LA couple kicked out of home after mountain lion moves in and refuses to leave

P-22 decided to swap the Griffith Park woods for a Los Feliz home

P22 in November 2014 (National Park Service )

A Los Angeles couple were temporarily kicked out of their home after the famous mountain lion P-22 snuck in and refused to leave.

The intruder was spotted by two security technicians as they installed equipment in the Los Feliz home on Monday evening.

State department officials tried to lure the cougar out by poking him with a large stick, using tennis balls to try to get his attention and firing bean bag rounds, but P-22 refused to budge for hours.

It has now left of its own accord, but it is not immediately clear where the lion went.

P-22 peaks out of the crawl space (NBC)

“I didn't think for two seconds that it was a mountain lion in my house,” homeowner Jason Archinaco told the LA Times. “If someone says Big Foot's in your house, you go, 'Yeah,' and you stick your head in there.”

Armando Navarrete, a team leader with the Los Angeles Animal Services who was called onto the scene, believed the lion was more likely to be a bobcat until he crawled into the gap and found P-22 staring directly back at him.

Navarrete said the technician who found P-22 lurking in the crawl space had turned "as white as a ghost" and left the property after raising the alarm “like a bat out of hell”.

Mr Archinaco’s wife Paula said P-22 appeared bemused by the fuss his presence had caused. “He was just lying there looking like, 'What? I don't understand what the hullabaloo is about,'” she said.

The couple’s house is located close to Griffith Park, where the lion rose to fame when he was discovered living there three years before becoming a squatter in the Glendower Avenue apartment.

P-22 was famously photographed in 2013 by National Geographic with the Hollywood sign in the background, according to the Associated Press.

Wildlife officials have now decided to wait to see if P-22 will leave of his own accord. Janice Mackey of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife told AP: "We're going to let him settle, we're going to let everything calm down, we're going to be really still and give him time to get out of there.”