LOS ANGELES, Calif. – In true celebrity fashion, a famous Los Angeles mountain lion that lounged under a home for hours and refused to budge for bean bags, tennis balls and prods may have wandered back to a neighbouring park all on its own.

Wildlife officials are trying to find out if the big cat known as P-22 is still under the residence in the hilly Los Feliz neighbourhood after a preliminary check early Tuesday turned up no sign of the animal.

Janice Mackey of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife said the agency planned a more thorough search, while officials from the National Park Service tried to pick up a signal from the electronic beacon on the cougar’s collar.

Homeowner Rachel Archinaco told Los Angeles television station KABC that workers installing a home security system encountered the cougar in a crawlspace around noon Monday.

“The one worker came sprinting through our house, white-faced, shouting, ‘There’s a mountain lion under your house!’” she said.

The animal, which has a red ear tag, normally lives in nearby Griffith Park. It arrived in the area several years ago from the western slopes of the Santa Monica Mountains and crossed two freeways to get there.

National Geographic famously photographed P-22 in 2013 with the Hollywood sign in the background, and several sharp photographs from a remote camera in Griffith Park captured the cat last year.

He survived mange and a meal of rat poison last year to become apparently healthy again.

At the home, wildlife officials cleared most media and gawkers away after darkness fell, then used several techniques to try to get him to move.

They poked him gently with a long prod, but that did little — other than temporarily lose the pricey GoPro camera they had attached to the end of it.

They fired a tennis ball cannon into the crawl space with hopes that at least the noise and commotion would scare him out, a tactic that often works with coyotes.

They then fired small bean bags, the same kind police sometimes use for human crowd control, toward the cat.

All the tactics, shown live on streaming video, drew mild reactions from P-22 — none coming close to drawing him out or even getting him to move much.

Archinaco’s husband Jason said the couple has three ordinary house cats and had thought about adding to their numbers.

“My wife wanted a fourth one,” he said, “but not this way.”