Bah, that was just a Tyvek bunny suit, we have those at work. They are disposable, a good barrier but boy do you sweat. He had a nice half-face filter though.
An ex-friend lives like many of the stories described, and the saddest part is she has a son who lives with her. He’s like five or six now, and I fear he’s completely neglected. CPS has been called by random people at least four times, and he was removed from the home once, but he’s back now.
I realize the child welfare system needs help, but when we just sit by as kids live in squalor it makes me sick. This isn’t a third world country, but some people live like it is. It sickens me and I hate her for how she is. She’s ruined that child with her ways, his life is over before it’s even begun.
But, I digress… 
This is second-hand, and probably doesn’t compare to some of what y’all have seen, but I know a person who knew a person in school whose family’s house was the worst she had ever seen. The only details I remember were several years’ worth of dirty clothes compacted into a floor-like surface on the ground – there was at least a foot of them througout the whole house. Also, any open beverage container had to be covered, lest cockroaches drop down from the ceiling and land in one’s drink with uncanny accuracy.
I’m definately going to read this thread, but when I saw it, I immediately wanted to post this link.
http://www.network54.com/Realm/Squalor_Survivors/
My apologies if it’s already been posted.
E3
I worry my sister will become one of these people when she’s out on her own. She is an unbelievable pack-rat/slob. And that’s saying something, because I come from a long line of messy people with too much stuff. However, my parents have a dog that will eat anything (from crayons to christmas ornaments, and anything that was once or might aspire to someday be food), which keeps most of the slobery at bay.
The dog, however, does not go in my sisters room, which is like the household black hole. Things just migrate there, in this giant pile that grows mutantly on one wall, until you can’t even walk in there. The pile is waist-level and you have to climb over it to get to the bed. It’s full of stuffed animals, toys, dirty clothes & trash. And every fall, she and my mom have a HUGE screaming fight when we have to wade in an muck out so they can turn the heat on without causing a fire.
She has this hoard of stuffed animals and toys, and she won’t let us throw anything away. My mom puts them in plastic tubs in the basement, and they migrate back up. Thankfully, she actually listens to my parents when they tell her no food in her room, or they’d have bugs. But so much trash. And used maxi-pads! This summer, her air conditioner began to leak. The pile got damp, then mildewed. My parents discovered the water when it began to drip out the dining room ceiling below. Warped the floor, wrecked the wall.
To say my father had a fit would be putting mildly. The next monday while she was at school, he bagged up just about everything in her room, and took it directly to the dump. Apparently, she then moved into my old room and began stashing stuff in there.
She came out to visit me last summer. Within a few days, the pile began near her suitcase. Nothing I said or did kept it away for long, and by the end of the summer it was taking over my den. As soon as I left for work, she would close up all the windows & drapes (no AC) and my the time I got home it was so stuffy and stinky I could barely breathe.
My sister is 19, somewhat developmentally disabled. I’m terrified of what she’ll be like when she’s on her own (or has my parents house to herself, or my parents are to old/sick to force her to clean). She has the potential to be one of those scary people.
Wow. I see myself in some of those stories and pix, although I like to think I would offed myself long before I got to live like that. Then again, humans have an incredible ability to adapt…I’m scared as hell to get a kitty cat, in case next thing I know there’s 4, then 10, then 20 and a permanent potpourri of pee, accompanied by a karpet of kitty krap that is Somebody Else’s Problem.
I had a roommate who was mostly pretty neat, except for the dishes and her 2 cats. We would argue about doing dishes, and I tried to compromise by buying dish towels and suggesting we do them together (these were her dishes, mind you, not mine), but she rejected that, saying that towel-drying dishes was “unsanitary.” You know what else is unsanitary? A sink full of maggots, which I discovered upon coming home one day.
She also had a closet that was the litter box. The litter box was in the closet, but since she couldn’t be bothered to clean it, the closet was full of cat piss and shit. Her cats would throw up on the floor, and she wouldn’t clean it up. The grossest thing: her cat had kittens on the carpet behind her bed and she never cleaned it up. Bleah.
