July 25, 2026 • 40 mins
Whether we’re talking yesterday’s newspaper, pamphlets from museums, or even old lottery tickets and straw wrappers, the world is chock full of things that were not meant to last. Today the guys join Alex Williams, the creator of the new podcast Ephemeral, to explore the strange, beautiful, disturbing and tragic stories of things that came and went, from the Collyer brothers to Pizzaria chips.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Fellow Ridiculous Historians. This week's classic episode is incredibly special
to us. Back in twenty nineteen or thereabouts, our good
good friend of the show, a brother in arms to
all of us, a guy named Alex Williams co created
with his own brother, our super producer, Max Williams, a
(00:23):
show called.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Ephemera Indeed, And on this episode, we talked to Alex,
the creator of Ephemeral, on the nature of his podcast,
which is out there for you to enjoy, as well
as a story about the Collier Brothers.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome to the show,
(01:14):
Ridiculous Historians, Thanks so much for tuning in. Peak Behind
the Curtain, it is officially summer in Atlanta. The humidity
and the heat combined to drape the city in soup.
It feels like walking through soup. So I am very,
very glad to be here inside our air conditioned studio.
My name is Ben, my name is Noah.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
The shipping container is icy cool today, and outside it
is sort of there's this miasma, this sort of funk,
this patina of awful hot, sweaty grossness that does kind
of envelop the city and it happened overnight, didn't it.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
It just happened overnight. Yeah, it permeated, It permeated this
fair metropolis of ours. I always forget about how dire
this situation becomes when we hit summer in Atlanta, and
you know this may mean that we're in here recording
more episodes. We do want to start the show with
a big shout out to our guest super producer Ramsey
(02:11):
ram jams Yunt, So everybody give him a fine hello.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
Do we get does he get a sound effect.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
That sounded good?
Speaker 3 (02:19):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (02:19):
It was very good. Good. I like it. And of
course this does not mean that we will ever forget
our wonderful our third amigo, right, super producer Casey Pegram.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Gone, but not forgotten, gone, I say, but gone where Ben?
Speaker 1 (02:39):
We were talking about this? So I have a theory.
Every year or so, Casey disappears and in France, someone
else reappears, a very different person who happens to look
a little bit like our dear friend Casey Pegram. This guy,
we imagine, is a member of the criminal underbelly of Paris,
known only by the name.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
Yeah, and he dons a completely different get up in
the form of a very slick looking leather jacket, a
single dangly cross earring on his left on his left ear,
and sometimes he wears fingerless gloves and rides around one
of those cool little mod motorbikes in the pictures.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Yet, and we strongly suspect that he may have one
or more secret families. It's true.
Speaker 3 (03:25):
None of this.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
We can neither confirm nor deny any of this. We
are wildly speculated.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
It's all true, though. Put the pieces together, people.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
All right, we're gonna have to let Casey have his
day in court here and defend himself. But you know,
Casey's not here. We're joined with Ramsey helping us to
pick up the slack. Here. Casey's doing his double life.
But that's not the only person that we have on
the show today, is it.
Speaker 4 (03:44):
Man.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
That's absolutely true. This is a special episode that I
know we were both very excited about. We have in
our network a brand new podcast that we're we're all
huge fans of, since you really huge fans of, and
it happens to be created by one of our close
(04:06):
friends who you may have heard mentioned on our show
or other shows before. Folks, Let's give it up for
Alex Williams, the brains behind the podcast. We call a
femeral because that's the name of the podcast.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Hi Alex makes us call it then, just by virtue
of having titled it and being a very good title
and a very fine podcast.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
Thank you for being here.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
What a flattering introduction. I'm very happy to be here.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
Well, here's the thing. We've been working with you for
quite some time now. We've kind of seen you grow
and develop and become more and more of a badass
in what the pros referred to as the podcast space
and making wild gesticulating quote fingers when I say that.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
You really have to. But here's the thing.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
You really took another level in terms of making not
only a history podcast, but something that I've referred to
when I describe it to friends as something akin to
like poetry meets sound, collage meets some music, concrete meets history,
And I think it's just a really beautiful piece of work.
And I'm just beyond stoke that it's on our network
(05:07):
and that you're the guy behind him.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
So we'd like to ask you.
Speaker 3 (05:10):
That was such a good pitch. I don't know if
I could pull that up, but that was great.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
He's good. Well, now it is your turn, so we'd
like to ask you some questions about ephemeral, about your
your inspiration behind it. But first, yeah, with that excellent
description that Noel just just recited, what how would you
describe it? How do you describe it when when someone's like, hey,
what's this thing you're working on?
Speaker 3 (05:33):
I start stammering and sweating, and I try to make
it as concise as possible as thinking of a quick
pitch in bed the other night. It's something like a
show about fleeting moments and the things they leave behind.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
M I like that because that's what epemera is, right.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
Epemera is sort of a remnant of a thing that
no longer is around, I guess kind of or the
idea of things being ephemeral means that they're fleeting or
that they're here today, gone tomorrow, but they do leave
behind some kind of residue if you know where to look.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
Right.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
Yeah, So the word itself is kind of tricky. In
the textbook, epemera might just mean paper.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
Right, broadsides, tickets, pamphlets for museums.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
Basically anything printed, hand printed, you know, printing press, computer printed.
That wasn't meant to be saved. But then it gets
into the issue of like, how do you determine whether
something was meant to be saved or not?
Speaker 1 (06:33):
Right, Like, for instance, a train schedule from the early
nineteen hundreds. Now, the ones that are around are considered
thing to be things that of historical value, right, But
when they were printed, they were thought to have a
definitive and very short lifespan or span of utility.
Speaker 3 (06:52):
One of the really classic examples is the stamp. The
episode I'm working on that will come up. Mondays about this,
well Monday, that might that might not be the Monday.
It'll come out on an it'll come out on a Monday.
I don't know when this will come out. But a
stamp is a really classic example.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
Right.
Speaker 3 (07:06):
So you've written a letter to your friend Noel, and
you've stamped it, and you've put in the mailbox and
he gets it and he rips it open and reads
the letter and he's, you know, overwrought with emotion. Whatever
he throws out or hopefully recycles the uh, and that's it.
But Noel happens to have a great stamp collection, right,
and I've sent him, you know, uh inverted Jenny stamp
(07:28):
from the nineteen thirties, and so he is overwrought with emotion,
not because of my great pros, but because this is
a great addition to his stamp collection.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
Because he is a philetist or philitist?
Speaker 3 (07:39):
Is that it is?
Speaker 1 (07:40):
How's it? How it's pronounced? You a p h I
L A T I s t one who collects stamps.
Speaker 3 (07:46):
What's the root word of philetist?
Speaker 2 (07:49):
Sorry, it could also be one who filets, you know,
That's what I would think, because that's how the British
pronounced fil a. They pronounce it phill it really they
do a hard t stund at the end of it.
I always find that very interesting because sometimes the Brits
seem like they really own the word, and sometimes they
just feel like they're mispronouncing and just to be cute,
cute sort of like aluminium, Like that's not the word, Brits.
Come on, it's illuminum. You're adding syllables in there that
(08:12):
don't belong.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
Place the American English. To be fair, we can't really
criticize the people who are doing it. First. That's also fair.
Ben If they want to add an extra pe on shop,
then that's kind of their call. Uh yeah, to answer
that question about etymology. It's interesting because it comes from
French and Greek. So uh itelia means exemption from payment.
(08:39):
The French philo means loving, so it's loving exemption from payment,
which is weird, right.
Speaker 3 (08:46):
No, but it's it makes sense, But don't ask me
to explain it.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
Well, we can learn more about this. What what did
you what are you exploring on this episode concerning stamps?
Speaker 3 (08:57):
Oh, well, it's not it's all over. It's much more
than you know. One of the things that we're doing
is actually taking the word apart in this in this episode,
so ef eemera comes from the root words epi meaning
honor of, like epicurius, epidermis, and hemera meaning day. It's
(09:20):
like a Latin Greek combination word. And so it starts
being used by people in you know, the Age of Enlightenment,
I guess, to describe things that only last for a day,
that may fly, you know, a certain species of plants
that flower and wither in a day. And then you know,
it becomes with time more broadly used to describe things
(09:42):
that don't last a long time, you know, or fleeting.
