What would happen if you never took out the trash? Obviously your home would start to resemble a garbage dump. Although this is a thought experiment that probably never crossed your mind before, it’s a daily reality for many more people than you’d expect. The introduction of the Hoarders series explains:
Compulsive Hoarding is a mental disorder marked by an obsessive need to acquire and keep things, even if the items are worthless, hazardous, or unsanitary. Up to 22 million North Americans have hoarding disorder.
I seldom have occasion to say anything nice about TV shows, but Hoarders has much cautionary value. The series began in 2009, and has been producing new episodes ever since. If your place needs a Superfund abatement, it will provide plenty of motivation. Watching the show is a great way to kickstart spring cleaning, and there’s nothing wrong with beginning that early! If you want to scare the devil out of kids who refuse to clean their room, look no further. Matt Paxton, one of the extreme cleaning specialists frequently appearing on the show, wrote The Secret Lives of Hoarders, which will be helpful for those who want a deeper dive into the muck.

What Does a Hoarded House Look Like?
Circumstances typically differ from one mess to another. Sometimes the show’s participants admit that they’re hoarders. Others deny that they have a problem. Those ones may insist that they’re “collectors.” There may be some actual collections in the heap: purses, teddy bears, creepy dolls, books, electronics, old lamps, kitsch, etc. Still, I have to wonder – what exactly would someone expect to do with a big stack of old VCRs? A lot of what actually gets collected is dust.
Many other cases involve thrift store “bargains” piled to the ceiling, acquired from years of retail therapy. (If you’re guessing that hoarders have a lot of trouble differentiating between “want” and “need,” you’re right.) Often a large part of the hoard consists of unmistakable trash. That much should be simple to clear out, since garbage is easily identifiable and has no usefulness or sentimental value, but this hasn’t happened for years. Then there’s an intermediate category of junky but serviceable items, or things that just need simple repairs. What to do with those is a tougher decision. Although they could be made useful, the problem is that they’re in a huge pile blocking multiple rooms, so most of it will have to go to the landfill to make the house liveable.
What the hoarders have in common is that their houses are stacked with junk, typically four to eight feet high. All rooms that are not completely packed are accessible only through narrow trails. Sometimes it’s necessary to climb over boxes, trash, and whatever else. Avalanches are a common problem, which sometimes occur while filming the show, and these represent a potentially fatal hazard. Dying under a pile of junk is an unenviable fate! Even the front door may be blocked off, such as for a New Yorker who had to jump up to the fire escape and crawl through a window to get to his apartment. He had to sleep on the streets as if he were homeless, since he’d hoarded out the place so badly. If a hoarder suffers a medical emergency, it will be difficult to impossible for the EMTs to enter. Fire hazards are common in such situations, which easily could end with the hoarder getting roasted.
When interior space runs out, the junk may spill out into the yard, creating a public nuisance. Sometimes this might even be a large lot filled with junk cars, scrap metal, construction materials, etc. This is one of the reasons why hoarders often become frequent fliers on the municipal code enforcement board’s naughty list. Often, they seek help offered by the show because they’re at risk of having their property impounded. Clean up or become homeless – tough decision, right?
Some hoards are relatively clean. Still, dust is inevitable, and it’s hard to avoid at least some spiders, bugs, and perhaps even rodents. When trash and rotting food are left out in the open, things get far worse. The home will be crawling with the usual chupacabras, and it will smell terrible. Although the occupants are used to it, newcomers sometimes vomit upon breathing the air. (Pro tip – bring a gas mask.) If the hoard has been piled up long enough, then snow shovels will be the most efficient tools to excavate the crumbly layers of debris. It’s worst of all when there’s animal waste, animal carcasses, or human waste. As far as I’ve seen, the show hasn’t unearthed any human carcasses, but it can happen. In some cases, the most efficient way to improve the property would involve a low-yield tac nuke, even though the lawn would glow in the dark for a while.
Obviously there’s a matter of degree involved. Matt Paxton’s book The Secret Lives of Hoarders describes five stages of clutter, from messy but with no exceptional problems all the way up to a disaster area very unfit for habitation. Houses appearing in the show generally fall into the higher categories. At that point, rooms are barely functional for their intended purpose, or not at all. One can’t park in the garage, chill out in the living room, or enjoy a meal in the dining room. The kitchen will have one working burner or microwave oven, if any. One would be lucky to have enough space left on the bed just to sleep, and horizontal recreation is out of the question.
In a house hoarded that badly, there’s a good chance that some or all of the utilities are off. If something breaks, repairs to water pipes, gas lines, or electrical wiring are impossible. Moreover, bills might have gotten lost and gone unpaid for a long time. If so, then the bathroom won’t have a working shower or toilet. (This necessitates the hoarder to find some creative alternative means, which can get remarkably disgusting. For one lady, who seemed like a space case from Epsilon Eridani, this involved doing her business in jugs and throwing them into the yard. Then there was a nice San Francisco house in which the toilet stopped working, so the brothers living there started using the bathtub instead, which got full to the brim and resembled a hog lagoon.) The opening of the refrigerator, typically for the first time in years, is a ritual on the show. The noisome results would tax H. P. Lovecraft’s imagination to describe. Sometimes the fridge will be crawling with maggots and other insects inside. Then, as often as not, the hoarder steps up wanting to save some or even all of the rotten contents.

Who Hoards?
