Has Anyone Ever Heard The Story of The Collyer Brothers?

This story absolutely fascinates me, I find it so sad and so bizarre.
These two brothers, Homer and Langley Collyer, lived for decades in hiding in their 2078 Fifth Avenue home in Harlem in the 1930s; where they were unempolyed and they obsessively collected newspapers, books, furniture, musical instruments, and many other items.
They are now often cited as an example of OCD and disposophobia - or a fear of throwing things away.

Because of their elusiveness there were many rumors about a fortune being hidden in their ‘mansion’ of money and material possessions so burglars would attempt to break in and teenagers would throw rocks at the windows. These actions just made the brothers even more eccentric, they started boarding up windows and creating booby traps to protect themselves and their things. Soon they stopped paying their bills resulting in their electric, gas, phone and water being turned off.

The older brother, Homer, became crippled due to rheumatism and also went blind due to hemorrhages that occurred in the back of both of his eyes. His younger brother, Langley, devised a remedy, a diet of one hundred oranges a week, along with black bread and peanut butter.

Finally in March 1947 the police recieved a phonecall insisting that there was a dead body in the house. The police however had a hard time getting in the building - there was no phone or doorbell and all the doors were locked, not to mention all the stuff they had blocking any enterance. So they ended up just pulling all the junk out and throwing it into the street. After a two hour crawl they found Homer dead in his chair, but they couldn’t find Langley.

Police assumed Langley went on the run but this turned out to be false, for a month later they found his dead body just ten feet from where Homer’s was.He had been crawling through their newspaper tunnel to bring food to his paralyzed brother when one of his own booby traps fell down and crushed him.
Homer, blind and paralyzed, starved to death several days later.

In total, police and workmen took 103 tons of garbage out of the house.
They found things like baby carriages, doll carriages (though both men were unmarried and had no children), a gun collection, rusted bicycles, camera equipment, bowling balls, dressmaking dummies, portraits, bed springs, more than 25,000 books, 8 live cats, hundreds of yards of unused silks and fabric, clocks, 14 pianos and various other instruments, and countless bundles of newspapers and magazines - some decades old.