My dad had a couple of rental properties and for some reason the people he rented to were always filthy slobs. He’d hire me and my brother to help clean them when they moved out. The time I remember most was pretty typical: filthy kitchens with caked sinks and range tops, broken furniture, trash, and clothes all left behind. The thing that stood out to me was that the back bedroom had a bunch of used douches everywhere, all over the floor. That woman must have had some kind of problem.
I know that my dad has a bunch of good filthy house stories, but he’s still just a lurker. I’m calling you out, dad!
ZJ
[QUOTE=Enright3]
I’m definately going to read this thread, but when I saw it, I immediately wanted to post this link.
http://www.network54.com/Realm/Squalor_Survivors/
Great if stomach-churning site. Is this a “sickness” that only affects people who have the means to procure and store lots of stuff in a private area? I wonder if this kind of accumulation has a correlative in non-Western and/or less materialistic societies?
Is there a DSM diagnosis for hoarding and crazed accumulation?
Books and dust!?!?! Sheeesh! Welcome to my room!
YOU GAVE THEM AWAY?!?!?!!?!? 
Go to the video store immediately and rent PINK FLAMINGOS, directed by John Waters & starring Divine.
And start a thread about it in Cafe Society telling us your reaction.
I grew up on what was essentially a family compound in very rural Alabama. Two of the houses on the place belonged to my grandmother and my great-aunts respectively.
Grandmother’s house: When my grandmother was a science teacher in 30s, 40s, 50s and early 60s people actually called her batshit crazy because she said one day men would walk on the moon. This was a wrong thing for them to do for two reasons: one is that men really did walk on the moon and the other is that it turned a blind eye to many perfectly valid reasons to call her batshit crazy, which she really was. She was also one of the most evil human beings I’ve ever known (manipulative, two-faced, abusive, completely selfish, malicious, etc.) and her house totally reflected the evil.
For starters she was a total pack rat of the Collyer Brothers variety who to my knowledge never threw away anything- magazines, newspapers, egg cartons, milk cartons, broken furniture- anything. Add to this that I don’t believe she even owned a mop or a broom- everything in the place was covered in dirt and grime and slime. Even as a little boy I didn’t have to be told not to eat anything that came from her kitchen- I’d pretty much pegged that one- though if I had I’m pretty sure my mother would have swept down and yanked it from my mouth like it was a cyanide slurpy. As somebody above described, there were rooms in her house that had to have passageways through them and rooms that were totally unusable because even the door wouldn’t open. She evidently had a phobia of some sort of starving because one bedroom literally (we learned after she had to be sent to a nursing home) was stacked from floor to ceiling with bags of rice, flour, cans of soup, gallon cans of chocolate syrup and an increasingly eccentric collection of non-perishables; while she had lived through the Depression she had never missed a meal so I don’t know where the fear came from.)
In any case, it was just filth and crap through and through. Add to this a very gross sidepoint-
while she had perfectly good running water, she grew so lazy and lax in her habits that she slept with an empty Crisco can next to her bed in case she had to relieve herself during the night [I suppose it’s really no more gross than the chamber pots she would have grown up with, but to my late 20th century sensibilities it seemed it] and had an old rug on her back porch that she sometimes used as a depository. Her sister, a 40 year veteran of the state mental hospital, moved in with her during the 1970s and was very prone to pulling up her dress and peeing in front of anybody who cared to witness.
Grandmother literally culled our garbage as well and most of her clothes were our hand-me-downs (old jackets, jeans, etc.). This was not a poor woman- she had two very good retirement pensions that actually gave her more income than most heads of families in AL at the time- but she was almost incapable of spending money. So she would usually be found dressed like a scarecrow, never showered, woke a little filthier each day than the night before and the house decaying just a bit more.
When she finally had to be put into a nursing home the house was in such a condition that “where do you start?” There were eggs in her refrigerator that exploded when they were touched. There were the remains of two enormous upright pianos and a room filled with nasty old sofas piled one on top of another. We finally ended up renting the house on a “First three months free to anybody who will clean it out” basis. God alone knows how much money was literally burned in the bonfire- Grandmother had a habit of hiding money in old books and newspapers (of which there was a ton) and other household objects- but had you seen the house you’d know why it wasn’t worth looking.