And that's where you start getting into trouble because like
in in a you know, the metrics of like a
human life. You know, maybe like one hundred years at best.
Something that doesn't last for long means something different than
like geologically right, like melting polar ice caps or ephemeral
(10:04):
At this point.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
Or was it? Who was that philosopher said all as ephemera?
Speaker 3 (10:09):
How have I never heard that? I've never heard of that.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
Maybe it's maybe it's a philosopher Marcus Aurelius.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
Okay, there we go, all this ephemeral, both what remembers
and what is remembered.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
There we go.
Speaker 3 (10:20):
How have I never used that quote for something?
Speaker 1 (10:23):
Your tagline, ye should hang out on the show more often. Man,
I'm full of vaguely remembered one liners from ancient philosophers.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
So I mean, I guess ephemeral ephemerah, by its nature
is sometimes a little hard to describe, as is the show.
It's not something that you can just encapsulate in a
quick elevator pitch. So I put forth that we listened
to a little bit of a clip that can then
set up a discussion.
Speaker 3 (10:45):
What do you say, Oh?
Speaker 1 (10:46):
Sure, Oh, let's do the call your brothers, Yes, sir?
Speaker 3 (10:49):
As a kid, Franz Litz's father would tell him scary
stories before bed. Only these stories were true.
Speaker 4 (10:57):
My father was a scientists engine inventor who had never
really had much use for fairy tales. He preferred real
life grotesqueries to fiction, and so at bed time I
would listen raptly to his urban horror stories. The most
macabre tale was one of the Collier Brothers, the hermit
(11:22):
hoarders of Harlem.
Speaker 3 (11:23):
There in their four story brownstone at the corner of
Fifth Avenue one hundred and twenty eighth 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.
Speaker 4 (11:38):
It was there in that brownstone that they amassed one
of the world's legendary collections of urban junk. And in
the end, the Collier brothers had one hundred and eighty
tons of junk stored in their brownstone. And so I
got this image of this horror house. Things like pattered toysmis, trees, chandeliers,
(12:01):
rusted bicycles, broken baby carriages, ford model t moldering oak chess,
fourteen pianos who added babies and fromaldehyde.
Speaker 3 (12:09):
And newspapers, hundreds of thousands of newspapers.
Speaker 4 (12:14):
It was a collection so extraordinary that their accomplishment, such
as it was, confirms like a New yorkers worse nightmare,
that they're crumpled people living in crumpled rooms where they're
crumpled possessions, the crowded chaos of the city refracted in
their homes. It's not that New Yorkers hoard more than
(12:38):
other people, so they have less room to hoard in.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
So the call your brothers c. L. L. Ye Er
were just as they're described in that clip, right, they're
what we would call compulsive hoarders.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
Yeah. I don't know the history of the term hoarder
if we're applying a modern term and acariness, but yes,
hacrats I suppose maybe is like an older term. Yeah,
but horder's certainly.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
Could you tell us a little bit more about these brothers.
Speaker 3 (13:11):
So there's really one book on them, and it's by
a fantastic, exquisite writer named Franz Lids who grew up
hearing you hear his voice in the clip. He grew
up hearing these stories from his father as bedtime stories,
as scary stories that he wouldn't tell. He would tell
Franz these stories, but not Franz's sister. For whatever reason,
(13:33):
I thought that was interesting, and so when Franz grew up,
he decided to learn everything that he could because no
one had really written anything, you know. Besides, they were
sort of part of the urban legends of Harlem and
of New York.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
To the point where it was almost a cautionary tale,
like even the New York Fire Department would I believe.
They had a term that they used called Collier's mansion
syndrome that referred to extra instances of extreme clutter in
apartments that were fire hazards. So it almost became, as
the name of the book implies, called ghost y men.
(14:08):
These these guys almost cast kind of a specter over
this particular region to the point where they were so
embedded in the cultural and oral tradition storytelling like ghost stories,
that became this kind of cautionary tale almost right.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
Yeah, there's there's also a racial element to that too.
The two brothers, Langley and Homer, moved with their parents
from Manhattan to the budding community of Harlem in the
eighteen nineties sort of an economic boom time, and Harlem
is this new, rich, fancy suburb for people that want
(14:42):
to get out of dirty New York, you know, get
out to gentrification basically. Yeah, well those oldest time well
it actually the economy crashes and there's a big bust
and all of these rich families like move out, and
there's all this empty space in Harlem. And then and
there was overtly racist practices taken on by the landowners
(15:04):
and harlve lifelines. Sure literally things that were called like
Negro surcharges, I see. And they would take these big,
beautiful brownstone mansions, like the Collier brothers lives in a
four story brownstone mansion and divide them up into you know, six, seven,
eight nine rooms, fill them up, overcharge African Americans to
(15:26):
live there. But so anyways, the Collier Brothers were some
of the few white residents at that point too. So
legend is that neighborhood kids would chuck rocks at their
windows and stuff and call them ghosty men, both referring
to like their sort of creepy hermit never come out
of the house. Is there someone dead in there?
Speaker 1 (15:46):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (15:47):
And also you know, perhaps a racial connotation.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
It's interesting too because there's a parallel story reminds me of,
which is the Masols film Gray Gardens, where it's you know,
this mother and daughter that live in a very they
come from affluence. They live in this very similarly decrepit
kind of mansion out in you know, the burbs, away
from New York City, and they're completely kind of delusional
(16:17):
and sort of exist in this strange bubble together. And
that sort of what ended up happening with the Collier brothers,
where they got to a point I believe one of
the Homer I believe was like a child prodigy and
like ended up getting some advanced degrees and did really
well for himself for a time, and then they ended
up just kind of withdrawing completely from society. And that's
when the extreme hoarding that we're talking about started to begin.
(16:37):
And that's also where the legend stuff kind of comes in, Right.
Speaker 3 (16:40):
They really both were prodigies. Romer had advanced degrees from
Colombia and like admiralty law.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
And what even is that? First of all, is it
like maritime stuff are similar? Yes, And I believe also
one of them was quite a talented pianist.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
Is Langley played at Carnegie Hall and was followed by
the famous pianists at the time, Padrewski, but Paaterewski quote
got better notices than Hey, so he gave up the piano.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
So, you know, it can always be discouraging to work
that grind of the music industry, regardless of the era
in which you live. Let's talk a little bit about
what this timeline of degradation looks like. Because while they
were infamous in their neighborhood and their community, especially as
(17:34):
things started to get worse and worse for them mentally
and you know, Homer got a stroke, they started becoming
more and more reclusive. Right. They didn't reach national attention
until nineteen thirty eight, when the New York Times reported
a false story about them and said that they had
(17:54):
turned down an offer of one hundred and twenty five
grand for their house.
Speaker 3 (17:58):
Yeah, there's a lot of strange sort of tabloid a.
New York had eleven newspapers in those days. There was
lots of lots of things that sort of bounce around
in an echo chamber, I suppose. So there's a lot
of strange leads that you can follow with the Collier
brothers that you never really get an answer to. I
should say that Homer quits his job, Langley stops playing
the piano, their father has moved back to Manhattan. At
(18:21):
some point, they stay in the house with their mother
and really sort of start shuddering in in their you know,
in their sort of mid twenties.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
And then their mother passes away.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
She passes away and is buried in some sort of
bizarre kind of cult like ceremony. She just whisked out
of a window one night and taken to a seminary
that's very far away on foot. And it's never in
the paper or anything. There's no obituary. She's she's just
gone one day, and they wanted to keep it private.
I suppose after that they more or less had no
(18:53):
contact with the outside world.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
I believe Homer lost his eyesight and became essentially legally blind, you.
Speaker 3 (18:59):
Know, and he I'm gonna illustrate it for you here,
had rheumatism and was doubled up like this with his
knees below his chin.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
So for the description, just since we're an audio show,
Alex has assumed a somewhat fetal esque position with both
legs folded up against his chest and his arms folded
around holding his legs.
Speaker 3 (19:20):
Oh I made this part, that's all you. No, the
arms is just me, that's my thing. But so the
poor guy. Yeah, and in his thirties this happened. I
believe lost his eyesight. Langley became his brother's keeper, and
I mean, I really do think they were. They loved
each other and were very dutiful to each other. Langley
(19:41):
devised this scheme of feeding his brother one hundred oranges
a day in orders who regained his eyesight. That's one
of the poll quotes we have left of Langley Collier.
