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There once stood a three story dilapidated brownstone at 2078 Fifth Avenue in Harlem, New York that had the reputation for being an eyesore within the neighborhood. It was where brothers, Langley & Homer Collyer lived.
On March 21, 1947, a man who chose to remain anonymous contacted New York’s 122nd Police Precinct about a terrible smell that was emanating from the home. It was the unmistakable odor of decomposition. Police were very familiar with the home since locals often reported strange goings-on at that very house.
When an officer arrived at the home, he was unable to find a way inside since the doors were locked, there was no doorbell & the windows were either boarded up or covered in iron grillwork. As authorities did finally gain access to the home, they were utterly stunned by what they found.
Homer & Langley Collyer were the descendants of a wealthy American blood line. Homer & Langley were born to parents Herman & Susie Gray. While Herman was a gynecologist, Susie was a talented opera singer. Both boys attended college & while Homer pursued a law degree, Langley obtained a degree in Electrical & Mechanical Engineering. Herman was said to be a very eccentric man who would paddle his canoe to work at the City Hospital on Blackwell’s Island, carrying the canoe to & from his home.
In 1909 Herman purchased the brownstone on Fifth Avenue with hopes of one day turning it into a sanitarium, a place for those suffering from chronic illness to seek medical treatment. However, this was an idea that Susie was not on board with & it sadly led to the demise of their marriage in 1909. After their split, Herman purchased another house for himself while Susie remained in the brownstone with her sons.
Herman died in 1923 & left his estate to his sons & six years later, Susie passed away in 1929. With both of their parents now gone, Homer & Langley officially had the three story brownstone to themselves. Not only did the home contain all of their items, but with the passing of their parents, they inherited all of their belongings as well. The brothers struggled to part with their parent’s things so they simply brought everything into the 1,500 square foot home.
Although Langley was a talented piano player who played at Carnegie Hall, he never appeared to hold down a job for any length of time while Homer did some work for an insurance company from 1929 to 1931, walking eight miles to & from the office each day. They both taught Sunday school at Trinity Church.
As time ticked by, the pair gradually withdrew into their own world, a trajectory that was increased after the death of their mother. By 1932, Homer was forced to stop working as he began to go blind while Langley quickly followed his brother into a life of seclusion, acting as his caretaker.
Despite their avoidance of the world, Langley began to secretly retreat from their home to collect the items that they both loved: musical instruments, books, various machines & things that piqued their curiosity. But as time went by, these random collections morphed into an odd fascination with things such as phone books, furniture, cameras, clocks, stoves, bicycles & even human organs in a jar, an interest that came from their father’s medical career.
Their love of stuff grew to an incomprehensible level that included 25,000 books, fourteen pianos, hundreds of yards of cloth & thousands of tin cans. It ultimately amounted to a measurement that suggested more than 100 tons of stockpiled possessions.
As time went on & Homer fully lost his vision, Langley began feeding, bathing & reading to him. He heartbreakingly told reporters that he was saving all of the newspapers for a time when Homer regained his sight & could catch up on the news. Not only did Homer never regain his eyesight, but he gradually became paralyzed from rheumatism & fully relied on Langley. After 1940, Homer never left their home again.
Since the brothers were skeptical of doctors, Langley tried various diets as a way to treat Homer’s ailments. Since their father had been a doctor & they inherited his plethora of medical books, they felt that a doctor wouldn’t have anything more to add than what they could read in these books. He fed his brother a steady diet of peanut butter, black bread & made sure he ate 100 oranges a week, believing they could cure his blindness, according to an interview Langley did.
As a way to avoid other humans, Langley would leave the house at night, sometimes walking as far as six miles for the specific bread he fed Homer. When he was seen, Langley was described as a timid man with blue eyes with a flowing mane of long white hair & an equally long mustache. He wore patchworked clothing & was said to be a little odd & eccentric.
As the years rolled by, the house gradually fell into disrepair & the men were seen less & less, Homer, not at all. In one instance, the bank tried to repossess the house when the mortgage wasn’t getting paid, breaking the door down at one point in 1942. Langley began to dip into their still-significant savings account & paid off the entirety of the mortgage with one final check of $6,700 ($132,000 in 2025).
However, they were without a source of income & the city shut down their utilities due to lack of payment. Because Langley was a skilled engineer, he managed to rig an old Ford Model T the family owned, to act as a generator although it didn’t end up working. He utilized pumps at local parks as a source of water & used a small kerosene heater to keep them warm during the cold winter months.
When Langley was interviewed by a reporter from The New York World-Telegram in 1938, he expressed that their way of living without a telephone & without opening their mail was freeing. During the interview, the reporter was not allowed entry into the house while Langley explained that he dressed in tatters as a way to protect himself from being robbed. Langley was outspoken about his fear of burglars & discussed that after neighborhood kids threw rocks through their windows, they boarded them over & wired their doors shut for added security.
In 1939 the electric company forced their way into the Collyer home to remove two old gas meters, something that attracted a crowd of 1,000 onlookers, according to an article in the New York Times. Neighbors were highly fascinated & curious with what was going on within the four walls of the home that the brothers shared. Who were they & why did they never come out?
As society changed around them, their isolation only heightened the curiosity & attention of their neighbors & various rumors swirled around. Some believed they were hiding a large sum of money inside. With this attention, there were a few break-in attempts so Langley began utilizing the objects he collected as a way to create a complex maze of traps to protect themselves inside should someone gain access to their home.
