Hoarded to death

It is official: being a slob can kill you.

"HARTFORD, Conn. — A Connecticut woman described by police as an apparent hoarder was crushed to death when a floor piled with clutter collapsed into her basement, state medical officials said Tuesday.

The state chief medical examiner’s office said 66-year-old Beverly Mitchell died of accidental and traumatic asphyxia.

Mitchell’s body was found Saturday as crews were using a backhoe to remove debris from her home in Cheshire. She may have been dead for more than a week, police said.

Town officials, meanwhile, are determining whether the home is still structurally sound.

Cheshire Fire Chief Jack Casner said no decision had been made on whether to tear down the house. He said building official deemed the house “unfit for human occupancy,” and have boarded it up with plywood.

Authorities have said they believe the first floor collapsed under the weight of all the clutter, which was stacked as high as the ceiling in some places.

“There is several feet of clutter throughout the entire house, anywhere from 4 to 8 feet high,” Casner said"


I sit here, boggling my mind trying to figure out how a human being can have a property, a private home to call their own and volunteer to live in pure shit. I once went to a house where the owner owned seven cats. To describe that smell, imagine if Glade invented a plug-in fragrance called "Ass". It's not just an ugly world, its unhealthy. If you're not breathing in noxious crap then your own house is collapsing on you from the garbage you stacked to the roof. I haven't missed garbage night since owning a house, it's not a hard thing to do.

Focus: How clean of a household to you keep? Do you keep a burn ward-esque shimmering clean or are you the type who isn't afraid to stack dishes and pizza boxes? What do you consider "extremes" in clean/filthy?

Alt-Focus: Horror stories of hoarders, super-slobs and insanely unhygienic homes you've encountered.

 

Focus: I like to keep my living space pretty clean. There's some clutter around every now and then, (there are a couple of dirty dishes in the sink that I need to wash) but there's mostly a place for everything and everything is in its place. My girlfriend is cleaner than me but more of a packrat. I'm not as clean but am perfectly happy to throw stuff out. I read my mail over the trash, for example.

Alt Focus: My mom is a hoarder. The basement is for throwing junk, and we refer to it as "the pile." There's gotta be at least a ton of stuff down there - thousands of books, old clothes, broken furniture, whatever the fuck. She's neurotic as shit about it. One time, when she was going to go on a vacation with some of her friends, Dad made a joke about renting a Dumpster while she was gone and clearing out the basement. She went into a massive crying fit and screamed bloody murder at him. Dad made the Shit, I touched the crazy face and backed away slowly. House is actually relatively clean... as long as you don't go in the basement.

 

I am the anti-hoarder, in that I'm absolutely neurotic about things being visible on counters and tables. If it is not strictly for display/decorative purposes, every item has a place where it cannot be seen. Within 3 seconds of my guy putting a dish on the counter or in the sink I am behind him picking it up and putting it in the dishwasher, and he's not a messy guy. It kind of drives me nuts that he won't let me put the TV in a wall mounted cabinet that can be closed when the television is not in use, because he seems to think TVs are in themselves something that a man should display. Boys are weird.

 

My wife and I hate mess, but we have a child so compromises must be made. For one, our carpets are pernently gross-looking. Nothing can be done about that, it's what happens when you have kids: let them wreck the present rugs and when they're old enough to understand, buy nice NEW floors. I cannot wait to have hardwood.

Dishes in the sink are one thing, but when you get fruit flies buzzing around said dishes that is the red flag that you're a lazy, messy fuck. Especially when you have a dishwasher, I love walking into kitchens and seeing the sinks piled with shit and there's the dishwasher sitting clean, the owners too lazy to unload it and rather take what they need from it. These people also use the "Pile Method" of laundry, where you stack clothes in monstrous mounds to not be thrown into a clotheswasher, but have them cleaned via the mystical goblin lasers that magically clean them in these piles, which works provided you hose them with aerosol deodorant before putting them on.

Clean dishes. Laundry hampers. And fuck Faye Dunaway, use wire hangers as much as you wish. These things require not-much effort and hardly cut into rigorous masturbation sessions and James Bond marathons (or both at the same time).