And he saved him newspapers, hundreds of thousands of newspapers
when he could read again, when he could read again,
which is heartbreaking and sweet. These newspapers obviously are yellowing, rotting.
(20:07):
Sure they're you know, it's a four story, humongous mansion.
Langley made them into arches and tunnels and made an
inner framework for their mansion out of newspapers and all
kinds of other to tris. I mean, there's really no
I have incredibly long lists of this stuff that I've
(20:29):
I've pulled from different sources.
Speaker 1 (20:30):
Oh yeah, let's see baby carriages, rusted bikes, Because apparently
Langley was so Homer never sought medical help for his rheumatism.
Is that correct?
Speaker 3 (20:43):
Well, it's hard to say. It's hard to be absolute
about anything. I mean, you know, like I said, we
have the one book and either there there's there's things
that we just want to never know.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
Best we have for primary source because it sounds like
a lot of the headlines of the time, the contemporary
papers you mentioned were just reporting stuff that would sell papers.
Speaker 3 (21:00):
Uh, there was we don't actually don't talk about this
in the episode, but there's one reporter, Helen Warden is
her name. Langley sort of took a liking to her.
She was waiting outside of his apartment or outside of
the brownstone one day around midnight he came out to
make his nightly rounds. He would walk around the city
and just drag a cardboard box with a string behind him, Yeah,
and fill it up with just whatever stuff he came across,
(21:24):
all kinds of things. She met him out there one
one night at the at the outside the brownstone, and
he just sort of started unloading information on her. She
made mention of maybe visiting inside the house one day,
and he's and that's when he stopped and took off.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
Oh, Wow. Yeah, and this is this is interesting because
around this maybe around this is after the time when
Langley began not going out until midnight, right, and then
returning home with junk. I So one of the things
that people familiar with this story probably always mentioned. It's
certainly a thing that I bet producers would mention when
(22:08):
they're talking about fictional adaptations, will be the booby traps.
Were the booby traps real? That's a question people.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
They were very real.
Speaker 1 (22:17):
That's the big kicker.
Speaker 2 (22:17):
I mean talking about this labyrinthine infrastructure of garbage essentially, right.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
I mean it was like walled up kind.
Speaker 3 (22:25):
Of every window, every door full.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
And they rigged it so that things would literally, if
they were intruders or dare we say, some sort of
like tomb raider type situation, people would get got.
Speaker 3 (22:38):
They just they really wanted to be left alone. I mean,
there certainly is some paranoia and some fear built into
that collection collecting habit.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
I heard that the booby traps were not not a
thing that they had just come up with out of
the blue. I heard it was a reaction to a
number of attempted burglaries on the house. When people began
to think that they were hoarding not only junk but
also a financial fortune, so maybe there was some logic
behind it.
Speaker 3 (23:07):
They were from a well to do family. At some
point they reportedly owned a large section of waterfront in
New York. Oh wow, Actually their parents were like cousins
and oh.
Speaker 1 (23:19):
That well to do.
Speaker 3 (23:20):
Yeah, it came over on the speed well from England. Yes,
so I don't know if anyone ever tried to actually
burgle their house, but there's certainly you know, all their
utilities got cut off one after the other, so people
from the city would try to get in their house.
Police officers absolutely, and you know Langley would occasionally just
sort of reach his head out the window and scream
(23:41):
go away, or they would just say nothing to them.
It sort of brings you right to this fateful day.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
Oh are you talking about in nineteen forty seven, March
twenty first, when police received an anonymous tip.
Speaker 3 (23:55):
That is the very that's very damn talking about.
Speaker 2 (23:59):
You know.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
No, you're in this episode, in the recreation of this
that we do. Oh, that's right, what did I do?
Speaker 2 (24:06):
It's been so long.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
You've been working on this for such a long time.
You've been doing recreations. I have don't get it.
Speaker 3 (24:11):
Absolutely you will you and Chuck are you know, maybe
we'll leave it to the listeners, fair to go seek
it out with this. Your voice and our friend and
colleague Chuck Bryant are intertwined in this.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
That's awesome.
Speaker 2 (24:26):
This is the one where the cops like yelling up
at the window. I do remember this now, Okay, that's
ringing a bell. I'm no spoilers there, but yeah, definitely
that's the kind of stuff you can expect in this show.
It's not only you know, it's not like this whereas
me and Ben Gavin about history. It's a real experiential
thing and it's got a lot of these kind of
cool production touches that really make it special.
Speaker 3 (24:46):
But what happened that day? So this is what we're said.
March twenty first, nineteen forty seven, that faithful day, the
police receive an anonymous phone call. Well, Charles Smith is
the guy who gives the phone call. Never we've never
been able to fall up and Charles Smith.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
So Alex did the air quotes there.
Speaker 3 (25:03):
So I forgot that doesn't come through. Charle Smith calls
the police and reports a body at the Collier Residence.
Police show up. Police that have been there before know
this place is booby trapped, so they proceed with caution.
But they do break down the door and it is
walled up with junk. They can't get through. They start
axing their way through, and vapor of decay erupts out
(25:29):
onto the street.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
Miasthma may see very much.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
It's sort of like Atlanta in the summer. It's all
coming very much, so for.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
Basically a whole day, they're trying to get in different ways.
It's all tunneled. They know that there's booby traps, things
like feces and jars and bricks and nails and things
like that, really terrible, horrible things that could very much
injure a person. Someone breaks through, takes a letter up
(25:59):
to the second story, breaks through a window and finds
Homer Callier doubled up as he always is in the corner,
but he's shriveled up and dead.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
How long had he been dead? Did it seem, for
lack of a better word, fresh, or was the corpse.
Speaker 3 (26:14):
Like well, I'm not sure how soon they were able
to determine it, but it had been a while. Oh wow,
it had been a while. And then the real question
was where's Langley? Has he killed his brother? Has he fled?
And the search that went on took weeks to find
Langley Collier.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
Did they search the city or the house?
Speaker 3 (26:37):
It was an international search. Oh wow, yeah, like I said,
eleven newspapers New York at the time. So that echo
chamber is going crazy. Langley Colliers are getting cited everywhere
in different cities in the Carolinas and Chicago on trains,
extra extra There's a moment where a guy there's a
photograph that gets published in some paper of a guy
(26:58):
literally holding a sign that says, I am not Langley
because he's got kind of like a little beard and
a little scruffy and maybe looks a bit like one
of the Caller brothers.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
So this is all clearly building to a conclusion of sorts.
It turns out, however, that Langley Caller has not crossed
the Atlantic, he has not smuggled himself into Canada or Mexico.
Where exactly is he.
Speaker 3 (27:26):
It's very tragic. He's found ten feet from where his
brother Homer was found. And it's a number of weeks later.
There was so much junk, and they'd spent all this
time clearing it, police and firefighters clearing it, then eventually
professional cleaning crews or clearing crews rather just ten feet
from his brother, he was coming to bring him food
(27:49):
and caught one of his own booby traps. Oh no
died there, and Homer died of neglect. He hadn't been fed.
And so you end up with this, like what Noel
was talking about earlier, this sort of bizarre, stranger than
fiction tale that's embedded in folklore, and it reads a
(28:14):
bit like a morality tale. But then I don't know
what it is that the Caller brothers did that was
so wrong, Like I think I say in the episode,
I mean, probably they should have paid their taxes and stuff.
But it's also a.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
Very distinctly New York kind of story where it's like
you're surrounded by people. Being in New York, every inch,
every scrap of space is used up, is you know, occupied,
and you have no like there's no sense of freedom
kind of when you're walking around New York, like it's
a beautiful place and there's a lot going on, but
it does have this claustrophobic feeling to it. Anyway, So
(28:49):
the idea that especially now knowing we know about real
estate prices and all that that two men would just
like own this quite opulent setup and just allow it
to become this absolute nightmare in that way, and it
speaks to kind of the cluttered feeling of New York
as a city. I think it's a very interesting parallel there.
(29:12):
And yes, is there anything wrong with being a hoarder
or collecting things or any of that stuff. No, but
this speaks to something I think a little bigger than that,
and that paranoia and the fact that these two were
all they had and they got into this, like, you know,
kind of cycle of just not wanting anybody else to
be in their lives at all, and yet they're living
in the most populous place in the country where there's
(29:35):
so much culturally going on in such an interesting time
and history too.
