14 People Who Died From Hoarding

Homer and Langley Collyer.These millionaires favored only two things: setting bomb booby-traps for intruders and living in a mansion full of garbage. In the 1940s, the two brothers lived among their trash piles in a Manhattan row house. Langley cared for his blind brother Homer. Langley thought vitamin C fixed Homer's sight, so he fed his older brother 100 oranges weekly to try and restore his vision.Old Langley did not know that carrots turn eyes into night-vision goggles.Good-hearted Langley kept piles of newspapers, assuming his brother would want current events after his sight returned. Then something crazy happened: one of the Collyers was killed by one of their own booby traps in 1947.

Police got a tip about a death in the Collyer home in New York City. They went to Manhattan, breaking in through a second-floor window to enter. A three-week manhunt started then, beginning in piles ofold newspapers, phone books, and furniture boxes.Police took the brothers to Atlantic City searching in the home.

When police re-searched the home, they found the brothers buried less than ten feet apart, under mountains of their hoarded trash.

A 51-year-old compulsive hoarder in Spain died in early 2016. One of his garbage piles collapsed on him. A friend in the Canary Islands called the police after not hearing from his hoarding buddy. Firefighters had to help remove the body from the huge amount of trash."Something out of the ordinary."""

The man had Diogenes Syndrome. This condition relates to hoarding but is not formally recognized for all hoarders. Diogenes Syndrome is a hoarding type where elderly hoarders not only hoard but also refuse help and personal care, showing great social distance.

In 2014, Beverly Mitchell, a 66-year-old woman from Cheshire, Connecticut, died from crushing. Her own crumbling floor gave way while she was in her basement. The first floor held items Mitchell had hoarded for years. Mitchell's body was found a week later. Local police and fire units cut a hole in the house side and beganusing a backhoe to remove debris from her home.The Connecticut hoarder's home needed a backhoe to unearth the body.

After Mitchell died and officials dug up her home, they said it was "unfit for human occupancy" and covered it with plywood.

Diners at the East Village Spiegel Cafe complained about the dead rat smell in 2016. This smell seemed to cover the place. A man in his 40s was found rotting above the restaurant. Neighbors called him "Box Man".The Box Man died above a restaurant." (the amount of boxes full of stuff he carried into his apartment daily) was found decomposing in his apartment above the restaurant.

The dead body's odor became stronger because New York City experienced a severe heat wave, speeding up decay. Almost a dozen trash bags left the apartment days after Box Man was found.

What's the strangest thing you've done with a sibling? If you didn't live with their dead body for over a year, you are not as strange as the Waldman sisters. This pair lived in aThe Hoarder Sisters lived in Grey Gardens.style home in a Boston suburb. Neighbors called it "The Hoarder Sisters lived in the haunted house..

A visiting cousin found the younger Waldman sister's dead body. The cousin found the 67-year-old woman buried under a table in clutter. Police told the older sister about her sibling's death despite the body's advanced decay.

In 2016, an elderly, legally-blind Brooklyn woman named Rita Wolfensohn learned she lived with her son's skeleton for nearly two decades. A relative, stopping by to get things for Wolfensohn who was hospitalized, found the discovery on the cluttered second floor. The visitor found a full skeleton in jeans, socks, and a shirt lying on its back on a thin mattress on the floor.

Police think the woman did not know about her son's death because the room looked likeA garbage truck dumped its load." and smelled like rotting food. Wolfensohn probably did not smell the corpse because police said it was so decayed, it did not stink anymore.

Roger Firestone and his wife Maureen were hoarders who died in March 2016. One of their cardboard boxes caught fire, igniting their curtains and spreading the blaze. Witnesses said Roger tried to stomp out the burning box on his lawn beforeHe ran back inside the house to save his bedridden wife..

Autopsies showed Roger and Maureen died from smoke inhalation and carbon monoxide poisoning. Local officials chose not to treat the fire as suspicious. Both the couple died, but two caregivers who worked for the family escaped the blaze.

Eight months after his death, the decomposed remains of Denis Walsby—a known recluse to his neighbors in Southampton, England—were found in his living room after police entered and saw that he hadHe created a small nest for himself.Police found Walsby's body under a high stack of paper at the bottom of his stairs. Getting to the body took a lot of work, like with other hoarders who die under piles of their own making.

Police said the house was so cluttered they could not step inside the door upon arrival. Flies buzzing around the place signaled something serious was wrong.

Chillcothe, Ohio saw a suspicious death in late 2016. Police found a 'badly decomposing body' in a home they were checking. One officer stated the house held so much trash that finding the body took time. There were about four feet of garbage in the pathways, plus more outside.Garbage was stacked floor to ceiling.

Neighbors claimed the man rarely left home, but they saw him occasionally. This time, he had not been seen for six months. Neighbors also claimed drug addicts used the home for getting high, creating suspicion about the man's death.

When Dean Verboven learned social workers planned to clean out his hoarder's home, he did what he could to control the situation.He set everything on fire.Hours before social workers cleaned Greenwich, Connecticut, he started a fire. The blaze took his life and left his elderly, invalid mother with severe burns.

Verboven's neighbors said he and his mother were 'sweet, well liked people.' They had declined slowly over the five years before the fire.

In December 2016, Jennifer Kirk of Waikato, New Zealand called local paramedics. Something was wrong, but authorities could not figure out the problem from her call. Emergency help found 'shoulder high' stacks of paper, envelopes, and every collectible imaginable. They arrived too late to save Kirk.

Pukete Fire Brigade Senior Station officer Cameron Grylls explained getting Ms. Kirk's body out was hard. "Access made it difficult to get inside. We moved much stuff from around the doors to open it and get her out. She had not been in parts of the house for ages. It looked like she made paths into pockets she needed."

The rest of the place grew covered in cobwebs and rats.Neighbors called her eccentric. One neighbor said Ms. Kirk mentioned flattening the house because it became unlivable.

Police found the body of a 45-year-old son crammed with newspapers and mail during a welfare check of a woman in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania. The son's death cause remains unknown; he might have been alive before the check.

Neighbor Bonnie McElheny recalls asking about the man during a recent talk with the older shut-in.I spoke to her on Friday.I asked her how Christopher was doing, and she replied he was not well.

Police found a 98-year-old woman's body mummified, clutching a blanket, among her hoarded possessions. The police discovered the woman's daughter knew about her mother's death for four years. This daughter was Janet Pallone Delatorre, an Arizona woman.Janet Pallone Delatorre told authorities this.She chose not to report the death when she found her mother's body in 2010 because of the house's condition.

She feared charges like neglect or manslaughter because the home was a hoarder's place. Delatorre, being rational, kept quiet until police found her mother.

The Allerton fire department in Liverpool, England, responded to a burning home in October 2016. Firefighters expected to find the bodies of an elderly married couple in the debris. The blaze worsened because of the floor-to-ceiling newspapers the couple kept inside.The floor-to-ceiling newspapers the couple kept in their home worsened the fire.The couple kept these newspapers in their home.

The actual cause of the fire remains unknown, somewhat mysteriously.