The Collyer Brothers: The Harlem Hoarders Who Were Buried by Their Own Junk
Updated: Oct 28
On the morning of 21 March 1947, a phone call came into a police station in Harlem. The caller, who wouldn't give his name, said there was a dead man inside the big brownstone at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 128th Street.
Everyone in the neighbourhood knew the house. Its windows were boarded or broken, its front door hadn't been opened in years, and two strange old brothers were supposed to live inside. Nobody had seen one of them for a very long time.
When police tried to get in, they couldn't. The front door opened onto a solid wall of newspapers, boxes, furniture and rubbish. So did the basement. In the end, a patrolman had to climb a ladder and smash his way in through a second-floor window. It took him about five hours to dig a path through the junk to the body.
It was the beginning of one of the strangest stories in New York history: the story of Homer and Langley Collyer, two educated men from a wealthy family who walled themselves in with more than 100 tons of junk, and were eventually killed by it.
Quick Answers
Who were the Collyer brothers? Homer and Langley Collyer, two wealthy, Columbia-educated brothers who shut themselves away in their Harlem brownstone for decades and filled it with an extraordinary amount of junk.
How did they die? Langley was crushed when one of his own tunnels of rubbish collapsed on him. Homer, who was blind and paralysed and depended on him completely, starved to death a few days later.
When were they found? Police found Homer's body on 21 March 1947. Langley's body wasn't found until 8 April, just a few feet away, after workers had spent weeks digging through the house.
How much was in the house? Accounts vary, but well over 100 tons of rubbish was removed, including about 25,000 books, 14 pianos and most of a Model T Ford.
What is Collyer Brothers Park? A small pocket park in Harlem, at Fifth Avenue and 128th Street, on the site where their house once stood.
A Good Old New York Family
The Collyers had been in America since colonial times, and they were very proud of it. Their grandfather had been a successful shipbuilder. Their father, Herman Collyer, was a gynaecologist who worked at the city hospital on Blackwell's Island in the East River, and who was known for paddling himself to work in a canoe. Their mother, Susie, was a former opera singer, and she was also her husband's cousin.
Homer was born in 1881 and Langley in 1885. Both went to Columbia University. Homer studied law and became an admiralty lawyer, dealing in shipping cases. Langley studied engineering, but his real love was music. He was a talented pianist and played a concert at Carnegie Hall, then gave up performing. He spent much of his time tinkering with inventions, including a machine for vacuuming the inside of pianos.
In 1909 the family moved to a four-storey brownstone at 2078 Fifth Avenue, at the corner of 128th Street in Harlem. At the time it was a fashionable neighbourhood for well-off white families.
Withdrawing from the World
Around 1919, Herman Collyer moved out and went to live elsewhere in Manhattan. He died in 1923. The brothers, by then in their thirties and forties, stayed with their mother. Neither of them ever married, and neither ever lived anywhere else. When Susie died in 1929, they inherited the house and everything in it, and they never left.
Harlem was changing fast. In the 1920s it became the centre of Black American life in New York, and most of the white families moved away. The Collyers stayed put. Langley later told a reporter they simply didn't want to be bothered, but the neighbourhood around them grew curious, and the brothers grew more suspicious. The house was burgled several times, and its windows were broken during the Harlem riots of 1935 and 1943. Each time, the brothers retreated further.
They stopped paying their bills. The telephone had been cut off as early as 1917, and in 1928 the gas, electricity and water went too. Langley tried to rig up a Model T Ford engine to generate electricity for the house, which didn't work, so the brothers lived by the light of kerosene lamps and cooked on a small kerosene stove. To get water, Langley walked to a pump in a park four blocks away, usually after dark.
The Newspapers Come Calling
By the late 1930s, New York's newspapers had discovered the Collyers, and they couldn't get enough of them. The city had eight daily papers at the time, and for nearly a decade they competed for any scrap of news about the hermits of Harlem. A reporter called Helen Worden of the New York World-Telegram followed the story more closely than anyone, and became the closest thing the brothers had to a biographer.
In 1939, the gas company decided it wanted its two old meters back. When the brothers refused to let anyone in, workers forced their way into the house while hundreds of people gathered in the street to watch. It made the papers, of course.
