Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things

369 Pages·2011·1.71 MB·English

by  Prof. Gail Steketee Ph.D.

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. hmhb ooks.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-O-15-IOI423-I
l. Obsessive-compulsive disorder. 2. Compulsive hoarding.
I. Steketee, Gail. II. Title. RC533.F76 2010 616.85^27—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. Piles upon Piles: The Story of Hoarding
2. We Are What We Own: Owning, Collecting, and Hoarding
3. Amazing Junk: The Pleasures of Hoarding
4. Bunkers and Cocoons: Playing It Safe
5. A Fragment of Me: Identity and Attachment
6. Rescue: Saving Animals from a Life on the Streets
7. A River of Opportunities
8. Avoiding the Agony
9. You Haven't Got a Clue

10. A Tree with Too Many Branches: Genetics and the Brain
11. A Pack Rat in the Family
12. But It's Mine! Hoarding in Children
13. Having, Being, and Hoarding

Reference List
Acknowledgments
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