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The Collyer Brothers Ghost Story
by Jay Maeder, NY Daily News 7/12/98 "When Homer first lost his sight, he used to see visions of beautiful buildings, always in red. He would describe them to me and I would try to paint them just as he directed. Someday, when Homer regains his sight, I will show the paintings to him." - Langley Collyer THE GHOST man of Harlem came out of his spooky old house only very late at night, and the neighbors would see him foraging for rags and junk and scraps of meat in the moonlight. The old hoodoo had lived in the moldering, four-story mansion at Fifth Ave. and 128th St. without telephone or electricity or gas since 1909, and the place was full of rats and pianos and newspapers piled to the ceilings, and the windows were boarded up and the doors were wired shut and the yard was heaped high with bedsprings and broken furniture and old stoves. Some said the Ghost Man was the richest man in New York City. Already a Harlem legend for decades, the ancient scarecrow Langley Collyer came to larger public attention in 1942, when he stopped making mortgage payments and the Bowery Savings Bank people pounded on his door for weeks. When he finally emerged from the funereal dust, he proved to be a courtly old gentleman, descended from aristocrats who had lived in the Hudson Valley for 300 years; he had a Columbia education; he had once taught Sunday school at Trinity Church downtown; his father had been a Bellevue physician. During the William Howard Taft administration, he and his brother Homer had moved from Murray Hill to Harlem and shut themselves off from the rest of the world. Why? Langley Collyer politely deemed this the brothers' own business, no one else's. "We don't want to be bothered." Homer was blind and crippled now, and Langley fed him, washed him, read aloud to him from the classics, played him sonatas. Yes, he said, it was true he kept 10 grand pianos: "They all have such different tonal effects." Yes, there were mountains of newspapers, too: "So that when Homer regains his sight he can catch up on the news." No, Homer did not require medical attention: "We are the sons of a doctor. We have a medical library of 15,000 books. Homer eats 100 oranges a week." And no, they didn't need Con Edison, because they had an old Model T Ford in the house: "I make my own electricity." No, they didn't need a phone: "There is no one I particularly care to talk to." And yes, the doors and windows were all barricaded: "To keep thieves out. I have put boxes all over the house, so that if thieves break in they will trip in the darkness and I will hear them." The mortgage had slipped his mind, he said; he would attend to it at once. And, refusing to spend a nickel on carfare, he walked from 128th St. to Park Row to meet with a lawyer. BUT BOWERY SAVINGS did not get paid, and Langley Collyer holed up again and letters collected unfetched on the stoop, and finally the bank began eviction proceedings and sent over a work crew with a court order to clean up the yard. From an upper window the old hermit screamed down at the shovelers. You can't take that! You have no right! That's my property! Leave that alone! Cops smashed through the front door, through the wire netting behind it, through the boxes and barrels and crates stacked upon one another in the foyer; beyond that were endless rolling hills of neck-deep rubble, and the cops gingerly climbed their way across the room until they found Langley Collyer huddled in a clearing he had fashioned in the belly of his fortress. Silently, he wrote a check for $ 6,700, paying off the mortgage in full. Then he ordered everyone off his premises and closed the door on the world again. And little more was heard of the Collyer brothers until Saturday the 22nd of March 1947. ONE COLLYER DEAD, the headlines said. SECOND HUNTED IN 5TH AVE. PALACE OF JUNK. AN ANONYMOUS phone call had brought the Fire Department rushing to the gloomy old manse. There was no getting in through the front door; firemen went up ladders to the upstairs windows and chopped through solid walls of baby carriages and plaster statues and garden baskets and Christmas trees and picture frames and chandeliers and bundles of sheet music and dressmakers' dummies and everywhere, everywhere, the stacks of newspapers, every issue of every New York paper since 1918, waiting for the day when Homer Collyer would see again. The whole place was an impossible maze of warrens and nests and tunnels. Deep inside one of them crouched on his haunches, head on his knees, hair and beard flowing to the floor was Homer Collyer, cold and still. Of Langley there was no sign. It was surmised that he was somewhere in the house, hiding. But everything was booby-trapped. The tunnels were full of trip wires that would bring debris showering down on any intruder. Workers had to cut through the roof and lift out hundreds of tons of junk, floor by floor, before they could even begin to dig for the missing man. They found the 10 grand pianos. They found the Model T Ford. After 18 days they found Langley Collyer, dead for weeks. A rat as big as a rabbit was gnawing at his feet when the flashlights finally landed on him, 10 feet from where Homer had died. It appeared that he had been delivering dinner to his brother when he triggered one of his own tunnel traps and suffocated. Surely the helpless Homer had heard the great crash and understood what it meant. There was no hope he could have reached a window to cry for help. Slowly, he had starved to death. Crowds massed daily outside the eerie house as workers continued to pick through it. At one point a black cat appeared on the stoop, and hundreds of spectators fled shrieking.
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