The Ghosty Men: Inside the Collyer Mansion (Rewind)

The Bowery Boys: New York City History

In 2022, Greg received a large box in the mail, containing hundreds of news clippings and documents related to the Collyer Brothers. This expanded, newly edited version of his 2019 show on the Collyer Brothers includes some of this research.

New York City, with over 8 million people, is filled with stories of people who just want to be left alone – recluses, hermits, cloistering themselves from the public eye, closing themselves off from scrutiny.

However, none attempted to seal themselves off so completely in the way that Homer and Langley Collyer attempted in the 1930s and 1940s.

Their story is infamous. In going several steps further to be left alone, these 'ghosty men' drew attention to themselves and to their crumbling Fifth Avenue mansion – dubbed by the press ‘the Harlem house of mystery’.

They were the children of the Gilded Age, clinging to blue-blooded lineage and drawing-room social customs, in a neighborhood about to become the heart of African-American culture. But their unusual retreat inward — off the grid, hidden from view — suggested something more troubling than fear and isolation. And in the end, their house consumed them.

Visit the website for images of people and places from this show