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A spinster who obsessively hoarded clothes died in her home after a mountain of suitcases fell on her, burying her alive. Joan Cunnane, 77, owned 300 scarves as well as thousands of trinkets and valuables. They took up so much space in her bungalow that she had only a 2ft-wide path to get around them, and her car and garage were packed with other goods. After she was reported missing earlier this week, it took police searching her home two days to sift through her possessions. Miss Cunnane was eventually found buried under a 3ft pile of cases in a...

AMSTERDAM, Ohio -- Deputies found garbage wall to wall inside the Amsterdam home and now one parent is facing charges. The 10-year-old girl and 6-year-old boy are in the care of a foster parent tonight and the father is facing a charge of child endangerment. Sheriff Fred Abdalla said me he did not arrest the mother because she is pregnant with the couples third child.

A woman in Shelton, Wash., who was reported missing by her husband, was found dead under piles of clutter in their home, where she suffocated to death, according to police. Shelton Police Chief Terry Davenport said the home was so cluttered that police officers' heads touched the ceiling as they climbed over the clutter. Authorities found the body of 62-year-old Marie Rose buried under clothes after 10 hours of searching. She reportedly suffered from a condition known as hoarding. Rose's husband believes she fell while looking for the phone in the house this week and suffocated. There were so many...

y father never had much use for fairy tales. The fifth of five brothers raised in a one-bedroom tenement on the Lower East Side, he preferred real-life grotesqueries. And so at bedtime, I would listen raptly to his urban horror stories, tales that filled the dark with chimera, bogeymen, golems.The most macabre was the tale of the Collyer Brothers, the hermit hoarders of Harlem. In lugubrious tones not unlike Boris Karloff's, my father described the vague aura of evil that had endowed the four-story brownstone on the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 128th Street for much of the 1930's...

The cases never cease to fascinate: reclusive people trapped by their own accumulations, in rooms made unlivable by floor-to-ceiling heaps of newspapers, books and saved objects — from twist ties to grand pianos.Some pass into legend, like the Collyer brothers, "the hermit hoarders of Harlem," who in 1947 were buried by the piles of urban junk that filled their four-story Harlem brownstone. But even less extreme examples, like that of the Bronx man rescued on Monday after being trapped for two days under an avalanche of magazines and catalogs, haunt the public imagination.Such compulsive hoarding is being recognized as a...

The UK's largest haul of Anglo-Saxon treasure has been discovered buried beneath a field in Staffordshire. Experts said the collection of 1,500 gold and silver pieces, which may date back to the 7th Century, was unparalleled in size. It has been declared treasure by South Staffordshire coroner Andrew Haigh, meaning it belongs to the Crown. Terry Herbert, who found it on farmland using a metal detector, said it "was what metal detectorists dream of". It may take more than a year for it to be valued. The collection contains about 5kg of gold and 2.5kg of silver, making it far...

ATHENS, Greece – Authorities say a hoard of 4,500-year-old copper weapons recovered off a northern beach is the largest of its kind ever found in Greece. A Culture Ministry statement says the discovery includes at least 110 ax and hammer heads, but several more should be extracted from compacted masses of corroded metal. The ministry says they were probably buried at a time of unrest or war. The hoard would have represented a fortune at the time.

Spooked by Bird Flu, Egyptians Hoard Water Residents of Cairo Fear Chickens Dumped in the Nile Could Infect Their Drinking Supply By Daniel Williams Washington Post Foreign Service Sunday, February 26, 2006; A12 CAIRO, Feb. 25 -- Of all the panicky ways that people worldwide have sought protection from bird flu, perhaps the most striking took root among Egyptians last week. Via e-mail and through advice dispensed on crowded city streets, word went out: Don't drink the water. Farmers, including the rooftop poultry breeders that are a Cairo fixture, had begun to dump stricken, dead chickens into the Nile River,...

HUGE HOARD OF IRON AGE COINS FOUNDBy Gavin Foster THE LARGEST hoard of Iron Age coins ever found on the Island has been unearthed by metal detectors. The haul of nearly 1,000 base silver coins was dug up over two weeks at a secret West Wight location by members of the IW Metal Detecting Club. But this week it also emerged the find is unlikely to be bought by the IW Museums Service for local display. County museums officer Dr Mike Bishop said his budget was empty and unless new funding was found, the service could not afford the many...