Are these people just slobs? Although they obviously meet the definition, usually there’s more to it than that. Matt Paxton’s book goes in depth into psychological conditions that can lead to hoarding. If you watch the show and notice a lot of irrational thinking, you’re right. Some of the hoarders are nice people. Unfortunately, the others can be pretty crabby. As one might expect, stubbornness is common, in many cases all the way up to full cranio-rectal impaction.
How do things get that way? Often there’s an origin story – a difficult childhood, abuse, a death in the family, a catastrophic breakup, etc. Sometimes they inherit a large pile of belongings and save it all rather than sorting through it. Perhaps a business folded and the inventory was brought back home. However, most cases involve retail therapy. There may be plans to have a yard sale, but it never happens. Then there are those with endless projects – typically handcrafts or repairs – and the hoarded supplies could give them something to do for the next ten years if they actually worked full time at it.
As for the show’s demographics, blacks and whites are the most represented, though Hispanics and Asians occasionally appear. (I tend to feel the most judgmental about whites and Asians; living in a trash heap is especially unbecoming for gente de razón.) Mixed couples are well-represented, something else to warm my heart. With occasional exceptions, the hoarders are elderly or in their late middle ages. Even if they had a sudden epiphany, it would be quite difficult for them to undertake an excavation all by themselves. Still, something must be done, and Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Despite certain social class stereotypes, quite often the hoarders are fairly bourgeois. A few are rich, and just can’t part with the dusty collectibles crowding them out of their homes. There are hardly any hoarded apartments on the show, though I’ve seen some remarkably messy ones in real life. Perhaps a selection process occurs. That is, downscale hoarders might simply pack up the necessary essentials and move onto the next apartment, leaving the prior landlord with the perturbing excavation job.
Often friends and relatives will appear on the show. They assist with labor during the cleanup, and obviously there’s the human interest element. Many hoarders are partnered. Sometimes both contribute to the hoard, but sometimes a spouse resents the hell out of the situation. Older children usually are quite bitter, which is understandable. They had to grow up in a filthy house, couldn’t bring friends over, and in some cases didn’t have a working shower. Obviously being smelly and unpopular through no fault of their own made them miserable. They don’t want to bring over the grandkids to visit a disaster area. As for young children, although they’ve grown up with the situation and one might assume they’re used to it, they have a surprisingly healthy awareness that this is abnormal. They’re generally happy to do their part, and greatly relieved that finally relief is at hand. Quite often, relatives will have drama with each other, and occasionally walk off the show in a snit.
What happens if the Augean stables never get cleaned? This will mean that, despite no lack of encouragement by family to deal with it, including multiple refused offers to help, the day will come when the hoarder dies with a pile of junk. This will have to be cleaned up by the heirs. This involves lots of heavy labor and tremendous stress. It’s a disservice to one’s heirs to let things get that way. What’s the point, anyway? Most of these people are elderly, and it’s not like they’ll be able to take their crap with them.
What Does Decluttering Involve?
The first part of the show describes the personal history of the hoarders. Then one of the organizers goes on a tour of the interior. This typically includes lots of scary footage and gross-out shots. The fun really begins when the cleanup is underway. Sometimes the hoarder is a no-show, leaving a dozen or so organizers, relatives, and dump truck drivers twiddling their thumbs for hours. The explanation (though put in more eloquent psychological terms) is that the hoarders are jerking everyone’s chains to reassure themselves that they’re in control of the cleanup. Or – so I figure – maybe the ones who do that are just irresponsible slobs who think nothing of wasting other people’s time.
When work begins, items are brought out onto the lawn for sorting. Much more often than not, the process comes to a screeching halt right there. The hoarder can’t bear to part with anything and wants to keep every damn item. “But I was going to make a prooooject out of it!” “But I could make five bucks on this at a yard sale!” “But I want those clothes, yes, that entire mountain!” During all the hemming and hawing, dump trucks are lined up at the curb, standing empty. The problem should be obvious, of course. The house only has so much interior volume, and has been packed with about five to ten times more than it reasonably can hold without looking like a pigsty. Reshuffling it won’t do much, even if they brought in an Olympic gold medalist at Tetris. So something has to give.
The show always has psychological heavy-hitters there to deal with the cranio-rectal impaction. Usually this comes with mixed results. For one example, I recall a young Canadian lady who was agonizing over a huge pile of empty cardboard boxes for three days. Why not just recycle them as the Goddess intended? What was so special about them? It’s hard to think of a more common manufactured product than a cardboard box.
Usually an epiphany happens by day two or three, though not always. The hoarder quits horsing around and gets with the program. Rooms are emptied, sometimes at a frenetic pace since the crew might only have a couple days left. The exterior has to be ship-shape enough to get the property off of the city’s radar. Usually they can pull off a miracle and complete the excavation. If not, at least the trails between rooms have to be widened to meet safety standards. A modest cleanup job might result in dump trucks carting away ten tons of crap. Other hoards can be much larger than that.
With the junk removed, the house’s true condition appears. Carpets will need to be changed out, walls will need repainting, and sometimes the furniture is ruined. That might be just the beginning. Rodents and other critters can take their toll. Sometimes a lot of problems are laid bare. Houses can sustain structural damage when they’re under constant strain by priceless treasures that exceed the engineered mechanical load. Deferred maintenance can lead to water damage or other problems.
