3 Terrible Cases of Hoarding

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!