Hoarders on A&E

I saw a promo while at my dad's for the holiday, and I'm this close to buying cable again just to see it. I love this shit.

I think A&E has a couple of eps on its website. I found it through Hulu so I'm thinking you can catch the show without cable.

As to the show itself, I watched one of the eps on A&E's site and holy fuck. You have to wonder how these people live with all that trash around them not to mention the stench. The bathroom from that one episode with the 21 year old gay guy and the alcoholic dad is the stuff of nightmares.

The one episode I saw featured a woman whose plan was to buy another house as a way to start over, but she ended up just using that house as another dumping ground. The only reason they had the intervention was because she got to the point where she couldn't afford her mortgage, and had no choice but to start clearing things out. Man, when the movers misplaced a 20 year old dish towel that she hadn't even seen in years she nearly had a stroke.

Never seen so much stuff in my life. Her houses were like two landfills with nice exteriors.

That's the one I saw. As an OCD neat-freak, it's incomprehensible how these people live. This might replace Sex Rehab as my favorite show.

Good news!

I can tolerate watching a lot of disgusting things on TV, but I can't stomach this show.

gahhhh I want to watch it but I don't. It's like an internet shock video - I wanna say that I've sat through it, but the feeling of dread is keeping me away. I'm kind of a clean freak (even though my desk doesn't necessarily reflect that) and can't stand the idea of having too much shit. I think my girlfriend was coming down with this before I moved in...it took me a while to talk her into dumping unnecessary crap. Now she's fine, but fuck why the fuck do you need a basket full of ancient hairclips you don't even use anymore and haven't used in years? I can see how this could get out of control.

I KNEW that was going to come up. No, she'd have noticed the dead cat.

There have been more stories than I like to admit about police finding dead people under clutters of shit. The neighbors don't suspect anything because the houses already smells like something died. One person I read about died of natural causes. But I heard about another where the person died because the stacks of clutter collapsed on him.

There were 2 dead cats. Watching this show made me want to clean every inch of my house with bleach.

I'm so glad I didn't see that episode. This is probably the nastiest show on TV.. and yet if my remote lands on it, I'll watch it in horror every time.

There was one I saw where a woman had a kid who had picked up her behavior because to him, that was just how people were. It was heart-breaking to see him casually walking around cluttered piles of boxes trying to find his toys, and knowing that in all likelihood, he had the same situation to look forward to when he grew up.

Yeah I saw that episode too. I can handle alot but that woman picking out seeds from a rotten pumpkin (for planting...wtf??) was too much for me for some reason. This show is nightmare fuel....

You and me both, man.

Did they ever explain if she used that toilet or just sort of went out in the yard like an animal?

You guys see the one with the crazy cat lady? She had a garage where neighborhood cats came in and lived and banged and they found DOZENS of dead cats, of every age. She's lucky she didn't face animal cruelty charges.

Yeah, this show is ultimate guilty pleasure. The production is pretty crappy (oh god, that fucking piano music they constantly use) but the subjects are just too compelling.

The Collyer brothers is the most well known instance.

My mom's side of the family is this way. Aunt, uncle, and grandparents. That house was always stacked up with shit, and my cousin, sister, and I would often spend time there cleaning it up and just throwing away tons of shit whenever we were left alone. When my grandparents died (they only died a few months apart) my mom and I begged my aunt to let us come over and clean the house. My aunt said sure, so we went over, started just pitching shit into huge bags and taking it to the sidewalk for trash, and my aunt freaked. She wanted to look through every single piece of paper and handful of junk to check for anything of importance.

It was then that it struck me that they weren't just filthy, but there was a bigger problem there. We left and didn't touch anything there. My uncle passed away a few months ago, and my aunt moved in with my mom. My cousin and her kids were allowed to move into my grandparents/aunt and uncle's old house. My cousin spent 4 weekends, with groups of friends, cleaning the house. At thanksgiving she showed me pictures. There were fucking dressers and tables I didn't even knew existed. The floors could be seen. The kitchen could be used. It was amazing.

