Bates Motel in Langley

1. The house on the hill

Drive south on 272 Street past the transfer station today and there’s nothing to see. From 2012 to early 2017, there was: a near copy of the Gothic house from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), looming over a low yellow motel with a vacancy sign.

Bates Motel was A&E’s prequel to Psycho, with Freddie Highmore as a teenage Norman Bates and Vera Farmiga as his mother Norma. The producers built their two most famous sets here, on a lightly sloped piece of disused Township of Langley land that the production leased. The original Hitchcock sets are at Universal Studios in Hollywood; Aldergrove’s was the working copy.

2. Why Aldergrove?

One of the show’s location managers told the Langley Advance Times in 2015 that scouts spent months looking before the first season. The Pacific Northwest weather helped: it’s a moody show, and the crews filmed through the rain and loved the fog. A Township manager noted that productions like this tend to settle on one or two main sites, which keeps trucks off the rest of the roads.

3. The roof that wasn’t there

In season one the house had no roof. The camera saw a two-storey facade, and computers added the top in post-production. For season two, a real 13-ton roof was built and lifted on in July 2013, complete with the circular “gunsight” window fans know from the film. The motel was used for interior and exterior scenes; the house interiors were filmed on a set elsewhere in the Fraser Valley.

4. What it took

The 2015 article gives a sense of scale. Prepping a shoot could take seven days and up to 50 people before a camera rolled. Each episode took eight days to film, ten episodes a season, with close to 100 people on site each shooting day. The production also leased a nearby private lot for hair, makeup and actors’ trailers, with shuttles running to catering. A production assistant told the paper about buying three pairs of gloves at a Langley work-wear store the day it snowed. Fans turned up too: the paper found two who had driven out from Chilliwack and Ontario just to see the house.

5. Fort Langley plays White Pine Bay

The fictional town around the motel borrowed Fort Langley more than once:

• October 2012, season one: an overnight shoot turned the Fort Langley community centre into White Pine Bay’s Woodchuck Festival, the backdrop for Norma’s secret date with Deputy Shelby in episode two.
• September 2016, final season: cameras were on Glover Road with Highmore, with the village again standing in for White Pine Bay.
• October 2016: a Fort Langley storefront became the town’s Village Hardware, which YVRShoots described as a regular set and a key location in the last season.

The Langley Advance Times and B.C.‘s film producers’ association have listed Bates Motel among Fort Langley’s best-known credits. The paper has also named the Hilltop Cafe on Fraser Highway, which closed in 2024, among the places the show used.

6. Checkout time

By January 2017 the final season was in the can. On January 30, 2017, a small crew started taking the house apart piece by piece. The producers offered to leave the motel for the Township, possibly as storage, and the Township said no. Before it went, the motel had collected a run of joke reviews on Google Maps from people pretending to be terrified guests.

Visiting today

There’s nothing left at the 272 Street site, and the surrounding land is Township property next to an active transfer station, so it isn’t a place to stop. The part of Bates Motel you can still walk is Fort Langley. Glover Road, the shopfronts that played White Pine Bay and the community centre that hosted the Woodchuck Festival are all a short walk apart. Our Fort Langley village guide covers parking, food and the walk down to the river. If you find white production trucks lining the side streets, another show has moved in: give the crews room and keep to the sidewalk.

More Langley filming: TV shows filmed in Langley.