Brothers

filled the dark with camera and boogeyman and golems. The most maccabre tale was one of the Collier Brothers, the hermit hoarders of Harlem every reason like that alliteration, in their four story brownstone at the corner of Fifth Avenue, and the brothers sealed themselves up through the Great Depression, both world wars and as Harlem shifted from a rich white suburb to a poor black slum, Omer Collier, the blind and bedridden older brother, lived there with his devoted

younger brother Langley. It was there in the brownstone that they amassed one of the world's legendary collections of urban junk. And in the end, the color brothers had tons of junk stored in their brownstone, And so I get this image of this horror house, things like pattered toys, Christmas trees, andeliers, rusted bicycles, broken baby carriages, Ford model team, moldering oak chest,

fourteen pianos who added babies, and formalde hyde. It was a collection so extraordinary that their accomplishment such as it was, confirms like a New Yorkers worst nightmare, that they're crumpled people living in a crumpled rooms, with their crumpled possessions, the crowded chaos of the city reflected in their homes. It's not that New Yorkers hoard more than other people, and so they have less room to hold in that

horror house. Terrified and fascinated France so much that as an adult he learned everything he could about the Colliers named movie, trapped their home with midnight street pickings and turned it into kind of a sealed fortress of ephemera, a hundred navy tons of it by the end, and children in Harlem chap rocks that the windows and called them ghost Team, which is where the title of the

book came from. Ghosting Man Frances two thousand three. Book Try says everything he could find on the lives of the mysterious hermits. The Colliers had love as only come over in the speedwell from England right after the Mayflower. They are the elderly seons of an upper class in Manhattan family. There's all kinds of rumored incestuous goings on. In fact, Herman and Susie, the parents, were cousins. In nine Herman and Susie packed up the family and moved

from Lower Manhattan to the budding community of Harlem. Harlem was built for the swells of the time. The rich people would move into Harlem because the elevated subway vaccine warn that it is was going up, and the idea is that people would move from Manhattan into this new suburb. Will never quite worked out that way. The boom of the late Hunters had turned into a bust by the early nineteen and nobody moved into these great brands, towns

and mansions. Harlem, like many neighborhoods at the time, developed under the overtly racist practices of its landowners. There were covenants against African Americans moving into the area, but the landlords and the building owners realized that they had a filled apartments with somebody, and by around nineteen ten, they started moving in black families and charging what was called the negro thir charge up to to live in these apartments buildings that they were meant for one family, but

were broken up into these tiny apartments. When the Colliers moved in, it was this might suburb where they're guying. Ecollegist father and his wife concert pianists live and maintained this mansion. Within ten years it had become a black slum. The father had moved back to the Upper West Side. Mothers stayed there with her two sons, but they basically barricaded themselves in, perhaps from the poor inhabitants of Harlem at the time. The Colliers Brownstone mansion was, like the

others in the neighborhood, a construction of extravagance. It was a Gilded Age structure that had libraries, elaborate kitchens, pious ceiling rooms, a lot of waynscoding, really massive spaces. That's one reason that these large family homes would be turned into apartment complexes that were seven or eight apartments because they were so immense, so there's a lot of room in there to collect. The brothers may have always been a bit eccentric, but did not start out as reclusive.

They were over educated. According to their father, Langley had degrees in chemistry and engineering mechanical engineering. Homer graduated five beta cap at Columbia with some advanced degrees, including a degree in admiralty law. They were not what I called

typical of New Yorkers. You know. Homer walked to his office of Admiralty Law on Wall Street eight miles every day because he refused to pay the nickel for the subway, but it was a waste of money, and of course he wanked backed every day, so it was was sixteen miles he walked every weekday. One day at the office, the boss noticed Homer's shoes had worn straight through the souls. He was offering a raise on the spot, turned it down, and never came back to work, not even to pick

up his last check. Langley never really held a job in his life. He was a pianist who had performed at Carnegie Hall and had once followed Pat Ruski, the great pianist at the time, But he said that since Druski get better notices than he did, he just gave it up. What was the point? He quit the concert stage and retreated to his brown stone in Harlem, and they're late twenties on. They pretty much stuck to themselves in this Brownstoner only came out at night, sort of

like vampires, but vampires dressed better than they did. They wore these pattered rags to discourage people from robbing them or even noticing them. They wanted to blend into the scenery. It's kind of mock homeless people, and people for the most part left them alone because they looked like they didn't have any money. Susie maintained her residence in the increasingly cluttered mansion. When she died, her sons were in

