Compulsive Hoarding

[Trans Fat 41g]

I don't know if this deserves its own thread but I'll shoot: is anyone here familiar with hoarders? Have any of you known one or had been one? If so, to what extent had anyone or yourself experienced hoarding?

 

[Quijibo69]

It has a tv show, this episode is the grossest one:

Spoiler: DO NOT WANT!

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

This is going to probably make my night much more fun sharing...

I live in an average not-too-nice but not-actually-bad neighborhood street nearby an intersection, most of the people keep their yards nice and neat and do their part in picking up garbage kids throw on the street when they go to School and I've been sweeping the sidewalk beside my house. Everything is fine and dandy except for the house across from me (which is now renovated and a family moved in) was subject to years of rot. Story goes this destitute man and his battered wife nicknamed "Piggies" lived in filth with their child there after his grandma passed away. Apparently she hoarded newspapers and aluminum cans, which her son (the father) also piled up in the back yard. He inherited the compulsive disorder from her, which lead to the situation getting even worse as the kid had to stay over there every other month. What pisses me off about it all, the landlord doesn't give two flying fucks about his land so he let it rot even after a terrible storm nearly destroyed half the residential block. Thankfully after *five years* it's in livable conditions and I hope Mr. and Mrs. piggy were put into rehabilitation.

 

[Magique]

I wish I had the horrifying rating now. This is awful.

 

[TowinKarz]

The Collyer Brothers are a well known case of hoarding, mostly due to the sheer excess it reached, even by hoarding standards, and the fact it ended up killing them both.....

 

[XYZpdq]

The best thing about living here in the cyberonline future is that with massive external drives I can download alllllllllllllllllllllllllll day to keep on hoarding and it barely takes up any irl room.

 

[vertexwindi]

I live with a hoarder.

 

[Vitriol]

After my great grandfather died, my father and grandfather found boxes of lead soldiers he'd made stored with his old service pistol, sword and trophies from the great war. My grandfather believed they must have been made shortly after his father returned from the trenches and in secret. I counted them a few years ago and there are >20 000.

Poor fellow was clearly quite damaged.

 

[Lefty's Revenge]

One of my closest friend's mother is a hoarder. Its basically ruined their relationship and caused him to cut ties with the whole family.

Shit is dark.

 

[Vorhtbame]

We've just moved into a house that's been in the family since at least 1870. How do I know it's 1870? Because there are boxes upon boxes of books, journals, and photographs from that year and thereabout. We could open a museum based just on what we found in one bedroom.

On the other hand, there were also dozens of boxes of unused seeds, broken and rusted cookware, mail-order catalogs, and bottles of cough syrup that expired twenty years ago, courtesy of the eccentric uncle who lived here until a few years ago. And don't get me started on the cans of food that date back to the seventies! I loved that old man, but he really couldn't understand why he didn't need two refrigerators in the back room.

 

[QE 757]

I had a compulsive hoarder in the neighborhood, an elderly man who had a collection of rusted car wrecks and old refrigerators.
He died a couple of years ago and they are cleaning up his yard and planning to demolish his house which was something straight out of a horror movie. Way worse than 14 BLC.

 

[unclestryker]

It has a tv show, this episode is the grossest one:

Ah yes hoarders, that hoader in the episode, had stuff is that episode that was so bad they couldn't air segments of what they found. Robin Zasio spent time in-between filming segments crying in her car. Matt had to drive home in his underwear because the cat juice manage to seep through hazmat suit and on to his clothing. Oh what's cat juice, you say? Well check out the episode down below.

Also here is the opie and Anthony segment.

 

[AnOminous]

I have an uncle with hoarding tendencies for very large machines and giant engines for very large machines and appliances and machine parts, but he has a lot of land, so he has kept these things stored on the land itself, and in a basement and a few relatively small outside storage places. He actually has used many of these things from time to time, so his somewhat implausible arguments for having all of this insane crap around sort of passes muster.

And he has a very good grasp of the law so somehow, this mammoth bunch of crap doesn't break the law.

(He also built a house where somehow, because of how he built the foundation, he has to pay practically no taxes on it. Seriously. The state tax guys challenged it and lost. Beat that, sovcits.)

But he's married to a woman who insisted none of that shit ever gets into the actual house, because she's exactly the opposite and a bit of a neat freak. And in fact, none of that shit is in the actual house.

This has somehow worked out.

ETA: Oh, the point. I forgot that.

Hoarders who aren't alone only get to do that shit because nobody challenges it. A hoarder is someone whose tendencies to do that are not countered by a working social support structure.

 

[fuehrer_dessler]

Shit man, I need a horrifying rating for all this shit.

 

[chimpburgers]

Never met a hoarder before but the TV shows I saw on it were enough for me. Matt Paxton has to have big balls to do what he does and cleaning up all that shit.

 

[waffle]

(He also built a house where somehow, because of how he built the foundation, he has to pay practically no taxes on it. Seriously. The state tax guys challenged it and lost. Beat that, sovcits.)