As needed, contractors go in to fix that up and get the utilities back online. Plumbers change out toilets that haven’t been flushed in years. Appliances may have to be replaced, including refrigerators that look like a biology experiment gone oh so horribly wrong. A cleanup crew goes in to zhoosh everything else. Then, at the finale, the hoarder is brought back, looking stunned to find a house that has empty floor space and doesn’t look like a garbage dump.
Sometimes the repairs will exceed the value of the house. In one case, a black chicken lady in the boonies lucked out; although her trailer was ruined, a mobile home manufacturer donated a refurb model which looked like a palace compared to her old one. Things don’t always work out that fortunately, though. If serious problems aren’t fixed, then the property might be condemned, leaving the occupants homeless. In that case, cleaning up the godawful mess turns out to be a case of destroying the village to save the village. Ironically, all those “bargains” packed to the ceiling turned out to be very costly indeed!
During the show, the psychology wonks try to teach them about making better choices. Also, the hoarders will be offered aftercare sessions to teach them better organization. Usually they aren’t interested. Although they’ve been given back a house that doesn’t look like a nightmare, apparently some hoarders go into a state of shock, mourning all their priceless treasures. There are a few follow-up shows to review long-term outcomes. Some of them stay clean, once liberated from the heap of junk. For one in particular, it was almost like being reborn. For most, unfortunately, the crap starts piling up again like a wave rolling in.

The Ideological Angle
The show is a constant reminder that the “whatever floats your boat” permissiveness so common in liberalism (both the classical and contemporary varieties) has practical limits. Moreover, transgressing the boundaries of sensibility will bring bad results. Since I’m a judgmental Fascist, I agree. As one might expect, the hoarders often have a troubled relationship with municipal officials encouraging them to get the junk off of their yards and make their houses safe again. Fortunately, by the end of the show, some of them drop the persecution complex and come to realize that these officials all along really were just doing their jobs, which is to look out for their best interests and that of the community.
Rights in general should not be abused. Property rights in particular do have some strings attached, such as the duty not to create a public nuisance. If my neighbor wants to paint his house in pink and green polka dots, let freedom ring. If he wants to make it a trash heap, that’s another matter. Sensible paternalism is much needed in today’s society, but there I go being a fascist again.
Approaching it from a leftist angle, there’s a lot to go on in terms of dialectical materialism. For one thing, although we still struggle with poverty, it looks like our current stage of industrial progress really is getting us closer to a post-scarcity society. (Bourgeois capitalism had more staying power than the pinkos expected.) Still, the accumulation of goods far beyond necessity, to the point where one is literally neck-deep in junk, takes some of the shine off of this development. It’s possible to imagine a messy home in the 19th century; Karl Marx himself was a remarkable slob. However, aside from a few extremely wealthy eccentrics, it’s pretty hard to imagine a place back then jam-packed from floor to ceiling with far more consumer goods than anyone has a use for. Our culture already has a problem with this. If in the future we get Star Trek replicators, how many more people would choose to live in a heap of useless crap? Maybe it’s time to think about how this could be handled.
As for the general economics take on it, aside from the obvious trash, the hoarded items constitute a vast amount of purposefully made factory products. During the cleanup, the goal usually will be to dispose of 90% of it. Therefore, a fraction will be retained, typically about 10%. As for the rest, salvageable goods might be donated. Occasionally items may be sold, though this is rare and seldom much of a windfall. Some other items – perhaps most – will be damaged beyond use, because of the conditions in which it was stored: food uneaten and well beyond expiration, items left to rust or molder outside, furniture ruined by rodents, etc. Some things might be recycled, remanufactured into something useful.
The remainder of the hoard will be usable still, or at least potentially so, but end up in a landfill. It’s not worth keeping, there’s far too much of it, and there’s nothing better to do with it. This includes a lot of small items that are perfectly good, or just need some basic cleaning or simple repairs. There’s just not enough value to make it practical to donate or resell it, so off to the garbage dump it goes – the great graveyard of manufacture. Surely the spoiled and wasted items add up to a tremendous loss of productivity.
Typically a hoard will consist of tens of thousands of dollars of “bargains,” and sometimes considerably more. Does it retain its value? On one show, an impressive pile of Barbie dolls in their original boxes turned out to be worth about half a million dollars. In a couple other cases, some large and well-maintained collections plausibly could’ve been converted into profitable tourist traps. These are rare exceptions, though. Often the hoarders believe that they’re sitting on a treasure trove, but it’s really a pile of crap.
The truth is that the “collectors” seldom will be able to recover more than pennies on the dollar from what they paid for the junk, if that. For those who can’t believe it, sometimes an appraiser will be brought in, or an impromptu sale will be arranged. Then it comes as a tremendous shock for the hoarders to discover that their priceless treasures are nearly worthless. Obviously this constitutes a massive waste. They’ve blown five, six, and occasionally seven digit sums on crap they didn’t need. If they’d put the money into a portfolio of reputable ETFs instead, they’d be enjoying a much nicer retirement. There’s certainly a tragic element to it.
Hoarding enables adjacent industries to flourish. Thrift stores are a common place to pick up “bargains” which will eventually end up in a huge pile, and one day the landfill. Then there are the shopping channels. (“See this cute dolly on the shelf, looking so sad and lonesome? You can rescue her for only four easy payments of $29.99 plus shipping and handling. Whip out those credit cards and call now, suckers!”) This is how compulsive shoppers get their dopamine hits, though I can’t imagine why retail therapy would be so much fun. Surely a tiddlywinks death match is more exciting. For them, thrift stores and shopping channels are as damaging as casinos are to compulsive gamblers. Finally, there are the storage units that profit massively because many of their customers are hoarders who just can’t bear to downsize their belongings. Year after year, the rental can add up to some serious swag. Let it be proclaimed: if you don’t need something, it’s not a bargain!
