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    Ghosty Men: The Strange but True Story of the Collyer Brothers, New York's Greatest Hoarders, An Urban Historical
    Ghosty Men: The Strange but True Story of the Collyer Brothers, New York's Greatest Hoarders, An Urban Historical
    Ghosty Men: The Strange but True Story of the Collyer Brothers, New York's Greatest Hoarders, An Urban Historical
    Ebook132 pages2 hours

    Ghosty Men: The Strange but True Story of the Collyer Brothers, New York's Greatest Hoarders, An Urban Historical

    By Franz Lidz

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    A true tale of changing New York by Franz Lidz, whose Unstrung Heroes is a classic of hoarder lore.
    Homer and Langley Collyer moved into their handsome brownstone in white, upper-class Harlem in 1909. By 1947, however, when the fire department had to carry Homer's body out of the house he hadn't left in twenty years, the neighborhood had degentrified, and their house was a fortress of junk: in an attempt to preserve the past, Homer and Langley held on to everything they touched.
    The scandal of Homer's discovery, the story of his life, and the search for Langley, who was missing at the time, rocked the city; the story was on the front page of every newspaper for weeks. A quintessential New York story of quintessential New York characters, Ghosty Men is a perfect fit for Bloomsbury's Urban Historicals series.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury USA
    Release dateDec 22, 2008
    ISBN9781596918467
    Ghosty Men: The Strange but True Story of the Collyer Brothers, New York's Greatest Hoarders, An Urban Historical

