It's the Bowery Boys Season of Mysteries through September and October.

Follow the Bowery Boys podcast so you don't miss a single spooky show.

And tell your friends.

Next week, Tom Myers will present to you an all new episode of the

Bowery Boys Podcast, a show about a mysterious recluse who lived for decades in a midtown hotel, a former

socialite with a mysterious past and an extraordinary secret, but she kept until the very end.

That story has several similarities to the tragic tale of the Collier Brothers,

those Reclusive Brothers of Harlem, who were the subject of a 2019

Barry Boys episode in which I present to you again today.

But that hook is not the only reason I'm revisiting their story now.

A couple years ago I received an email from Terry Summerson, whose husband Paul

Sommerson had passed away in 2018.

Paul was best known as a tech writer and editor for PC magazine in the 1980s

and PC computing in the following decade.

Now during the 1980s he also began working on a book about the Collier brothers with journalist

Franz Lids.

Paul dropped out of that project and Lids went on to publish that book in 2003

with the title Ghosty Men. That book was one of the sources I used in creating my

2019 podcast. Well in

2002 Terry was sorting through her husband's files and discovered a

substantial box of research on the Collier Brothers, most of it primary sources, which Paul

had compiled while researching that book.

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