Brew: Today I have a story for you.
A story of one of New York City’s prestigious families
whose prestige eroded over the years and eventually ended in
tragedy and infamy, surrounded by filth and piles of garbage.
Take a seat, and I’ll tell you
the tale of the Collyer Brothers.
Today’s episode focuses on a mental disorder.
Much like any mental disorder, hoarding carries
a certain stigma with it that can make life
more difficult for those who suffer from it.
We’re not here to lay judgement on anyone, we’re just
looking to explore a topic from an unbiased position.
If you have any concerns about your mental
health, please speak to a psychiatrist so that
you can determine what kind of support you need.
And with that out of the way… Let’s get into it!
Quiz: And what’s this?
Brew: This is where I keep my research
notes from all of my previous episodes.
… Quiz: You keep physical copies of them?
Brew: Is that odd?
Quiz: Yes.
Brew: Huh. You sure?
Quiz: Certain.
It’s 2021...
What’s this one?
Brew: Oh that?
These are rabbit holes that proved a bit
too deep while I was doing my research.
Anything catch your eye?
Quiz: Yeah, why’s this one so thicc?
Brew: Oh, that’s a story that I took
out of that video I made about hoarders.
At the time I thought it was too much to include,
but if you’re curious I can fill you in..
Our story starts in New York City, 1881.
On November 6th , a boy named Homer was born into
the respectable Collyer family to gynecologist
Dr. Herman Collyer, and opera singer Susie Gage Frost Collyer.
While not the first child the Collyers had,
Homer’s older sister Susan had tragically died
four months after her birth the year before.
Susie and Herman were first cousins, and also
descendants of Robert Livingston, an American
lawyer and Founding Father of the United States.
Herman Collyer was known to be an
eccentric, but wealthy individual.
He worked at the City Hospital on Roosevelt Island, and
was known to canoe to and from work down the East River,
carrying his boat through the streets to and from the river.
The Collyers would have another
child several years after Homer.
Langley Collyer was born October 3rd, 1885.
At the time, the family was living in
a tenement while their father interned.
The future of the brothers seemed bright at this time,
with Homer being accepted into the College of the
City of New York at the age of 14 as a “sub-freshman”.
Six years later, he would receive his bachelor’s.
In 1909 the family moved from their tenement into a
New York Brownstone in a wealthy district, Harlem.
Homer went on to receive a degree in admiralty law
from Columbia University, and was a member of the
once-prestigious Phi Kappa Beta fraternity while studying.
Some sources claim that Langley also studied at
Columbia, though for engineering and chemistry.
However, Fredrik Knudsen of Down the Rabbit Hole stated
that Columbia has no records of him attending the school.
Unclear academic record aside, Langley did also pursue
a career as a concert pianist with some matter of
success, even playing at the famous Carnegie Hall.
However, over time Langley eventually ceased playing
the piano and turned his career to selling them instead.
In 1919, the brothers’ parents separated.
Herman Collyer moved out into a house of his
own, while Susie remained in the brownstone,
and the brothers stayed there with her.
Only four years later in 1923, their father passed away
and left the boys all of his possessions, including
various medical items and a full Ford Model T car.
In an early sign of what was to come, Homer and
Langley moved these items to the brownstone.
They even took apart the car to fit it inside.
Homer and Langley lost their mother in 1929,
left to live in the brownstone alone from then on.
Their lives continued as normal for the next four
years, with both brothers leaving the house and
socializing with others, attending their jobs.
Homer continued to work as a lawyer, Langley
as a piano dealer, and both would even teach
Sunday school at Trinity Church, at which
their family had been parishioners since 1697.
Despite their notoriety, their lives seemed ordinary.
That changed in 1933.
The year hemorrhages in the eyes blinded Homer.
In turn, Langley quit his job as a
piano dealer to care for his brother.
In response to why he didn’t seek out a doctor to treat
his brother, Langley is quoted as responding thusly:
“You must remember that we are the sons of a doctor.
We have a medical library of 15,000 books in the house.
We decided not to call in any doctors.
You see, we knew too much about medicine.”
But as speculated by Down the Rabbit Hole, the
brothers may have been more afraid that doctors
would cut Homer’s optic nerves, meaning there
would be no chance for him to recover his eyesight.
In addition to Homer’s blindness, another
aspect of the Collyers’ lives changed.
Namely, the Great Depression.
