Series / Hoarders

Compulsive hoarding is a mental disorder marked by an obsessive need to acquire and keep things, even if the items are worthless, hazardous, or unsanitary.

Hoarders is an A&E Reality Show which provides a glimpse into the lives of people suffering from compulsive hoarding. A typical episode focuses on two hoarders whose situation has deteriorated to the point that they face serious financial/legal/personal consequences unless they get the hoard under control. A therapist who specializes in this type of behavior meets with the hoarder ahead of time to assess the problem, and a cleanup crew consisting of professional cleaners, friends, family members, and volunteers is then brought in. The goal is to return the property to a more livable state in a short period of time, usually two days, with the therapist guiding the hoarder to make sensible decisions about what should or should not be kept.

Hoarders has proved itself an incredibly popular show, being A&E's most-watched premiere if Wikipedia is to be believed. Probably because it caters to our collective interest in mental disorders. Watchers beware: After a few episodes you might get fear-driven urges to clean your own house. But maybe that's a good thing.

Some episodes can be watched at A&E's website and Hulu. Many episodes are also available on Netflix.

The series ran for six seasons on A&E, from 2009 to 2013. Lifetime then picked it up for a series of "Where Are They Now?" specials in 2014, followed by a seventh season (under the altered title Hoarders: Family Secrets) in 2015. The series moved back to A&E starting with the eighth season premiere in January 2016. A tenth season premiered in March 2019.

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This show provides examples of:

• Abusive Parents:
  • Many hoarders are perpetrators of this. Wilma (S4 E16) repeatedly said, that she never wanted her children and would not have had them. As detailed below, she also confessed on camera to chaining her son to a bed as a punishment. She even had him go to the hardware store with her to pick out the chains, on the pretext that they were for the dog.
  • Many other hoarders are victims of this. Michael's (S6 E7) father was not only abusive, but a former member of the Nazi SS. In that episode, Micheal once told a story where their father cooked and served their pet rabbit for dinner.
    Michael: "I really knew my father was a monster from that day. That's probably the first time I started to look at him as a dark, frightening, murdering bad guy."
• The Alcoholic: Several hoarders suffer from alcoholism as well as compulsive hoarding.
  • Jake's (S1 E4) father filled most the cabinets and drawers in his house with empty wine bottles.
  • Richard from the A&E revival season was an even bigger alcoholic, to the point where he had to drink whiskey every 20 minutes or he'd go into withdrawals.
• All for Nothing: Some cases end with the hoarder refusing aftercare and filling their home right back up with junk. Others have the crew successfully clean up the house, only to find there's so much structural damage and contamination that it can't be restored on time or within the owner's budget.
• And Then What?: The psychologists and/or cleanup crew sometimes use this logic in attempts to help a hoarder see his or her trajectory is futile. It rarely works.
• Axe-Crazy: Ricky (S7 E5). At one point, he hurled a steak knife at one of the cameramen.
• Based on a True Story: Most of what you see is real and not even as bad as some actual situations encountered by hoarding/cleanup people. The crew acknowledges that some of the family strife is ginned up to create dramatic conflict. A production team member in an early season revealed that they were making some of the homes messier than they really were; he said to watch carefully and you'd see the same stuff appearing in different houses.
• Beware the Nice Ones:
  • Matt Paxton, one of the reoccurring cleaning specialists, is typically extremely friendly. He is also the one who typically gets really upset with the hoarders that abuse children and animals and is never afraid to deliver a "The Reason You Suck" Speech.
  • Dorothy Brenninger as well. If you're in danger of losing your kids to CPS because of your hoard and she's on the cleanup crew, watch out.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing:
  • Billy Bob (S4 E2) goes from a goofy Manchild to a very aggressive jerkass once his hoard of toys and board games is threatened.
  • Sandra (S9 E6), facing eviction from a mansion she has filled with junk, gradually shifts from "sweet old Southern lady" to "total meltdown" as everyone from the new owners to the cleanup crew to the local police gets fed up with her.
