MM#19 Ten Feet Away

In 1947, police broke into a Harlem brownstone through a second-story window.

 

It took them five hours of digging to find the first body.

The second one took three weeks.

 

Homer and Langley Collyer were Columbia-educated men (a lawyer and a concert pianist) who had slowly sealed themselves inside their family's brownstone and never came out. By the time anyone thought to check on them, the house contained over 140 tons of collected material: 25,000 books, more than a dozen pianos, a horse-drawn carriage, parts of a Model T Ford, and decades worth of carefully saved newspapers. Because Homer had gone blind. And Langley was saving them for when his sight came back.

 

In this episode, we dig through the wreckage of 2078 Fifth Avenue… and find something stranger than hoarding at the center of it.

 

Because this isn't really a story about junk.

It's a story about two brothers, and what devotion looks like when it has nowhere left to go.

 

 

🎧 Take a bite of this Morbid Morsel.

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Original music in this episode is provided by the talented:
SHDWLRKR

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