A. A private home.

Q. Where is it supposed to be on the show?

A. Somewhere in (or near) Bon Temps, Louisiana.

Q. When did we see it on the show?

A. Often, from the last episodes of Season One to the early episodes of Season 2.

It begins in Episode 11 of Season One ("To Love is to Bury"), when Tara sees a naked woman and a giant pig standing in the middle of the road, and swerves her car into a ditch to avoid hitting them.

As a result, Tara is arrested for drunk driving and locked up in the Bon Temps jail. (We learn later that the naked woman was Maryann Forrester herself.)

Maryann shows up at the police station, and despite being a total stranger, bails Tara out of jail. We first see the home in that episode, when Maryann drives Tara to her house - a stately colonial mansion.

She pretends to be a social worker of sorts, and claims that her house is "an informal halfway house".

Maryann keeps Tara there by making the estate a veritable resort, complete with servants waiting on her hand & foot, and a new boyfriend (a guy named "Eggs").

We see the house again in the first episode of the second season ("Nothing But Blood"), when Sam Merlotte comes to the mansion to return a bag of cash he had accidentally stolen from Maryann when he was a youngster.

We see it again in that same episode when Tara, Maryann & Eggs smoke a joint by the pool.

The home's sprawling back yard shows up again in Episode 2 of Season 2, in a scene where Tara and Eggs get to know each other better.

In Episode 3, the back yard & pool is where Maryann stages her first black-eyed orgy, possessing the townsfolk of Bon Temps with her magic, and causing them to run wild.

(And it's during that first party there that Detective Andy sees the pig in the doll house.)

In the 4th episode, the orgies prove too much for Tara, and she moves out of Maryann's house and into Sookie's house. Unfortunately, Maryann follows her there, and makes herself at home, bringing her wild parties with her. So that is the last time we see this original house.

(We find out later that Maryann didn't even own that first home - she was just a squatter.)

Q. What is it actually, in real life?

A. A residential home - but nowhere near Louisiana.

Q. Where can I find it in real life?

A. The home is located at 3535 Locksley Drive, just south of Pasadena, CA.

It's on the north side of the street, between Madre Street & S. Lotus Avenue, about a block north of Huntington Drive.

That's about two miles east of the famous Huntington Library & Gardens (in San Marino), and about a mile and a half west of the Santa Anita Race Course and the L.A. Arboretum. (All three of those places have been used extensively for filming, over the years.)

The producers also used the back yard, the pool, the patio, the interior of the house and even the same furniture (e.g. the bed Tara wakes up in the next morning.)

(You'll find many photos of the house on this site - which has nothing to do with "True Blood".)




   The photos below were shot in 2009 by Lindsay Blake of iamnotastalker.com :












  Here is an aerial photo of the house. And here is a map link.




Warning: This is a private home. Do not trespass on their property,
knock on their door, or do anything else that might disturb the residents!

Q. How the heck did you figure out where it was?

A. This was an interesting find...

While Googling for the terms "True Blood" and "filming", I came across a short article by a Pasadena real estate agent, who mentioned that there was a house in southeast Pasadena where they occasionally filmed "True Blood".

I emailed the agent and asked him what scene(s) has been shot there, but he didn't bother to reply.

I went and checked the Pasadena shoot sheet, and they didn't have anything listed for "True Blood" being filmed at a house.

Fortunately, I had just recently been out to the southeast Pasadena area to shoot photos of two "Dexter" homes. And those very expensive homes were located in an unincorporated area just south of Pasadena and just east of San Marino.  So, since Pasadena didn't claim the location, my hunch was that they probably filmed in that neighborhood.

However, most of the houses on "True Blood" are either very modest cottages or ancient Southern houses (like Bill's) - nothing that would match the kind of modern, multi-million dollar homes found in that area near southeast Pasadena..

So I made a mental note to look for expensive, modern homes in "True Blood" when I re-watched the first season episodes.

Maryann spent so much time in Sookie's house (in the second season) that I almost forgot she had started out in a different home. But the minute I saw that colonial mansion again, I thought to myself: I bet that's in southeast Pasadena.

So I began a search of the area near those "Dexter" homes, but when I didn't find the house immediately, I impatiently emailed fellow location-hunter Chas Demster to join the search. He, in turn, contacted fellow location-hunter Owen Lockwood, who started looking in the same area and had more luck than I did.  He found it almost immediately. ( Thanks, Owen! )