Intervention and this show hit so damn close to home, it's depressing, but I think they're great if the cliched "only one person" gets help from a family member after seeing an episode.

My wife and I have a strange way of finding hoarders to live next to. In our last place we shared a wall with one whose collections were so bad she couldn't use her front door. She had to go in and out through the basement. It wasn't a huge problem until we started to get flies periodically.

Now we have a condo in a building where there's an elderly woman below us with a similar problem, and my fear every day is that the place will burn down after a light bulb sparks and ignites every newspaper she's saved from every major city for the last sixty years.

Yeah, In the apartment building I just moved out of in August my neighbor was like this. She never kept rotten food, or other nastiness around, and her place was clean, just lots and lots of stuff. For example, she wound go buy 5 or 6 copies of the latest Madden football for her nefews for Christmas. Problem was, she never gave them to them and that kind of stuff would just accumulate. If she needed a new computer or wanted a movie on DVD, toilet paper, whatever, she'd buy multiples. She eventually started stacking stuff on top of the stove. Of course, fire happended, and fire trucks started showing up with more and more frequency. That's when I decided I really need to buy a house and move.

You should have decided that you needed to rob her place. Multiple computers/games/DVDs? SCORE.

You really think she wouldn't notice? She'd have a four alarm meltdown.

Only four?

Some of them are OCD, like that guy's house on the Tonight Show where Conan bought some stuff. Organized piles.

However, the giant trash heap of a house on the last Hoarders, that lady was clearly just really really really lazy.

There was a porta toilet, the kind that uses sacks to hold the poop, in her living space.

christ

My grandmother was a big hoarder of THINGS, but she kept it secret, and kept the house pretty clean. I still remember my Dad and his siblings starting a fire in the yard and burning a bunch of her shit, then making her sell the rest in a giant yard sale. Then they moved her into an apartment, and she's been fine for the last decade-plus.

On subject, this show is too depressing for me.

I've heard of something like that happening, but I always thought it was some sort of "urban legend". The irony of people being crushed under the weight of their own material objects is too perfect to have happened. But with all the weird shit in this world, someone being flattened by 45,000 ketchup packets they keep in their living room doesn't seem all that unrealistic.

Every time I watch this show, I'm thankful that smell-vision doesn't exist.

It doesn't matter. I can still smell it.

I like to mention the Collyer Brothers in any hoarding thread, for the new guys.

It doesn't matter. I can still smell it.

Whenever there's an option to watch a high def version of a show, I jump on it. This is the only show that I watch where I can only stand the standard def version. Hi-def might be too much for a show like Hoarders.

Also, I saw the premier and holy shit. Even by this show's standards, that was a rough one. 2 dead cats, 8,000 pounds of garbage, and then to top it all off, a layer of topsoil that has developed from all those years (decades) of garbage. Jeez!

Well that's just dandy.

Also, I half expected her to pop those false teeth in like nothing right after they unearthed them.

Me too. I told my wife the same thing. "I bet she pops those dentures in her mouth right then and there.". I think she would have too if they found the bottom half as well.

E.L. Doctorow wrote a book about them, just came out in September.

As a social worker, my wife had to occasionally deal with hoarders. Quite a few times, she'd come home from work freaked out over finding dead animals and such in a hoarders house. One time, she actually found a mouse nest and had one of them scurry over her feet in an attempt to escape (she drank alot that night). There are more of these houses than you realize.

I wonder what the split is between people that have a legit mental condition and how much is pure lazy.

Oy! I just posted that like 10 posts ago! And whenever someone asks for help cleaning out a dead relatives house, ask if they're a hoarder first. I learned that lesson the hard way.

From what I understand, many hoarders are anything BUT lazy. Some literally spend all of their 'free' time sorting and organizing their hoard to the point of exhaustion.

Shit, sorry. I looked through the thread but it's hard to see the screen over my piles of ziplocked hair clippings and things I found on subway seats.