Sleepy Hollow In Real Life: Wilmington, North Carolina

In case you’re planning to visit Wilmington, NC, the home town of FOX’s magnificent TV show called Sleepy Hollow, here’s a few handy tips.

First of all, check out this map of some of their filming locations. This is what we mainly used (big kudos!), although some detective work and questions to the locals were needed after that.

A quick look at the Sleepy Hollow filming locations in Wilmington, NC

Adam’s Antiques is now an art gallery. They were just re-decorating the space when we went, but I’m thinking they’ll be well ready by the time you get there. If the owners are there or someone who’s aware the space was used on Sleepy Hollow, ask them about it! There’s a little shelf / wall they built during the filming. We got a little private tour from a fun handyman and got to take our sceneframes, too!

They’ve used a few churches for filming (i.e. some purgatory shots), but you can’t just walk into a church unless there’s a service or something else going on. So you might want to check those out beforehand in case you want to get inside. They are beautiful to look at from the outside too, but we just couldn’t use them in any sceneframing shots without getting in.

Sleepy Hollow’s original power trio standing at a crossroads.

We didn’t go to Clarendon Plantation as it is not open for tourists and it didn’t seem likely we could get anywhere close with a car, so we spent our time looking for other places.

Remember the scene where Ichabod and Abbie go looking for clues in the forest and find the passageway to the lost village? We went looking for the spot at Greenfield Lake and although we couldn’t find it, it was a very lovely ride around the lake. We stopped at a few spots and got greeted by dozens of cute turtles! So, worth the visit, too :)

We also got a chance to watch them film an episode for season 2 in the historic town of Brunswick. We can’t really tell you what was going on (mostly because we didn’t see that much but also because we can’t and won’t publish any spoilers out of respect), but we can tell you where it happened, as it’s also an lovely place to visit. This is where we spent a rainy day and got a smiling “hi” from Tom Mison and talked to some extremely nice crew members and firefighters. Such a lovely bunch of people!

Beautiful park pond in Wilmington, NC

Another cool thing to do in Wilmington, NC: The film studio tour!

You should definitely check out the EUE/Screen Gems studio tour if you’re into any of the movies and TV shows filmed in the Wilmington / North Carolina area.

Sleepy Hollow films their studio bits here, as well as the folks of Under the Dome. We didn’t get to visit the Hollow set (spoilers!), but who knows, maybe you’ll get luckier! We haven’t watched Dome (yet), but it was still quite an amazing visit. There’s a lot of history and productions that call these studios their home, so you’ll hear many interesting stories during the tour. Just remember to bring cash.

Orlando Jones (Sleepy Hollow) in one of our sceneframes.

Good places to eat in Wilmington

If you’re looking for good food, I have a couple of recommendations for that too:

Slice of Life for delicious pizza slices & lunch salads, and Indochine for some AMAZING Thai food & atmosphere. We posted a couple of photo on Instagram from each: Slice of Life, Indochine. Too bad our camera phones weren’t better back then, right?

Beautiful beach life in North Carolina

If you have time for some beach life, you have to take a drive down to Kure beach! Take a walk in the sand and see the lovely pastel coloured beach houses. I just wanted to rent one of those houses and stay forever to be honest…

As a cherry on top, we had breakfast with Orlando Jones. He’s the best, seriously.

So, that’s about all I can remember about Wilmington right now. Be sure to let us know what you ended up doing & seeing, we’d love to hear about it!