Kicked off on October 29, 1929 or “Black Tuesday” as it
is known, the collapse of the stock market and widespread
unemployment helped cause a demographic shift in Harlem
which saw the Collyer brothers leaving their house even less.
Yeah, it’s not great.
Their shut in nature hadn’t exactly begun there.
The Bowery Boys podcast posits that Homer and Langley’s
mother had been something of a recluse herself in the years
after her separation from their father, and when she had
passed the brothers had arranged for her body to be taken
by the undertaker in the dead of night through a window.
Langley took to caring for his brother day in and
day out, only leaving the house to gather necessities
and other things that caught his attention.
He claimed to have created a diet for Homer that
would restore his sight that consisted of black
bread, peanut butter, and 100 oranges a week.
He also began collecting newspapers so that his brother could
catch up on the world events once his sight was restored.
Even without a source of income, the Collyers
still had a comfortable inheritance put aside.
So it seems odd that the brothers stopped paying for gas
and water, instead opting to heat the house by burning
lamp oil and fetching water at a pump several blocks away.
Fueled by rumours that the two had vast riches stored away
within the house the brothers faced other issues, such
as break-ins and children throwing rocks at the windows.
The younger brother barricaded and bolted
the doors in response, and started going out
only at night to gather things he needed.
The two lived in isolation, connected only to the outside
world by Langley’s ventures, the newspapers he gathered,
and a crystal radio he had apparently constructed.
Their phone line had been disconnected long before, in 1917.
As the years rolled by, the house fell into
disrepair and local rumours intensified about them.
Some believed that the two lived in
orientalist splendour within, sitting on a
fortune they were afraid to invest in a bank.
These rumours were reinforced when a news article appeared
in The New York Times in 1938, repeating the claims after
they had refused to sell their home to a real estate agent.
By now the Collyer’s estate was in a state of disrepair
on the outside, its first floor windows and doors
boarded and barricaded with few signs of life - yet
at times those passing by could hear piano music.
It was an inviting mystery, so it shouldn’t be
a surprise that journalists took interest in
the brownstone and its mysterious inhabitants.
Later in 1938, a reporter for the World-Telegram
named Helen Worden Erskine managed to secure a rare
interview with Langley in which he stated “we’ve
no telephone, and we’ve stopped opening our mail.
You can’t believe how free we feel.”
The next year, the Collyer’s home would draw attention again,
this time as Consolidate Edison workers forced their way in
to retrieve the gas meters that had been unused since 1928.
The workers, barred from entry, had to climb their way to
the second story windows to break in and secure the meters.
All the while, Langley shouted
angrily at them to leave his property.
In the end, workers smashed the doors open from the
inside with a crowd forming to watch the display.
This in turn led Langley to reinforce
his measures to keep intruders out.
In 1942, another reporter managed to catch
up to Langley and secure an interview with
the increasingly mysterious local figure.
In the following report, Langley claimed that
Homer was now suffering from rheumatism - though
the two still refused to see a doctor.
The reporter, one Herbert C Lewis had waited
for Langley outside his house, and had been
invited to walk with him on his nightly travels.
The two talked about the neighbourhood, and Langley’s life.
The younger Collyer brother’s life had become caring for his
brother, saying that “I cook his meals and have to cut up
his meat into little cubes so he can eat it with a spoon.
I have to bathe him and tend to all his wants.
I used to read to him.
We have all the classics in our library.
I used to read Shakespeare and Dickens,
but my eyes went bad and I stopped.
So now we just talk and listen to the radio…”
“I’ve neglected my social life badly.”
This would be the final interview Langley gave, as soon
after the Bowery Savings Bank sent a crew to repossess the
home for failure to pay the mortgage and clean the interior.
Police broke the front door down, only to reveal
piles of garbage that stood as tall as the officers.
As they entered, Langley wordlessly handed over a check
for $6,700 - which would be over $101,000 in today’s money.
Langley then ordered everyone to leave his home.
From this point on, the police would receive
regular anonymous calls that someone had died
within the home, and one of these calls led Langley
to allow one of the responding officers inside.
Entering into the decrepit house, Langley led the officer
through a series of maze-like passageways cleared through
the piles of newspapers, boxes, and other oddities within.
It took thirty minutes to navigate the home, in his
paranoia Langley had adorned the home with multiple
traps, including cans affixed to the floor to trip
intruders, and piles of garbage set to collapse on any
who tripped triggers that would crush and kill them.