 

I like cleanliness, but it just doesn't usually end up high on my priorities list. If I'm tired from work, working out, etc... I don't put a ton of work into tidying up my apartment. But I will say, at least once a week, I snap, throw on a playlist, and spend an hour straightening up. My bathroom is always clean and my kitchen gets a good scrub weekly, but its never pristine cause I use it a TON.

I definitely got a "messy" reputation among my friends and former roommates due to not being obsessed with it and living with very "neat" people. Couldn't stand clutter. I had a mat near the front door that I would leave 2-3 pair of shoes on and one of my former roommates would routinely throw them in the front hall closet cause he couldn't stand them being out. Another roommate would wake up early on the weekends cause he couldn't sleep in, and I'd wake up at 10-11 to a pile of my things from the common rooms piled in front of my door. So in comparison to them, leaving some shoes here, a book there, some clothes on my floor, I was downright slovenly. Yet the same roommate with the shoes shared a bathroom with me and our sink, toilet, and bathtub would only get scrubbed if I did it. Dried backwash and soapscum didn't bother him but a pair of sneakers by the door was unforgivable.

The other thing with me is my tidiness is directly related to storage space. If I don't have places for everything, I'm liable to let it accumulate.

Alt-focus: My paternal grandfather is a TERRIBLE hoarder. Not piles of papers everywhere, but more little knick nacks that "you never know when you'll need this". As a child of the depression, he can't stand to throw anything away. We cleaned out the basement of a small office building he owned, which essentially served as a storage space, and it was a NIGHTMARE. Cans of 30 year old paint in "Candy Apple Green", a whole upright chest of mini draws filled with unmatched screws, nuts, bolts, and tools, broken fishing equipment, etc... He's the kind of guy that when you get a piece of furniture from IKEA and there are a extra screws and such, he would keep EVERYTHING. Then again, this is the same man who has worn the same shirts for 20 years and pours leftover dressing from his salad bowl back into the bottle, despite having a net worth well into the 7 figures. So I'm not entirely surprised.

 

Focus: A little cluttered, a couple of dishes in the sink, and bathrooms, carpets, floors, etc get cleaned on a weekly to semi-weekly basis, so there is no actual dirt and grime about. Or very little.

I try to make things easier by doing the small things - every day when I get out of the shower I rinse it, and very other day when I switch out towels i use the old towel to wipe down the shower, tub and sink. Takes all of 3 minutes. Going upstairs? Never go empty-handed. And so on.

Alt focus: Back in high school and college I worked for a pharmacy, and would occasionally deliver prescriptions. One day I delivered to an elderly couple in the next town and walked into a horror show.

The outside of the house looked fine. But when the old woman opened the door, the first thing I noticed was the grime on the legs of her walker. Visible grime. And on her legs as well. She asked me to come into the house to give the prescriptions to her husband and so she could pay me. There was hole in the living room wall, with cats going in and out of it, and cat shit, a dead bird, and other unidentifiable things on the floor. Next to the chair her husband was in was a side table with dishes and empty jars of food piled on it. There was a jelly jar with fuzz growing out of the top. I was trying my best not to actually see any of this, when the woman asked me to get her checkbook off of the desk. I had to move various newspapers and magazines and small boxes to find it - and everything was coated with a fine film of grease and dirt/dust.

When I got back to the store, I told the owner how horrible it was, and he contacted their children, and the place was cleaned out within days

 

I will never forget this girl Lacy I wanted to hook up with in high school. This girl was pretty fun and was easy on the eyes. One day she invited me over to hang out (read fool around). Out of all the disgusting things I've seen in this world in my 31 years, this girls house reigns number one. The house was fine on the outside but once you stepped inside if the newspapers, magazines, fast food wrappers, dirty clothes and dirty walls did not hit you, the smell immediately did. I cannot emphasize enough how horrible this place smelled. The smell can only described as 100 cats using her floor as a personal litter box mixed with hot garbage. The smell of ammonia was so strong it made your eyes water. There was a time I went to a legitimate garbage dump and that still had NOTHING compared to how bad this house smelled. I spent maybe ten minutes in the house standing the entire time before I made up some lame ass excuse and left. She pestered me for a while after that about wanting to go out, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. The way she lived I didn't want to find out how she kept her personal hygiene.