Speaker 4 (29:39):
Right.
Speaker 3 (29:40):
Franz Lids calls it a New Yorker's worst nightmare.
Speaker 1 (29:43):
Yeah, you know. For me, this also calls to mind
a documentary called Cropsy. Are You Familiar with Us? Cropsy
is a documentary about an urban legend regarding a boogeyman
like figure that's stall people in this in the area
surrounding a place called the Willowbrook Mental Institution. Which had
(30:06):
been closed down and in the in the course of
this documentary, they find that this boogeyman like figure, this
modern urban legend, is based on fact, and there is
a real uh, there is a a pearl of truth
inside this this lambjel of scary urban folklore. We got
(30:29):
there so uglier than a Joe Montana pass.
Speaker 3 (30:32):
I have seen that documentary, but I didn't remember it
until you start talking about it. It's good. Yeah, it's
a worthwhile documentary. I need to rewatch that.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
Now you've heard us talk a little bit about the
Caller Brothers, folks, but if you want to truly experience
the story, which goes much deeper than what we've discussed here,
we highly recommend that you get thee too your favorite
podcast app of choice story on the seventeenth of June
to talk out to check out the call your Brother's Story. However,
(31:08):
there are other episodes of Ephemeral available now. Like, as
you're listening to this, please listen to the rest of
our show before you listen to the next one. But
what are some topics that really stuck out in your
mind that you've published recently.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
Well, we've just published an episode with interviews Sarah Wasserman,
who's a professor at the University of Delaware, is basically
an ephemera teacher. Oh wow, yeah, and so she's the
person who can really answer some of the tough questions
that we brought up at the top of the show.
The episode before that is a study of Ottoman American
(31:48):
diaspora music. You might say, what immigrants from the collapsing
Ottoman Empire in the early part of the twentieth century,
the teens, twenties, thirties, fleeing like people are from all
over the world coming to America and recording heart stopping
(32:08):
beautiful music in New York, mostly Chicago for big labels
like Columbia Victor and then also some small independent labels too.
So music in Greek and Arabic that has largely, almost
entirely been forgotten, These records that were pressed in limited
(32:29):
quantities because of some sort of racist practices at that time.
Speaker 1 (32:33):
That's astonishing. You know, part of the area where I
and one of our colleagues, Dylan Fakean is from in
Tennessee is has a huge population of Lebanese immigrants who
have left. I think Lebanon was, at least in name
(32:53):
ruled by the Ottoman Empire until that collapse from what
post World War One nineteen eighteen ish. And I think
I've heard some of I have to listen to this.
I think I've heard something that might qualify in this
genre that's bizarre to me.
Speaker 3 (33:09):
And I mean there's all kinds it's not. There's all
kinds of music in it. There's party songs, there are
heartbreak songs, and there's fantastic singing and ood playing and
things that I don't really have the vernacular to describe.
But we interview in this episode, and really where all
(33:31):
of the inspiration for it came from is a gentleman
named Ian Nagoski who is in Baltimore and does reissue
records of this stuff, literally sometimes pulls them out of
the trash. I've seen pictures of some of these records
that they have that are so abused, and does everything
he can to salvage them, to save them, to learn
(33:53):
as much as he can about the performers. Sometimes you
can't find anything. Sometimes you get lucky and to spread
the word about it. So it's a fantastic interview that
that's part of that and the music and it is
it's some of my favorite music now I.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
Would love to hear it, and don't have to take
our word for it. You can tune in and check
out this music yourself.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
And that's the thing what you're gonna get with this
show is the conceit of the show is such a
cool one, but it also allows for such a broad
range of topics, which I think is really important even
for a show like what we do. Like our only
lynchpin is that these stories are in some way bizarre, strange,
or ridiculous or hilarious, and so that gives us like
(34:35):
kind of carte blanche to let go in all kinds
of different directions. Similarly with your show. Very different show,
but very similar heart in terms of just like being
fascinated by things and wanting to get answers to why
things play out the way they do in history, and
just kind of I think anyone that is into this
show even remotely is going to be very much into
your show as well.
Speaker 1 (34:54):
To me, it's a there's something about it, and please
take this for the profound compliment it is that reminds
me of the free associative nature of the film Waking Life,
the way that it connects in this very very intentional
but a dreamlike state. You know what I mean? This
(35:15):
is this is one of the podcasts that I hear
a ton of shows, but this is one of the
ones that comes with a very new and unique voice.
And I mean that sincerely.
Speaker 3 (35:28):
You can compare me to Richard Linkletter anytime. I'm fine
with that.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
So it looks like we're going to We're going to
have to save our our own explorations of things that
came and went for another day. But shout out to
Pizzeria Chips. I miss you if you're listening. If a
big demo of our show is extinct.
Speaker 2 (35:50):
Sentient pizzeria chips. Yeah, extinct potato chips terrifying. I gained satpiens.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
I was going to talk about Beta Max tapes that
were only literally killed. Production was killed by Sony like
in twenty sixteen, and I believe they stopped distributing the
players and recorders of Beta max tapes only a couple
of years before that. But that used to be kind
of the like go to for high resolution news footage
and archiving. And now I actually have a stack of
(36:18):
Beta max is on my desk right now that I'm
trying to find a place that can transfer them digitally,
and there are folks that still have them, whether they're
news agencies or like companies that specialize in digitizing your
family memories. That's big business now because of this nature
of epemera. And not only is the medium antiquated now,
the way of playing it back is gone or much
(36:39):
more scarce. And that says that you have a really
great trailer for your show that's all about answering machine
messages and how that used to be such a cultural
thing that people would do and it was important to
leave a really good message and just the idea of
these things that kind of came and went left an impression,
and now it's almost this kind of like specter that
like hangs over society and it's really interesting looking forward
(37:00):
to hearing more from a femoral with Alex Williams.
Speaker 1 (37:03):
I'm going to I'm going to save that. I have
this great list that I'm going to save and post
on our Facebook page later for ridiculous historians. Because I
did an okay job just mentioning pizzerias. It's really hard
not to just immediately start talking about them. So I'm
just gonna like mention some things that left and then
we'll pick it up later. So check us out on
(37:24):
our Facebook page, Ridiculous Historians. You should be able to
find a femeral wherever you find your favorite podcast like
Ridiculous History and so on. In the meantime, Alex, thank
you so much for coming on the show. Actually another
started with a peak behind the curtain. Let's end with one.
Our office actually closed a few hours ago and we
(37:45):
were able to convince you to stay over and take
this strange journey with us.
Speaker 3 (37:50):
You know before, I feel like i'd be remiss to
not mention that Ridiculous History was the first show that
I helped make. That's very beginning it was. It was
the three of us at the very very beginning of it.
Speaker 2 (38:04):
And Alex, I'm not sure if you know this or not.
You've got so much on your play. We thank you
at the end of every episode for the wonderful theme
that you composed. So now we can do our little
thank yous, and we can do it in person. Thanks
to Alex Williams who composed our theme and for being
here today for an interview.
Speaker 3 (38:19):
I did know that you've thought and I very much
appreciate it. Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 1 (38:22):
We are big fans of thanking people in this show.
I'd also like to thank super producer Ramsey, ram Jams
you owns, thank you so much for saving the show. Ramsey,
thanks for having me. Guys, absolutely our pleasure.
Speaker 2 (38:36):
Thanks to super Producey Casey Pegrim here in spirit, not forgotten,
gallavanting around Paris right now living his best second life.
And thanks to Christopher Haciotis you know, also here in spirit.
Speaker 1 (38:48):
Thanks to Jonathan Strickland aka the Quiztor, as well as
our research associate gabe El, who desperately needs a nickname,
so send some suggestions our way.
Speaker 2 (38:59):
Ben, Thanks to you for always being a friend and
a confidant down that road back again you know the drill.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
Yeah, thanks to you as well. Noel. We are gone
for today. This ends our episode, but not our show.
You can also find us on our aforementioned Facebook page.
You can find us on Twitter. You can find us
at Instagram. You can also find our weird personal Shenanigans,
misadventures and malarkey on our personal instagrams. I am at
(39:27):
Ben Bolin.
