Catherine Fogarty had a 'Paranormal Home Inspection' of her Toronto home.
SUPPLIED PHOTO
Maybe that door that opens all by itself in the middle of the night is just hung improperly. Or maybe you’ve got some uninvited houseguests. Either way, a new TV series hopes to get to the bottom of the things that go bump in the night in your home.
Paranormal Home Inspection, currently casting for its first season and slated to air on HGTV and Mystery next spring, brings a team of experts to try to find the cause, be it mechanical or supernatural, of the strange noises, misplaced items or apparitions.
The team includes a traditional home inspector, a paranormal investigator and psychic, as well as a researcher. Only the researcher meets the homeowner and knows the details of what’s going on in the home, so as not to taint the findings of the other experts. At the end of the roughly week-long investigation, the homeowner is presented with a full report.
When the idea of doing a paranormal show came up, executive producer Catherine Fogarty was intrigued but wanted to make sure they approached it in a balanced way, so she decided to research the pilot in her own home.
She purchased her Toronto home about four years ago and it didn’t take long to start hearing weird noises, find items that had been moved around and even, during a basement renovation, having the contractors locked out twice — by a deadbolt that could only be locked from the inside.
Fogarty says she’s open to the concept of the paranormal. “I’ve always had the mindset (that) we just don’t know. I think you have to keep an open mind. I’ve never had any of these kinds of experiences before, so it wasn’t something that was really on my radar. I can’t explain what happened in my home (so) I have to keep a very open mind.”
During Fogarty’s Paranormal Home Inspection, the home inspector found a mis-hung door and evidence of an old leak to help explain why doors were opening by themselves and an occasional musty smell. As for strange middle-of-the-night growling, he speculated raccoons.
Fogarty says she was certainly open to these natural causes. “If there’s other ways of explaining this, we want to know,” she says. “We want to legitimately explore both avenues.”
The paranormal investigator heard strange things and had motion sensors go off during her overnight stay in Fogarty’s home, leading her to conclude there was some sort of presence there.
The psychic also found evidence of spirits. Fogarty actually had two psychics visit the home, one who didn’t make it past the rough cut of the pilot, and they both came up with the same findings; reacting to the same exact spot in the home — her basement laundry room — and deciding on the same number of presences, two male and one female.
Finally, the researcher hunted through the city’s archives, digging up maps and records that backed up some of the psychic’s findings, including verifying the names that spoke to her — which belonged to previous owners.
After sharing the research, the show returns to visit the homeowners a month later. Explains Fogarty: “We want to give it some time. We want to know, based on the information we’ve given them, has that altered their opinion of what they want to do in the home?”
In Fogarty’s case, it hasn’t. She says the incidents have continued, but she has learned to live with it.
“Sometimes it’s just like living with an annoying house guest. It’s not frightening,” she says. “I don’t consider whatever is in my house to be aggressive, they just want you to know that they’re here.”