their mid forties. They spirited her out of the apartment through a window late one night and took her to the cemetery in Brooklyn, which was a long way await. She was buried there in this kind of private, was cult like ceremony and buried and then unmarked grave in the cemetery, but it was never announced that she had died, or how she died, or what had happened to her. Is one of those mysteries of the Caller Brothers that

was never quite explained. To borrow a phrase from GHOSTI Men life in the Harlem Brownstone now became one long conversation between Homer and Langley. So what did the call your brothers actually doing this mansion alone together? Well, Homer had a stroke in his thirties. He was paralyzed from it. He couldn't walk anymore, crippled by rheumatism, hunched over with his knees bent and his head kind of resting on his knees, and he couldn't see. His brother had to

become his keeper. Langley nursed them, washed them, fed him a hundred oranges a week in this bizarre attempt to cure his blindness, and saved newspapers for Homer to read when he regained his sight. Hundreds of thousands of newspapers that became the Colure collection. Aside from that, Langley would go out at night sorting through trash cans and dumps to is finding food. Because they refused to spend money anything,

they didn't really believe in the money. That's how they spent their days reading, collecting more trash newspapers, and filing up their junk. Since they were totally indiscriminate on what they collected, you would just pushed piles against wall and build tunnels so in that sense, I think Langley was an architect, constructing the framework of the inner mansion. Their solitary lifestyles extended beyond junk collecting. It seems that the

brothers made all attempts to extricate themselves from society. They didn't pay their taxes and paid bills. Tax collectors would come and couldn't get in and leave notices on their door with lessons and dozens. Langley would never pick them up. His rappor senitives. His lawyers couldn't get to him either, so they couldn't pay the bills. The police periodically would

try to break in. Sometimes they try to hatch it or act their way through, but the walls drunk were so massive that there was no way to get through. Occasionally language pop his head up, went now and just say go away, and they resented that whole aspect of government. He was kind of like an early libertarian. They actually owned a time half of the Queen's waterfront, which they left to ruin in many places. To see, were very

poor managers there had no interest in managing it. So they had a lot of money just never sparent it. That led to various utilities being cut off. Telephone service was terminated in followed by gas and electricity, and somewhere in the mix they lost running water too, which is fine in a way with the Collier brothers, because anything like electricity or gas could turn their brown stone into this raging infernum at some point, which was always a danger.

But for anything they absolutely needed from the outside world, Langley would devise a system. Langley would make these nightly rounds collecting meat from garbage cans, and he would just cut around the rotted part. He would collect the water from the fountains in Mars Park, and that's what they would use for water. I mean, it was of course very insanitary, but in a way they didn't need running water, and in a way they didn't need electricity because Homer

was blind and couldn't see in the first place. Langley was used to the dark because that's when he went on his scavenger hunts. They were perfectly comfortable being these creatures of the night. One of the only things that the Collier shared with their neighbors in Harlem was anxiety about each other. They resented what they called the hooligans in the neighborhood. But I think many of the middle aged and elderly people had a kind of a benevolent

idea of them. The bookers would leave them meet and at the newsstands, and there would be a stack of newspapers that Langley could go to a night and just rummage through and take home. Still, as the looming Corner mansion grew more and more decrepit, so did the enigma. Since nobody could enter, anybody saw of the place where the newspapers that lined the windows. There was this extremely mysterious place that all sorts of rumors sprang from, and

no one quite knew what was it. Within the four walls of the building, there were rumors that Langley may have killed his brother, and there were all sorts of corpses hanging from the trees and there that people buried under their junk. The stories became larger and larger, and the inclusive brothers became more and more part of the Harlem folklore. They were famous or infamous within Harlem. For Franz and his family, tells of hermit hoarders did not

require much imagination. Michael Arthur was a lot like Langley Collier in the difference, of course, he made his daily rounds in the daylight. Arthur had his apartment in the Bronx that was equally bizarre and punn Old guy had visited and actually dat over one night when I was eight years old, nineteen fifty nine. That would be I would walk through and be afraid that these powering mounds

of newspapers would avalanche and kill me. And I was afraid that no one would find me under all these newspapers. But it's still I was a kid and was very fascinating to actually be in that kind of environment. I can't quite figure out why my father in his right mind, or my mother for that matter, who really kind of despised her brother in laws, would actually let me and my sister stay in, you know, this huge fire hazard. But it was one of the great memories imprinted in