Enjoyed this article?
Be the first to leave a tip in the jar!
Related
-
The Gilded Age: Social Climbing, Class Sniping and Showdowns In the Wild, Wild East
-
So Long, Jimmy
-
Bonfire of Insanity
-
Joker: Folie à Deux – the Great White Nope
-
The Judeo-Angst News Roundup
-
Why I Wish They’d Stop Talking to White People About Race
-
Why Historical Guilt Is An Invalid Premise
-
(((Hollywood Types))) Upset They’re Not Included in Academy Awards Diversity Quota
37 comments
This one strikes a nerve. I’m married to a hoarder. If you didn’t know I lived here, you wouldn’t know I lived here. One not nearly as bad as the poor souls portrayed on the show, but a hoarder nonetheless. Our closets are bursting at the seams with stuff that has gone untouched for years. The garage is the same. I have on occasion taken items to work and disposed of them in the dumpster. I’m even constantly being accused of throwing away things that I never touched. She just lost track of them. Our spare bedroom door can only be opened far enough to grab the vacuum cleaner.
You’re correct in saying that shopping and shopping channels are no different than casinos for compulsive gamblers. She once explained to me the whole process of shopping. There’s a method to it. When you only find two thirds of an outfit that you desire you must hit every store in town in order to complete the purchase. Meanwhile her walk in closet is stuffed to capacity. She has dozens of items with the price tags still attached . She has never entertained the idea of a yard sale, but selling items on Facebook marketplace or Craigslist is a common practice. You should see what shows up to buy items from her. The kind of people that you would give $10 to just to stay away from your house. She then gets excited about the $10 not releasing she probably spent $200 on it just a year ago. Yes she has a storage unit. I don’t know what she pays or what is in it. I once demanded that I be permitted to clean the garage and throw away all that I deemed unnecessary. She threatened to throw away all of my belongings. Rationalizing barely worked. “. We need the lawn mower “ we need the six foot ladder “ we need the snow blower “ we don’t need 40 cans of paint that have all hardened. Strangely enough she will allow our daughter to clean up. Just not me.
One thing you failed to mention is animal hoarding. The demographics on that are: Hoarders 100% white Abusers 100% black virtually no outliers. Save that for another essay.
My condolences. How trying to the soul that must be.
Would watching a few episodes of Hoarders perhaps make her see reason? Or would that just upset the apple cart? Anyway, if all else fails, perhaps you can hand your daughter some cash on the QT to do a deep cleaning.
A very close friend is a hoarder. It has to be seen up close to be believed. His particular madness, is rinsing out food wrappers (frozen dinner trays, aluminum cans, chip bags, empty ice cream cartons, deli containers, foil wrappers, plastic wrapping from single-serve food, even fast-food paper wrappers) and stacking them all around his kitchen. The ostensible goal of keeping it, he states, is “recycling”. Additionally, every room in his home is stacked with cardboard boxes and plastic bags full of newspapers, magazines, greeting cards, documents, pieces cut from post-cards and sales-flyers. It represents an adult lifetime of detritus; some of this stuff is decades old. It fills every room, with “aisles” to allow for walking through. He realizes he does it. The true insanity is that he has moved several times — and taken the stuff with him. Years ago, I attempted to throw some of it away, and there was HELL to pay!
My mom exhibited some minor parallel behavior. It only showed up when she was quite old, having lost a husband and a daughter and needing in-home care. She became very protective of her “paperwork,” a pile of coupons, solicitations for charity, magazines with offers, etc. that she was always meaning to get around to. It seemed to me an understandable holding on to some sense of agency and control as her world was shrinking and she was dying.
But the kind of hoarders on the show indicate an infantile sense of object relations, an inability to internalize them and differentiate the thing and the meaning. Like the old dirty piece of blanket or toy that some kids absolutely require in order to go to sleep, for example. The frequent outbursts of rage at the attempt to remove what’s hoarded indicates a felt threat to the self. It reminds me of a kind of primitive religiosity whereby the destruction of a sacred object or image is felt as the destruction of the deity itself rather than a painful but survivable loss of a valued locus of connection with it. Reminds me of psychoanalytic book called Mad Parts Of Sane People.
Hard to witness. Awful to live with.
So, when will he get around to recycling it, then? 😛 It’s the oddest excuse because it should involve getting rid of the stuff…
I’m a big tree-hugger, so I’m all about recycling. That, of course, involves following through and putting it in the bin at the curb!
The problem with my friend’s “recycling” scheme is that the food wrappers never leave the kitchen! The stacks have reached the bottom of the kitchen cabinets on every available inch of counterspace.
Nothing wrong with being a tree-hugger; I’m a nature-lover, myself. I am deeply skeptical, though, about the efficacy of recycling. Just my personal opinion — my best to you with whatever works for you.
Did he ever say why he won’t get up off his duff and recycle them for real? Something odd is going on with that.
