Day after day, year after year, Patrice Moore received a load of mail—newspapers, magazines, books, catalogs, and random solicitations. Each day the 43-year-old recluse piled the new with the old, until floor-to-ceiling stacks of disorganized paper nearly filled his windowless 10-by-10-foot apartment in New York City. In late December, the avalanche came, and Moore was buried standing up. He stood alone for two days, until neighbors heard his muffled moaning. The landlord broke in with a crowbar; it took another hour for neighbors and firefighters to dig Moore out and get him medical help.
Newspaper accounts of the avalanche duly noted that Moore was luckier than Homer and Langley Collyer, two pack-rat brothers who for four decades crammed their Harlem mansion with heaps of debris: newspapers, old Christmas trees, sawhorses, perhaps a dozen pianos, even a dismantled automobile. On March 21, 1947, Homer was found dead of starvation. It took another 18 days for city workers to uncover Langley’s smothered body.