my mind from my youth. According to Lids family lore, the origins of Uncle Arthur's collection were deep rooted. This drunk mania may have begun at the end of World War One. He was maybe three years old. He had a thirteen year old brother, Leo. He had a job of removing every third bulb from the strings along the beach of Coney Island. That's when the Coney Honest and Steeple Trace Park and Luna Park and all the lights

along the boardwalk. Somehow that was supposed to confuse German Zeppelin's that might attack New York and a Chris There we happened, But why they would come to Tony Island is another question. Leo would bring the scent bulbs home to Arthur, who was fascinated with any three year old might by their smooth, shiny roundness. As he grew older, they break one by one, but even as an adult he had saved a few from his youth that perhaps

was the start of his collection. And then when we got older, he would take the F train to the beast of Coney Island with his family, and he browsed through the trash cans on the boardwalk or collectible junk. He would come back from those family outings and sort of boarding stuff in his little space under the bed. He shared with my father. The stories of Uncle Arthur, like those of the Collier brothers, back at a central question what makes something chunk? Proverbially, what makes one person's

trash another's treasure. It goes into the difference between a collector and a connoisseur. I mean a guy like Malcolm Forbes would collect Faberge eggs, which were highly valued into the tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Arthur, like

Langley Collier, was not scriminating. He collect anything there's a little shoe shoe policy, sponges you find in hotel rooms, not that he was ever in hotel rooms, but he had a whole collection of those, and on an entire drawer full of parking tickets, and he had taken off the windshields of cars. And I said, you know why

you're taking parking takes off of cars? He said, well, people just leave him on their windshields when he required made the connection, and I was wondered how much those people had to pay in the end because they never responded to their first ticket. He's still gone into the idea of just having things and collecting that the junkie collected he considered like his friends or like his cat. They were part of his family, so he hated giving up on any of them, were parting with them. He

just kept accumulating. He told me he regretted mixing up his gems with common everyday newspapers. Christal gems where things like broken pencil sharpenness and old shoes, and looked through his cupboards and they like seventy one pound bags of coffee and seven news four cans of evaporated milk amid the stacks of old newspapers and tapes of used razor blades, and drifts of pipes and bird cages and scithers or whatever.

I once found a paper bag containing a single penny and a note explaining that it's been found in front of his apartment building in December twelfth, nineteen fifties. Fours in the early sixties especials look up to the skies. Arthur always looked down to the ground. That's how he would find things, not always in traffickings. Been on the street. He us this little plux sparrow of a man, and it was kind of like a Sherpa of Brooklyn or

the Bronx, wherever he was at the time. He's carrying these huge sacks of things and mattresses on his back through the streets of New York. Among the myriad subcategories of junk and Arthur's possession, one department featured above all others. Shoelaces. She would write on the shoelaces if it came from a sneak here, you know pen leather shoe or you know a boot, and that became this humongous shoelace collection.

As a syndrome, boarding goes back to ancient Egyptians at least, and there are historical accounts of boarding that did back like four hundred years through the necropolis is of pharaohs, vast cities of the dead. These rulers Memphi dynasties were buried in what was called mastabas, which are oblong tombs with sloping sides and flat roofs and huge storerooms above and below. The late pharaohs were jam packed with his possessions.

Collections typically include furniture, clothing, magical annulets, weapons, tools, gameboards, in lunchboxes, mummified geese, jugs of wine. In those days, the ancient Egyptians believed that the pharaoh couldn't lead much of a life in the afterlife without his stuff, so

basically they thought you could take away with you. And I think there's an element of that in horders that they think that the stuff will survive them and maybe accompanying them wherever going after death, which is why they're so possessive of each individual item and give it up. Arthur knew where everything, or every at least every category was, you know, his empty cigarette access, the matches he found on the street, the parking tickets, all the ephemera was

his specific places. You could point to an area and say, well, that's you know, that's where the bottle caps are. I mean not that they were in neat piles or anything. I mean they were in total messes, but they did have an order which only knew about. Do you think of people who live with furniture that they hate and

it's only because they inherited it. I think a lot of those collectors, if you will, think that it's des trying the memory of their parents or grandparents or whatever, and they don't want to do with disservice or disrespect their ancestors. But the stigma against junk collecting takes on a much different shape. With some grounds, there's a justifiable

reason that people living with hoarders. I mean, there are mice roaches, which Arthur had in abundance, and it had so many mice that his cat was afraid to come out it was a huge fire hazard, and the entire building can go off in flames, and that would be the well spring of the fire. So I have great sympathy for people living in a building occupied by someone who just collects indiscriminately. On the other hand, they are individuals and they have chosen to live apart from everyone else.