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    Reviews for Ghosty Men

    3.5/5

    60 ratings10 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Is it bad that, after reading this book, these men became my instant heroes? You'll have to read the book (ha, ha-- librarian trick) to find out. From my point of view, they're ensconsed warmly amongst their piles of junk, their tottering piles of old newspaper, their stacks upon stacks of boxes, their miscellania gathered from the sides of the road and trash cans-- four floors of bliss! Protection from the outside world! A true, not-metaphorical barrier from the slings of everyday life! I sleep (candid admission!) with piles of junk surrounding me on my bed. To be surrounded by piles of junk in an entire decaying old New York mansion? Indescribable bliss. My only complaint about this book is that it does not spend quite enough time on the Collyer Brothers themselves, dwelling more instead on Uncle Arthur (fascinating himself). But Five-plus stars to the lifestyle.
    • 4/5
      This short book is a good, not great, introduction to the fascinating Collyer brothers of Harlem, who mesmerized New York in the 1930s and 40s with their extreme eccentricities and mysterious house. Turned out the house was filled with well over 120 tons of junk. Lidz spends 40% of the book discussing his own uncle, also a hoarder, as a means of getting inside the heads of these long-dead men, who left no biographies. It doesn't quite work. A fuller story waits to be told about Homer and Langley Collyer. This provides just enough to leave this reader wanting more.
    • 3/5
      This tells of the Collyer Brothers who died in 1947 in their junk-filled four-story home in Harlem in New York. I have long been interested in this amazing event, and read on 11 Jan 2004 with appreciation Marcis Davenport's novel, My Brother's Keeper, based on the weird happening. This book is true, but tells the story mixed with humor and also tells of the author's nutty uncles, who also collected junk. There are humoroous events, mostly about the author's uncles, and I found I resented that story being mixed in with the Collyer story. One stands in amzement that the frightful conditions existing in the Collyer home persisted as long as they did. I have know of situations of people living in junk infested homes and they have been forcibly removed because they were a danger to themselves--as the Collyer brothers certainly were. On the other hand, one should not find a person mentally ill just because they have an unusual attitude to the way they want to live. But at some point society failed the Collyer brothers in letting them endanger and then lose their lives in the junk which filled their huge home. I would have preferred a more documentary type book, and some pictures of the people and the home would have been welcome.
    • 3/5
      The sad, strange true story of the Collyer brothers, famous recluses and notorious hoarders.
    • 4/5
      This book held my interest during a long wait at a doctor's office, so that much can be said for it. However, having not read the book or seen the movie Unstrung Heroes, I wasn't prepared for the extent to which it was about the author's uncle. I was really only interested in the Homer and Langley Collyer, the famous hoarding brothers from bygone days (and the subject of E.L. Doctorow's novel, Homer and Langley, which I plan to read soon). At 161 padded pages, it seemed like a long magazine article, rather than an actual book.
    • 5/5
      I don't know why it took me so long to get around to this short but fascinating book. It's the story of both the Collyer brothers, New York's legendary hoarders, and his own uncle, one of a family of oddballs, who also accumulated junk. All these hoarders are united by an inability to discern "valuable" things like Steinway pianos from scraps of paper they find on the street. Everything must be saved.What struck me about the book is its essential sweetness and sympathy toward its subjects. He's in no hurry to diagnose or judge either the Collyers or his uncles for their strange habits, just to tell their story. He's written a book about all his uncles and now I'm anxious to read that, too.
    • 4/5
      Both funny and sad, "Ghosty Men" by Franz Lidz, a tragedy that reads like a comedy, is the extraordinary, moving story of the real-life predicament of Homer and Langley Collyer, the New York "Hermits of Harlem", recluses in their four storey brownstone house from 1929 (when their mother died) to 1947 - Homer never venturing out after losing his sight in 1934, Langley rarely emerging and then usually only after dark. Barricaded in their fortress of solitude, appalling pong everywhere, inches thick coating of dust over everything, surrounded by stockpiles of boxes, crates and stacks of yellowing newspaper (hoarded over decades) with a mazelike network of passages, living out a ghost-like existence in a void of dead and empty, meaningless time, the Collyers remained static in a time-warp year-upon-year, decades that saw Harlem transformed into a rundown black ghetto. Sensitive in his approach to the Collyers, affording them respect and dignity, Lidz cross-cuts in alternate chapters to his own eccentric Uncle Arthur, who like Langley Collyer, spent a lifetime amassing an astonishing assortment of junk, never passing up an opportunity to lift the lid of a dumpster. Uncle Arthur chapters contain hilarious moments, heartbreak and fascinating insights into old-time New York characters and a New York that is no longer - but for this reader, eager to get back to the Collyers, proved something of a sideshow distraction from the billed main feature. In 1938, following years of reclusive anonymity, the Collyers suddenly found themselves catapulted into the public arena, thrust into the harsh glare of the national media spotlight when the story of their bizarre existence was widely reported. Much later, when Homer was found dead in 1947 and word spread that Langley had disappeared, there followed an enormous explosion of hyped-up media ballyhoo with thousands of gaping onlookers congregating outside the Collyer home in the hope of catching sight of the missing Langley. Police searching the building had to negotiate barricaded entry-points and huge junk-piles inside, rigged with nasty booby-traps to repel intruders. It seemed that everyone had an explanation to offer about the root cause of the Collyers tragic situation, with Journalists, Psychiatrists, Christian Socialists all having their say . . . even the famous novelist Howard Fast chipping in. It seems ironic that the lifestyle of Homer and Langley, New York's greatest hoarders who withdrew from the outside world for solitude and anonymity in their brownstone fortress of junk, should become the subject of such intense public focus, for that very reason!! Recommended!
    • 4/5
      What an interesting (and short!) read.Lidz talks about the bizarre Collyer brothers and parallels their obsessional collecting life with his own Uncles, who lived 3 blocks away and were also horders.
    • 5/5
      Is it bad that, after reading this book, these men became my instant heroes? You'll have to read the book (ha, ha-- librarian trick) to find out. From my point of view, they're ensconsed warmly amongst their piles of junk, their tottering piles of old newspaper, their stacks upon stacks of boxes, their miscellania gathered from the sides of the road and trash cans-- four floors of bliss! Protection from the outside world! A true, not-metaphorical barrier from the slings of everyday life! I sleep (candid admission!) with piles of junk surrounding me on my bed. To be surrounded by piles of junk in an entire decaying old New York mansion? Indescribable bliss. My only complaint about this book is that it does not spend quite enough time on the Collyer Brothers themselves, dwelling more instead on Uncle Arthur (fascinating himself). But Five-plus stars to the lifestyle.
    • 5/5
      Fabulous, riveting well-told tale of obsession. Much better than the Doctorow novel.

