Teaching Mrs. Tingle filming locations

October 3, 2012September 29, 2017

Leigh Ann’s House from “Teaching Mrs. Tingle”

The final Teaching Mrs. Tingle location that I was absolutely desperate to find was the home where Leigh Ann Watson (Katie Holmes) lived in the 1999 thriller. Because the other two properties featured in the movie are located in Pasadena (you can read my post on the house belonging to Mrs. Tingle (Helen Mirren) here and Coach Wenchell (Jeffrey Tambor) here), I was positively convinced that Leigh Ann’s residence was, as well, and spent countless hours scouring aerial views of the city. After repeatedly coming up empty-handed, though, I decided it was time to call in the big guns – fellow stalkers Mike, from MovieShotsLA, and Owen, from the When Write Is Wrong blog – for some back-up. And, amazingly enough, Owen found the dwelling fairly quickly – in Culver City of all places, an area which I never would have searched in a million years. Thank you, Owen! So I dragged the Grim Cheaper right on out to stalk the abode just a few days later.

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In the screen capture I had sent him, Owen had noticed that the faint outline of a 4 was visible in front of the 110 address number posted above Leigh Ann’s front door. Because of the picturesque trees visible on Leigh Ann’s street, Owen was also at first convinced that her house was located in Pasadena and spent quite a bit of time searching 4100 blocks in the area. When those efforts proved fruitless, he decided to take a look at IMDB’s Teaching Mrs. Tingle filming locations page to see if it would provide any insight. And, sure enough, it did! After noticing that both Culver City High School and Culver Studios were mentioned as being used in the flick, he shifted his hunt there and eventually found the house at 4110 Lincoln Avenue, just a few blocks north of the high school (which I believe was only used for a few interior shots). Yay!

Leigh Ann’s house is only featured twice, and very briefly at that, in Teaching Mrs. Tingle – first in an opening scene in which Jo Lynn Jordan (Marisa Coughlan) picks Leigh Ann up for school. In the scene, only the residence across the street from Leigh Ann’s is actually shown, though.

The abode next pops up in the scene in which Leigh Ann returns home for the night after she and her friends have taken Mrs. Tingle hostage. As you can see below, the residence looks quite a bit different now than it did during the filming. A white picket fence has since been constructed around the perimeter of the property, the paint color has since been changed and quite a bit of foliage has since been added to the front yard. I was absolutely floored to see that the moon-shaped cut-outs were still present in the window shutters, though. Love it!

In real life, the residence was originally built in 1934 and boasts 3 bedrooms, 2 baths, 1,472 square feet of living space, and a 0.15-acre plot of land. As luck would have it, the homeowners happened to be outside when we showed up to stalk the place and they truly could NOT have been nicer. And while they did not own the bungalow at the time of the filming, the previous resident had informed them of the property’s cinematic history. For some inexplicable reason, though, they have yet to rent the movie to see the house onscreen for themselves. Sheesh! Some people! Winking smile If I owned that house, I’d be watching Teaching Mrs. Tingle pretty much nightly!

I am fairly certain that the real life interior of the dwelling was also used in the flick, but, unfortunately, I could not find any interior photographs of the residence with which to verify that hunch, nor did the homeowners know if any filming took place inside

I was absolutely shocked at how much Leigh Ann’s neighborhood resembled Pasadena in person. In fact, if someone had shown me the photograph below prior to me stalking Leigh Ann’s house, I would have bet money on the fact that it was a photograph of a Pasadena street. Who knew Culver City had trees like that?

You can find me on Facebook here and on Twitter at @IAMNOTASTALKER. And be sure to check out my other blog, The Well-Heeled Diabetic.

Big THANK YOU to Owen, from the When Write Is Wrong blog, for finding this location. Smile

Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

Stalk It: Leigh Ann’s house from Teaching Mrs. Tingle is located at 4110 Lincoln Avenue in Culver City.

October 2, 2012September 29, 2017

The Blankenhorn Lamphear House from “Teaching Mrs. Tingle”

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post (which you can read here), I recently went on a trek to find all of the locations used in the 1999 thriller Teaching Mrs. Tingle. The locale I was most interested in tracking down, of course, was the huge Victorian manse belonging to the movie’s titular character, who was played by Helen Mirren. Once I learned from the flick’s production notes that the residence was located in the Pasadena area, I figured that, thanks to its fabulous façade, it would most likely be chronicled in the architectural section of Hometown Pasadena. So I immediately started scanning through the tome and fairly quickly came across a blurb about a property named the Blankenhorn Lamphear house which said, “This house is one of Pasadena’s finest examples of the Queen Anne style, the most romantic and fanciful of the Victorian era’s architectural idioms.” I quickly punched the address provided into Google Street View and, sure enough, the Blankenhorn Lamphear house and Mrs. Tingle’s abode were one and the same! So I dragged the Grim Cheaper right on out to stalk the place just a few minutes later.

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The Blankenhorn Lamphear house was originally constructed in 1893 by the Bradbeer and Ferris architecture firm. It was commissioned by a wealthy railroad executive named David F. Blankenhorn. David’s son, David F. Blankenhorn Jr., who was born on the premises, grew up to become a very successful real estate mogul – it was he who handled William Wrigley Jr.’s purchase of Catalina Island in 1919. The Blankenhorns later sold the property to a Mr. and Mrs. John Lamphear, who lived there for many years with their three children. The property changed hands once again in 1994 when the Lamphear estate sold it to its current owner for $425,000.

As you can see below, the 6-bedroom, 2-bath, 3,017-square-foot home, which sits on 0.31 acres, is absolutely spectacular in person.

