Jacksonville

This page is still in development.  Keep checking back in case I find some of my own photos sometime soon...

Mystery Filming Location

Jacksonville, Oregon

Oh, no Ma'am, don't call it a "Sears Catalog House".  Right idea, wrong catalog.

For those who think I have never physically been in any spaces or places I talk about, I'm about to disabuse you of that notion right now.  Because this is a house I have seen the inside of.

Twice.

Dammit.

It's something that brings back warm memories because it was a trip I got to take with my grandparents more than once.  I wanted to find out where this movie I'd seen had been filmed.  Well, where in Jacksonville.  So we took more than one summer trip to Jacksonville and to other places in that part of Oregon.  In Jacksonville, we even went to the cemetery as my grandfather wanted to see the grave of Colonel T'Vault.  We also saw the graves of the original owners/occupants of a number of historic homes and places in Jacksonville.

The saddest would have to have been little Lydia Beekman, who was just a little girl when she died.  Her parents, C.C. Beekman and his wife, were devastated.  For the rest of their lives, they kept a photograph of Lydia in their bedroom at their now preserved home in Jacksonville.  The house had been completed just a little too late for the child to have lived in it, but her surviving siblings, Benjamin and Carrie Beekman, did.

Another grave in the Jacksonville cemetery is that of Jeremiah Nunan, whose house is still referred to as the "Catalog House".  His grave is along the edge of the cemetery, and his widow (I've seen her referred to as a "mail-order bride") is not beside him despite the space reserved for her.

What do these two men have to do with a little movie called "Mystery Mansion"?

Well, as I was able to learn on my trips to Jacksonville, it was the Nunan house that was used as the abandoned and dilapidated Drake house in the film.

And Beekman?

If you have seen this movie, you might remember Sam telling the kids--again--what the story was surrounding the old Drake house.  He told the kids, "Three outlaws robbed the Beekman Bank..."

My grandfather sat right up and said, "The Beekman Bank was never robbed."

And it wasn't.  

Yes, there was really a Beekman Bank.  C.C. Beekman established this bank when he first came to Jacksonville.  It is still preserved as an historic site today.  And considering C.C. Beekman wasn't even fond of checking accounts, it's hard to imagine his bank holding onto funds for loans and such that would have been a magnate for robbers.

However.

C.C. Beekman, before establishing his bank and home in Jacksonville, was an agent for Wells Fargo.  As in, the Wells Fargo stage.  And the Wells Fargo stage most certainly was robbed on more than one occasion.  Beekman was one agent tasked with dealing with robberies and robbers.  So, not too far fetched for the purpose of the story.

It's hard to imagine that the Nunan house was the house used for the mansion in the movie, but only if you see it from one perspective.  When I was there, there was only one way to approach the house, and it wasn't from the side used to film the movie.

The "Catalog" House