As
professional recyclers and garbage removalists, we’re obviously huge fans of
keeping the environment healthy. It pays to dispose of your rubbish in a
thoughtful manner to keep our planet beautiful for future generations. Not only
that, but doing a mass clean up – whether it’s of the inside or your home, your
backyard or your office – can improve your mood and make you more comfortable
in your space. Everybody appreciates cleanliness and neatness.
Or so we thought. For some people – generally known as ‘hoarders’ – collecting rubbish and stacking it up by the piles is an enjoyable pastime. A hoarding disorder actually effects around 2-5% of adults, and while it often affects a person in their childhood, it usually becomes obvious in their later years when they have accumulated more. Hoarding behaviour obviously worsens a person’s ease of living, yet their compulsive inability to throw things away is very difficult to overcome.
Here
we look at some of the most extreme cases of hoarding in recent times.
Edmund Trebus of London
Trebus’
is an infamous case of hoarding as he featured on the BBC documentary program A Life of Grime in the 1980’s and soon become known in England for his compulsive
tendency to collect things. A fan of Elvis Presley, he initially started by
collecting as many of the artist’s records as he could (which turned out to be
a huge amount). He also had a love for vacuum cleaner and cameras. In his older
years, his problem became more serious and he became much more indiscriminate
in terms of what he thought was worthy of collecting. It got to the point where
he would roam the streets picking up random items.
At
the height of the problem, he had accumulated 515 cubic yards of trash in his
house, at which point he moved to a nursing home.
Edith Bouvier Beale and Edith Ewing Bouvier of New York
This
mother and daughter hoarding duo were former socialites and actually related to
Jackie Kennedy. Living in a rundown East Hampton mansion in the state of New
York, they accumulated a huge amount of human and animal waste. Authorities
eventually raided the home and discovered literally hundreds of cats living in
the home, not to mention racoons and other critters that seemed to pop in from
time to time through the roof. Reportedly, it cost $32,000 to clear all the
rubbish (and install a plumbing system and furnace). This was a huge amount of
money in those days.
Kenneth Epstein of Las Vegas
Authorities
called it ‘one of the worst cases of hoarding ever seen’, and for good reason.
Epstein, a 55 year old resident of Las Vegas, had so much rubbish in his home
that he had to crawl on top of it to move through the house. After numerous complaints
or foul odours from neighbours over 2 years, a warrant to search the home was
issued and the authorities went in. They had no idea what they were in for.
Around
36 truckloads of rubbish were removed from the duplex home and some of the
items that were discovered are quite simply shocking. 33 living cats and 9 dead
cats were discovered in the rubble and most items were riddled with pests of
just about every description including spiders and cockroaches. Not only had
that, but meat in the various fridges of the house had decayed so much it had
become liquid. Not the kind of home you can entertain in!