Speaker 2 (39:27):
I actually has changed my handle. I am now at
how now Noel Brown and where can they check out
ephemeral on the social media's alex at ephemeral show.
Speaker 1 (39:36):
We'll see you next time, folks Hi.
Speaker 2 (40:01):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Fellow Ridiculous Historians. This week's classic episode is incredibly special
to us. Back in twenty nineteen or thereabouts, our good
good friend of the show, a brother in arms to
all of us, a guy named Alex Williams co created
with his own brother, our super producer, Max Williams, a
(00:23):
show called.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Ephemera Indeed, And on this episode, we talked to Alex,
the creator of Ephemeral, on the nature of his podcast,
which is out there for you to enjoy, as well
as a story about the Collier Brothers.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome to the show,
(01:14):
Ridiculous Historians, Thanks so much for tuning in. Peak Behind
the Curtain, it is officially summer in Atlanta. The humidity
and the heat combined to drape the city in soup.
It feels like walking through soup. So I am very,
very glad to be here inside our air conditioned studio.
My name is Ben, my name is Noah.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
The shipping container is icy cool today, and outside it
is sort of there's this miasma, this sort of funk,
this patina of awful hot, sweaty grossness that does kind
of envelop the city and it happened overnight, didn't it.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
It just happened overnight. Yeah, it permeated, It permeated this
fair metropolis of ours. I always forget about how dire
this situation becomes when we hit summer in Atlanta, and
you know this may mean that we're in here recording
more episodes. We do want to start the show with
a big shout out to our guest super producer Ramsey
(02:11):
ram jams Yunt, So everybody give him a fine hello.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
Do we get does he get a sound effect.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
That sounded good?
Speaker 3 (02:19):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (02:19):
It was very good. Good. I like it. And of
course this does not mean that we will ever forget
our wonderful our third amigo, right, super producer Casey Pegram.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Gone, but not forgotten, gone, I say, but gone where Ben?
Speaker 1 (02:39):
We were talking about this? So I have a theory.
Every year or so, Casey disappears and in France, someone
else reappears, a very different person who happens to look
a little bit like our dear friend Casey Pegram. This guy,
we imagine, is a member of the criminal underbelly of Paris,
known only by the name.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
Yeah, and he dons a completely different get up in
the form of a very slick looking leather jacket, a
single dangly cross earring on his left on his left ear,
and sometimes he wears fingerless gloves and rides around one
of those cool little mod motorbikes in the pictures.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Yet, and we strongly suspect that he may have one
or more secret families. It's true.
Speaker 3 (03:25):
None of this.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
We can neither confirm nor deny any of this. We
are wildly speculated.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
It's all true, though. Put the pieces together, people.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
All right, we're gonna have to let Casey have his
day in court here and defend himself. But you know,
Casey's not here. We're joined with Ramsey helping us to
pick up the slack. Here. Casey's doing his double life.
But that's not the only person that we have on
the show today, is it.
Speaker 4 (03:44):
Man.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
That's absolutely true. This is a special episode that I
know we were both very excited about. We have in
our network a brand new podcast that we're we're all
huge fans of, since you really huge fans of, and
it happens to be created by one of our close
(04:06):
friends who you may have heard mentioned on our show
or other shows before. Folks, Let's give it up for
Alex Williams, the brains behind the podcast. We call a
femeral because that's the name of the podcast.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Hi Alex makes us call it then, just by virtue
of having titled it and being a very good title
and a very fine podcast.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
Thank you for being here.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
What a flattering introduction. I'm very happy to be here.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
Well, here's the thing. We've been working with you for
quite some time now. We've kind of seen you grow
and develop and become more and more of a badass
in what the pros referred to as the podcast space
and making wild gesticulating quote fingers when I say that.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
You really have to. But here's the thing.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
You really took another level in terms of making not
only a history podcast, but something that I've referred to
when I describe it to friends as something akin to
like poetry meets sound, collage meets some music, concrete meets history,
And I think it's just a really beautiful piece of work.
And I'm just beyond stoke that it's on our network
(05:07):
and that you're the guy behind him.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
So we'd like to ask you.
Speaker 3 (05:10):
That was such a good pitch. I don't know if
I could pull that up, but that was great.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
He's good. Well, now it is your turn, so we'd
like to ask you some questions about ephemeral, about your
your inspiration behind it. But first, yeah, with that excellent
description that Noel just just recited, what how would you
describe it? How do you describe it when when someone's like, hey,
what's this thing you're working on?
Speaker 3 (05:33):
I start stammering and sweating, and I try to make
it as concise as possible as thinking of a quick
pitch in bed the other night. It's something like a
show about fleeting moments and the things they leave behind.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
M I like that because that's what epemera is, right.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
Epemera is sort of a remnant of a thing that
no longer is around, I guess kind of or the
idea of things being ephemeral means that they're fleeting or
that they're here today, gone tomorrow, but they do leave
behind some kind of residue if you know where to look.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
Right.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
Yeah, So the word itself is kind of tricky. In
the textbook, epemera might just mean paper.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
Right, broadsides, tickets, pamphlets for museums.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
Basically anything printed, hand printed, you know, printing press, computer printed.
That wasn't meant to be saved. But then it gets
into the issue of like, how do you determine whether
something was meant to be saved or not?
Speaker 1 (06:33):
Right, Like, for instance, a train schedule from the early
nineteen hundreds. Now, the ones that are around are considered
thing to be things that of historical value, right, But
when they were printed, they were thought to have a
definitive and very short lifespan or span of utility.
Speaker 3 (06:52):
One of the really classic examples is the stamp. The
episode I'm working on that will come up. Mondays about this,
well Monday, that might that might not be the Monday.
It'll come out on an it'll come out on a Monday.
I don't know when this will come out. But a
stamp is a really classic example.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
Right.
Speaker 3 (07:06):
So you've written a letter to your friend Noel, and
you've stamped it, and you've put in the mailbox and
he gets it and he rips it open and reads
the letter and he's, you know, overwrought with emotion. Whatever
he throws out or hopefully recycles the uh, and that's it.
But Noel happens to have a great stamp collection, right,
and I've sent him, you know, uh inverted Jenny stamp
(07:28):
from the nineteen thirties, and so he is overwrought with emotion,
not because of my great pros, but because this is
a great addition to his stamp collection.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
Because he is a philetist or philitist?
Speaker 3 (07:39):
Is that it is?
Speaker 1 (07:40):
How's it? How it's pronounced? You a p h I
L A T I s t one who collects stamps.
Speaker 3 (07:46):
What's the root word of philetist?
Speaker 2 (07:49):
Sorry, it could also be one who filets, you know,
That's what I would think, because that's how the British
pronounced fil a. They pronounce it phill it really they
do a hard t stund at the end of it.
I always find that very interesting because sometimes the Brits
seem like they really own the word, and sometimes they
just feel like they're mispronouncing and just to be cute,
cute sort of like aluminium, Like that's not the word, Brits.
Come on, it's illuminum. You're adding syllables in there that
(08:12):
don't belong.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
Place the American English. To be fair, we can't really
criticize the people who are doing it. First. That's also fair.
Ben If they want to add an extra pe on shop,
then that's kind of their call. Uh yeah, to answer
that question about etymology. It's interesting because it comes from
French and Greek. So uh itelia means exemption from payment.
(08:39):
The French philo means loving, so it's loving exemption from payment,
which is weird, right.
Speaker 3 (08:46):
No, but it's it makes sense, But don't ask me
to explain it.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
Well, we can learn more about this. What what did
you what are you exploring on this episode concerning stamps?
Speaker 3 (08:57):
Oh, well, it's not it's all over. It's much more
than you know. One of the things that we're doing
is actually taking the word apart in this in this episode,
so ef eemera comes from the root words epi meaning
honor of, like epicurius, epidermis, and hemera meaning day. It's
(09:20):
like a Latin Greek combination word. And so it starts
being used by people in you know, the Age of Enlightenment,
I guess, to describe things that only last for a day,
that may fly, you know, a certain species of plants
that flower and wither in a day. And then you know,
it becomes with time more broadly used to describe things
(09:42):
that don't last a long time, you know, or fleeting.
And that's where you start getting into trouble because like
in in a you know, the metrics of like a
human life. You know, maybe like one hundred years at best.
Something that doesn't last for long means something different than
like geologically right, like melting polar ice caps or ephemeral
(10:04):
At this point.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
Or was it? Who was that philosopher said all as ephemera?