My great-aunts house: Their place wasn’t as disgusting as my grandmothers, but it was definitely not a place you’d hold a wedding. While they weren’t as insane as my grandmother, they were eccentric- they were twins who into their 90s not only lived in the house where they were born and slept in the room where they were born but still shared the same bed where they were born. This was a rambling old dog-trot homeplace (for those not familiar- a dog trot is a fairly common type of folk-home in the south distinguished by a wide open hallway through the middle to allow breeze) and true to its name the aunts had several dogs and cats. They never much enjoyed housework and when their mother died when they were in their 70s they basically rebelled and stopped altogether. They’d sometimes sweep the floor with straw brooms they made themselves, but mopping and scrubbing- just wasn’t gonna happen.
And like all good Southern maiden aunts they had an army of inbred cats who had full access to everything, so there was that smell. One night one of their cats had kittens between the two of them in their bed and they still didn’t change the sheets.
They had no running water and it was by choice; my father did everything but hijack them and force them to have it installed, but they didn’t want it and, when they finally relented in their early 90s and got it, wouldn’t use it. They thought it was indescribably nasty that people would defecate inside the house. They used to love to tell the story of their father who in the 1910s went to visit their brother, who had married and built a house closer to town. When their father needed to relieve himself he asked where the outhouse was and was shown the toilet and given instructions on how to use it (which almost constipated him). When he asked where he was going to sleep that night (the house only had about three rooms and there were several kids) his son proudly took him onto the screened in “sleeping porch” where a bed was set up- this was actually evidently something of an honor in the 1910s as the screened in porch was the coolest place in the house at night. Their father came home and told them “I ain’t never goin’ to see your brother Harley again long as I live… he’s got the craziest damn house you ever saw. You shit inside it and you sleep outside it.” They shared his sentiments.
One of my favorite memories from their house of horrors: in the 1970s (their 80s) their old gas stove died (they would use gas and electricity, though the latter mainly because they liked The Tonight Show) and my brother and I were given the task of moving it out so the new one could be installed. As we budged it we felt it bump on something and there beneath was a long-dead and almost perfectly mummified gray and black cat staring up at us with a shrivelled expression. I screamed. Kitty (the sassier of the two) just calmly looked at it and said “Well I’ll be… that’s where Smokey Blue ever got to!” while Carrie, also non-disturbed, just agreed “Yep… we’d always wondered. I’m glad to learn he didn’t just run away cause he didn’t like us.” Kitty and Carrie made great old fashioned biscuits and sausages and sweet potato pies but I never ate another bite from their kitchen.
My friend Tim can’t compete with my grandmother and aunts but it’s not for lack of trying. I’ve known his places to be absolutely disgusting by modern urban standards. One of his grosser moments was when he moved into an efficiency and ordered a pizza on his first day, placing the leftovers in his refrigerator. He didn’t renew his lease and when he moved out almost a year later, the pizza box was still in there. He also keeps jars of olives on his toilet as a snack, which I find gross for reasons I can’t even begin to catalog.
I’m pretty sure you can report to CPS anonymously.
A friend of mine had CPS called on her for her house being unsafe for her kids. A number of factors had contributed to it getting to that point, and it was a wakeup call she needed and was actually grateful for.
My cousin’s best friend lives in a trailer, in Texas. She lived here with her 5 year old daughter and 3 year old son. I was there in February, 1990 and the once-live Christmas tree was still up… from 1988. Still decorated and everything. Clothes in piles all over the floors, no telling clean from dirty. Food and trash were everywhere. They had a tame rat that lived with them, not exactly a pet. It just decided to stop running away from them. The rat was cleaner than the children.
Well, reading these stories makes my blood run cold. My story isn’t as bad as all that, but it was still bad to me.
When we moved from SC to Florida, instead of selling the house we rented it out. Our last tenant was there for about four years. She paid the rent on time each month, and the Property Manager would send us bills now and then, for AC repair and such.
