The Secret Lives of Hoarders: True Stories of Tackling Extreme Clutter (4 page)

Typical of the “great walls” of clutter that Matt and his crew encounter in the most dangerous Stage 5 hoarding cases.

If friends and family are still in contact with the hoarder, they are deeply concerned and have probably tried interventions. A hoarder at this stage is usually in serious financial trouble, and it's likely that someone has contacted city or county authorities.

Depression is often so severe for a Stage 5 hoarder that he or she struggles to get up each day. A hoarder at this stage is often confused, perhaps saving items for people who are no longer living. Hoarders at this stage don't leave the house, with the exception that some may move to their cars or a homeless shelter to sleep.

 

 

None of these stages is clear-cut. The scale shows a continuum in which a Stage 4 hoarder could have a clean house with no bugs or cobwebs, but it is so packed with stuff that nothing is accessible. Or a Stage 2 hoarder might have a fairly accessible house but a completely filled basement and attic.

The initial assessment of what is being hoarded and where the hoarder is on this scale gives us a sense of the severity of the problem. And while it seems, on the surface, a simple matter to call in a cleaning and repair crew, dealing with hoarders is far from simple. The key to a successful cleanup is to understand what makes hoarders do what they do.

When I first started my business and was searching for jobs, I would drive around and hunt for hoarders. I looked for a house where the blinds were closed and pressed against the windows. Or the yard was overgrown and animals were roaming around. I knew that I'd find a likely client if stuff was piled on the porch or in the yard or in an outbuilding on the property. The stereotypical hoarder—the overweight, elderly woman, unkempt, dressed in layers of clothes, sitting in front of the TV all day long—lives in that house.

Well, at least that's the stereotype. But in the years since I started Clutter Cleaner, I've worked with hundreds of hoarders of every stripe. The truth is that hoarders come in all sizes, shapes, colors, ages, and backgrounds. Many of them contradict the stereotype: They're smart, educated, and have good jobs. If you met them at work or in a social situation, you would never guess they were hoarders. Unfortunately, this makes it easy for outsiders to minimize or dismiss the problem.

Margaret actually seemed to fit the classic type—the older, poor woman living in squalor with her pack of dogs. Hers was a full-blown case in which hoarding had destroyed her house to the point that the living conditions were completely unsafe.

By contrast, Brad and Ellen's house didn't look like a typical hoarder situation, but it had become an issue for them because the clutter was making it difficult to keep track of toys and clothing, and they felt embarrassed by how it looked. More important, how to deal with the clutter had started causing arguments that were spilling over into other parts of their marriage. They called me for help because they sensed that if they didn't address it, the mess (and their bickering) would keep spiraling out of control.

When I first met Li outside her house I would never have guessed that she was an extreme hoarder ... and neither would anyone else, since she hadn't let anyone except for two of her five children into her home in years. In her mid-sixties, Li was generally well dressed, tastefully made up, and in good shape. She looked in every way to be a pampered suburban housewife, but she was, in fact, a Stage 5 hoarder.

Li and her late husband had raised five children in their four-thousand-square-foot, three-story farmhouse in rural Connecticut. My first visit to Li's home revealed that the house and the barn on the property were all completely stuffed to the gills with clothing and household items. Li was pretty well confined to her kitchen and adjacent bathroom, hemmed in by the massive amount of stuff that she had purchased during more than a decade of hoarder-fueled shopping.

Li's house was big enough so that she had room to save all of her now-grown children's clothes and toys, which is what was at the bottom of the piles. And when her husband died and the children had moved away, Li started filling up the house in earnest.

And then there's Rick, a tenured college professor who could excuse his saving papers, magazines, journals, and other printed matter—until it got of out of hand. At school, Rick appeared to be just a regular guy, neatly dressed, articulate, and rational. When he talked about his hoarding, he could almost convince people that saving every scrap of information he came across was a natural extension of his job. But one look inside his house revealed that instead, his hoarding was making his living conditions unsafe. His house was a firetrap.

Like Rick, Jackson was a well-educated person with a good job. By all accounts he was good at his job as a social worker—he even sometimes worked with extreme hoarders. Jackson was young, healthy, in good physical shape, and kept his small house clean and orderly—at least until his Blondie memorabilia collection gradually took over, like so much kudzu. He was able to convince himself—and others—for a long time that he didn't have a problem even though he'd stopped having friends over to visit because he was embarrassed by the clutter. His collection may have sounded like an interesting hobby to outsiders, but it was ruining Jackson's life. But he couldn't get it together enough to tackle the ever-growing mounds of stuff.

Katrina was a retired divorcée who had worked as an office manager for a large company. She was an energetic redhead, smart and opinionated, whose hoarding started with a home-based business selling skin care products. She was storing an ever-growing amount of samples, catalogs, awards, paperwork—and lots of inventory. In addition, years earlier, Katrina had been so determined to get a decent settlement out of her divorce that she actually went to law school and got her degree. Now, long after the settlement, Katrina still had boxes, stacks, and filing cabinets full of legal paperwork. Katrina argued that these were very important documents, which they may have been, but she didn't really need to hold on to everything so long after her divorce was final. At the very least, this stuff didn't belong in her living space. She could have scanned or stored most, if not all, of the data. As a result, after years of neglect, mold was evident along the walls, floors, and baseboards of her home. She even had ivy growing through the floor in one of her rooms.