Speaker 3 (10:09):
How have I never heard that? I've never heard of that.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
Maybe it's maybe it's a philosopher Marcus Aurelius.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
Okay, there we go, all this ephemeral, both what remembers
and what is remembered.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
There we go.
Speaker 3 (10:20):
How have I never used that quote for something?
Speaker 1 (10:23):
Your tagline, ye should hang out on the show more often. Man,
I'm full of vaguely remembered one liners from ancient philosophers.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
So I mean, I guess ephemeral ephemerah, by its nature
is sometimes a little hard to describe, as is the show.
It's not something that you can just encapsulate in a
quick elevator pitch. So I put forth that we listened
to a little bit of a clip that can then
set up a discussion.
Speaker 3 (10:45):
What do you say, Oh?
Speaker 1 (10:46):
Sure, Oh, let's do the call your brothers, Yes, sir?
Speaker 3 (10:49):
As a kid, Franz Litz's father would tell him scary
stories before bed. Only these stories were true.
Speaker 4 (10:57):
My father was a scientists engine inventor who had never
really had much use for fairy tales. He preferred real
life grotesqueries to fiction, and so at bed time I
would listen raptly to his urban horror stories. The most
macabre tale was one of the Collier Brothers, the hermit
(11:22):
hoarders of Harlem.
Speaker 3 (11:23):
There in their four story brownstone at the corner of
Fifth Avenue one hundred and twenty eighth 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.
Speaker 4 (11:38):
It was there in that brownstone that they amassed one
of the world's legendary collections of urban junk. And in
the end, the Collier brothers had one hundred and eighty
tons of junk stored in their brownstone. And so I
got this image of this horror house. Things like pattered toysmis, trees, chandeliers,
(12:01):
rusted bicycles, broken baby carriages, ford model t moldering oak chess,
fourteen pianos who added babies and fromaldehyde.
Speaker 3 (12:09):
And newspapers, hundreds of thousands of newspapers.
Speaker 4 (12:14):
It was a collection so extraordinary that their accomplishment, such
as it was, confirms like a New yorkers worse nightmare,
that they're crumpled people living in crumpled rooms where they're
crumpled possessions, the crowded chaos of the city refracted in
their homes. It's not that New Yorkers hoard more than
(12:38):
other people, so they have less room to hoard in.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
So the call your brothers c. L. L. Ye Er
were just as they're described in that clip, right, they're
what we would call compulsive hoarders.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
Yeah. I don't know the history of the term hoarder
if we're applying a modern term and acariness, but yes,
hacrats I suppose maybe is like an older term. Yeah,
but horder's certainly.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
Could you tell us a little bit more about these brothers.
Speaker 3 (13:11):
So there's really one book on them, and it's by
a fantastic, exquisite writer named Franz Lids who grew up
hearing you hear his voice in the clip. He grew
up hearing these stories from his father as bedtime stories,
as scary stories that he wouldn't tell. He would tell
Franz these stories, but not Franz's sister. For whatever reason,
(13:33):
I thought that was interesting, and so when Franz grew up,
he decided to learn everything that he could because no
one had really written anything, you know. Besides, they were
sort of part of the urban legends of Harlem and
of New York.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
To the point where it was almost a cautionary tale,
like even the New York Fire Department would I believe.
They had a term that they used called Collier's mansion
syndrome that referred to extra instances of extreme clutter in
apartments that were fire hazards. So it almost became, as
the name of the book implies, called ghost y men.
(14:08):
These these guys almost cast kind of a specter over
this particular region to the point where they were so
embedded in the cultural and oral tradition storytelling like ghost stories,
that became this kind of cautionary tale almost right.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
Yeah, there's there's also a racial element to that too.
The two brothers, Langley and Homer, moved with their parents
from Manhattan to the budding community of Harlem in the
eighteen nineties sort of an economic boom time, and Harlem
is this new, rich, fancy suburb for people that want
(14:42):
to get out of dirty New York, you know, get
out to gentrification basically. Yeah, well those oldest time well
it actually the economy crashes and there's a big bust
and all of these rich families like move out, and
there's all this empty space in Harlem. And then and
there was overtly racist practices taken on by the landowners
(15:04):
and harlve lifelines. Sure literally things that were called like
Negro surcharges, I see. And they would take these big,
beautiful brownstone mansions, like the Collier brothers lives in a
four story brownstone mansion and divide them up into you know, six, seven,
eight nine rooms, fill them up, overcharge African Americans to
(15:26):
live there. But so anyways, the Collier Brothers were some
of the few white residents at that point too. So
legend is that neighborhood kids would chuck rocks at their
windows and stuff and call them ghosty men, both referring
to like their sort of creepy hermit never come out
of the house. Is there someone dead in there?
Speaker 1 (15:46):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (15:47):
And also you know, perhaps a racial connotation.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
It's interesting too because there's a parallel story reminds me of,
which is the Masols film Gray Gardens, where it's you know,
this mother and daughter that live in a very they
come from affluence. They live in this very similarly decrepit
kind of mansion out in you know, the burbs, away
from New York City, and they're completely kind of delusional
(16:17):
and sort of exist in this strange bubble together. And
that sort of what ended up happening with the Collier brothers,
where they got to a point I believe one of
the Homer I believe was like a child prodigy and
like ended up getting some advanced degrees and did really
well for himself for a time, and then they ended
up just kind of withdrawing completely from society. And that's
when the extreme hoarding that we're talking about started to begin.
(16:37):
And that's also where the legend stuff kind of comes in, Right.
Speaker 3 (16:40):
They really both were prodigies. Romer had advanced degrees from
Colombia and like admiralty law.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
And what even is that? First of all, is it
like maritime stuff are similar? Yes, And I believe also
one of them was quite a talented pianist.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
Is Langley played at Carnegie Hall and was followed by
the famous pianists at the time, Padrewski, but Paaterewski quote
got better notices than Hey, so he gave up the piano.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
So, you know, it can always be discouraging to work
that grind of the music industry, regardless of the era
in which you live. Let's talk a little bit about
what this timeline of degradation looks like. Because while they
were infamous in their neighborhood and their community, especially as
(17:34):
things started to get worse and worse for them mentally
and you know, Homer got a stroke, they started becoming
more and more reclusive. Right. They didn't reach national attention
until nineteen thirty eight, when the New York Times reported
a false story about them and said that they had
(17:54):
turned down an offer of one hundred and twenty five
grand for their house.
Speaker 3 (17:58):
Yeah, there's a lot of strange sort of tabloid a.
New York had eleven newspapers in those days. There was
lots of lots of things that sort of bounce around
in an echo chamber, I suppose. So there's a lot
of strange leads that you can follow with the Collier
brothers that you never really get an answer to. I
should say that Homer quits his job, Langley stops playing
the piano, their father has moved back to Manhattan. At
(18:21):
some point, they stay in the house with their mother
and really sort of start shuddering in in their you know,
in their sort of mid twenties.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
And then their mother passes away.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
She passes away and is buried in some sort of
bizarre kind of cult like ceremony. She just whisked out
of a window one night and taken to a seminary
that's very far away on foot. And it's never in
the paper or anything. There's no obituary. She's she's just
gone one day, and they wanted to keep it private.
I suppose after that they more or less had no
(18:53):
contact with the outside world.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
I believe Homer lost his eyesight and became essentially legally blind, you.
Speaker 3 (18:59):
Know, and he I'm gonna illustrate it for you here,
had rheumatism and was doubled up like this with his
knees below his chin.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
So for the description, just since we're an audio show,
Alex has assumed a somewhat fetal esque position with both
legs folded up against his chest and his arms folded
around holding his legs.
Speaker 3 (19:20):
Oh I made this part, that's all you. No, the
arms is just me, that's my thing. But so the
poor guy. Yeah, and in his thirties this happened. I
believe lost his eyesight. Langley became his brother's keeper, and
I mean, I really do think they were. They loved
each other and were very dutiful to each other. Langley
(19:41):
devised this scheme of feeding his brother one hundred oranges
a day in orders who regained his eyesight. That's one
of the poll quotes we have left of Langley Collier.
And he saved him newspapers, hundreds of thousands of newspapers
when he could read again, when he could read again,
which is heartbreaking and sweet. These newspapers obviously are yellowing, rotting.
