Several years ago I was taking some very nice clients around on a home tour, showing them different houses around Salt Lake City. One particular property was advertised as “Vacant” and seemed great on paper– it had the right amount of square footage, beds/baths, within the price range– all that good stuff, but no photos (never a good sign). When we arrived, the first thing we noticed was, well, all the junk. The front yard was the 
receptacle of all kinds of kid toys, a few picnic tables, some scattered clothes and garbage bags. The owners of this house had definitely never watched a tutorial about curb appeal, but I advised my clients to look past the mess and try to envision the house and yard cleaned up and looking nice. There was no keybox on the front of the house (Fellow Realtors: Why you gotta make it so hard? If you want to sell your listing, put your keybox on or near the front door and make it easy for us to walk in!), so we picked our way around to the back yard.
If the front was ‘a little messy’ the back was a TOTAL AND COMPLETE DISASTER ZONE. Through the advent of reality television, I have come to understand this phenomenon as HOARDING. Unless you’ve seen shows like “Buried Alive“, it will be hard to envision, but imagine junk and garbage (old tricycles, wading pools, clothes hampers, dish racks, ratty towels, eyeless dolls, #10 cans, fingernail clippings, holey socks, wigs, prom dresses, car parts, etc) piled up about 3 feet high and formed into tunnels like a maze. 
Wide-eyed, I realized that I had no realtor-speak (you know: “charming” instead of tiny bedrooms, “step-saver” instead of suffocatingly small kitchen, “fixer-upper” instead of money pit) at my disposal to re-frame the circumstances, so I simply opened the back door and we walked in. The interior was much like the back yard. All the hallways and walls were lined with piles of stuff and you had to tighten your core to improve your balance enough to navigate over, around and through without accidentally touching anything. Eventually we located the kitchen (nice big windows, lots of light) and commenced to debrief the situation. The buyers and I were looking around and pointing out positives and negatives, when the husband sort of jumped back in a startled fashion. I looked down and realized that he was staring at a taxidermied turtle (tortoise? I can never remember…oh, here is the answer) that was about 2 feet in diameter and about 18 inches tall. 
As I was examining it, I also jumped back in surprise! It moved! This poor creature was abandoned and living alone in this hoarder’s haven. We gave it some water and called the listing agent to make sure he was aware of the situation (he wasn’t– believe me, it was not easy to spot a live tortoise in that house).
The tortoise lived to see another day, and my clients and I eventually found the perfect house for them (no pets included). I can help you find the perfect house, too! And the journey to find it will be fun and full of hidden surprises.
I always get an unrelenting desire to clean out a closet when I see things like this. I ignore it, of course, and it eventually goes away. I’m sad for the turtle!
I was sad for the turtle until you tried to pass off a photo of some Hollywood turtle as the animal in your story. Boo.