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My boyfriend and I live in the top unit of a duplex, and a few years back, we had a downstairs neighbor who was a hoarder. We both worked long, irregular hours at the time, so for the first few months, we rarely saw her, but she always seemed nice enough. When she was moving in, we noticed she seemed to have a ton of stuff for just one person, but whatever. She was quiet, which was all we really asked for. A few months after she moved in, I came home to my boyfriend drinking a beer with a look of abject horror on his face. She'd caught him in the foyer that afternoon, and asked him if he had a minute to help her put a table together. Being a generally helpful person, he agreed. She opened her door to let him in, and his jaw dropped. Just piles of crap everywhere, taller than he is (he's 6'2", so that's fairly impressive. She wasn't a particularly tall woman, I'm not even sure how she reached), with narrow pathways carved through. It's a two bedroom unit, and both bedrooms were apparently so full that she just slept on the couch. Some things were in boxes, most weren't. She had an ancient terrier and two cats (one of which had whatever the cat equivalent of a cleft palate is), and he said the smell was so bad he had to breathe through his mouth the whole time. After putting the table together, he practically ran upstairs and commenced drinking. I sort of thought he was exaggerating until a few months later, when we were awoken early on a Saturday morning by the police banging on the building door. Apparently they'd been called in for a welfare check, because she hadn't been returning her sister's calls. She didn't seem to be home, and by that point we knew she maybe wasn't quite right in the head, so we let them in. She never locked her door, so they were able to get into her place no problem, but when they saw the dog they asked if I could come in and keep him calm. I stepped inside (to my eternal regret, wearing just a robe), and immediately started gagging. Not only had my bf not been exaggerating, it had gotten worse in the time since he'd put the table together. Just piles of sometimes literal poo poo everywhere. There was a breakfast bar, which had four half-empty, rotten gallons of milk just sitting on it. The windows were completely blocked by furniture and loose crap, so it was practically pitch black inside. The floor felt sticky. The whole place just felt sick and wrong. I pet the poor dog (he was a very sweet old fella, I always felt just awful for him) while they looked for her. She wasn't in, and the cops practically ran outside to get a breath of fresh air, visibly shaken. I have to believe Baltimore city cops have seen a lot of bad poo poo in their time, but one of them said it was the worst he'd ever seen. After that, we let the landlord know what had happened, and he agreed to keep an eye on the situation. In the meantime, my boyfriend decided to help her if he could. She was apparently terrified of rats, and used that as an excuse for not taking the trash out, so he offered to do that for her once or twice. She eventually just started leaving full trash bags in the foyer for him to take out for her; no asking, no thank you. He did it anyway, but it didn't stop the smell from her apartment from getting so bad I had to hold my breath while walking up the stairs. All the while, every time I saw her coming home, she was carrying bags of more stuff. After a while, she lost her job and stopped paying her rent and bills. Her power got shut off, and I offered to charge her phone for her a few times. After that, similar to the garbage bags, she would just leave it on the stairs every day for me to take up and charge, with never a please or thank you. I'm not as nice a person as my boyfriend is, so after a while I just started stepping over it. The final straw happened because of the dog. We were having a particularly hot summer, and she would apparently just leave him leashed to a bench on the front porch all day while we were at work. I came home to a note taped to our front door from one of our neighbors, a dog walker, who was just appalled by it and offered to take the dog to the vet on her own dime, as he was pretty obviously not well. She agreed, and several of us on the block contributed to the cost. A week later, he was back on the porch. At that point, the landlord had about all he could take and evicted her. When she finally moved out, she left the bulk of her hoard behind. My landlord's handyman cleared it out into the backyard for a towing company to take care of, and the pile practically reached to our balcony. I sadly don't have the pictures anymore, but dear lord. Among unidentifiable piles of crap, she had: - three exercise bikes. She did not look like the sort of woman who exercised regularly. - no less than five dot matrix printers. In 2012. - the backseat of a car - a bucket full of bottles of 80's nail polish, judging by the fonts and the way they'd separated - a massive collection of cheap carnival stuffed animals, the kind that aren't remotely cuddly and look dirty even when brand new. After who knows how long in her hoarder's den, they looked terrifying - a surprisingly solid vinyl collection. I scored a few Ramones albums and a 12 inch of my favorite XTC song, among a few other things - a swarm of fleas, which, when deprived of her animals, migrated up to our apartment and made our cats miserable Looking back, I don't know why we just sort of lived with it the way we did. We're seriously lucky that the house didn't catch on fire, especially when her power was shut off. The smell in the foyer was so awful we stopped having friends over. It took the landlord months to get the place in a rentable condition again, and even then, the new tenants had issues with fleas almost immediately. We still live here, and occasionally we'll get mail for her, usually from collection agencies. I have no idea what happened to her after she got kicked out, but she was a nice lady, and I seriously hope she got help somehow. But I am very, very glad I don't have to deal with the stench anymore.
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Mar 1, 2016 18:24
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 16:13 |
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Hate Fibration posted:But what happened to the dog? I never knew, and I still feel bad about it  . When we realized how bad things were, we briefly talked about offering to adopt him, but he was sixteen years old (on top of not being in great health) and she'd had him since he was a puppy. A huge change like that really wouldn't have been good for either of them at that point, and I think her pets were just about all she had in the world, besides piles and piles of crap. It was all around just such a weird, depressing situation.
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Mar 1, 2016 22:54
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