(20:07):
Sure they're you know, it's a four story, humongous mansion.
Langley made them into arches and tunnels and made an
inner framework for their mansion out of newspapers and all
kinds of other to tris. I mean, there's really no
I have incredibly long lists of this stuff that I've
(20:29):
I've pulled from different sources.
Speaker 1 (20:30):
Oh yeah, let's see baby carriages, rusted bikes, Because apparently
Langley was so Homer never sought medical help for his rheumatism.
Is that correct?
Speaker 3 (20:43):
Well, it's hard to say. It's hard to be absolute
about anything. I mean, you know, like I said, we
have the one book and either there there's there's things
that we just want to never know.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
Best we have for primary source because it sounds like
a lot of the headlines of the time, the contemporary
papers you mentioned were just reporting stuff that would sell papers.
Speaker 3 (21:00):
Uh, there was we don't actually don't talk about this
in the episode, but there's one reporter, Helen Warden is
her name. Langley sort of took a liking to her.
She was waiting outside of his apartment or outside of
the brownstone one day around midnight he came out to
make his nightly rounds. He would walk around the city
and just drag a cardboard box with a string behind him, Yeah,
and fill it up with just whatever stuff he came across,
(21:24):
all kinds of things. She met him out there one
one night at the at the outside the brownstone, and
he just sort of started unloading information on her. She
made mention of maybe visiting inside the house one day,
and he's and that's when he stopped and took off.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
Oh, Wow. Yeah, and this is this is interesting because
around this maybe around this is after the time when
Langley began not going out until midnight, right, and then
returning home with junk. I So one of the things
that people familiar with this story probably always mentioned. It's
certainly a thing that I bet producers would mention when
(22:08):
they're talking about fictional adaptations, will be the booby traps.
Were the booby traps real? That's a question people.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
They were very real.
Speaker 1 (22:17):
That's the big kicker.
Speaker 2 (22:17):
I mean talking about this labyrinthine infrastructure of garbage essentially, right.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
I mean it was like walled up kind.
Speaker 3 (22:25):
Of every window, every door full.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
And they rigged it so that things would literally, if
they were intruders or dare we say, some sort of
like tomb raider type situation, people would get got.
Speaker 3 (22:38):
They just they really wanted to be left alone. I mean,
there certainly is some paranoia and some fear built into
that collection collecting habit.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
I heard that the booby traps were not not a
thing that they had just come up with out of
the blue. I heard it was a reaction to a
number of attempted burglaries on the house. When people began
to think that they were hoarding not only junk but
also a financial fortune, so maybe there was some logic
behind it.
Speaker 3 (23:07):
They were from a well to do family. At some
point they reportedly owned a large section of waterfront in
New York. Oh wow, Actually their parents were like cousins
and oh.
Speaker 1 (23:19):
That well to do.
Speaker 3 (23:20):
Yeah, it came over on the speed well from England. Yes,
so I don't know if anyone ever tried to actually
burgle their house, but there's certainly you know, all their
utilities got cut off one after the other, so people
from the city would try to get in their house.
Police officers absolutely, and you know Langley would occasionally just
sort of reach his head out the window and scream
(23:41):
go away, or they would just say nothing to them.
It sort of brings you right to this fateful day.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
Oh are you talking about in nineteen forty seven, March
twenty first, when police received an anonymous tip.
Speaker 3 (23:55):
That is the very that's very damn talking about.
Speaker 2 (23:59):
You know.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
No, you're in this episode, in the recreation of this
that we do. Oh, that's right, what did I do?
Speaker 2 (24:06):
It's been so long.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
You've been working on this for such a long time.
You've been doing recreations. I have don't get it.
Speaker 3 (24:11):
Absolutely you will you and Chuck are you know, maybe
we'll leave it to the listeners, fair to go seek
it out with this. Your voice and our friend and
colleague Chuck Bryant are intertwined in this.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
That's awesome.
Speaker 2 (24:26):
This is the one where the cops like yelling up
at the window. I do remember this now, Okay, that's
ringing a bell. I'm no spoilers there, but yeah, definitely
that's the kind of stuff you can expect in this show.
It's not only you know, it's not like this whereas
me and Ben Gavin about history. It's a real experiential
thing and it's got a lot of these kind of
cool production touches that really make it special.
Speaker 3 (24:46):
But what happened that day? So this is what we're said.
March twenty first, nineteen forty seven, that faithful day, the
police receive an anonymous phone call. Well, Charles Smith is
the guy who gives the phone call. Never we've never
been able to fall up and Charles Smith.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
So Alex did the air quotes there.
Speaker 3 (25:03):
So I forgot that doesn't come through. Charle Smith calls
the police and reports a body at the Collier Residence.
Police show up. Police that have been there before know
this place is booby trapped, so they proceed with caution.
But they do break down the door and it is
walled up with junk. They can't get through. They start
axing their way through, and vapor of decay erupts out
(25:29):
onto the street.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
Miasthma may see very much.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
It's sort of like Atlanta in the summer. It's all
coming very much, so for.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
Basically a whole day, they're trying to get in different ways.
It's all tunneled. They know that there's booby traps, things
like feces and jars and bricks and nails and things
like that, really terrible, horrible things that could very much
injure a person. Someone breaks through, takes a letter up
(25:59):
to the second story, breaks through a window and finds
Homer Callier doubled up as he always is in the corner,
but he's shriveled up and dead.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
How long had he been dead? Did it seem, for
lack of a better word, fresh, or was the corpse.
Speaker 3 (26:14):
Like well, I'm not sure how soon they were able
to determine it, but it had been a while. Oh wow,
it had been a while. And then the real question
was where's Langley? Has he killed his brother? Has he fled?
And the search that went on took weeks to find
Langley Collier.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
Did they search the city or the house?
Speaker 3 (26:37):
It was an international search. Oh wow, yeah, like I said,
eleven newspapers New York at the time. So that echo
chamber is going crazy. Langley Colliers are getting cited everywhere
in different cities in the Carolinas and Chicago on trains,
extra extra There's a moment where a guy there's a
photograph that gets published in some paper of a guy
(26:58):
literally holding a sign that says, I am not Langley
because he's got kind of like a little beard and
a little scruffy and maybe looks a bit like one
of the Caller brothers.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
So this is all clearly building to a conclusion of sorts.
It turns out, however, that Langley Caller has not crossed
the Atlantic, he has not smuggled himself into Canada or Mexico.
Where exactly is he.
Speaker 3 (27:26):
It's very tragic. He's found ten feet from where his
brother Homer was found. And it's a number of weeks later.
There was so much junk, and they'd spent all this
time clearing it, police and firefighters clearing it, then eventually
professional cleaning crews or clearing crews rather just ten feet
from his brother, he was coming to bring him food
(27:49):
and caught one of his own booby traps. Oh no
died there, and Homer died of neglect. He hadn't been fed.
And so you end up with this, like what Noel
was talking about earlier, this sort of bizarre, stranger than
fiction tale that's embedded in folklore, and it reads a
(28:14):
bit like a morality tale. But then I don't know
what it is that the Caller brothers did that was
so wrong, Like I think I say in the episode,
I mean, probably they should have paid their taxes and stuff.
But it's also a.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
Very distinctly New York kind of story where it's like
you're surrounded by people. Being in New York, every inch,
every scrap of space is used up, is you know, occupied,
and you have no like there's no sense of freedom
kind of when you're walking around New York, like it's
a beautiful place and there's a lot going on, but
it does have this claustrophobic feeling to it. Anyway, So
(28:49):
the idea that especially now knowing we know about real
estate prices and all that that two men would just
like own this quite opulent setup and just allow it
to become this absolute nightmare in that way, and it
speaks to kind of the cluttered feeling of New York
as a city. I think it's a very interesting parallel there.
(29:12):
And yes, is there anything wrong with being a hoarder
or collecting things or any of that stuff. No, but
this speaks to something I think a little bigger than that,
and that paranoia and the fact that these two were
all they had and they got into this, like, you know,
kind of cycle of just not wanting anybody else to
be in their lives at all, and yet they're living
in the most populous place in the country where there's
(29:35):
so much culturally going on in such an interesting time
and history too.
Speaker 4 (29:39):
Right.
