Lost in the maze of a backlogged system one of my managers made reference today to the Collyer Brothers. He shook his head as no one at the table got the reference. Tonight I took it upon myself to investigate and of course share the information on who these brothers were. Two American brothers, from a middle class family, both lived in a Harlem located brown stone throughout their lives, seeing both their parents pass away. Their lives spanned a great social change in Harlem, moving from being an area of affluence to the distinctly black neighbourhood we know today with the brothers earning a name for eccentricity and snobbishness. The brothers become paranoid of the outside world, burgled on one occassion as rumours spread of their wealth. The brothers were in fact unemployed for decades, Columbia University educated and professionally trained, they put their skills to use in engineering booby traps to safe guard their house, eventually progressing to a point where they were barricaded in the house from the inside. Langley, the younger brother wandered the streets at night gathering rain water and managing to gather food to sustain a diet based on one hundred oranges a week, peanut butter and bread. His brother Homer’s health degenerated quickly to a point where he lost his sight. Decades of hoarding meant over 84 tonnes of material was eventually recovered from the house. An anonymus tip was made to the police in March 1947, reporting a dead body was in their house. Police and a special emergency team finally accessed the house, finding Homers body - there was no sign of foul play, he had died from malnutrition and cardiac arrest. A search began for Langley, needlessly it turns out. He had in fact been crushed beneath a pile of hoarded newspapers navigating his way through their mess to reach his brother with food, his body ravaged by rats. I can only imagine the labyrinthine maze of items packing out their house that meant it took 3 weeks to find the second brothers body, lieing only 10 feet away.  Bizarre.