I still to this day wonder how someone so nice and good looking can live in such a cesspool.

 

This conversation happened a few weeks ago:

Me: "Dude, you don't even have sheets on your bed."
Friend: "Yeah, they came off a few weeks ago."

Okay, bed sheets aren't roof shingles. They don't "come off" and then you have to call professionals to re-install them. This is a fairly easy fix. It requires all the effort of bending over and walking a distance of six feet and about 1/100th the time he spends looking for the remote. You're single, its your castle, fine. But you're fucking lazy, and that isn't open for debate.

 

Alt-Focus: I got a couple of good stories here...

So this chick I met off Facebook and I briefly dated before I simply lost interest in her, but she and her mother and grandmother were dead set on me being involved in their daily lives for some ungodly reason. Now I'd seen poverty before, as in folks that made West Virginia trailer trash look like the Hiltons; but this was like anything I'd ever seen before. This family of three lived in a structure composed of four barns or outbuildings composed of plywood and scrap tin with some sort of vegetation for a roof. They made their 'living' selling roots and "herbs" (using the term loosely) out an old rusted out school bus sitting on the ground, not on cinder blocks but on the ground itself. It was a truly appalling sight.

This family contacted me to come by and see if I'd do some work for them, do some weed eating around this dwelling and cut down some trees around a power line running across the lot they occupied. Well I managed to slip around and do this weed eating while they were gone, no fucking way was I going to cut down any trees around a power line. I returned a day or two later to pick up the $10 I was owed, and I knocked on the door and it pushed open. I called out for them and got no answer; knowing the three were all partially deaf I decided to walk inside. I first had to step over a row of overflowing litter boxes before coming upon a mound of garbage, not in bags just piled up against a wall. I didn't venture farther in but over the garbage pile I saw clothes lying in heaps, rusted cans of food in boxes around a couch, books with mold on them on tables.

Now the outside of this place was similar. Piles of old toys and tires; rusted tools and lawn equipment. Multiple cats, dead and alive, and thorn bushes and poison ivy on the walls of the building and growing out the roof.

I left and never went back; fuck that ten dollars. Those people needed it more than I did.

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Another time, I was hanging out with this chick I banged one time at this apartment she was crashing at with a few other people I kinda new. Well this chick I banged, lets call her C, came up with the idea of 'lets all go to my apartment and I'll cook spaghetti for everyone'. This was news to me, why she was living with someone else while paying rent on an apartment she was renting was beyond me. "But what the hell?" I thought to myself, I ain't got anything better to do. So me and these other people piled into our cars and picked up a couple cases of Natty Lite and went to the next town up to C's apartment.

It wasn't much to look at from the outside, kinda dumpy but certainly liveable. C warned us not to go inside until she did some 'quick cleaning', so we all chilled a few minutes and drank cheap beer in the front yard while C was cleaning. I had to take a piss eventually and wandered on in through the front door; holy fucking hell...

The floor at first glance appeared to be made of dried dog turds. As I learned that evening, C had to crash with other people because she couldn't afford to pay the electric bill... For seven months. This event occurred in July. This dog shit had been marinating in this apartment for seven months. I went outside and vomited and I'm not a man that vomits easily from anything.

C was going to serve us all spaghetti made in what I now refer to as Dogshit Manor. C was going to serve a group of friends, food that was cooked in Dogshit Manor.

This was not hoarding per se, but this stands out far and beyond the dwelling in the first story, as the worst place I've ever set foot in. Not because of the physical conditions but the reason behind it all. It wasn't poverty behind the dog turd flooring, but being too lazy and uncaring to clean it up.

 

I'll put up something lengthy later this weekend. Hoooooly shit do I have hoarder stories. A few things off the top of my head:

- Snakes love those big newspaper piles, especially big snakes who eat cat-sized animals. I have never felt more creepy-crawly than when I was climbing over a big pile in a hoarder house and saw an 10+ ft snake skin laying on the floor. Nope. Nope. Nope. I'm fucking out.

- On the topic of snakes, we ran a guy who hoarded exotic reptiles. One of his heat lamps caught the house on fire. You know what's way more disconcerting than crawling on the floor, looking for the seat of the fire, and seeing the silhouette of panicked snakes and big ass lizards dart back and forth in their cages and seeing toppled cages on the floor? Nothing. Fuck that shit.