Speaker 3 (29:40):
Franz Lids calls it a New Yorker's worst nightmare.
Speaker 1 (29:43):
Yeah, you know. For me, this also calls to mind
a documentary called Cropsy. Are You Familiar with Us? Cropsy
is a documentary about an urban legend regarding a boogeyman
like figure that's stall people in this in the area
surrounding a place called the Willowbrook Mental Institution. Which had
(30:06):
been closed down and in the in the course of
this documentary, they find that this boogeyman like figure, this
modern urban legend, is based on fact, and there is
a real uh, there is a a pearl of truth
inside this this lambjel of scary urban folklore. We got
(30:29):
there so uglier than a Joe Montana pass.
Speaker 3 (30:32):
I have seen that documentary, but I didn't remember it
until you start talking about it. It's good. Yeah, it's
a worthwhile documentary. I need to rewatch that.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
Now you've heard us talk a little bit about the
Caller Brothers, folks, but if you want to truly experience
the story, which goes much deeper than what we've discussed here,
we highly recommend that you get thee too your favorite
podcast app of choice story on the seventeenth of June
to talk out to check out the call your Brother's Story. However,
(31:08):
there are other episodes of Ephemeral available now. Like, as
you're listening to this, please listen to the rest of
our show before you listen to the next one. But
what are some topics that really stuck out in your
mind that you've published recently.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
Well, we've just published an episode with interviews Sarah Wasserman,
who's a professor at the University of Delaware, is basically
an ephemera teacher. Oh wow, yeah, and so she's the
person who can really answer some of the tough questions
that we brought up at the top of the show.
The episode before that is a study of Ottoman American
(31:48):
diaspora music. You might say, what immigrants from the collapsing
Ottoman Empire in the early part of the twentieth century,
the teens, twenties, thirties, fleeing like people are from all
over the world coming to America and recording heart stopping
(32:08):
beautiful music in New York, mostly Chicago for big labels
like Columbia Victor and then also some small independent labels too.
So music in Greek and Arabic that has largely, almost
entirely been forgotten, These records that were pressed in limited
(32:29):
quantities because of some sort of racist practices at that time.
Speaker 1 (32:33):
That's astonishing. You know, part of the area where I
and one of our colleagues, Dylan Fakean is from in
Tennessee is has a huge population of Lebanese immigrants who
have left. I think Lebanon was, at least in name
(32:53):
ruled by the Ottoman Empire until that collapse from what
post World War One nineteen eighteen ish. And I think
I've heard some of I have to listen to this.
I think I've heard something that might qualify in this
genre that's bizarre to me.
Speaker 3 (33:09):
And I mean there's all kinds it's not. There's all
kinds of music in it. There's party songs, there are
heartbreak songs, and there's fantastic singing and ood playing and
things that I don't really have the vernacular to describe.
But we interview in this episode, and really where all
(33:31):
of the inspiration for it came from is a gentleman
named Ian Nagoski who is in Baltimore and does reissue
records of this stuff, literally sometimes pulls them out of
the trash. I've seen pictures of some of these records
that they have that are so abused, and does everything
he can to salvage them, to save them, to learn
(33:53):
as much as he can about the performers. Sometimes you
can't find anything. Sometimes you get lucky and to spread
the word about it. So it's a fantastic interview that
that's part of that and the music and it is
it's some of my favorite music now I.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
Would love to hear it, and don't have to take
our word for it. You can tune in and check
out this music yourself.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
And that's the thing what you're gonna get with this
show is the conceit of the show is such a
cool one, but it also allows for such a broad
range of topics, which I think is really important even
for a show like what we do. Like our only
lynchpin is that these stories are in some way bizarre, strange,
or ridiculous or hilarious, and so that gives us like
(34:35):
kind of carte blanche to let go in all kinds
of different directions. Similarly with your show. Very different show,
but very similar heart in terms of just like being
fascinated by things and wanting to get answers to why
things play out the way they do in history, and
just kind of I think anyone that is into this
show even remotely is going to be very much into
your show as well.
Speaker 1 (34:54):
To me, it's a there's something about it, and please
take this for the profound compliment it is that reminds
me of the free associative nature of the film Waking Life,
the way that it connects in this very very intentional
but a dreamlike state. You know what I mean? This
(35:15):
is this is one of the podcasts that I hear
a ton of shows, but this is one of the
ones that comes with a very new and unique voice.
And I mean that sincerely.
Speaker 3 (35:28):
You can compare me to Richard Linkletter anytime. I'm fine
with that.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
So it looks like we're going to We're going to
have to save our our own explorations of things that
came and went for another day. But shout out to
Pizzeria Chips. I miss you if you're listening. If a
big demo of our show is extinct.
Speaker 2 (35:50):
Sentient pizzeria chips. Yeah, extinct potato chips terrifying. I gained satpiens.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
I was going to talk about Beta Max tapes that
were only literally killed. Production was killed by Sony like
in twenty sixteen, and I believe they stopped distributing the
players and recorders of Beta max tapes only a couple
of years before that. But that used to be kind
of the like go to for high resolution news footage
and archiving. And now I actually have a stack of
(36:18):
Beta max is on my desk right now that I'm
trying to find a place that can transfer them digitally,
and there are folks that still have them, whether they're
news agencies or like companies that specialize in digitizing your
family memories. That's big business now because of this nature
of epemera. And not only is the medium antiquated now,
the way of playing it back is gone or much
(36:39):
more scarce. And that says that you have a really
great trailer for your show that's all about answering machine
messages and how that used to be such a cultural
thing that people would do and it was important to
leave a really good message and just the idea of
these things that kind of came and went left an impression,
and now it's almost this kind of like specter that
like hangs over society and it's really interesting looking forward
(37:00):
to hearing more from a femoral with Alex Williams.
Speaker 1 (37:03):
I'm going to I'm going to save that. I have
this great list that I'm going to save and post
on our Facebook page later for ridiculous historians. Because I
did an okay job just mentioning pizzerias. It's really hard
not to just immediately start talking about them. So I'm
just gonna like mention some things that left and then
we'll pick it up later. So check us out on
(37:24):
our Facebook page, Ridiculous Historians. You should be able to
find a femeral wherever you find your favorite podcast like
Ridiculous History and so on. In the meantime, Alex, thank
you so much for coming on the show. Actually another
started with a peak behind the curtain. Let's end with one.
Our office actually closed a few hours ago and we
(37:45):
were able to convince you to stay over and take
this strange journey with us.
Speaker 3 (37:50):
You know before, I feel like i'd be remiss to
not mention that Ridiculous History was the first show that
I helped make. That's very beginning it was. It was
the three of us at the very very beginning of it.
Speaker 2 (38:04):
And Alex, I'm not sure if you know this or not.
You've got so much on your play. We thank you
at the end of every episode for the wonderful theme
that you composed. So now we can do our little
thank yous, and we can do it in person. Thanks
to Alex Williams who composed our theme and for being
here today for an interview.
Speaker 3 (38:19):
I did know that you've thought and I very much
appreciate it. Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 1 (38:22):
We are big fans of thanking people in this show.
I'd also like to thank super producer Ramsey, ram Jams
you owns, thank you so much for saving the show. Ramsey,
thanks for having me. Guys, absolutely our pleasure.
Speaker 2 (38:36):
Thanks to super Producey Casey Pegrim here in spirit, not forgotten,
gallavanting around Paris right now living his best second life.
And thanks to Christopher Haciotis you know, also here in spirit.
Speaker 1 (38:48):
Thanks to Jonathan Strickland aka the Quiztor, as well as
our research associate gabe El, who desperately needs a nickname,
so send some suggestions our way.
Speaker 2 (38:59):
Ben, Thanks to you for always being a friend and
a confidant down that road back again you know the drill.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
Yeah, thanks to you as well. Noel. We are gone
for today. This ends our episode, but not our show.
You can also find us on our aforementioned Facebook page.
You can find us on Twitter. You can find us
at Instagram. You can also find our weird personal Shenanigans,
misadventures and malarkey on our personal instagrams. I am at
(39:27):
Ben Bolin.
Speaker 2 (39:27):
I actually has changed my handle. I am now at
how now Noel Brown and where can they check out
ephemeral on the social media's alex at ephemeral show.
Speaker 1 (39:36):
We'll see you next time, folks Hi.
Speaker 2 (40:01):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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