Langley occasionally talked to reporters, and he seemed almost proud of the way they lived. He told The New York Times that they had no telephone and had stopped opening their mail, and said you couldn't imagine how free they felt. He explained that he dressed in shabby old clothes when he went out because if he looked well off, people would rob him. When asked why they didn't use electric light, he said Homer couldn't see anyway, and that he himself preferred the house a little on the shady side.
The more attention they got, the more the brothers dug in. Local boys threw stones at the windows. Rumours spread that the house was full of cash and treasures. Langley added more barricades.
Homer Goes Blind
In 1933, Homer suffered haemorrhages at the back of his eyes and went blind. A few years later, he was paralysed by rheumatism and could no longer get out of his chair. Langley became his full-time carer.
Langley refused to call a doctor. He insisted that he could treat his brother himself. As he later put it to a reporter, they were the sons of a doctor. His cure was a diet of black bread, peanut butter and oranges, lots of oranges. He claimed Homer sometimes ate a hundred a week, because the vitamin C would bring his sight back.
He also started keeping every newspaper that came into the house. When Homer got his sight back, Langley said, he'd want to catch up on everything he'd missed. Years' worth of newspapers piled up in bundles, then in walls, then in whole rooms.
The Ghost Man of Harlem
While Homer sat in the dark, Langley went out at night. Neighbours would see him shuffling through the streets after midnight in a battered coat, sometimes dragging things behind him on a rope. He scavenged for food, and for anything else that caught his eye. Local children called him the ghost man.
He brought everything home. Old newspapers and magazines. Broken furniture. Car parts. Musical instruments. Baby carriages. Bundles of string. Gradually the house filled up, from the floors to the ceilings, until the only way to get around inside was through narrow tunnels Langley had cut through the junk.
He was terrified of burglars, so he booby-trapped the tunnels. Some had tripwires that would bring down piles of bundled newspapers, or heavy objects, on top of anyone who blundered into them. Only Langley knew how to get through safely.
The brothers became a local legend. Rumours spread that they were hiding a fortune in cash inside the house, which was part of why burglars kept trying their luck. Langley dismissed the stories of hidden riches as tommyrot.
The Mortgage
Despite living like hermits, the brothers weren't poor. In 1942 the bank tried to repossess the house after the brothers had stopped paying the mortgage. Officials turned up to evict them, and workmen began breaking in. Langley came out and calmly wrote a cheque for the full amount, about 6,700 dollars, and told them to leave. They did.
Five years later, the outside world finally came in.
21 March 1947
After the anonymous phone call that morning, officers found the front door blocked by a wall of junk. Patrolman William Barker eventually went up a ladder and climbed in through a second-floor window. Behind it was more rubbish. He and other officers spent around five hours tunnelling their way through newspapers, boxes and broken furniture.
They found Homer Collyer in a small cleared space, sitting hunched in a chair, wearing a tattered bathrobe. He was 65 years old, blind and emaciated, with his long white hair falling to his shoulders. The medical examiner said he'd died of starvation and heart disease, and that he'd been dead for around ten hours.
There was no sign of Langley.
The Hunt for Langley
At first, the police assumed Langley had run away and left his brother to die. A manhunt was launched, and there were reported sightings of him across nine states. Crowds gathered outside the house every day to watch, and the newspapers had a field day.
Some suspected that Langley himself had made the anonymous phone call, then slipped away. One rumour had him boarding a bus to Atlantic City. Meanwhile, Homer's body had to be taken out of the house through the window, wrapped in a canvas sack. It was the first time he'd left the building in years.
Meanwhile, workers began clearing the house, room by room. It was dangerous, filthy work. They had to watch out for Langley's booby traps, and the whole building was at risk of collapse under the weight of the junk. Item after item was carried out to the street and loaded onto trucks while crowds of onlookers watched.
The clear-out turned into a public spectacle. On 24 March, despite pouring rain, crowds packed the street outside and cheered and jeered as strange objects were lowered from the roof and carried out of the windows. On the second day of the search alone, workers removed five tons of junk, along with a sick cat. Several more cats were found living in the house, somehow surviving among the rubbish.