My uncle Arthur was maybe the most lovable person I've ever met, But you know, they're not concerned with the welfare of other people. They're concerned with adding to their junk. Francis found himself for aiding to his uncle on both sides of the issue. As a child, I was fascinated by him that someone should live this way in gold tunnels and erect structures, although I never quite felt as my father did that Arthur was just a miss of his boy who wouldn't conform to what society thought apartment

should look like. As an adult, I realized the responsibility that tenants should have to each other, and what a difficult position he was putting everyone else in the apartment complex in. You know, as I get older and I realized the landlords were threatening to a victim, I felt a need to step in and actually cleaned some of the stuff out before he got thrown on the street. France took it upon himself to attempt the insurmountable to

clean out Arthur's apartment. Brian in a game of friends, maybe five or six of us just with contractor bags to throw out stuff. It was pretty amazing because we'd find things have been lost for twenty years. It was almost like an archeological big and find these tangled mounds of twine and electrical cord climbing up these rolling hills.

Newspapers that were still in their plastic sleeves and shirts and jackets, slopped out on staying grocery bags and onto grubby carpet, and the stove and the witch encounters disappeared from view and lost under a couple of feet of cans and bottles, these colder like mobiles and Uncle Arthur fashion out of clothes pins and coat hangers, and the bedroom closet was packed with newspapers from as far back as the Carter administration was in two thousands, and the

refrigerator had English muffroms from the end of the Reformation. He spent eight hours there, not even getting through the living room. There was so much stuff, and then we had to stop because the superintendent of the building said there was no more room outside for anybody else's garbage. Landlord hired his own crew and they spent ten days cleaning out the apartment. It took actually a month of sanitation workers coming there to clean out the stuff we

had brought downstairs. I remember when I brought him in and he was sort of shocked, right seeing this at space. And had brought him an intimate cake as part of like moving in or removing in gift, and I dropped a few crumbs and we struck me as really odd. He went to a closet and got a broom and a desk pan and swept it up. So I was thinking myself, God, he really has reformed. She's actually cleaning

something up. I visited him maybe a month later. The table that had been cleaned was now full of papers piling up and stuff all over his bed, and you could just see rubbish forming his piles. The upside for him was he gave him room to collect more junk, so that he kind of liked told me that the landlords didn't like the hobby, but what can you do. I've got a lease. It gave him a certain powers, that power to be your own person, free of a

society that doesn't understand you. That all came crashing down for the Call your Brothers the morning of March one. Yeah, well, nobody has seen Langley in a while. During his nightly rounds. Kids started saying, well, maybe he's dead. I mean, they always said he's the ghosts he man, but maybe it was a ghost now. It took cold among the people in the neighborhood. What really said it up was every morning Langley would set out milk for the stray cats

in Harlem. They were just me owing under his window for days on end, and people wondered why they hadn't been fed. It was that Friday morning of the one when the police were tipped off on the matter. The caller identified himself as Charles Smith, that man Avenue Omar Collier police arrived. Nobody answered. When they asked their way through the front door. The police and gathered onlookers were overcome by the smell of decay. There is this dark forest of junk. It took almost an entire day to

get through the barricades in the front door. Kind of bushed back through the annals and the walls of newspapers, and they'd see like single shoes and single socks landing everywhere, because if deposited buying a flash flood, or he's trying to capitalist pins and cereal boxes and great tapes of magazines and drifts of yellowing New York Times is and yelling news is and Brooklyn Eagles near in a live

in these papers in. The cops and city workers who had been called out to the Collier House before knew that the place would be treacherous, and by design, the

brothers didn't want anybody ever entering their space. They feared robbers burglars police, so they constructed these elaborate booby traps and of bricks and cinder blocks and bottles of their own feces and really kind of dangerous, sometimes discussing things with every possible entrance walled off with junk, and without knowing your way around Langley's network of booby trap tunnels, the only way in was to clear a path. Police

began excavating, hurling chunk out onto the street. Hours passed without headway from a ladder, an officer bashed open the second story window and crawled in flashlight drawn what d o A. They finally found in a corner Homer, who was hunched over in his usual position, being paralyzed, with a shriveled orange next to him. Dead. He had died of the hydration and hunger in mid fan, but Langley was nowhere to be found. The cops boarded up the house and went home for the weekend, thinking the younger