As for why my friend doesn’t do something about the piles of discards, I don’t know. Knowing him as I do, my guess is that he thinks these items, and the countless bags of printed material he has stashed, can still be of use to someone else at some future time. He is actually a very intelligent man, fascinated by geography and cartology, and even sketches his own maps. He is also a very good man; the kind of friend you can rely on in a pinch.
My friend and I now live about 400 miles apart, and he has proven to be an excellent correspondent. I have to tell you, though, he has mailed me food wrappers on a couple of occasions; wanting me to note the ingredients listed on a candy-bar wrapper, or the country of origin noted on the box of a tube of toothpaste, to give a couple of examples. (Needless to say, all went directly into the trash.) In fact, his adult children have told him that when he passes away, everything he leaves behind is going straight to the landfill!
Your article has certainly struck a nerve. I’ve seen some fascinating comments in this thread, speculating on the psychology behind hoarding. Thank you for all you’re doing at Counter-Currents. Your humorous, up-beat outlook is much appreciated!
I knew two brothers who were hoarders. They lived in the family home after the parents died and the other siblings moved away. Their house was just as described. Insurance companies won’t insure hoarding properties. They had a fire when trying to start the long unserviced gas fireplace one winter. The fire department were called but couldn’t save one brother due to not being able to get around easily due to the clutter. The clutter also provided ideal material for the fire to spread quickly.
Oh dear – that’s a terrible way to go! If only they could’ve foreseen it.
Not to mention these broken ideologies they stuff in the corners of the rooms, tawdry methodologies that didn’t amount to much even back in their heyday. In the basement are piles of misleading euphemisms, the (by now) cured flotsam and jetsam leftover from navigating the political correctness of the 90s, dangerous and sundry ephemera and bric-a-brac line the stairway to the second floor. It began as a kind of domestic rind, then scaling the walls and beginning to overhang. A vole’s tunnel, after all, may be soiled but it’s safe.
The episodes where hoarders also have cockroach infestations are the most horrifying for me, personally.
Better not watch the Upton Pratt episode from Creepshow, then. 😛 “Got buugs again, Missah Pratt?!”
Yeah, it gets nasty. Way back, I had a fairly nice apartment, until some slobby neighbors moved in next door. Then the tiny roaches came in. Then they proliferated. Then my place was invaded by the insect hordes from Planet Klendathu.
Call me a cruel judgmental fascist as well but I cannot stand these people. How do things get that way? Often there’s an origin story – a difficult childhood, abuse, a death in the family, a catastrophic breakup, etc. Fine, welcome to the club. The normal response for the rest of us is to drink, binge eat, gamble, hikikomori withdrawal, off ourselves, or self-improvement. Not make a level 5 biohazard for the neighbors cause some selfish crone is convinced she has a stash of Rosalita’s Goonies’ gems somewhere beneath the roach larvae, shit, dead cats, and more shit. My mother is a mild-average clutterer with vcr tapes from 1989 and a broken zenith wooden console TV that drives me bonkers as is but at least she’s not obsessed over keeping junk like they’re priceless heirlooms to score big on Antiques Roadshow. That is bearable; these people are impossible. I’m sure if they were Lemmy or Franz Gutentag/Schlechtnacht hoarding Nazi memorabilia the network executives would be empathic and understanding, not lust to burn the place down with them inside or sue the cleanup crew for daring to do their job. If only people were half as hysterical and angry about hoarding horrors as they were during peak covid hysteria.
“He had to sleep on the streets as if he were homeless, since he’d hoarded out the place so badly.”
Wow. That’s taking it to the next level. I almost admire such dedication.
I suspect he’s the first person ever to win Tetris.
Unsaid about life living with a hoarder in this land of the mixed multitude is that it is impossible to bring similar minded individuals over to visit and the couch which could be used for those passing through is loaded down with, I hate to say. Whether hoarding junk is an illness or another means of undermining any resistance to the current regime, I don’t really know. The advantages are that one’s rent is cut in half by sharing and that my pets are welcome. All I have to do is get used to living in cramped quarters while the present situation plays out. It’s a port in a storm and no one can call me a white supremacist – one can dream. So until the next chapter begins it’s a stiff upper lip and making the most of what one has. A glass half full or a glass half empty?
I have had two experiences with hoarders. The first one involved a woman who was my Grandmother’s next-door neighbor. She also happened to be my art teacher at the public elementary school I attended from Kindergarten through second grade, but since she had lived next door to my Grandmother for decades previously, I was already aware of her by the time I got to Kindergarten. She was “artsy”, as you might expect an art teacher to be, and “eccentric”. I’ll call her Mrs. So-and-So. Mrs. So-and-So’s husband had died before I was born in 1968.
She would go search through the garbage cans in the alleys of the quite nice, totally White neighborhood, and find stuff and bring it back and decorate her yard with it, and put it on her porch, and in her house. It drove my Grandmother nuts! Mrs. So-and-So wore a distinctive floppy hat when she went on her trash excursions, and my Grandmother would spot her (I spent lots of time at my Grandmother’s house as a kid) and she would say “There goes that crazy Mrs. So-and-So to get more trash for her yard! Since I was inclined to being “artsy” myself, I thought Mrs. So-and-So was “cool” and that my Grandmother was being too harsh. That went on for years and years.