At the end of the tunnels and passageways,
the officer emerged into a clearing.
The tale differs based on the retelling, but one
thing remains the same, there he saw the emancipated
Homer Collyer, still living but immobilized,
his knees tucked to his chin by rheumatism.
These calls continued for years, and police protocol became
that responding officers were to knock at the door and
await a reassurance from Langley that everything was fine.
Then, in 1947, this routine changed.
The police received yet another tip that someone had
died in the house, but this time it came with a report
that a foul “miasma” had started to emerge from within.
When the responding officer
knocked this time, no one answered.
Officers tried to enter but found the first floor impossible
to break into, having been filled from wall to wall.
Removing the piles of possessions would take far too
long, so they moved to the second floor, breaking
the window and pulling out refuse from within.
Navigating the traps and passageways within, the
police found Homer and found his emaciated body.
He had died only ten hours prior.
At first the police believed that Langley was the one
who had placed the anonymous tip, fueled by claims
that someone had seen a figure sneak out the back door
of the home, and began a nationwide search for him.
Reports came in from all over claiming to
have seen him, but these proved fruitless.
After three days, the search focused instead on the
brownstone with suspicions rising that Langley had
died somewhere within the house in the piles of refuse.
Meanwhile, the house itself was proving to be unlivable.
Rain water had damaged the house to the point that a
building inspector fell through the third floor, and the only
thing keeping it standing were the piles of items within.
Workers couldn’t begin in the basement or risk a
collapse, so they entered through the roof and threw
the Collyers’ possessions out into the courtyard below.
Among these possessions were over 25,000 books,
endless newspapers, pianos, their father’s
canoe, the Ford Model T, and various medical
oddities that had belonged to their father.
Three weeks after Homer’s death,
the manhunt for Langley ended.
His body was discovered under a pile of Langley’s possessions
that had once been a tunnel, only ten feet away from
where his brother had been found, eaten away at by rats.
Langley had prepared a meal for his older brother,
only to trip one of his own traps and bring the tunnel
collapsing down upon him, crushing him, and leaving
Homer to succumb to starvation all alone, seated
mere feet away from his deceased younger brother.
Condemned, the Collyer brownstone was
purchased by a non profit and demolished.
In its place now stands a small park named after the family.
In the years since, the name Collyer has become a
warning for children - a sort of boogeyman that they
might become if they don’t clean up after themselves.
The brothers have been written about through a
number of articles, and have even been the subject of
books, novels, and episodes of television programs.
They’ve been viewed with contempt and disgust
by some in the years since they disappeared into
their home in Harlem, but I think it might be
worth viewing them with a more sympathetic lens.
As our understanding of mental illness and hoarding have
increased over the years, let’s not point and laugh at
these two brothers, but instead see them as two individuals
whose mental health issues led them to seclude themselves
away from society - and in the end, claimed their lives.
Quiz: That is so heavy.
Brew: The thing about this kind of story is that,
no matter how simple they may seem at first glance,
there’s often a rabbit hole lurking beneath that
you can fall into and spend days sorting through.
And often, the more you learn about it, the
deeper you dig to satisfy your own curiosity.
Quiz: Well yeah, the real challenge is to find
the pertinent information for a story, and then
summarize it in such a way to get the point
across without taking away from the overall story.
Brew: I knew I liked you.
Chill: Is he done yet?
I hate when he gets into these doom and gloom episodes.
Grill: Ugh, he always gets into these macabre,
meandering miseries and that new girl ain’t
helping neither opening that can of worms.
Do you even remember how long it took Brew
to get that out of his system last time?
Cuz I do!
And not only is it doom and gloom,
but now there’s mountains of mess?
Chill: Messes are just the worst!
Though, um, now that I think about it,
it’s getting a bit messy in here too.
Hey homie, Check your phonie
And, you know, it might be time for…
Grill: You’re not gonna start—
Chill: Spring cleaning!
Grill: Alright, well, you do you.
Hey homie, Check your phonie
I’m gonna go read these texts or whatever.
Chill: And don’t you worry, I won’t
toss your Kittykat Sunshine plushie.
Not like that time Brew threw out all my yoga
mats or that time that you burned away my shirt.
My favourite shirt.
Nope, that ain’t me.
If you like it Chill, come get into that
spring cleaning vibe with me over on my
channel with some lo-fi beats to tidy up to!
Let’s get our Marie Kondo on!