For years, two elderly women from Hoboken, New Jersey lived in dread of being served. Here is an except from the local paper of April 9, 1921.
"For the first time in more than three years, two elderly women, formerly of New York, came out into the sunlight… when the health authorities of Hoboken forcibly ended a life of almost unbelievable seclusion they had been living in a hotel in that New Jersey city.
“Morbid fear of process servers, engendered by long litigation, in the course of which the modest fortune she had inherited from her husband had been swept away, was the younger woman’s only explanation of the long years in which the two had hidden in Meyer’s Hotel.
“I had to, I had to,” Mrs. Miller said when asked why she had lived like that. Later the fear of process servers developed out of her conversation as the only plausible explanation.
“The women’s mode of life was simple. They moved in in January 1918. With them were two dogs. One was in the room, what became of the other one no one knows. Milk was left every day at the door. When Mrs. Miller heard the milkman’s receding steps, she would open the door slightly and snatch it in. Food came from a department store, ordered by mail and paid for by check on the Columbia Trust Company, New York.
“A crack under the door was the sole means of communication with the outside world. Through it, Mrs. Miller would thrust her check for $30.00 rent each week, order her canned goods via letters left for the maid to post, and accept her daily newspaper. No hotel employee had entered the room in more than three years."
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