Well, last summer, the house had appreciated enough that we decided to sell it. We asked the tenant to move out, and she did. Then Ivylad and I drove up to clean it up and sell it, thinking we could spend a couple of days sight-seeing.
Ha.
First off, the neighbors filled us in. She owned neither a vacuum cleaner or a lawn mower. The place was covered in roaches. We set off twelve bug bombs on two separate occassions and still had to get the exterminator in three times. The PM apparently knew none of this, and had no idea the house was in such bad shape. I don’t think the carpet had been vacuumed in four years. The bathtub was black. The dryer vent had busted out and was haphazardly duct-taped back together. Closet doors were removed for whatever reason, and she had painted over the wall-paper.
It took us longer than expected, and we eventually had to hire a handyman to finish up. But, we got our asking price for the house, and learned an important lesson: Never try to own a rental property more than a short drive away. The PM does not care, as long as the rent is paid on time.
Bad property manager, Ivylass . Our department does once-yearly inspections inside the rental unit, every unit, from apartment suites to houses. The property managers also try to do regular drive-bys of the houses/duplexes in their portfolios. I’ve sent lots of letters regarding junk outside the houses and lawn maintenance, and then scheduled follow-up inspections and drive-bys for the property managers to see that tenants are keeping the premises in the condition that they assured us they would. Your property manager was definitely lax.
I’ve described this several times, but that was in other threads.
For the “enjoyment” of those here, I’ll have another go:
My friend "Lula" (fake name) has hoarding and cluttering disorders and an OCD personality to match. She still lives in her folks' house, which she has systematically clogged up with crap over the past six or seven years. When her dad was still alive and her mom wasn't in assisted living, I used to go over there now and then.
Anyway, the kitchen drawers and cabinets are loaded with plastic containers, lids and utensils, corks, plastic bags, rubber bands and twist ties. There is so much crap around the counters that it took me 2 hours just to make a simple breakfast when I was elder-sitting Lula’s mom while daughter went on vacation. The fridge and freezer were crammed full of stuff and it was hard to find anything in there. Hundreds of packets of ketchup, mustard and mayonnaise fall out of the fridge doors when you open it. The back patio has boxes of stuff piled up on it and I’m sure the garage is similar.
The front living room cannot be walked through because there is crap everywhere, including boxes of cereal, crackers and cookies that should be in the kitchen. Gift baskets sit and get dusty in front of the fireplace. Cobwebs gather on the statues and little bench in the entryway.
The spare room is full of clothing, shoes and hotel toiletries which Lula is so attached to that she can’t bear the thought of donating them even though she never uses them.
Lula’s bedroom is a place she has not entered in at least three years. She cannot walk to the bed, which is loaded with stuff anyway, and she can’t get to her closet, so she hangs her clothes on hangers on top of the doorways and on cupboard handles. She has been sleeping in her mom’s bed. Her mom’s room is also hopelessly cluttered with clothing, shoes and jewelry, as well as furniture.
The den features stacks of magazines and newspapers, plus all kinds of trinkets and souvenirs which Lula cannot live without because she wants a sentimental reminder of any place she’s ever been to.
It is not possible to vacuum the house due to the lack of space to push a vacuum.
I refuse to go in there until it is cleaned out, but she takes every opportunity to be out of the house so she won’t have to deal with it.
I should also note that Lula’s colleagues have no idea what her house looks like because she always looks good at work: hair fixed, makeup on, nice clothes.
I wouldn’t even bother to tell them what a pigsty she comes out of because they’d never believe it in a million years.
I’m just glad her mom isn’t there anymore, because it was quite obviously unsafe for a frail, elderly lady.
I think I read those when looking up info on Lula’s condition.
Also see this:
http://ocd.stanford.edu/about/symptoms.html
I have only witnessed it once about 25 years ago, but a friend that does service work in homes regularly reports what he refers to as a TRAIL HOUSE
Guess it saves on the trash removal bill. Just a path wide enough to walk from one room to the next.