• Blatant Lies: Pretty much all of Sir Patrick's (S3 E2) back-story. Basically, he turned out to be a con man and sex offender with multiple accounts on multiple online dating sites, trying to get dates with as many (often underage) girls as possible.
• Collector of the Strange: The "neater" hoards tend to start out as collections of, well, collectables such as commemorative beer cans or vases.
  • This led several viewers to observe "if you're rich, you're a collector; if you're poor, you're a hoarder."
• Conspiracy Theorist: Jackie the teddy bear hoarder believed people were conspiring to steal her teddy bears or replace them with cheaper ones, and was also convinced that people were hiding in her house waiting for her to leave her hoard unguarded.
  • Also applies to some hoarders who believe the end of the world is imminent. Special mention to Linda (S9 E4), who was convinced the dollar would collapse and usher in the apocalypse at the time the show was filmed. Spoiler: It didn't.
• Crazy Cat Lady: Some of the people on the show have been animal hoarders and, yes, that is every bit as disturbing as it sounds.
• Creepy Doll:
  • One woman had literal tons of dolls; she would even amputate their limbs at her "doll hospital" (it's okay, she was a nurse).
  • Not to mention Sir Patrick, (S3 E2) who had a collection of dolls because they reminded him of a 9-year-old girl whom he molested. She was his daughter. Yikes.
  • Randy the carnival game hoarder has numerous smiling mannequins that are supposed to represent clones of himself sitting around his workshop. That's creepy enough, but he mentions how the next generation of Randy clones will have 'authentic Randy hair', and produces a tupperware container of his own hair he's been saving. Then he acts like it's cotton candy and pretends to eat it.
• Creepy Souvenir: One woman kept her late husband's used cigarette butts in their ashtrays for thirty years. Another left her husband's pants in the same spot after he took them off, then collapsed and died.
• Crossover: Mark Hall-Patton, one of the experts who regularly shows up on Pawn Stars, comes to evaluate the authenticity of some of the items in Lonnie's (S9 E1) hoard.
• Dark and Troubled Past:
  • A woman who hoarded dolls had serious self-esteem issues, starting from when she wasn't allowed to attend her own mother's funeral. Another woman who hoarded cats had her father die of a heart attack right in front of her when she was 13 years old and felt it was her fault.
  • Other people suffered abuse or neglect by their parents, or endured sexual assault or other trauma.
• Deadpan Snarker: Cory Chalmers isn't shy about making snarky comments if conditions are bad or cleaning is halted.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Merlene (S6 E11) kicked her 16-year-old daughter out of her house for throwing away a coat hanger.
• Downer Ending: In some episodes, the hoarder refuses to get help and their living situation continues to spiral downwards. For example, the cleanup of Sandra's former home (S9 E6) brought nearly everyone involved in it to tears. Auctioneers found a few salable items and she hauled off a pickup truckload of things to keep for herself, but pressure from the new owners and local law enforcement resulted in nearly everything else being hauled away as trash. The home in question was a four-story, 10,000-square-foot mansion that was on the U.S. National Registry of Historic Places.
  • Also happens with Hanna (S3 E19) and Lynda, to name only two.
• Dysfunctional Family:
  • Hanna (S3 E19) and her family. Hanna herself is an elderly animal hoarder who lives in a single-wide trailer filled with chickens, turkeys and other farmyard birds crammed into tiny cages caked with filth. She has 16 children, 10 of which are still alive during filming, all of whom she physically abused growing up. When they return to the house to attempt to clean it, all hell breaks loose as the family scream, swear and physically assault each other in front of the Hoarders crew. Dr. Zasio summed it up well:
    "These children that she has raised, don't have ability to communicate without yelling (they continue arguing as crew members attempt to break it up) This family is probably the largest family I've ever seen, and it is by far, the most dysfunctional family I have ever seen."
