I inherited my cousin's hoarder house. Under the debris, I unearthed a devastating family secret that makes me question everything dad said...
The rusting cars were the first indication of what lay ahead.
Eileen Stukane peered closer at the parked vehicles, abandoned outside her cousin's house. Inside, beneath a blanket of fallen leaves that covered them, she saw a mountain of unopened letters and junk mail.
Stepping through the front door it got worse: decades of rotting debris and filth spread over every inch of the small suburban Philadelphia house. When she opened the fridge, flies swarmed out. There was no electricity and the stench was unbearable. The house had lain empty since its occupant's death ten months earlier, but the mess it contained was the work of a lifetime.
Most people at that point would turn and run. But Stukane is not like most people.
'I do remember sitting down with friends the first week I walked into the house and saying, I think I'm going on an adventure,' she told the Daily Mail.
Now she has turned that adventure into a book. 'The House that Held Everything' describes in gruesome detail Stukane's battle to bring order to the three-bedroom, two-bathroom property she inherited on the death of her cousin, Bob.
He was 67 when he died in 2016 and, as Stukane reveals, he was - like 19 million other Americans - a hoarder.
Stukane had no way of knowing, when she embarked on the Herculean task of clearing his former home, that she would gain not only an insight into her reclusive cousin's lonely life. She would also unearth a shocking deception, perpetrated against her own father and kept secret for decades.
Stukane (left, with her sister Ellen, right) embarked on the Herculean task of cleaning out the house
Upon Bob's death in 2016, Stukane discovered he was a hoarder
Stukane, 80, grew up in the East Village of Manhattan with her cousins Peter and Bob living in the apartment upstairs. As children, she and her three siblings played with the brothers who were a similar age - their fathers were brothers. But they were not particularly close as adults.
Stukane knew only the rough outline of Bob's life. It was a story of unfulfilled potential, an existence twice derailed.
Bob was an artistic, nomadic soul who roamed the country in the 1970s. But in 1980 he was assaulted in a Californian motel. Stukane does not know the details of the attack, but it marked the end of his carefree days. Then 31, Bob moved back to the family home in Cherry Hill, New Jersey - just across the Delaware River from Philadelphia.
Fourteen years later, at the age of 55, he was involved in a serious car crash that sparked a life-long addiction to opioid painkillers and saw him become even more reclusive.
According to Stukane, Bob regularly rebuffed her attempts to engage him, refusing her offer of an Uber to drive him to family gatherings.
Instead, unmarried and childless, he spent the last 11 years of his life alone. His brother had died in 1996, their mother in 1997 and, when his father passed away in 2005, there was no one in the family home but Bob. He was, Stukane writes: 'A mad monarch, presiding over a lifeless, walled-in kingdom.'
By the time of his death, Stukane hadn't spoken to him in over a year.
She only found out about it by chance when, nine months after his passing, her sister was idly searching the website Ancestry and came across a death notice. His body had been found by a neighbor.
When Stukane rang the funeral home to find out how and when Bob died, she was surprised to be told that they had been looking for her.
The house, it emerged, now belonged to her, her sister and two brothers, as they were the next of kin.
Stukane was horrified to see the conditions in which Bob had lived, but also 'angry at him for pushing us away and in effect attempting to erase us.'
Decades of rotting debris and filth spread over every inch of the small suburban Philadelphia house
Rather than hiring a cleaning service, Stukane undertook the responsibility herself, now that the house belonged to her. (Pictured: The kitchen after it was cleared out)
The house had lain empty since Bob's death ten months earlier, but the mess it contained was the work of a lifetime
Stukane and her sister Ellen pose in an empty room of the house
Stukane's two brothers wanted a hoarding clearance company - of which there are more than 20,000 in the US - to come and empty the house, at a cost of $12-15,000 for one week's work.
Bob had enough in his accounts to cover the cost, but Eileen and her sister Ellen wanted to do it themselves.
'We just wanted to give them the respect that we thought they deserved,' she said. She didn't anticipate just how long it would take – the process took a full year. Nor did she realize what she refers to as the 'emotional journey' it would represent.
Bob lived with mountains of Christmas decorations, which he kept up year-round - something Stukane found particularly poignant.
'The fact that the house was filled with Christmas ornaments and little Christmas trees and nutcracker dolls and crafts to make ornaments that he brought to the church thrift shop - to me, that was someone reaching out for happier times, and trying to lift his spirits,' she said. 'He wanted the Christmas spirit all year long, all by himself.'
And, as she sifted through the detritus of decades, Stukane uncovered that shocking secret. Her father Edward had grown up believing his own dad had died when he was just two years old.
Almost 40 years later, Edward's brother Mike told him of a chance encounter in a bar with a man bearing their father's name. Their father was very much alive. It led to a reunion in 1960.
It was a story that never really made sense to Stukane, though her father appeared to accept it.
But, sorting through paperwork in her cousin's home, she found a stash of letters between her uncle Mike and his father. The letters spanned the years when Mike had allowed his brother to believe their father was dead.
To this day Stukane has no idea why the two conspired to keep such a secret: all those involved are long dead.
No doubt there is much about her cousin's life and habits destined to remain a mystery but, in her attempt to make some sense of it, Stukane also tried to learn more about hoarding itself - and the traits that those suffering from the condition share.
Ellen stands in front of the house that took a year to clear
In the wake of the project, Stukane (pictured) also tried to learn more about hoarding itself
She found that it is often genetic, with chromosome 14 in the DNA believed to host the hoarding trait. She discovered Bob's brother, who had died all those years earlier, was also a hoarder.
Some hoarders have OCD, and some, like Bob, PTSD. Most keep it hidden from the outside world, with many becoming reclusive.
'There's a real loneliness connected to hoarding,' she said. 'I wanted to bring that out, too. Someone who is hoarding does not want to live that way.'
It is too late for her cousin but, Stukane said, if a person approaches the problem with 'an open heart,' and without judgement it is possible to help someone struggling with hoarding.
There are practical measures one can take starting, Stukane writes, with the Clutter Image Rating app, which analyses uploaded images and rates the severity of the hoarding as well as providing a list of resources to help.
She explains how to create a 'Harm Reduction Plan,' explaining to the hoarder that their way of living is endangering them and encouraging them to allow the removal of some objects to limit fire hazards and other risks.
And she references 'Buried in Treasures,' a 12 to 16-week online course held via Zoom, in which hoarders attend weekly meetings to discuss their behavior and experiment with virtual reality which allows participants to clean out and donate goods and see how they feel.
Stukane and her sister organized a burial for Bob, whose ashes had been left in his local church. He was laid to rest beside his parents. That, she said, rather than the act of clearing out the home, gave her 'a sense of closure.'
'I felt like we'd done the best job we could,' she said.
'There was some relief in that. We did a good job. We gave them the dignity that they deserved.'
