Nothing about the Collyer brothers' upbringing predicted what they would become. Their father, Herman Livingston Collyer, was a Manhattan gynecologist who worked at Bellevue Hospital. Their mother, Susie Gage Frost Collyer -- Herman's first cousin -- had been an opera singer. The family traced its lineage to the Livingstons, one of New York's oldest families, and claimed ancestors who arrived on the Fortune in 1621, a year after the Mayflower. Homer studied law at Columbia University. Langley was an accomplished concert pianist who performed at Carnegie Hall. In 1909, their father moved the family into the Harlem brownstone. Dr. Collyer had his own eccentricities -- he was known to paddle a canoe down the East River to Blackwell's Island for work, then carry the vessel home on foot. But no one expected what would happen after both parents were gone.

After their mother died in 1929, the brothers continued their normal lives for a few years. Homer practiced law; Langley dealt pianos. Both taught Sunday school at Trinity Church, where the family had worshipped since 1697. Then, in 1933, Homer went blind from hemorrhages behind his eyes. Langley quit his job to care for his brother, and the two began to disappear from public life. When asked why they shut themselves away, Langley's answer was simple: "We don't want to be bothered." Teenagers threw rocks at their windows, so they boarded them up. Rumors spread that the house contained treasure, drawing burglars, so Langley built booby traps -- tunnels of junk rigged with trip wires designed to collapse on intruders. The phone was disconnected in 1937. Electricity, water, and gas were shut off in 1938 for nonpayment. Langley emerged only at night.

Despite their reclusion, the Collyer brothers attracted persistent media attention. In 1938, a story about their refusing a $125,000 offer for the brownstone appeared in The New York Times. Reporters came calling. A journalist who met Langley in 1942 described him as "a soft-spoken old gentleman with a liking for privacy" who spoke in a "low, polite and cultivated voice." Langley told Helen Worden of the World-Telegram that he had stopped performing piano professionally because Paderewski had followed his Carnegie Hall performance and gotten better reviews. "What was the use of going on?" He dressed in shabby clothes deliberately: "They would rob me if I didn't." Homer, paralyzed by rheumatism and blind, trusted no outside doctors. "You must remember that we are the sons of a doctor," Langley explained. "We have a medical library of 15,000 books in the house. We decided we would not call in any doctors. You see, we knew too much about medicine."

On March 21, 1947, an anonymous caller told police that someone had died inside the Collyer brownstone. Officers smashed through the front door and hit a solid wall of junk from floor to ceiling. They found Homer's body in a nest of debris, dead about ten hours. A manhunt for Langley stretched across nine states; someone reported seeing him on a bus to Atlantic City. He was ten feet from his brother the entire time. On April 8, workers removing debris found Langley's decomposing body in a two-foot-wide tunnel, crushed under a suitcase, newspaper bundles, and three metal bread boxes -- killed by one of his own booby traps. Police and workmen eventually removed approximately 120 tons of material from the brownstone: the piano, the X-ray machine, thousands of books, the newspapers saved for Homer, and 34 bank passbooks containing $3,007. About 2,000 people gathered outside to watch. The house was razed in July 1947. Today the site is a small pocket park at 128th Street and Fifth Avenue, still bearing the Collyer name.