulate the safety of continuing
the search for Langley and the removal of the debris.
While the search continued in the house, police decided to close an entire block of 5th Avenue in order to keep the crowds back so the workmen could remove the debris and load it into vans or sanitation trucks, as appropriate.


On April 1st, Homer Collyer was buried. Police were hopeful that Langley would show up at the funeral, but that did not happen. The removal of debris from the mansion continued.


Many pianos were removed from the home during the search. On April 8, 1947, the body of Langley Collyer was found a mere 8 feet from where Homer was found. Three bundles of newspaper and a suitcase had covered his body. It appeared that Langley had been crawling through a newspaper tunnel to take food to his paralyzed brother and became the victim of his own booby-trap. Rats had partially consumed his body. (see end of post)
His brother Homer, blind and paralyzed, died of starvation
several days later.
He was wearing just a tattered blue and white bathrobe. Homer's matted, grey hair reached down to his shoulders, and his head was resting on his knees.


Other items removed from the house included baby carriages, bicycles, old food, guns, glass chandeliers, bowling balls, sawhorses, plaster busts, Susie Collyer's hope chests, pickled human organs, eight cats, a Model T chassis, fourteen pianos, many musical instruments (banjos, violins, accordians, gramophones, clavicords), and newspapers that were several decades old.


And here's a dead Langley. Congrats if you made it this far down.

[ZombieGreco]

Couldn't they have sold some of that shit for money for the bills??

[andell78]

Oh my gosh. Imagine that stench!!

[Shadowkeeper]

Awesome post speedlimp, thanks!

[reaper1880]

thats awesome

[Ugh82]

Really great post, much appreciated.

[Corpsebanger]

hehe really good post, never heard of this story

[CHL]

Originally Posted by ZombieGreco

Couldn't they have sold some of that shit for money for the bills??

Hoarders normally don't sell their shit, they just keep collecting stuff. That's what they do.

I'd heard of the brothers sometime ago, but have not seen these photos. Good post.

[Momzilla123]

Wow, really neat post! It's sad how they both died, especially the paralyzed brother. What an awfull way to go!
One of my friends is a mild hoarder. But her mother was a SEVERE hoarder, which I guess why she tends to accumulate "stuff". When her mother died 3 yrs ago, she left a house that is STILL to this day being sorted out, emptied, and cleaned by my friend and her adult kids. It's a weird mental illness.

[butterfly]

Wow good post and read. I like the b/w pics.