    Book preview

    Ghosty Men - Franz Lidz

    Ghosty Men

    Ghosty Men

    The Strange but True Story of the Collyer Brothers,

    New York's Greatest Hoarders

    An Urban Historical by

    FRANZ LIDZ

    For those sardonic sisters, Gogo and Daisy Daisy

    All art is the same - an attempt to fill an empty space.

    - Samuel Beckett

    Contents

    Chapter 1 Homer Leaves Home

    Chapter 2 The Lost Collyer Brother

    Chapter 3 Helen and the Hermits

    Chapter 4 Homer's Odyssey

    Chapter 5 Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On

    Chapter 6 Harlem Degentrified

    Chapter 7 Arthurian Legend

    Chapter 8 Just a Greater Walk with Thee

    Chapter 9 The Citadel Saved

    Chapter 10 Uncle Arthur Meets His Match

    Chapter 11 Ballyhoo

    Chapter 12 Requiem for a Featherweight

    Chapter 13 Brother, Where Art Thou?

    Chapter 14 The Junkman Cometh

    Chapter 15 If He Hollers, Let Him Go

    Chapter 16 Fool For Love

    Chapter 17 Laugh Boys Laugh

    Chapter 18 Yard Sale of the Century

    Chapter 19 If You Knew Susie

    Chapter 20 Subterranean Homesick Blues

    Acknowledgments

    A Note on the Author

    Chapter 1

    Homer Leaves Home

    Homer Collyer left the moldering Harlem brownstone for the first time in seven years in a khaki canvas sack, lowered down a fire truck ladder like dirty laundry in a duffel bag.

    Already famous as the Hermits of Harlem, Homer, blind, paralyzed, and sixty-five, and his brother, Langley, sixty-one, had lived in the four-story mansion since 1909, gradually filling it with . . . stuff.

    Harlem was fashionable, bourgeois, and white when the Collyers moved in, but they became reclusive in a neighborhood that became increasingly shabby, poor, and black.

    Stray cats crying in the night were perhaps the first to sense that death had come to the house at Fifth Avenue and 128th Street.

    For decades, Langley had fed a multitude of cats around midnight when he set out on his own nocturnal rounds, scavenging through the trash bins of the city. A wraithlike figure in ragged, Dickensian clothes, the old hoodoo rarely left the house during the daylight hours. He had created a sanctuary of junk for himself and his older brother. But on this morning - during the first dark hours of spring on March 21, 1947 - the cats remained hungry and unfed.

    Dawn had already come when police received a call from a man who identified himself as Charles Smith.

    There's a dead man at 2078 Fifth Avenue.

    Name of the deceased? asked the cop on duty.

    Homer Collyer.

    About ten o'clock, a police inspector and about fifteen patrolmen arrived at the decaying house. Reports of Homer's death had often brought police to the Collyer home over the years. But they had been inside only once.

    Five years earlier, a police sergeant named John Collins, checking one more rumor that Homer had died, persuaded Langley to let him in through a basement door intricately wired shut against intruders. Collins stumbled along behind Langley for half an hour as he led the way through a pitch-black basement and upstairs through a booby-trapped labyrinth of rubbish.

    He found Homer alive and indignant.

    I switched on my flashlight, he said. "And there was Homer, sitting up like a mummy. He was on a cot, a burlap bag beneath him and an old overcoat on the foot of the cot.

    I am Homer L. Collyer, the lawyer, the old man said in a deep voice. I want your name and shield number. I am not dead!

    Why are you sitting with your knees up to your chin? the sergeant asked.

    My legs are doubled by rheumatism. I can never lie down again.

    So on this spring morning in 1947, new rumors of death brought a crowd of hundreds and then thousands to wait on the Harlem corner in a cold drizzle while police tried for two hours to get in. The cops closed off the street as it filled up with newspaper reporters, newsreel photographers, and cameramen from a new medium - television.

    The house looked deserted. The doors were bolted and the ground-floor windows were covered with rusted iron grilles. The windows were all broken, shuttered, or stuffed with paper.

    Police chopped a hole in the front door. Fumes foul with age and mildew billowed forth. The police peered into a solid wall of rotting junk amassed over the decades: shattered sawhorses and fractured frying pans, crushed umbrellas and rusted bi cycles, broken baby carriages and smashed Christmas trees, chipped chandeliers and tattered toys, and everywhere, everywhere, newspapers - thousands and thousands of newspapers, stuffed under furniture, stacked in unsteady piles against walls, strewn in yellowing drifts across the floor.

