"Linda"
Hoarders, S10
First, apologies for the extreme lateness. I've been watching the movies but unable to type due to an ongoing injury. Trying this on my phone. Probably will need to edit A LOT later.
Okay, so I had been binging Hoarders for months. I've taken a break because...it can literally be worse than the goriest slasher flicks. Anywho, let's get to the first episode I watched for this year's Horrorfest: Linda.
Linda is an approximately 60ish woman who lives alone in her own home. She's a hoarder. At one point, Linda had custody of her two grandchildren due to their mother being in prison for drug dealing. Social services were called to the house and the conditions were so bad that the SW went to visit mom in prison about the situation. We learn this from the mom, who came into her addictions as a way to escape the home. Getting pinched triggered her worse nightmare: her own kids having to live with Linda. (She ends up becoming a neat freak herself.) She works to get out of prison ASAP (2 yrs?), to get the kids out of her mom's house.
Fast forward several years, Linda is staying with her daughter and grandchildren, in the daughter's home, due to health issues. BUT she still exhibits concerning behavior and the family has decided she has to go back to her own house. And by "concerning behavior" I mean peeing and pooping in their drinking cups.
Yes, you read that right.
The daughter gets the professionals of the Hoarders show involved and cleanup starts. Linda does not even seem present in the moment. She has a lot of excuses. The house is like 3-4 feet deep in just trash. The trash is covered in pet and rodent waste. It's discovered that the kids used to sleep on a soiled mattress and had to store their clothes and food in plastic bins to protect them from the mice. Linda also used to chain up dogs in the house, and they were forced to live in their own waste. Her daughter rescued the dogs, nursing them back to health. Consequently, Linda cites the dogs as the reason she pees in cups. Literally, "If the dogs can pee and poop on the floor, why can't I?"
You may be scratching your head - or gagging - at that logic, right now. Like why would someone want to emulate dogs and where do the cups come in? Or just, you know, what the fuck? Well, Dorothy the organizer and her crew are hard at work chiseling - yes, chiseling - through the hoard on the floor in the house. The first layer had a lot of pet and rodent waste. The second layer of trash was wet with what they assumed was animal urine. When they get to the third layer, Dorothy realizes it's all human feces and urine - like a thick sludge soiling, binding and contaminating everything - on the floor and likely has been in every layer.
I'll give you a moment because I needed one.
It comes out that Linda had actually been shitting on the bathroom floor of the daughter's house. In her own home, she frequently urinated and defecated in cups that then sat around. She semi-denies some of this, but the granddaughter, Shawntae, outs her. Shawntae says Linda used to pee in cups and make Shawntae throw them out by the neighbor's yard. (Actually, at the beginning of the show, the therapist said she could smell the house from down the street. Imagine living next to that.) Shawntae also reveals that Linda would just defecate in cups in front of the children. She also sais she would sometimes find mice drowned in cups of Linda's urine. Boy, this was a lot. It took me three days to watch this episode, no lie.
I'm just going to wrap this up here. The house gets boarded up because the hoard and contamination caused structural damages that would be too expensive to fix. Linda ends up returning to the home anyway.
I throw up my hands.