When I was a kid, before I had started Kindergarten and getting taught art by Mrs. So-and-So, I had a bunch of the old G.I. Joe toys, the 12-inch tall ones, with lots of their guns and other equipment, and I had a “G.I. Joe Footlocker” to keep all that stuff in, it was just a smallish wooden box with a hinged lid, painted Army Green with the G.I. Joe logo, and a painted white rectangle where you could write your name (I wrote my name in the space provided), rank, and serial number, just big enough to stuff a few G.I. Joes and their junk into. I was playing with my G.I. Joes one day in my Grandmother’s front yard, and I went inside to pee. I wasn’t gone but a couple of minutes at most, but when I came back, all my G.I. Joes and the G.I. Joe Footlocker were gone. I was shocked! That was the first time anything had been stolen from me. I figured some kid must have done it, although it was an almost entirely “old people neighborhood”, which was why I was playing alone in the first place.
My Grandmother died in the late 90s and her house was sold, but Mrs. So-and-So lived on until 2006. I noticed that her estate sale was being held, so I went to it. I had always wanted to go inside her house and see what it was like, but never had. Holy crap! It was INSANE! So much junk everywhere, even though the estate sale people had cleaned it up some. Whole rooms and bathrooms blocked off with junk, literally thousands of unopened boxes of lipstick and nail polish, unidentifiable stuff she had found in the trash and had obviously thought was cool.
Then I found my G.I. Joe Footlocker with my name on it that I hadn’t seen since I was about 5 years old. The estate sale wanted $50 for it! It had all my now-vintage G.I. Joe stuff in it, in really good condition.
All my tolerance for her “cool artsiness” and “eccentricity” vanished in an instant! I took it to the checkout counter of the estate sale and showed them my I.D. and demanded that they give it to me. They wouldn’t. I was so pissed off, but there wasn’t really anything I could do without causing a scene, and I didn’t have an extra $50 to spend on my own stolen stuff, so I left.
In 2014 I began working at an antique store in that same neighborhood. Coincidence had it that the woman who ran Mrs. So-and-So’s estate sale had a booth there. We became friends. I recognized her from the sale, but didn’t tell her about it immediately.
One day I mentioned it to her, “Hey do you remember…”. She said “Oh if I had known you back then, I would have given it (my G.I. Joe stuff) to you. She also went on to tell me that it took them two-and-a-half months to prepare for that sale (most estate sales take a week or two to prepare), because the house was so crammed full of junk, and because they started finding lots of cash hidden in magazines and books, so they had to meticulously go through the pages of every magazine and book, and being a hoarder house, there were tons of magazines and books in piles, along with all the other junk. They ended up finding over $250,000 in cash stuck in thousands of mostly magazines.
She also told me that Mrs. So-and-So also had neighborhood reputation, of which I wasn’t aware, of being a kleptomaniac, and that all those thousands of unopened lipsticks and nail polishes and who knows what else (like my G.I. Joe stuff) were stolen.
My second experience with hoarders started in 1976 when my family moved from the house I had initially grown up in to a different neighborhood. Less than a block away, there was a house where a married White man and woman in their 50’s lived. This neighborhood is also very nice and totally White.
The man of the house collected old vintage Cadillacs and even a couple of old Rolls-Royces, all of them black, and none of them working. He’d been at it for years, before we ever moved there in 1976, and when we moved there he had 16 derelict cars parked in his side-yard and front yard on the grass.
He also collected dogs. He kept the dogs in cages in his back yard, which was surrounded by a tall wooden fence, which made viewing the back yard impossible from the street or alley. He had been collecting dogs for years too. He obviously never cleaned up the dog shit, because you could smell it from several houses away. The dogs would howl and whine a lot.
When I was 10, a friend from down the street and I started a lawn-mowing business with our parents’ lawnmowers. We would walk around the neighborhood and knock on people’s doors, and ask them if they wanted to pay us to mow their yards. We usually charged $30 a yard back then, which we thought was a lot, but the yards in that neighborhood are pretty good-sized.
The Cadillac and dog-hoarding man would, besides hoarding dogs and Cadillacs, also let the grass in his yard grow so tall every year in the summer that the city would cite him, and then send a city crew to cut the grass, and fine him. That had also been going on for years before my family moved to that neighborhood.
My lawn-mowing friend and I thought it would be a good idea to ask him if he wanted us to mow his yard. Bad idea! He cussed us out and literally chased us off his property.
Things went on at his house like that for years.
Then much later, in 1993, I was living in a building, and a friend of mine lived in the same building, and I went to his place to visit him, and his TV was on to the local 5 o’clock news. On the news was a live shot from a helicopter circling over a house that guys in HAZMAT suits were going in and out of. I thought “that place looks familiar”. Yep, they mentioned the street name and I knew immediately that it was Mr. and Mrs. Cadillac and Dog Hoarder’s house.
Turns out, Mr. and Mrs. Cadillac and Dog Hoarder had a roofer over to look at fixing their roof, and in the process he had seen their back yard and got a glimpse inside their house, and he had left almost immediately and called the cops. The cops came out, took a look, and called the HAZMAT crew.
There were over 50 dogs in cages in the back yard, some dead, mostly dying. Inside of the house, there was trash piled up 3 to 4 feet high, with little walkways through all the trash, and in the little walkways there were DEAD DOGS ROTTING AWAY in various states of decomposition, and even skeletons of dogs that had been apparently been there for years. The news said that there were probably at least 30 dead dogs in the house.
Mr. and Mrs. Cadillac and Dog Hoarder was so lazy, or insane, or whatever, that if a dog died in the house, they wouldn’t even bother to pick it up and take it outside, they would just cover it with quicklime, which to me honestly seems like more work.
