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.

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!

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.

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