THE HOUSE THAT was used as the home of psychotic killer Buffalo Bill in the 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs is officially on the market.
Scott and Barbara Lloyd are selling 8 Circle Street, in the eastern Pennsylvania town of Perryopolis, after 39 years of happy residence.
The three-storey, four-bedroom house is where the climactic final encounter takes place between FBI trainee Clarice Starling (played by Jodie Foster) and serial killer Buffalo Bill.
The production crew took six weeks to turn it into the squalid home of the murderer, played by Ted Levine.
A film crew spent three days shooting in the foyer and dining room of the home, about 30 miles south east of Pittsburgh.
“The Lloyds actually lived upstairs during the shoot, but not during filming,” Kristie Forsman from Berkshire Hathaway Home Services told TheJournal.ie.
Later on, the cast and crew left a signed poster, and other little notes around the house.
The poster now hangs framed in one of the 105-year-old house’s bedrooms.
The Lloyds, both 63, were married in the foyer in 1977, Dianne Wilk, the estate agent for the property, told TheJournal.ie.
That foyer was the scene of the first, suspenseful conversation when Starling calls to the door of Jame Gumb, whom she suspects of being the serial killer Buffalo Bill.
The Lloyds are asking $300,000 (€270,000) for the home, which also features an in-ground pool and a vintage train caboose as a pool house.
The Silence of the Lambs won five Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay.
The most iconic feature of the house, of course, is the macabre dungeon with a pit, where Buffalo Bill kept his victims.
Kristie Forsman, from Berkshire Hathaway in Pittsburgh, wouldn’t be drawn on that question, telling TheJournal.ie:
We want prospective buyers to come and discover the mystery for themselves.
However, current owner Scott Lloyd burst that particular bubble, telling local newspaper the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review that those scenes were shot on a sound stage, and not in the basement of No. 8 Circle Street.
Dianne Wilk, the estate agent for the property, told TheJournal.ie she had been inundated with interest from media and possible buyers, ever since the house went on the market.
I’ve got all sorts of calls I haven’t returned, text messages, emails.I’m delighted, but I just want to sell the house now.
Contains additional reporting by the Associated Press.
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