With the number of people hoarding increasing since the Covid pandemic, one cleaning technician has lifted the lid on some of the disgusting things found inside homes
Bottles containing urine and semen, knee-high waste and mice living in mattresses are just some of the things found in hoarders’ homes across the UK.
The grim discoveries have been revealed by cleaning technician George Mensah, who owns Merseyside House Clearance based in Wavertree.
The 58-year-old is often tasked with gutting properties that are packed to the brim with clutter, human waste and rubbish, but called what was inside one particular home “bizarre”, Liverpool Echo reports.
George, who has been clearing properties for the past 12 years, said: “We have had it in the past where people have kept their own urine in bottles. When we have had that we are non-judgemental and with that type of work, what we have done is we have emptied the bottles – there have been around 40 or 50 bottles – and we emptied them down the toilet.
“Then we have swilled them out with a neutralising disinfectant and taken them to the recycling centre. But on this occasion we came across around a thousand bottles of urine.
“But the problem was there was semen inside the bottle.” He added: “That was the most bizarre thing we have ever come across and that was in the past six weeks.”
At this particular house, George and his team were wading through knee-high waste.
“We were up to our wellies in putrid waste which was like food waste, kebabs, McDonald’s, polystyrene wrappers, oven meals. There were tins, cans, you name it, it was there,” he said.
“It must have been up to our knees because we couldn’t see our wellies and we waded through. It was when we got upstairs when we saw the bottles of urine with semen in them and there were a thousand of them.
“None of them had tops on, so we were walking in and knocking them over.”
Alarmingly, mice were also living in the mattresses and skirting boards of this home, while rats were seen downstairs.
George said: “They were living in the mattress, every skirting board had a hole in it. They weren’t living within the property, they were living in the property.
“Funnily enough there were rats downstairs because when we were cleaning the kitchen we had a roll of black bags and what the rats had done was drag them into the hole – which was bizarre.”
According to the NHS, hoarding is “where someone acquires an excessive number of items and stores them in a chaotic manner, usually resulting in unmanageable amounts of clutter. The items can be of little or no monetary value.”
It is a recognised disorder but, according to George, people who hoard frequently do not see it as a problem, or have little awareness of how it’s affecting their life or the lives of others.
He said: “The good thing about it is people are coming to us and say ‘look my relative has a problem’. But when we are going there what we are seeing is unprecedented .
“They are dirtier, they are so dirty. Human waste, adult nappies like Tena Ladies and Tena Men. People like urinating and doing their business in the bath. It is a mental illness.”
George, whose team have featured on TV, including programmes Call The Cleaners on ITV and Hoarders on Channel 5, believes more people are coming forward to seek help due to the raised awareness of hoarding.
“The taboo subject of being a hoarder is starting to dwindle away and that is what we are trying to achieve,” he said. “Where a lot of people won’t come forward because they are the only ones but when they look at the telly, they go ‘god that’s worse than mine’ and then they come forward and I think we are being hit by a lot of them simultaneously.
“There are lot more coming out of the woodwork, which is a positive sign. It is a recognised illness. The council and other organisations now have a document with a cluster of pictures which show the severity of hoarding.”
George said agencies are now coming together to help those who are hoarding.
Read the full article here