Collier would turn up by Monday. He was still missing. There was a search that began all over New York and in fact all of the world for Langley Collier, which was front page news for several weeks. It became this kind of game to find Langley Callier, and three of the newspapers and tabloids in New York in fact, potical rewards for finding Langley Collier. People would site him on the subways and the trains, and he is sited in Europe and in North and South Carolina, so many

potas should kind of go. Anyone who looks like a homeless person basically a little capped and beard and unkempt, was presumed to be Langley Collier. All the while, dozens of city workers continued sifting through the contents of the house dropping detritus to the street below to be hauled away. Just stuff flying out of the windows that are thrown by police and mostly firemen were afraid for their own states because they feared that the floors might buckle with

the weight of all this junk. His huge mob of people in the street, mostly locals. But then when the papers started writing about it, people from all over the Try State area came just of curiosity to save the mansion. People who were just catching things as flying out the window and in the wind, the running petting sheets of music and old newspapers down the street just to have parts of the themed Collier collection. You could not actually drive through that part of Harlem then, because there are

so many people clogging the avenues. Days stretched into weeks. On the first of April, police hope Langley would show up to his brother's funeral, but no such luck. A professional clearing crew was called in to finish the job at the brown Stone. One day, while they're on the second floor looking through the debris, you guy reached into a pile of newspapers and said, oh, I found it too.

After sixteen days of searching, it turned out Langley's body was laying just ten ft from where Homer's corpse have been found. When he was going to bring food to his brother, Langley pulled his own boobie trap. It toppled this immense stack of newspapers and detritus that trapped Langley. He could not escape, so he's suffocated beneath his own collection. He was called out and a gunny sack throw down the window like his brother had been, and that was

the end of the search for Langley Collier. The irony New York's greatest hoarders, crushed beneath the weight of their own junk was not lost on anyone. You know. The socialist papers at the time talked about capitalism causing their death because they had a possess all these objects and they they were crushed under the weight of capitalism. There are a lot of metaphors going around at the time, and that was one of the most poetic. The family name, too,

has cemented in pockets of American vernacular. Firefighters still describe a hazardous overpacked residents as a Collier. Every once in a while. The brothers turned up as a punch line and someone's joke who broke the all time low gas Bill record Brothers, unless we forget to mention generations of parents criticizing their children's messy rooms. France's father had a Freudian interpretation of Uncle Arthur that was certainly adapted to

the Colliers as well. My father used to claim that Uncle Arthur's courting was his way of quote unquote channeling aggression and simplemating it. And maybe there's a perhaps a defensiveness behind what about the would call his hobby Like Langley, he built barricades and set up booby traps and nests inside the walls of junk. But really I wouldn't call it aggression as much as that was the way he pained his individuality. For me, there's one thing about the

call Your Brothers. I get stuck on. Their story reads like a parable, a morality tale that ends with a fitting punishment, like a Greek myth. But if that's the case, what was their crime? Sure they may have not been good neighbors or citizens even, and maybe they should have paid their taxes, But to think of their horrific deaths as symbols of fate the lesson seems disproportionate to the tale.

If you visit Harlem now, you won't find a crumbling brown stone at Fifth where the party Brothers Manchion once stood. I have a city in New York has put a pocket park. It's very pleasant in the spring, filled with daff hills blooming, and grass is freshly green, and there's an iron fence with a dozen sycamores shading the benches within. You can't really get inside without a key, and I have no idea who has the keys and said for the Department of Parks. So it's almost like a museum

without objects. The street itself is gentrified and looks nothing like a bit in nt. Like much of Harlem, there are these late nineteenth century brown stones next to two spaces where the brown stones have been knocked down so away the pocket park is not unlike much of the rest of the avenue, and that there are buildings in

empty space, the building and then empty space. So unless you know what you're looking for or read the plaque, we wouldn't know necessarily that this was the cost celebrat Ephemeral is written, assembled by Williams, and produced by Any Reese, Matt Frederick and Tristan McNeil, with additional mixing from Josh Stain. And technical assistance from Sherry Larson. Franz Lids is a writer for Smithsonian Magazine and a frequent contributor to The

New York Times. Ghost Deman and Unstrung Heroes Franz's childhood memoir are two of the most excellent books I've read and reread. Find them, buy them and find us at Ephemeral. Dutch Chell next time on Ephemeral, I actually found a tape box that said head cheese in all capital letters

on it, and there's no way I'm not picking that up. Also, it's on a tape box of a company that I know did not make tapes after the nine, So this is this is an ancient tape and it says head cheese on it, And I'm intrigued, what is this going to be? It is in the world right hand, and Ina and media defend them show find podcast. Is that the apple hack past or will ever use in your favorite chos