Italians discover hoard of Roman statuesThe works have been protected by a temple wall which collapsed during an earthquake 1,600 years ago By Edek Osser CYRENE. An Italian team of archaeologists has discovered 76 intact Roman statues at Cyrene in Libya. The discovery is remarkable because the site, once a thriving Greek and then Roman settlement, has been under excavation for the last 150 years. With a nearby coastal port, Apollonia, serving it, Cyrene was once a conurbation equivalent to Alexandria, Carthage and Leptis Magna. An important Dorian colony, founded by Greek settlers from the island of Thera in 631...

Archaeologists Find Hoard of Celtic Coins Fri Jun 3,10:43 AM ET AMSTERDAM, Netherlands - Archaeologists have uncovered 17 ancient Celtic coins in a field in the south of the Netherlands, the first hoard of such coins found in the country. Amsterdam's Free University excavated the site in April and will display the coins, which are made of silver and mixed with copper and gold, in the Limburgs Museum in the city of Venlo on Saturday. They are estimated to date from 20-50 B.C., shortly after Julius Caesar began the Roman conquest of the region. Leaders of local Germanic tribes "probably...

BEIJING, May 27 -- Shoppers in Finland raided shelves for toilet paper Wednesday in fear of it running out as a lockout of workers kept the Nordic country's paper mills shut. ¡°As soon as we get a delivery, the packages vanish off the shelves. The big bags go first,¡± said Hille Laine, manager of a central Helsinki shop, which had no tissue paper products left. Paper makers enforced a four-week lockout May 18 following a two-day strike by workers. The dispute in the key export sector is mainly over industry's plans to scrap mill shutdowns during some holidays and on...

Search for lost ring leads to hoard of ancient treasure Apr 12 2005 By Gary Skentelbery Daily Post Correspondent A QUEST for a missing wedding ring has helped uncover a collection of ancient treasures dating back up to 4,000 years. Thought to be from tombs on the holiday island of Cyprus, the pricesless collection had been collecting dust in a Cheshire attic for nearly 40 years, with the belief they were old holiday trinkets. Their historic value was discovered when Neville Davies enlisted the help of archaeologist and metal detecting enthusiast James Balme, to help track down his son-in-law's missing...

A part of Yasser Arafat’s secret hoard - $4 bn - has been documented and accounted for in a painstaking project undertaken by Nigel Roberts, the World Bank’s country director for the West Bank, and Palestinian finance minister Salam Fayyad. They have obtained partial information about another $1-2bn and found a further three to four billion invested on Arafat’s behalf by two individuals, his chief financial adviser Mohammed Rashid, and Palestinian-born international tycoon Samer Khoury. This was reported exclusively by DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s exclusive sources for the first time in DNW Issue 197 on March 11. ”You can stop going around with...

History unearthed Dec 3 2004 Chester Chronicle A HOARD of Viking jewellery has been found by a metal detector enthusiast in the Cheshire countryside. The finder, Steve Reynoldson from Keighley in West Yorkshire, made the discovery near Huxley on Sunday during a metal detecting rally which attracted almost 100 enthusiasts. Archaeologist Dan Garner, who works for Chester Archaeology, went to the site where he confirmed the booty of 20 silver arm bands was likely to date from the Viking period in the 10th century. Mr Garner said: 'Of the treasure-detected finds in the area, it has to be one of...

Stellar cellar discovery (WANG CHUNSHENG) 01/21/2003 About 3 tons of ancient coins were unearthed from a cellar in Lushan County, Pingdingshan City of Central China's Henan Province, last Monday. The cellar also contained dozens of iron ware pieces and a porcelain bowl. It was found during renovations of an old house at the Lushan No 2 Senior High School. The cellar is in irregular cuboid form and occupies 1.2 by 1.4 by 0.7 cubic metres. Some experts believe the owner of this fortune dug the cellar to store food in case of emergency. More than 30 types of coins were...