A femurals of the protection of I-Hurt Radio.

As a kid, Franz Lids's father would tell him scary stories before bed.

Only these stories were true.

My father was a scientist, engineer, inventor, who never really had much use for fairy tales.

He preferred real-life grotesqueries to fiction.

And so at that time, I would listen rapidly to his urban horror stories, which are tales that fill the dark with chimera and bogeyman and golems.

The most macabre tale was one of the Collier brothers, the hermit hoarders of Harlem.

I always liked that alliteration. Hermit hoarders of Harlem.

I always like that alliteration.

In their four-story brownstone at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 128th Street,

the brothers sealed themselves up, through the Great Depression, both World Wars,

and as Harlem shifted from a rich white suburb to a poor black slum.

Homer Collier, the blind and bedridden older brother, lived there with his devoted younger

brother Langley.

It was there in that brownstone that they amassed one of the world's legendary collections of urban junk.

And in the end, the Kali brothers had 180 tons of junk stored in their brownstone.

And so I get this image of this horror house.

Things like tattered toys,

Christmas trees, chandeliers, rusted bicycles, broken baby carriages,

Ford Model T, moldering, poke chess, 14 pianos, two-headed babies and formaldehyde.

It was a collection so extraordinary that their accomplishment, such as it was,

confirms like a New Yorker's worst nightmare,

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