Collecting can be a harmless hobby, or it can become an obsession. In this episode, we look at extreme collectors: people that collect such vast quantities of unusual things that it impacts their lives, their relationships and their livelihood. Take the Las Vegas retired neurosurgeon who's spent over 30 years filling two houses and a huge back yard with a weird mix of unusual items. His final piece will be his own corpse, which will be embalmed and entombed in the basement. Or the English collector who's amassed so many ornamental birds and bird trinkets that he can't use his kitchen or bathroom. Or the Cleveland man who loves feet so much that he collects anything and everything to do with them. He has albums full of photographs of feet, thousands of pairs of shoes and socks, and even films his own foot-fetish movies. And in Turkey, a potter's strange collection is hidden below his workshop in an underground cave, where the walls are lined with locks of human hair, voluntarily snipped from the heads of thousands of women.
Taboo was broadcast on SBS ONE at Friday 2 October 2020, 14:25. This episode was initially placed on Sunday 3 February 2019.