.

That just sounds like the King of the Hill episode where Dale builds a watchtower with no foundation, 49' tall and a 9'x9' base just to get around county building codes. Then it falls over.

One of my real good friend's dad's has filled the entire family home with Nintendo and Godzilla shit, he's a fucking doctor too. He always clears out the garage and talks about how it's going to be his super cool staging area to clear the house out. Then he fills the garage with shit again.

 

[TowinKarz]

There was an old, old motel on the side of the road here in town. Old enough that it looked right out of Hitchcock's Psycho, the lone proprietor's house on the back of the lot, and the actual Motel rooms in your typical roadside setup up front. Well, this place had ceased being an actual for-business motel in the 70's, partially because it couldn't compete with chain hotels, since it had no amenities, and partially because the road it was on was bypassed by a freeway and that literally killed traffic driving by. Anyway, it had lain unused and getting a bit shabbier each year until about 2010 when the proprietor/owner died and a new person bought the lot, hotel and all. I had a chance to talk to him, and apparently, it was a hoarder's nightmare. Every single one of the hotel rooms was filled to the ceiling with usual hoarding junk, newspapers, old appliances, furniture, knick-knacks, stuffed until the floors under the rooms collapsed, and then they piled stuff on top of that new space at the top.... the main house was just as bad, and the property was strewn with dead ranges, fridges, and the rusted hulks of 12 cars. The guy said he had 10 industrial-sized roll off dumpster loads taken out to get rid of it all, and then called in a bulldozer to flatten the motel part. The place actually looks like a nice spot to live in now, he's working on making it into an event center where you can have a nice picnic or family reunion, else I think he wouldn't have bothered with the de-hoarding effort.

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

Jesus Christ, the types of garbage you can fit in what is supposed to be a residential structure. Holy shit.

 

[Cosmos]

Sometimes I feel like I'm walking the thin line between "packrat" and "hoarder." I have a very difficult time getting rid of things because I can always think of an excuse to keep something around, be it because I "might need it again someday" or because I'm convinced it has sentimental value. Thankfully though, it only extends to actual functional items and not trash.

I feel like I have the potential to become a hoarder if I'm not careful, which is why I'm, you know, careful. But at the same time I've binge watched and read a ton of stuff about hoarders so I feel like I've sufficiently traumatized myself into not drifting down that path.

Also, animal hoarders make my soul ache. I know that the majority of animal hoarders aren't evil animal abusers; most of the time they genuinely love their animals but just cannot take care of them and refuse to accept it. But I cannot deal with seeing living, feeling creatures living in overcrowded filth and waste because they're being hoarded away like inanimate objects.

 

[Watermelon1337]

Also, animal hoarders make my soul ache. I know that the majority of animal hoarders aren't evil animal abusers; most of the time they genuinely love their animals but just cannot take care of them and refuse to accept it. But I cannot deal with seeing living, feeling creatures living in overcrowded filth and waste because they're being hoarded away like inanimate objects.

I somewhat agree with you, I think it depends on the hoarder, but most of the time I feel no sympathy for them because anyone can look at a cat covered in mange and diseases and know it's not right for the cat to look that way. I get something's already wrong with a hoarder's mind to where they just literally don't 'notice' any of the garbage around them but when I used to watch the shows, normal people would be devastated and angry that there's litters of dead or dying kittens hidden in layers of filth and the hoarders almost never twitch a single muscle. They only show emotion when anyone says they're taking the animals way to help them or give them humane deaths and they scream and rant and rave because their possessions are being taken away. I rarely ever see them actually care and love for an animal in such conditions and ever want to do what's best for them. I have only seen one hoarder who kept one room for his birds completely clean and empty so that they wouldn't have to live in a crowded bunker of trash like he did.

The hoarders that force their children or someone unable to leave the house to live in the same conditions are the fucking worst. The kids usually end up with horrible health issues and even go to the ER for breathing problems and the hoarder relative doesn't bat an eye. It's crazy just so see a normal person screaming at a hoarder trying to get it through their head how awful or abusive they are and the hoarder just looks blank. Or, if they DO feel defensive, they become nasty horrible people screaming back at them and the cleaning process comes to a halt.

As for knowing any hoarders in my personal life, I had some neighbors who moved into a nice 2 story house near the park. They left their halloween, christmas, and easter decorations all piled and rotting in the front porch, plus a kiddie pool, plus some bikes and a slide in the back yard. They never even touched any of them for the entire year and a half they lived there. The parents were overweight white trash and their kids looked anemic. The entire family would stop whatever they were doing in the front or back yard to literally stare at you until you went back inside or were out of sight. My neighbor said they reminded him of some backwoods feral family from a horror movie. Our little group of houses closest to them noticed a smell like garbage constantly coming from the house. I guess reports came in because the family was evicted, but not before 3 storage pods filled with garbage and broken furniture were piled and heaved off.