Wanted: creepy houses for TV

[attach]2112[/attach]Catherine Fogarty has a trio of unusual house guests staying at her 100-year-old South Riverdale home.

One night they smashed a fishbowl. Another night they turned on the bath taps and left the water running. They move things and don’t put them back. One of her young sons complains that they make a lot of noise while he’s trying to sleep.

The worst part: she’s never seen them.

Though Fogarty describes herself as a half-skeptic, the experts agree: she has ghosts.

To confirm her suspicions, Fogarty brought in two psychics.

“They both independently came up with the same information,” Fogarty said. “That there were three spirits in this house — two male, one female — and they both came up with an animal spirit as well.”

But Fogarty isn’t fazed. In fact, she’s banking on the opportunity.

A television producer by trade and a co-owner of Big Coat Productions, Fogarty and her team have created Paranormal Home Inspection, currently in development with HGTV. Fogarty’s home and ghostly guests are the subject of the first episode.

“We’re looking to feature average homes with normal people that have things happening that they’re just not sure what’s going on,” explained Shahzaana Satar, a producer with Big Coat. “They don’t necessarily believe in ghosts, but it’s an area they’re willing to explore because the conventional type of things aren’t giving them the answers they’re looking for.”

[attach]2113[/attach]But conventional is where the home inspections start. A team of traditional inspectors will try to explain the odd happenings through sober, real-world logic first. One example in Fogarty’s case was a furnace cover that popped off in the night. The inspector explained it by saying that furnaces often vibrate, and that can happen. Case closed.

But what about the running bath, the smashed fishbowl and the other unexplainable events?

“Then we send in a renowned psychic who does her own type of inspection,” Satar said. “And then there’s a ghost hunter and paranormal investigator. She brings the science part of it.”

During production of the first episode things went predictably weird. One cast member had to drop out of the show after filming a scene where the ghost hunters camped out overnight in Fogarty’s Riverdale home.

“(Our researcher) got very ill. We’re re-casting her because she said to us after the experience that she was too freaked out by it,” Fogarty said.

But the show must go on, and Big Coat needs your help finding homeowners who’ve experienced the unexplainable.

“We don’t want to make people think that these people are nuts,” she said. “These are normal people in normal homes. It’s not the Addams family. It’s just people like myself who say, ‘I don’t know what’s going on, but something’s going on’.”