Bad Hollywood Tour Guides Charge $50 To Tell Lies, Put Homeowners At Risk For Stalkers

You’d like to think that if you’re forking over a sizable amount of cash to be shown the sites of Hollywood, your tour guide would at least have some idea what they’re talking about. Yet a new report shows that not only are some of these tour buses apparently fleecing passengers; they’re also putting innocent homeowners in the crosshairs of potentially dangerous stalkers.

The NBC4 I-Team in Los Angeles recently spent hours undercover taking nearly two dozen tours and found that a number of these supposed tour guides are either just making things up or have been horribly misinformed.

On just one tour, the guide pointed out the homes of 50 Cent, Paris Hilton, Danny DeVito, Ice-T and Coco — except none of those houses belonged to any of those celebrities.

One house that was correctly identified was a property once owned by Michael Jackson, but the tour guide claimed this was the house where Jackson dangled his then-infant son Prince Michael II from a balcony with a blanket over his face. Problem is — that happened at a hotel in Berlin, several thousand miles from L.A.

During other tour rides, passengers were not only pointed toward homes Kim Kardashian, Britney Spears, Robert Downey Jr., Jennifer Lopez, and a dozen others don’t live, they were also told outright, potentially slanderous, lies — like the tour guide who pointed out a house and said Justin Bieber had been responsible for burning it down.

The operator of one tour brushed off the I-Team’s finding as saying that “This is all about fun, this is all about Hollywood,” and that his customers don’t actually mind that they are being told fictions.

But it’s not fun for some of the homeowners whose properties are incorrectly flagged as celebrity homes.

For example, there’s the guy whose house has been repeatedly pointed to as belonging to Julia Roberts. In addition to the usual autograph-seekers, he’s had Julia stalkers climbing over the wall to his property, painting love notes on his walls, and leaving threatening notes.

“To cleanse our love, I see your house burning in flames around us as we burn and perish hand in hand,” reads one of many notes left by just a single stalker. “We will be together very soon.”

This homeowner, who took the tour to confirm that guides were lying about his house belonging to the Oscar-winning actress, is now suing the tour company.

“Knowing that so many mentally unstable people who are trying to chase down these celebrities,” he tells NBC4. “I’m now being chased down and I’m not a celebrity and I don’t want to be a celebrity. I just want a peaceful life, which I now can’t have.”