  • And then there was Wilma (S4 E16), whose house was falling apart from neglect and the effects of her hoarding. Her three adult children claimed that she abused them when they were growing up, and she calmly described on camera a time when she chained one of them to his bed as discipline. As the cleanup effort progressed, she took no responsibility for the situation, told her children she didn't love them, and told the therapist that she wished she'd never had them in the first place.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: If you watch the first season after viewing subsequent offerings, you will find that the cases have gotten increasingly dire. One early episode featured a guy whose house was jam-packed with stuff (to the point where going up and down the stairs was something of a Tetris exercise), but whose home was essentially hygienic. The show's counselor warned him that things would get worse if he didn't accept help, but he insisted that he would be able to take care of it himself. When the show revisited some weeks later... the house was effectively decluttered, much to the owner's self-satisfaction. This would be unthinkable in most later-season episodes.
• Egopolis: Randy (S4 E5) hoards antique carnival and penny arcade games and wants to open his own retro boardwalk-style arcade called 'Randyland'.
• Epic Fail: The cleanup crew used these exact words to describe the final outcome for Linda (S9 E4), who was convinced that civilization was about to collapse and that she had to hoard in order to survive in the aftermath. She was so resistant and impossible to reason with that the crew left without removing a single item from her property.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: If it wasn't obvious from the title, the show's about compulsive hoarders.
• Explosive Breeder:
  • Gary's (S3 E19) house is overrun with pet rabbits that he refuses to get neutered/spayed.
  • Glen (S3 E20) let three of his pet rats loose in the house, and didn't have the heart to recapture or stop feeding them. Months later, his home is covered in a Swarm of Rats.
• Extreme Omnivore: Some food hoarders on the show can stomach the most disgusting food. In one instance, Lisa, mentioned below, ate some weird whatever in her fridge.
• Freudian Excuse: Some of the people featured have a somewhat understandable motivation for their hoarding.
• From Bad to Worse: The story of Terry (S6 E8) the cat hoarder. At first, she had all the cats she hoarded spayed or neutered. Then her money ran out and the cats began breeding out of control. They began dying of respiratory problems, and she didn't want to bury them and couldn't afford to cremate them, so she saved their bodies in her freezer. Then her freezer ran out of room and her refrigerator quickly filled up with rotting cat corpses. Then she started putting them in Ziploc bags and stuffing them into a closet.
• Genre Blind: The first day of cleaning always grinds to a halt when the hoarder resists throwing away their possessions, resulting in one of the cleanup team expressing how "behind schedule" they are. However even after eight seasons, nobody has ever thought to budget an extra day to accommodate the hoarder's resistance.
  • Worse because when the cleanup stops the entire clean out team, including family, friends and junk haulers are forced to sit around doing nothing until the problem is resolved. A small scale test with perhaps normal garbage cans and the mental health professionals could have the hoarder work out their issues when other people aren't on the clock.
• Girls Love Stuffed Animals: A couple of women have been shown to hoard stuffed animals. Jackie is covered under the Conspiracy Theorist above.
• Gross-Out Show: Oh, heck yeah. Gross stuff can range from cockroach infestations to long-since-expired food in dirty fridges.
• Harmful to Minors: The cause of Terry's (S6 E8) trauma was this, as when she was 13, her father died of a heart attack right in front of her.
• Impoverished Patrician: Deconstructed. Kevin (S4 E12) is the son of celebrity talk-show hosts Jinx Falkenburg and Tex McCrary; due to how he grew up, he was very unprepared to live on his own, and so became a hoarder.
• Insane Troll Logic: Many hoarders resort to this to keep some of their stuff. For example, Jake (S1 E4) refused to clean up any of his dog's shed hair because he believed it would somehow lead to her death. This is actually a common manifest of OCD.
  • The most extreme case to date is Linda (S9 E4), who insisted that she needed every single piece of junk on her hopelessly cluttered farm to survive in case civilization fell apart overnight. Even to the point of saving rotted, worn-out clothes so she could use the snaps and zippers. The cleanup crew ultimately gave up and left without removing anything from the property.