The news reported that Mr and Mrs. Cadillac and Dog Hoarder were taken, involuntarily, off to the State Hospital. I never heard about them again.
Bulldozers came and scooped up about a foot of the topsoil in the front yard, side yard, and back yard, and took it away, and the house was gutted down to the bricks, roof included, and blasted with sand-bleach water. Then the house was rebuilt, with the original brick shell and foundation, and where the topsoil was bulldozed from the entire front, side, and back yards was filled with those white garden rocks that are about an inch long, and then it sat empty on the market for years.
Many times, I have wondered how the realtor answered questions about the history of the house. “Gee everything inside this house looks so new! What’s the deal with the entire yard being white garden rocks?”
It sold a few years ago, and some people actually lived there for a while. Then, last year, I noticed the front windows had been broken out, and it sat that way for a few weeks.
Then a FOR SALE sign went up in the yard, and a few weeks later, the house was torn down (finally!), and in the last few months a brand-new house has been built there. I still wonder if the new owners know about what happened there.
Wow, those are two incredible stories!
That first lady was a loon. She has a quarter of a million bucks squirreled away in random locations, but then has to steal a kid’s toy box, and all the other stuff she pilfered in the neighborhood.
As for the couple after that, anyone who treats animals that way should be doing time in the Hanoi Hilton or some other fun Third World lockup.
“As for the couple after that, anyone who treats animals that way should be doing time in the Hanoi Hilton or some other fun Third World lockup.”
I totally agree. They did apparently get involuntarily committed to the State Hospital which has a notoriously bad reputation here.
I think that some context to my post would be valuable for full understanding. I wrote that Mrs. So-and-So was “my art teacher at the public elementary school I attended from Kindergarten through second grade”.
The reason I stopped attending that public school was because when I was in second grade, black bussing started, bussing in blacks to my school, in the middle of the school year. It was very controversial, of course. It was an all-white school before that, even in 1975.
The teachers there tried to “prepare” us for the arrival of the blacks.
The busses showed up after we, the White students were in our classrooms. Extremely loud shouting!!! We could hear them from inside the building as the blacks got off the busses.
The blacks were still segregated into “portable buildings” that the school had, wisely, acquired in advance of the blacks being bussed to the school, and they had a different lunch time, after the white students ate. The only interaction with the blacks was in the restrooms.
On the first day (a Monday) that the blacks were bussed to my school, a black child, in the boy’s restroom, was screaming “FUCK! MOTHERFUCKER! SHIT! FUCK!” and then he hit me really hard, out of nowhere, on the left side of my face. Some white libtard teacher was there and saw it happen, and took me to the “infirmary” at the Principal’s Office, and they called my parents, who came and picked me up.
I never went there again after that day, my parents were smart and withdrew me and enrolled me into an all-White private school that was 20 miles away from our house, in what was then an almost completely undeveloped suburb, just fields, but which is now an overrun urban shithole.
About a year after that was when my parents moved our family to the neighborhood where Mr. and Mrs. Cadillac and Dog Hoarder were, which was much closer to the all-White private school.
Yes, great stories, you have a knack for telling personal anecdotes.
The busing story is parallel to mine, but they did it in two waves: the first was in 1974, with a few black kids bused to my neighborhood elementary school, and the second wave was 1977, where it was comprehensive and school district wide.
Just finished reading Pat Buchanan’s 2017 book about the Nixon administration and was surprised how omnipresent and important the busing issue was. I wonder about the bus industry’s role in this. They must have benefited greatly. The school bus industry, every single time.
The Bussing Industrial Complex makes total sense, along with all the other corruption associated with the public school system, that has been proved over and over and over again.
“in what was then an almost completely undeveloped suburb, just fields, but which is now an overrun urban shithole.”
I’m not even kidding. That suburban area, which used to be nothing but unused fields (not even farms) when I was a kid, is now a shithole of negro section-8 apartment complexes, with one of the worst violent crime rates in the larger… uh… “metroplex”
You can snort between the lines and probably figure out the major metropolitan area to which I am referring.
Don’t let my Nom de plume fool you though, I’m “talking” about Texas
South Dallas or WSW Houston?
Far north Dallas, actually. Lots of Section 8 apartments up there, with lots of violent crime.
This was an outstanding review, very funny (I laughed out loud a couple of times), but also very perceptive. Beau, you have a real gift for humor. Your only rival here is Goad.
Hoarding is a sad phenomenon which, however, obviously offers some kind of insight into the recesses of the human mind and its potential for bizarrities should the triggering circumstances arise. As your review sagely observed, much of this behavior is ‘enabled’ by capitalist hyper-productivity; what would medieval peasants have hoarded – rocks? chicken bones? They just didn’t have much stuff.
But it does set one to wondering what other potential for weird behaviors might lurk in human DNA if only the necessary external conditions should obtain.
Still, reading the comments, I think we must distinguish between “hoarding” and true “collecting”. I realize there might be common psychological impulses behind both behaviors. My mother used to collect these expensive crystal figurines and objects (sailboats, pigs, a German Iron Cross, all sorts of differently shaped birds, etc). My dad and I hated this habit because a) we both thought it was a waste of good money, and b) mom was always screaming at us to “be careful you don’t knock anything [ie, one of her damn pieces of crystal] down” every time we wanted to hang out in the living room, which was filled with these things.
