The Food Hoarding House Of Horrors

Typically, the hoarders featured on Hoarders will keep expired, rotten food in their homes as part of their mental illness, but have the ability to recognize that they should not actually eat it. However, Lisa, a food hoarder featured on last night’s episode—whose house was likened by several people as something out The Texas Chainsaw Massacre because of the bones and gore and stench—was a different story entirely. She actually re-purposes the bugs and worms that her old food attracts and uses them as ingredients. She doesn’t have a working refrigerator so she hangs newer food from chandeliers in plastic bags so the rats can’t get at it. And that means that the rats are stuck eating older food, and are dying from it. The cleanup crew found several carcasses, some of which were fossilized. The head of the cleanup crew actually described one of the smells in Lisa’s kitchen as a mixture of “sugar and butt.”

Lisa’s interest in food began after her husband—whom her daughter described as an “abusive sociopath”—wouldn’t let her engage in crafting or her other interests and cut her off from the outside world, so she channeled her creativity into cooking. However, over the years her passion for food took a dark turn and she began cooking things with raw chicken hearts and telling people it was apple pie. Eventually, her husband gave her HPV, but wouldn’t allow her to see a doctor, so it progressed into cervical cancer, which is when all the junk really started piling up. Still, Lisa doesn’t see a problem with it, and actually ate something unidentifiable out of a 25-year-old jar to prove a point to the hoarding specialists, who eventually called Adult Protective Services on her.