Hoarding is a very serious and devastating situation. It is emotionally draining. For the Professional Organizers that work with Hoarding clients it is unlike what you see on the T.V. shows. It is much more personal and more devastating.
Sometimes clients come into your life and make an impact that you never expected. One such client of mine was a hoarder. As with most hoarders Professional Organizers usually know to expect the worst. My client was a wonderful, highly educated woman with a problem. A problem that I always suspected would eventually lead to her death.
But - she was lucky. As I had anticipated a fire did break out in her home but she was pulled out of her house by some neighbors and she survived. Not without extensive physical damage. But she survived.
The fire did finally force her out of her home and she is now living in a nursing home where she is getting the treatment she deserves.
Not everyone is so lucky.
Hoarding is a serious problem.
Read some of the stories from the past:
Langley Collyer
He lived with his brother, Homer, who was blind and
paralyzed, in a three story mansion in New
York.
It was filled from floor to ceiling with newspapers, boxes,
barrels, crates and 10 grand pianos.
On March 21, 1947, the New York police received
a tip that there was a dead body in the house. They broke down the front door
but couldn’t get in because of all of the stuff.
They climbed in through a second
story window and found Homer, dead. He had died of a heart attack.
The house was a maze of nests
& tunnels and was booby trapped. There were trip wires that would bring
down debris on any intruders.
Workers cut through the roof and
lifted out 136 tons of junk.
After 18 days they found the
body of Langley Collyer who had been dead for weeks.
It appeared that he had been
crawling through a tunnel to deliver dinner to his brother when he triggered
one of his own booby traps and suffocated. Homer had then starved to death.
What was salvageable from the
tons of junk that had been collected, sold for less than $ 2,000 at auction.
The house, condemned as a health and fire hazard, was razed. Today it is a
parking lot.
Grey Gardens
In
the early 1970s, two women related to Jackie Onassis were the subjects of the
critically acclaimed documentary, Grey Gardens, about eccentric
behavior. The women, Edith Bouvier Beale and her mother, Edith Ewing Bouvier,
were former New York socialites who spent
their days holed up in a decrepit East Hampton
mansion.
When
the Suffolk County Board of Health raided their house, they found piles upon
piles of garbage amid human and animal waste. It was said that only three of the mansion’s 28 rooms were
used, while the others were occupied by hundreds of cats, possums and raccoons.
When word of the deplorable conditions got o
Jackie-O, she and her then-husband Aristotle Onassis paid $32,000 to clean the
house, install a new furnace and plumbing system, and cart away 1,000 bags of garbage.
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