Was this hoarding? I don’t think so. My mother was extremely hygienic (too much so sometimes, imo), and certainly wouldn’t tolerate garbage or mess anywhere. But it was a kind of OCD collecting.
OTOH, am I now a hoarder because I’ve taken possession of all this crystal, even though I bloody hate it all? The problem is that I feel as though the stuff really has value (if I had to buy all her figurines over again, I’m sure it would cost in the $25-50,000 range), and I want to flush some money back out of them (they’re beautiful objects, very tasteful, not old tin trays or cans or dead pets, LOL!), but just never find the time to figure out how to do so. So, they all sit carefully packed in wadded newspaper and styrofoam chips in a bunch of – you guessed it! – stacked cardboard boxes in what’s supposed to be a spare bedroom.
And what about books and, the real doozy, learned periodicals? I visited the great libertarian Murray Rothbard’s Las Vegas home once about 34 years ago, and it was utterly covered in books. I mean, every last place, including kitchen countertops. He also had tons of magazines (not People or Sports Illustrated), many different newspapers lying around, and various types and sizes of notebooks. He also (I’d heard) had a similarly book-bestrewn apartment in NYC. Indeed, when he died he left slightly over 20,000 books to the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
Was this hoarding? Rothbard was a major scholar and public intellectual. Of course, even a man whose entire life was spent inside the academy and among books – reading and writing them – could not have come close to reading TWENTY THOUSAND of them before he died. Yet he did acquire them, had “canyons” running through floor stacks of them, etc.
And am I a hoarder on my own because I cannot bring myself to discard any of my learned periodicals – the first 15 years of AR (after that I went electronic), the last dozen or so years of Instauration, 38 years of Chronicles, 30 years of the New York Review of Books (and those are oversized), 20-odd years of First Things, etc? I see this as collecting – they’re part of my larger book collection – but maybe it shades into hoarding a little bit.
Still, reading the comments, I think we must distinguish between “hoarding” and true “collecting”.
YES.
To my mind, collecting involves being organized (knowing what you have, know where it is, being able to actually retrieve the item, & keeping the item in good repair (clean, operational). My elderly Mom has had many hobbies that lasted her entire life, including painting, studying history, and … shopping. She can’t throw anything away without a big fight. She’s never put anything into storage; instead she’ll simply have an addition built onto her home or garage until she completely fills up that space.
She’s told me: You think I have too much clutter? Well, you haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen (my neighbor) Dr. Jane Doe’s home!
I finally got an invitation over to her home, & I was amazed. She Did collect everything under the sun (many small antiques) & had everything on display, just like a retail shop. But it didn’t feel super cluttered/junked up because it was so. well. organized. & nearly everything was attached to the walls museum-style. Though nearly every wall surface was completely filled with collections of all sorts, there was still empty horizontal space on the coffee table, end tables, counter tops, etc. This, plus the organization of all the stuff, is what distinguishes collecting from hoarding.
You mentioned having collectible AmRen periodicals. I hope that VDARE decides to publish books of their most popular articles.
I figure that Jim and I are the funnybone around here. In fact, he’s inspired me on that.
As for hoarding, there’s a whole lot of irrationality going on with it. The line between that and collecting can be a bit blurry. I’d say that it should be drawn where it creates a public nuisance or causes personal problems. If you can’t walk around your place without bumping into things, or you fear being buried under a collapse, maybe it’s time to use that round thing called the trash bin, right?
I have some…familiarity….with this issue.
It’s not trauma. There is a component of depression and losing one’s role in life and addiction, and its flow has a genetic basis.
It starts through not being rich and realizing that’s probably always going to be the situation, and the other partner just giving in and then the wrong values are ascribed to material goods even if they have little worth or are a terrible burden.
Stuff becomes the currency of identity, it’s always justified and the acquisition of more stuff piled on top becomes their ‘values’ displacing natural healthy ones, forming a padding against reality. More stuff = more padding and everyone is living in this padded museum. It’s the perversion of normal healthy ideas towards objects.
It’s something I associate with less wealthy whites people.
It can cause a lot of problems in families because now the junk has to be preserved at all costs. It’s distorting.
Making TV shows about it, turning it into entertainment is easy. Try living through it.
‘Although they’ve been given back a house that doesn’t look like a nightmare, apparently some hoarders go into a state of shock, mourning all their priceless treasures.’
Right. Because the values are inverted.
I figure there’s a provisioning instinct for gathering valuable items. The problem is that, unless moderated by the power of reason, this can go straight off the deep end and we also lose sight of what’s valuable and what’s not. Anyway, I hope that made sense…
Thirty years ago I knew a single, childless, petless elementary school teacher with a really good income who complained to me that she couldn’t save any money. That was because she spent her entire discretionary income on so-called “collectibles” purchased at garage sales, yard sales, and estate sales. She transported them in a huge pick-up truck she purchased and stored them in a large rented storage unit. These items were a lot less valuable than she thought, including multiple 30-year baby cribs/carriages and 50-year old sewing machines plus quite ordinary vases. Her statement rather pissed me off because I was trying to survive on a small fraction of her income and she was fishing for sympathy from me!
If you have a Subscriber access,
simply login first to see your comment auto-approved.
Note on comments privacy & moderation
Your email is never published nor shared.
Comments are moderated. If you don't see your comment, please be patient. If approved, it will appear here soon. Do not post your comment a second time.