Someone like Margaret looks like a hoarder—overweight, straggly hair, socially withdrawn, and living in a messy house. Because of that she is more likely to get attention and help from friends, relatives, or social services. But hoarders like Li, Rick, Jackson, and Katrina can slip under the radar, with their problem growing worse until it threatens their relationships, their livelihoods, and their health.

It's impossible to diagnose hoarding solely based on what someone says, what they look like, or even what shape the house is in. Brad and Ellen were smart, social people and their house wasn't so messy that a visitor would assume they had a problem.

It makes sense how hoarders like Li start collecting stuff. But how do things get so out of control? Katrina was clearly an intelligent person who knew that mold is dangerous. Why couldn't she stay clean? These are frustrating questions that many family members and friends of hoarders ask, and the answers aren't always simple.

When people think of hoarders, they think of someone living among broken furniture, decomposing garbage, and animal feces. But hoarding isn't just about dirt and trash; it's about hanging on to things that seem important for one reason or another. The rest is garbage that accumulates because everything else has gotten out of control.

Most hoarder houses end up looking like the owners collect general clutter—too many old clothes, sheets and towels, tote bags, warehouse-sized crates of food, and other items from daily life. Yet some hoarder houses are pristine and packed with fine antiques and collectibles. Most often the hoarders start with that sort of thing, be it magazines, clothes, or valuable artifacts, which then accumulates and takes over the house. The tendency to hoard
one thing
often spreads until the hoarder becomes incapable of getting rid of
anything
.

I've seen homes and yards full of bicycles, airplanes, pornography, empty prescription bottles, live birds, dead rats (carefully sealed in plastic bags), handbags, and even a collection of ten thousand cookie cutters. Hoarders are as diverse and creative as the stuff they collect.

Margaret was a Stage 5 dog hoarder. She started out with one dog, but her love for animals quickly made her the go-to person for strays. Margaret's dogs had complete run of the house, chewing, eating, and marking anywhere they liked and sleeping in a pack on the beds. Her animal hoarding eventually extended to a few parakeets in a large cage and then to ten horses she kept in a barn behind the house. Margaret was unable to say no to any animal in need.

The classic stereotype of the animal hoarder is the old lady with too many cats, like our client, Rose, whose thirty or so cats roamed freely through her house and garage. During the time I worked with her, every time I tried to breathe without a face mask I got a mouthful of fluffy hair. My crew and I found more than fifty dead cats and kittens; their dried-out skeletons were flattened under piles of clothes and boxes.

Rose never noticed any missing pets because there were just too many around to keep track of. The decaying animal smell didn't get anyone's attention because the whole garage and house reeked of cat urine.

Ironically, Rose wanted to protect and care for the animals, but her hoarding got in the way. The animals quickly became endangered simply because she couldn't feed all of them regularly, change their litter, and provide adequate living conditions.

It's hard for a non-hoarder to understand why someone needs so many pets. In so many cases, it became clear to me that a hoarder overlooks the mess when the animals are a comforting substitute for human contact. An animal that loves and doesn't judge might be the only positive thing in a hoarder's day. And taking in animals that would be neglected otherwise gives meaning to the hoarder's life. It can be really empowering to feel so important to the very survival of another living being, but even those best intentions go horribly wrong.

Rick, the college professor we met earlier, had twenty-five years' worth of mail, magazines, and financial documents. A two-foot-thick layer of compressed paper carpeted the whole house.

Every surface in Rick's house was covered in mail. The living room was so cluttered with huge piles of paper and other items that we didn't realize there was furniture in there until we cleaned it up. Rick had spent his whole career gathering, sorting, and sharing information, so for him to throw away that paperwork was almost sacrilegious.

It is difficult for most “information hoarders” to let go of newspapers, books, or mail. Matt has learned that many hoarders know where a specific issue of a magazine or paper can be found.

This is a form of information hoarding. Rick couldn't bear to let information slip through his fingers, out of his control. Books, newspapers, CDs, magazines, photographs—basically any printed or recorded material was important to him. Information hoarders are usually people who have dedicated their careers, and lives, to education in one form or another. Many of them are highly educated themselves and work at top-level jobs in government, law, corporate America, or at universities.

The average person will read the morning paper and then toss it into the recycling bin. Rick read it and then decided that the article on investing would be really helpful one day. Or he'd save a magazine with a gardening article for a friend. (Of course, the friend inevitably did not get the magazine.) Then there were the crossword puzzles—so good to take to a doctor's appointment and work on in the waiting room. So each newspaper or magazine went into a pile. But the next day another newspaper went on top of the growing stack, and pretty soon he had years-old piles of paper that he saw as full of potentially useful information and entertainment.

The logic that so much information can be stored online nowadays has little effect on information hoarders. Some hoarders do, in fact, use their computers to back up the physical items they are holding. But for many hoarders, “online” can seem nebulous. If it's not in the house, hoarders worry that they can't locate what they need instantly. Surprisingly, information hoarders can usually find what they're looking for—or at least know where it is in the piles, though it may be buried three feet deep.

Marcie's house was packed floor to ceiling with unopened plastic bags of items from discount and big-box stores. This stout, gray-haired grandmother who dressed in flowery polyester pantsuits loved to shop. Her hoarding had progressed to the point where she'd go shopping to replace things she couldn't find in her mess, but then she would also buy extra stuff while she was at it. For years, Marcie would come home from her latest spree, put her shopping bags down on the nearest pile, and then never look at them again. Soon she forgot what she had just bought and often ended up buying replacements for something she didn't know she already had—something still pristine in its original packaging.