Helen Worden was there too, tipped off by the local druggist. One of the police officers on the scene told her that this was her story, and its final chapter was being written right now.
On 8 April 1947, after more than two weeks of digging, a workman found a body under a pile of newspaper bundles, a suitcase and a chest of drawers, in one of the narrow tunnels. It was Langley. He'd been dead for some time, and rats had eaten part of his body.
He'd been lying less than ten feet from where Homer was found. The police worked out what had probably happened. Langley had been crawling through one of his tunnels, perhaps to bring food to his brother, when he triggered one of his own booby traps. The bundles came down on top of him and crushed him.
Homer, blind and unable to move, had been left alone in the dark. He would have heard nothing, or perhaps the sound of the collapse. He waited for his brother to come back. Over the following days, he slowly starved to death, just a few feet from Langley's body.
What Was Inside
By the time the house was cleared, workers had removed somewhere between 120 and 140 tons of junk. Accounts of what they found read like a list from a fever dream:
About 25,000 books, many of them on medicine and engineering
Fourteen pianos, including grand pianos, and two organs
The chassis of a Model T Ford
Years of bundled newspapers
Human body parts preserved in jars, believed to be from their father's medical practice
The jawbone of a horse
An early X-ray machine
Baby carriages, a doll's carriage and dressmaker's dummies
Several guns
Bundles of old pin-up pictures and countless bits of broken furniture
Some of the more saleable items were auctioned. A few ended up on display in a Coney Island-style dime museum. Most of it was simply hauled away as rubbish.
The House Comes Down
Once it had been emptied, the brownstone was declared a fire hazard and unsafe to live in. Later in 1947, it was demolished.
The brothers' estate attracted dozens of claims from people saying they were relatives, including one woman who insisted she was their long-lost sister. The courts spent years sorting it out. Once taxes and debts were paid, there wasn't much left to go round.
The plot of land eventually became a small pocket park. It's still there today, a quiet patch of trees and benches at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 128th Street, and its official name is Collyer Brothers Park. Not everyone in the neighbourhood loved the idea of naming it after two hoarders, but the name stuck.
It's a funny sort of memorial. As one New York parks commissioner put it, sometimes history is written by accident. But it's the only one the Collyer brothers have, and it stands on the exact spot where they lived and died.
A Name That Means Hoarding
The Collyer brothers never really went away. In New York, their name became shorthand for a home stuffed so full of junk that it's dangerous. New York firefighters still talk about a Collyers' mansion when they're called to a fire in a hoarder's home, a warning that there's so much stuff inside that it's risky to go in.
Their story has been told again and again. Marcia Davenport fictionalised it in her 1954 novel My Brother's Keeper. In 2009, E. L. Doctorow published Homer & Langley, a novel that imagined their lives in the house, with Homer as narrator. There have been plays, documentaries and countless magazine articles.
The writer Franz Lidz grew up fascinated by them, partly because his own eccentric uncle Arthur was a hoarder too. He wove their story into his memoir Unstrung Heroes, which became a 1995 film directed by Diane Keaton, and later wrote a full book about them, Ghosty Men, named after what the children of Harlem used to call Langley. According to Lidz, his uncle once said, with something like admiration, that you had to have brains to collect that much stuff.
Today, compulsive hoarding is recognised as a mental health condition in its own right, and the Collyers are often held up as the most extreme example there's ever been. Whatever was going on in their minds, the story is a sad one. Two clever, privileged men slowly cut themselves off from the world, and in the end they were swallowed up by the things they couldn't bear to let go of.
Langley had kept all those newspapers so that Homer could catch up on the world when he could see again. In the end, they were what killed them both.
Suggested Reading
Want to dig deeper into the strange world of the Collyer brothers? These are worth a look.
Homer & Langley by E. L. Doctorow. A haunting novel imagining the brothers' lives inside the house, told by the blind Homer.
Ghosty Men: The Strange but True Story of the Collyer Brothers by Franz Lidz. The true story of the brothers, alongside the author's own eccentric uncle who was inspired by them.
As an Amazon Associate, Utterly Interesting earns from qualifying purchases.
