Bodies of mummified cats were found among mounds of belongings by cleaners sent in to tackle a hoarder’s home in the ‘worst case’ they have ever seen.
Workers were left stunned after making the shocking find in a house in Lancashire, that was loaded to the rafters with junk including old kitchen appliances, newspapers, stacked storage containers and office furniture.
It was so rammed full of belongings that a ladder was needed to climb through a second-storey window as loads of rubbish were blocking all other entrances.
Among the rotting debris were the bodies of up to four pet cats, which had been put on shelves and covered in newspaper.
The extreme case was discovered after the male homeowner, in his late 70s, who lived in the property alone, passed away without any known close family.
Experts said that it’s believed he was hoarding for upwards of three decades.
The teams were tasked with clearing the home in February but were barely able to enter the unkempt property at first.
It took the team 45 hours to make some progress on the case, with the home filled with such a tremendous magnitude of rubbish, they were unable to enter the property.
A ladder was put up to a second-floor bedroom window to allow access and from there, they started the demanding task of clearing piles of rubbish in dozens of skips.
Heir hunting company Blanchards, based in Kent, who hunted down relatives of the homeowner, described the case as ‘heartbreaking’.
One said it was one of our saddest and most memorable cases.
They said that they’d cleared hundreds of properties and had never seen hoarding so bad that they had to climb a ladder and enter through the upstairs window as all the other entrances were blocked.
Eventually, heirs for him were discovered, second cousins twice removed who didn’t even know him.
It’s believed that the man had plans to start a phone exchange business, which is where the hoarding started in the 1990s.
Much of the home was jam-packed full of old phone equipment which he didn’t get rid of when the business plan didn’t materialise.
A spokesperson for Blanchard’s added that he wanted to open a telecom museum as telecom was his previous line of work and that over the years he collected mounds of telecom technology. He began storing those telecom artefacts in containers.
The most heartbreaking thing is that this poor gentleman was there alone without another soul in the world to care about him. No wonder he was in such a state, and I’m sure people will come out of the woodwork once they hear of this because where there’s a will, there’s a relative.
This is an extremely heartbreaking story, but remember that anyone can have traumatic life events and grief which can paralyse them and might leave them unable to cope and you really can’t tell beforehand how things will impact you.
Crap can pile up on you and hoarding can begin because they believe that there’s something in there that they need or love in there somewhere, and they dare not chuck things away in case they throw that special thing away, and then despair sets in and things stack up and it makes it more difficult and harder to find the things that they wanted.
Then they become more depressed and become embarrassed of the hoarding and can’t let people in. They lose social connections and they wind up barely existing in a house they can’t invite anyone into and can’t or won’t ask for help.
These people shouldn’t be humiliated and we should learn to be kinder to people who have problems!
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 