Two educated, well-born brothers sealed themselves inside their New York brownstone and filled it with 140 tons of junk over decades. One died trapped under his own booby trap. The other starved to death ten feet away.
Homer and Langley Collyer were born into a respected Manhattan family — their father a physician, their mother a former opera singer. Both attended Columbia University. Homer became a lawyer; Langley was a concert pianist who performed at Carnegie Hall. By 1940, they had not left their Harlem brownstone in years.
The withdrawal began after Homer went blind in 1933. Langley quit his job to care for him and the two stopped paying bills, disconnecting phone service in 1937 and losing electricity and gas in 1938. Langley foraged for food at night, sometimes walking miles to retrieve groceries, and fed Homer a diet of 100 oranges per week, convinced it would restore his sight.
As the brothers grew more fearful of their changing neighborhood, Langley began constructing an elaborate maze of tunnels through the accumulated junk — old newspapers, baby carriages, bicycles, pianos, a Model T chassis, human organs in jars, 25,000 books. He also set booby traps throughout the tunnels to crush intruders.
On March 21, 1947, police responded to an anonymous tip about a dead body in the house. After five hours of digging through the packed foyer, they found Homer — dead of starvation, having apparently been unable to reach food after his brother stopped returning. He weighed 82 pounds.
Langley was nowhere. Police searched nine states based on reported sightings. On April 8 — more than two weeks later — a workman found Langley's decomposing body just ten feet from where Homer had died. He had been crushed by his own booby trap while crawling through a tunnel, probably bringing food to his brother.
It took workers months to remove the hoard: 140 tons of material, including 14 pianos, glass chandeliers, bowling balls, a folding horse carriage top, and thousands of bundles of newspapers. Langley had been saving the newspapers 'so that when Homer regains his sight he can catch up on the news.' The brothers are buried in unmarked graves at Cypress Hills Cemetery.