    At a quarter after twelve, the fire department ran a ladder up to a second-story window. Patrolman William Parker climbed up and into the still heart of the hoard. He flashed his light into a cavelike burrow.

    One DOA, he shouted down.

    The dead man was Homer Collyer. He sat hunched on the floor about six feet from the window, his body emaciated, his knees pulled up to his chin. He wore only a tattered gray dressing gown. His cheeks were drawn; his dirty white hair and beard uncut for years hung in tangled locks to his waist. His right hand rested near a shriveled apple, a container of rancid milk, and a copy of the Philadelphia Jewish Morning Journal from Sunday, February 22, 1920.

    The place is like a maze, said Detective John Loughery, who followed Parker through the window. We have to bend double to get through it all.

    They dropped Homer to the sidewalk in the khaki body bag. A mortuary ambulance took him away. An autopsy showed that his stomach and digestive tract were empty. The medical examiner said he died of neglect.

    At five o'clock the police boarded up the house.

    Where's Langley? murmured the crowd. Where's Langley?

    Chapter 2

    The Lost Collyer Brother

    My mother used to call my uncle Arthur the lost Collyer brother. I was never sure if by lost she meant missing, helpless, or that his real name was Langley.

    I already knew who Langley was because my father told me cautionary tales about the Collyers as bedtime stories. He had a family full of Collyer brothers, and Uncle Arthur seemed to me much like Langley. Every time I went to visit I remembered the haunted house of the Collyers. Their story has stuck with me to this day, dragged along by my fear that Uncle Arthur would end up like Homer, lost in his junk.

    My mom regarded her brother-in-law pretty much the way Tom Sawyer's aunt Polly regarded Huckleberry Finn. They both cordially hated and dreaded the irresistible attraction of vagabond outsiders who ignored order, convention, and even cleanliness.

    Huck Finn scuffed through the dirt lanes of nineteenth century St. Petersburg, Missouri, dressed in hand-me-down clothes in perennial bloom and fluttering with rags. Uncle Arthur shuffles through the asphalt streets of twenty-first-century Brooklyn outfitted in layers of Salvation Army overcoats the color of bad weather.

    While pirating with Huck on the Mississippi, Tom Sawyer's pockets harbored a lump of chalk, an India-rubber ball, three fishhooks, and that kind of marbles known as 'sure 'nough crystal.' While scavenging along the East River, Uncle Arthur's pockets often brim with his own schoolboy treasures: corks, bottle caps, and knots of used shoelaces.

    Huck and Tom. Homer and Langley. The twains meet in Uncle Arthur, a small, lopsided, eternally boyish octogenarian with gentle brown eyes and ears like teacup handles. An urban prospector, he mines the neighborhoods taxi drivers ignore, trashmen neglect, and police suspect. And just as Tom admired Huck and delighted in his forbidden company, I am enchanted by Uncle Arthur.

    Mostly, I admire his commitment to extreme squalor. Like the Collyers, Uncle Arthur has turned squalor into an art form. In my childhood memoir, Unstrung Heroes, I described spending the night of my eighth birthday at an apartment he then had in the Bronx. Towers of cereal cartons and soapboxes honeycombed the living room and spread into the kitchen.

    Uncle Arthur's space was as enclosing, consoling, as Tom Sawyer's cave. Great jumbles of nubby pencils and chewed swizzle sticks crunched underfoot. Second-, third-, and seventh-hand books leaned against the windows as bulwarks against reality. Newspapers - thousands and thousands of newspapers - were everywhere: stuffed under furniture, stacked in unsteady piles against walls, strewn in yellowing drifts across the floor. Uncle Arthur's closets creaked with the overspill.

    In Uncle Arthur's vault of shifting, sunlit dust, his papers close around you like a dark forest. Without him for a guide, you ran the risk of setting off one of his Collyerlike booby traps patched together from frayed rope, jam jars, telephone books. Still, at eight, I couldn't resist charging through the litter of letters and cards and coupons. Every misstep dislodged a big

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