5 Unbelievable True Examples of Extreme Hoarding

Hoarding seems to be a growing problem and one that is now receiving more coverage both in the press and on our screens. A quick flick through the daytime TV listings will reveal that broadcasters seem be hoarding episodes on the topic! When does an unwillingness to throw out something that may one day be useful tip over into something more extreme though? When it becomes like these troubling cases:

1) The Collyer Brothers

Due to the sudden increase in publicity surrounding it, we may think of hoarding as being a 21st Century problem. In fact, one of the most high-profile examples dates back to 1947. The Collyer brothers were reclusive siblings in their 60s, living in a Manhattan apartment filled to the brim with clutter. Police attended reports of a foul smell emanating from the premises and struggled their way through a mish-mash of newspapers, musical instruments, books and furniture to discover the body of Homer Collyer. They couldn’t, however, locate his brother, Langley.

This led to a countrywide manhunt…only for the process of decluttering to eventually uncover Langley’s body in the flat, 18 days after his brother had initially been found. Langley had died first, leading to his blind and equally reclusive brother’s eventual death from malnutrition.

In the end, 140 tons of accumulated junk was removed from their home.

2) Vasoulla Harman

When we’re watching Jasmine Harman showing a couple round an idyllic open-plan sunshine-home on TV’s A Place In The Sun, it seems a world away from a property packed with useless junk picked up from the street. For Jasmine though, that place wasn’t a world away, it was only a visit to her mum’s house away. That’s if she was able to visit at all, for quite some time she wasn’t. “It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see her, it was that I literally couldn’t get into her house”, she told The Guardian.

Thankfully, though not entirely cured, Jasmine’s mother does seem to be making enough progress for visits to have become possible again.

3) Irene Vandyke

Sadly, extreme hoarding doesn’t just occur in relation to possessions, some people also hoard animals. Upstate New York resident Irene Vandyke had 99 cats living in crates that were stacked from the floor to the ceiling of her home. That situation would be depressing enough, but things took a turn for the macabre on examination of her freezer. In it were 67 dead cats that had been covered in plastic bags and stored away.

4) Bettina Grossman

Most cases of hoarding relate to people holding onto things which simply don’t have a use but the case of Bettina Grossman is slightly different. An artist living in New York’s legendary bohemian hangout, The Chelsea Hotel, she had become increasingly reclusive as she filled her apartment with boxes of her own artwork. Eventually, a younger artist, Sam Bassett, was able to befriend her and help her to organise her collection. He even made a documentary about her that brought her and her work to greater attention. Following Sam’s intervention, Bettina was able to find enough space to stop sleeping on a deckchair in her hallway and even told someone that she’d been able to laugh “for the first time in twenty years”.

5) Edmund Trebus

One of the things about hoarding is that it doesn’t just affect the hoarder themselves but can also affect their neighbours. Accumulating huge amounts of junk can make it difficult to keep conditions sanitary, allowing vermin to populate an area. Trebus spent his 80s in his home in Crouch End in London, surrounded by enough rubbish to infuriate both his neighbours and the local Environmental Health department. 515 cubic yards of rubbish isn’t to be sniffed at (seriously, you’ll catch something) but you do have to offer some kudos for his collection of every record Elvis ever recorded!

As we’ve read, extreme hoarding isn’t just a 21st Century phenomenon but it is one that we seem to be hearing more about all the time. We’ve all been seduced by a ‘bargain’ at one time or another and bought something that we don’t particularly need, but these examples go way beyond that. Hopefully soon we’ll be hearing about people who have managed to fully recover from this unfortunate condition.

Related Post: The World’s Weirdest Collections.

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