So on the fateful night of March 21, 1947 when the anonymous caller complained about the stench of death emanating from the Collyer’s home, a patrol car was dispatched. The officers stood outside unsure of what to do; not only were the doors & windows locked & covered, but the brothers had stopped paying their phone bill years earlier.
Once an emergency squad finally broke through a window, they discovered that the house was inaccessible due to the sheer volume of items inside. It ended up taking seven police officers & officials from the New York housing commission to begin clearing a path. It was a shocking sight; the team found that the home was filled with a heaping pile of junk. There were newspapers, boxes & chairs piled up to the point that the home was basically impenetrable. Slowly but steadily the team of seven began gradually tossing the contents of the home onto the street below to move their way further into the home.
Meanwhile, an officer managed to break through a window of the second floor & like the officers one floor down, he slowly fought his way through a pile of junk that reached the ceiling. There were random, obscure items that included parts of sewing machines, a two-headed baby doll, a human skeleton & pickled human organs from their father’s medical collection, old umbrellas that were tethered together & piles upon piles of empty boxes.
After five hours of digging, the team finally came across 63-year-old Homer Collyer’s body; he was sitting in a small makeshift cubby of newspapers that were piled to the ceiling. He wore a tattered bathrobe, his body was hunched over in his armchair with his head resting over his knees. The medical examiner determined that he died from starvation as well as heart disease about ten hours before his body was discovered.
However, there was still no sign of Langley & as word spread of Homer’s body being found inside, neighbors began to speculate as to his whereabouts. Many wondered if he boarded a bus headed to Atlantic City while police assumed he fled the state from guilt from his brother’s death. They wondered if he had been the person to place the anonymous phone call so that his brother’s body could be recovered. Meanwhile, multiple state officials dispatched officers to search for him.
Fifty-three people came for Homer’s burial on April 1 at Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn, but when Langley wasn’t one of the 53, police began to question if he had fled after all. Regardless, days continued to pass while a team remained at the brownstone, combing their way through the never ending piles as a crowd of about 2,000 spectators gathered in the street. X-ray machines were brought out along with the 120 tons of junk, more than the weight of a blue whale. There were baby carriages, bowling balls, two organs & eight live cats.
After nearly three weeks of ongoing clean up, a crew was at the home on April 9 when workmen came across a tunnel that was formed by a suitcase, bundles of newspapers, books & three metal bread boxes when they noticed a human foot. It was here where 61-year-old Langley Collyer’s body lay. There was a chest of drawers to one side & a rusty set of bedsprings on the other. He died only ten feet away from his brother.
Langley was wearing three jackets, a red flannel bathrobe over jeans which were over brown pants that were worn over khaki pants & a large pair of overalls with no underwear. There was an onion sack that he wore as an ascot & a burlap gunny sack pinned to his shoulders, the layers of clothing to protect himself from the harsh cold of winter.
It was a highly unpleasant sight as Langley’s remains had been partially eaten by parasites & vermin, especially rats. His body proved to be in the later stages of death & the tip about the stench of decomposition was no doubt from Langley’s death as Homer had died only about ten hours before help arrived.
In the end, investigators determined that Langley died while he was walking through his tunnel of debris, bringing his brother food when hundreds of pounds of debris from his own booby trap fell upon him & he slowly suffocated to death. Authorities estimate that he died on March 9, nearly two weeks before Homer. Unable to move, Homer likely starved to death after his brother died, sitting, unable to move without any food or water.
It’s very likely that before Langley suffocated to death, he tried to pull his way out from the pile that lay upon him when he realized he was unable to do so. Since he was so close to where Homer sat, they likely continued to speak with one another as they each waited for death to come. Langley would have known that without his ability to care for his brother, this was also a death sentence for Homer.
Although the Collyer’s neighbors often wondered what went on beyond the doors & windows that were boarded over & shut tight, the extent of their hoarder’s den was unlike anything anyone involved had ever seen. Since the early 1930s, they had been progressively collecting their items, sealing themselves inside their home.
Under a modern lens, it’s clear that Langley & Homer were afflicted & trapped by more than just their things. Langley at least, must have been suffering from hoarding disorder, an ongoing difficulty throwing away or parting with possessions because the person afflicted believes that these things need to be saved regardless of their actual value. Cases can range from mild to severe; those that are severe can seriously affect daily living. It’s clear that Langley was suffering from a severe case of hoarding disorder.
Sadly, Homer’s blindness & inability to move kept him physically confined to the house while Langley’s mental afflictions prevented him from leaving while his hoarding disorder slowly caused their home to become a death trap.
The home was demolished in July after the last 15 tons of debris had been removed. In 1965, the lot became a small park nestled within the city that was later named Collyer Brothers Park in the 1990s.
Despite the fact that the brothers had kept to themselves, their deaths & what was discovered inside their home brought the story of their compulsive hoarding into the public’s consciousness. Sadly, their isolation & hoarding likely crossed over to a fully fledged untreated mental illness & in the end, their home consumed them.
References:
- The New York Times: 128th St. & Fifth Ave, former site of the Harlem house where the Collyer brothers kept all that stuff; wondering whether a park should keep its name
- The Pittsburgh Press: Langley kept faith with brother to the end, died under junk near him in their ‘castle’
- Christopher Roosen: The sad story of the Collyer brothers & the question of ‘do we own our stuff or does our stuff own us?’
- Mayo Clinic: Hoarding disorder
- Ati: The Collyer brothers: The original hoarders of the 1930s
- National Crime Scene Cleanup: Strange Deaths: The Collyer brothers
- Cabinet Magazine: Buried Alive: At home with the Collyer brothers
- Gotham to Go: The incredible history behind the Collyer Brothers Park in Harlem