In Teaching Mrs. Tingle, high school students Leigh Ann Watson (Katie Holmes), Luke Churner (Barry Watson) and Jo Lynn Jordan (Marisa Coughlan – in an AMAZING performance) pay a late night visit to the home of their mean-spirited English teacher, Mrs. Tingle, in order to clear up a misunderstanding. Things don’t go quite according to plan, though, and the three wind up holding Mrs. Tingle hostage inside of the abode for a few days.

A large gate and a massive amount of foliage were added to the residence for the filming, so it looks quite a bit different (and a lot less spooky) in person than it did onscreen.

And while the Teaching Mrs. Tingle production notes state, “The filmmakers chose for Mrs. Tingle an elegant Victorian house in Pasadena, split by a mysterious spiral staircase – a layout that matches the constant shifts and turns of plot and ups and downs of the fate of Leigh Ann Watson and Mrs. Tingle”, because the majority of the movie’s action took place inside of the home, I do not believe that the real life interior was used in the flick. Unfortunately, I was not able to find any interior photographs of the property with which to verify that hunch, though.

Fellow stalker Anthony informed me that the very same house was also used as the residence where Helen North Beardsley (Lucille Ball) and Frank Beardsley (Henry Fonda) lived with their eighteen (!) children in the 1968 flick Yours, Mine and Ours. As you can see below, the façade of the house has not changed much since that time.

The home’s real life address number of “346” was even visible in the background of a few scenes. Love it!

According to a 1974 Pasadena Star News article, only the exterior of the Blankenhorn Lamphear house was used in the flick. The interior of the Beardsley home was a set built inside of a soundstage somewhere in Hollywood. As you can see below, it does not match the interior of Mrs. Tingle’s house in the slightest.

You can find me on Facebook here and on Twitter at @IAMNOTASTALKER. And be sure to check out my other blog, The Well-Heeled Diabetic.

Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

Stalk It: The Blankenhorn Lamphear house, aka Mrs. Tingle’s home from Teaching Mrs. Tingle, is located at 346 Markham Place in Pasadena. The Daddy Day Care house is located right around the corner at 351 Congress Place.

October 1, 2012September 29, 2017

Coach Wenchell’s House from “Teaching Mrs. Tingle”

It’s that time again, my fellow stalkers! October 1st – the beginning of my Haunted Hollywood postings. And I could not be more excited! So without further ado . . . let’s get started! A couple of months ago, I stopped by my good friend Marci’s boyfriend’s house to pick up something she had left for me there. (Marci just so happens to be the owner of one of my favorite places in the entire world – Lula Mae gift shop at 100 North Fair Oaks Avenue in Pasadena. If you are in the area, I cannot more highly recommend stopping by. I love the place so much, I practically hang out there. It’s where I go whenever I need a gift, or am in a bad mood, or am suffering from writer’s block. The store manages to cure all of my ails! But I digress.) While I was there, Marci’s bf and I got to talking about filming locations (imagine that!) and he mentioned that the 1999 thriller Teaching Mrs. Tingle had been filmed at a residence near where he used to live on Atchison Street in Pasadena. Well, let me tell you, I just about fell over upon hearing the news as I had long been under the assumption that the flick had been lensed in North Carolina. So I ran right out to purchase the DVD and immediately started trying to track down all of its locales. Thanks to some big help from the usual suspects (fellow stalkers Mike, from MovieShotsLA, and Owen, from the When Write Is Wrong blog), I managed to find quite a few of them. So I figured what better way to kick off my Haunted Hollywood month than by posting about the house that started my Teaching Mrs. Tingle obsession.

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As it turns out, the house on Atchison Street stood in for the residence where Coach Wenchell (Jeffrey Tambor) lived in Teaching Mrs. Tingle. It popped up only once in the movie, in the scene in which Leigh Ann Watson (Katie Holmes) and Luke Churner (Barry Watson) drove the passed-out (and married!) Coach back to his home after he stopped by Mrs. Tingle’s (Helen Mirren) pad for a booty call. And I should mention here that while I was not really a fan of Teaching Mrs. Tingle, this stalker absolutely LOVES LOVES LOVES herself some Katie Holmes, which is why I became so obsessed with tracking down locales from the flick.

After they arrive at his house, Leigh Ann and Luke dump the Coach onto his front porch and then Leigh Ann, sadly, spots the Coach’s wife sitting inside reading by herself. Only a very tight shot of the home and its front porch area was shown in the flick.

It was such a tight shot, in fact, that I had a hard time pinpointing the exact house that appeared in the movie. (Marci’s boyfriend had only told me that the residence was located on the 1100 block of Atchison). It was not until I spotted two very distinct trees in the background, located in front of a neighboring residence, that I was able to figure it out.

In real life, Coach Wenchell’s house, which was originally built in 1926, boasts two bedrooms, two baths, 2,112 square feet of living space, and a 0.33-acre plot of land. As you can see below, it is an absolutely adorable little house and I am really surprised that more of it was not shown onscreen.

You can find me on Facebook here and on Twitter at @IAMNOTASTALKER. And be sure to check out my other blog, The Well-Heeled Diabetic. (I made the photograph below using some SERIOUSLY COOL Halloween filters, fonts and graphics that were just added to my favorite photo editing program PicMonkey.)

Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

Stalk It: Coach Wenchell’s house from Teaching Mrs. Tingle is located at 1101 Atchison Street in Pasadena. Westminster Presbyterian Church, where Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag got married, is located just around the corner at 1757 North Lake Avenue.