• Insufferable Genius: Vance (S5 E10) the book hoarder has a self-professed IQ of over 200 and is very snarky and sharp-tongued.
• It Came from the Fridge:
  • One person who hoarded food kept it in her fridge even after it had long since gone bad.
  • Taken to a new level with Lisa (S4 E10), a woman who enjoyed cooking and hoarded years-old food. Her daughter described a past incident in which she opened the refrigerator and found a dead squirrel in the butter dish. Later, during the cleanup, Lisa opened a jar of unidentifiable black sludge and ate some of it on camera.
  • Terry (S6 E8) estimated she had 75 to 100 dead cats in her refrigerator and freezer, as they waited for her to be able to afford cremation. What doesn't help this is that those carcasses started rotting.
• It's All Junk: The goal of the show's intervention is essentially this trope on a much larger scale, and the more successful hoarders are eventually able to recognize that most of their possessions are this. Essentially, the mental illness that leads to hoarding is the inability to distinguish truly valuable or useful items from junk.
• Manipulative Editing: In the Cold Opening for Jan (S6 E10), the scene cuts from Matt Paxton picking up a dead cat to Jan irately yelling "Well, who did that?! One of ya'll did that!" as if she was blaming the cleanup crew for killing it. During the episode, she broke down crying when presented with the dead cats, and the above outburst was provoked by the crew dropping a piece of furniture.
• Nausea Fuel: Pretty much the point of the show. invoked
• Never My Fault: Eileen (S4 E15) can be seen loudly pinning her problems on just about everyone around her throughout most of the episode, including her 11 year old son. She goes as far as saying that her four sons getting taken away by Child Protective Services would give them a much needed lesson in parental respect in her eyes — something that renders her assigned therapist, Dr. Zasio, shocked speechless.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted. For example, there have been multiple hoarders named Linda, Ron, Karen, or Lisa.
• Point-and-Laugh Show: Some people who work with hoarders complain that the show presents a stereotypical view of hoarders as "trailer trash", i.e. working class folks. There is a certain amount of class/income privilege assumptions at work here; a sense that middle- to upper-class people with a lot of stuff are collectors (especially if their stuff is neatly organized, like books on shelves, figurines in cabinets, etc.), working/lower-class people (who maybe can't afford to organize their collections) are hoarders.
• Product Placement: 1-800-GOT-JUNK? is usually used for cleanup services, and their distinctive dump trucks are prominently shown whenever they're on site. It gets worse during the professional organizer's team meeting with the hoarder's family, as the 1-800-GOT-JUNK? employees will be standing behind them with their ubiquitous blue shirts and hats in full view.
  • The episode with Sandra (S9 E6) comes close to being a stealth commercial for the business of the new owners, Eric and Michael Fuko-Rizzo, which is based out of the North Carolina mansion Sandra formerly lived in.
• Psychopathic Manchild:
  • Gary (S3 E19), a middle-aged bunny-hoarder who hides in his bedroom or flounces off in a huff rather than speak with the professionals sent to help him. At one point he throws a water bottle at his wife Kathy "because [he] felt like it". Ultimately, even though the rabbits are his problem, Kathy is the one who ends up dealing with them while Gary sulks, pouts, throws tantrums, and gives film crews the finger like a spoiled, sullen five-year-old.
  • A regular Manchild with a mental disability got his own little Crowning Moment of Awesome by standing up to his mom, who would leave her dolls in his room for months and might have even stolen his money to buy more dolls.
  • Billy Bob (S4 E2), a toy collector, who tries to boss the cleaners and his family around to keep his precious toy hoard from being thrown away (actually saying at one point to the cleaners "This is not your show, this is the Billy Bob show"), saying "You're excused" rather imperiously to dismiss the cleaners when they go against him on this, and in general acting like a complete bastard.
