The Collyer Brothers~

Amy T sent me on a search for the Collyer Brothers, and I'll bet I'm the only person here old enough to remember when they were found, and the huge sensation their life "style" made on NYC and the entire nation. I was born in DC and grew up there, so their story certainly made the news on the East Coast.

If you Google them (and I did remember they spelled their name with a Y, although you'd expect it to be IER)
and pull up the Wikipedia piece, you'll get their entire story. It is haunting. They were both college-educated & their father was a doctor who left his wife & two sons when they were young. When their mother died, they inherited the townhouse (although later in the account they did have a mortgage amount to pay off which I suspect was actually taxes) and began collecting everything and anything, stuffing the house full of things. They stacked newspapers in the rooms and hallways, leaving tunnels or narrow paths through. No electricity, no telephone, no running water, no heat except a small kerosene heater.

Neighbors complained of a foul odor, so police broke in & found their bodies. One died of malnutrition and starvation; the other one, who had set booby traps throughout the place, got trapped in one of his own devices and died.