- We had a lady who would shit in her refrigerator AND eat out of same fridge on the upper racks.

- If you sit in a chair long enough, your skin will graft to the fabric of the chair. When you are taken out of the chair, the top layer of skin stays, like peeling off the top of a blister.

 

My dad was an HVAC repairman for 35 years and worked in some pretty nasty houses that he told us about over the years. Like, homes with "a path" between the door, the fridge, the lazyboy and the bathroom, such that he had to actually break a window to get into the basement to fix their furnace. I think he actually called protective services a few times for people because the living conditions were so bad.

I bought a Craigslist TV off someone I now believe was a crackhead. I knew the area of town was a bit sketchy, but the TV was a good deal so I powered through. I walked to the door and rang the bell and an enormous woman answered the door - the crackhead's mom. She let me in, and the place REEKED of cat and human waste. Just awful. But I wanted that TV.

Piles of papers, books, plates of food (cat and human), cat shit, mail, empty boxes, clothes - all over the stairs, the floor. Every room had at least 10 piles of crap up to my waist. When I finally met the crackhead himself, I insisted we handle the proceedings outside because I thought I was going to pass out. The heat in that place was insane. It was easily 30 degrees in the house and it was March. They must have cranked the furnace up as high as it could go so everything was sort of... cooking.

Anyway, the takehome message is that I negotiated a 47" LG flatscreen down from his $450 asking price to $100.

 

Alt Focus: My family's business is real estate development which means I get to experience lots of lovely locales that people call home.

We had one a few years back where my Dad purchased a co-op in Manhattan in a rather expensive building which had a rent controlled tenant paying an obscenely low amount of rent. She also never paid said rent and would wait till the eviction process then complain to the court about the apartment being unlivable, getting postponements and finally paying all the back due rent after 6-7 months of jerking everyone around. Enter my Dad and his buddy who start the long process of raising the rent and/or kicking her out.

Now, when purchased it was bought site unseen. And anytime we went up there to try to collect the rent or talk to her she would never open the door all the way, just a crack, but you could see stuff piled up in there...oh and the smell. The entire floor reeked because of her apartment. I have no idea how the neighbors weren't complaining or they just got used to it.

We start the eviction process and she starts demanding repairs and extermination be done to her apartment, oh did I forget to mention that? Her apartment was infested. Every contractor that we sent there said work was impossible to be done because of the mess. Once again at this time we still had no idea what the apartment looked like inside. The judge orders she lets a cleaning service in so the repairs and renovations can be done. They take out 75+ industrial sized garbage bags worth of trash. The judge calls her a hoarder. She claims she's not a hoarder just a "clutterer." After another 4 or 5 months of court, she screws up and misses an important court date and finally gets evicted.

When we show up for the eviction. We finally get a look at the apartment, the door swings open and the smell hits us fully...I don't even know how to describe it, but according to my Dad who was previously a cop and had to sit on dead bodies that were ripe in the summer said it was worse than that. Looking in, there were just stacks and stacks of trash piled up(remember this is after a "cleaning"). I didn't go in, my Dad's friend did, another guy that's been in some really disgusting places, he came running out in 30 seconds throwing up everywhere. Apparently, the lady was a wino and her favorite thing to hoard were empty wine bottles, hundreds if not thousands of them all fermenting in the apartment.

The workers we sent in to clean had to go in wearing full suits with respirators to empty the place out. They took out somewhere between 150-200 industrial sized garbage bags from this one bedroom apartment. Oh, and they also found dozens of sex toys in there as one day we went to pay them and found them running through the hall of the building hitting each other with dildos.

 

Smacking each other with used dildos? Who's really the gross ones here?

 

I mean, I can't decide which one of these is worse. It's just unfathomable to me that someone could be so disgusting.

Focus: Biggest issue I personally have is with old computer equipment. I've got a bunch of junk in boxes that I keep telling myself I'm going to get rid of, but because most of it technically still works, I hesitate. That and the fact that I feel I should recycle it instead of simply throwing it in the trash, which provides an additional obstacle and I'm lazy.