  • Lisa (S3 E20), who kept dozens of cats in her house, decided halfway through the cleanup that she wanted nothing more to do with the show. She kicked the entire crew off her property, claiming that they had falsely promised to simply clean the house, and dared her father to evict her. The kicker? He had every right to do so, since the mortgage was in his name.
  • Andrew (S3 E16), who obviously has a mental illness, refuses to accept the reality of his massive hoard, files an order of protection against his brother, who he may have cheated out of an inheritance, and makes childish remarks concerning his situation and his brother (such as stating that his brother may have had four people killed). The crew manages to clean up some of his yard, due to all the drama, and at the end of the episode no progress has been made on the house itself.
  • A tragic example of this is Doug (S6 E2), who suffered brain damage and amnesia in an ATV crash and hoards in case he finds something that sparks his memory of who he used to be.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: One of the male organizers, who is usually a very nice guy, is not afraid to be a bad ass and deliver a verbal beatdown to the Hoarder. It seems his Berserk Button is when the hoarder puts their loot over their own family.
• Retail Therapy: Deconstructed by Jennifer (S1 E1). Not only is she a compulsive shopper, but Ron, her husband, is a compulsive hoarder.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Happens in the episode with Linda (S9 E4). She was so resistant and impossible to reason with that the cleanup crew left her property without removing a single item.
  • Also occurred when cleaning expert Matt Paxton spent the night in hoarder Patty's house during Season 5. It was so hoarded, dirty, and full of supposed rats, roaches, and other wildlife that he literally said, "Screw this, I'm outta here."
  • Some of the hoarders themselves will say this, or an equivalent, and storm off if they feel the experts and family members are being too pushy.
• Selective Obliviousness:
  • "This little doll doesn't take up any space!" ...And the rest of that eight-foot-high pile?
  • Shanna (S6 E4) initially believed that the awful smell in her house was due to mold and dust - not the thousands of gallons of accumulated human waste she stored in bottles and buckets and dumped out on her lawn.
• Serial Escalation: And you thought your house was messy...
• Skewed Priorities: Many hoarders refuse to part with their junk, or are especially picky with what they're willing to throw out, even though keeping it is putting their lives and the wellbeing of their families at risk. This is even when they are given an ultimatum that it's going to be either the things or their families, or when the city itself has outright stated that it will condemn the house and evict them if they don't get it cleaned up in time.
• Stepford Smiler: Dr. Robin Zasio always greets a hoarder for the first time by creasing her face into a fixed smile, raising her voice several pitches and saying "Hiiiiii! Nice to MEEEET youuuuu!" It doesn't last long, thankfully. (Smiling suppresses your gag reflex, which is probably helpful when dealing with many of the featured homes.)
• Swarm of Rats: Thanks to Glen (S3 E20) letting his pets loose in the house. By the time a lot of the issue was sorted, rescuers found thousands of rats.
• Trash of the Titans: Nearly all of the homes featured on the show are this, most often due to either not throwing out garbage or letting serviceable items deteriorate.
  • Lynda (S6 E4) was an example of the latter, hoarding enough emergency supplies to fill two houses because she believed the Rapture was imminent.
  • Augustine (S2 E1) was notable for showing just how long her piles of trash had been growing. Her son, in his late twenties during the episode and who had been removed from the home as a child, discovered his old toys and half a package of diapers.
  • Sandra (S9 E6) took this trope to its extreme by filling a 10,000-square-foot mansion with junk from top to bottom. The rooms were crammed so full that Dr. Zasio got lost in the mess for a short while.
• Way Past the Expiration Date: Many of the hoarders were storing food that expired years ago.
• Wham Episode: Gary/Hanna (S3 E19). Is it a coincidence that the show's two most loathsome individuals (a former child abuser who tortures and abuses animals and a Psychopathic Manchild with a persecution complex who blames all of his problems on people discriminating against rabbit owners) share the same episode?
• You're Insane!: Expect at least one family member to say this, or a version of this, at least Once an Episode.

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