Haunted to Death

It’s Hart to Hart via HGTV on All Hallows’ Eve, as partners and home renovation hosts Peter Penwell and JP Broadway try not to flip when their newest fixer-upper is rumored to be a haunted house . . .

Kicking off season three of their hit reality TV show Domestic Partners is a home renovation project with an irresistible hook. Woods Hall is a lavish 1913 manor home in the Detroit suburb of Pleasant Woods, once belonging to the town’s founding family. It also comes with its own ghost.

Twenty-five years ago during a Halloween night party, automotive heiress and beauty queen Emma Wheeler-Woods, wearing a white Princess Diana wedding gown as a costume, fell from a third-floor balcony to her death. Or was she pushed?

Fiona Forrest recently inherited the home after learning she was Emma’s daughter, and she and her fiancé have hired the Domestic Partners to restore the family property to its original splendor. But ghostly sightings, injured crew, secret passageways, locked rooms, and sabotage beg the question: Is the place actually haunted? And perhaps more practically, was Fiona’s mother murdered?

Hustling to have work finished in time to shoot the finale on Halloween--the anniversary of Emma’s mysterious death--do Peter and JP have a ghost of a chance of also solving a cold case from a quarter of a century ago before someone else takes a fall?

Frank Anthony Polito is an award-winning author and playwright. His novels include the Lambda Award-winning Drama Queers!, Lost in the ’90s, The Spirit of Detroit, and Band Fags!, among many others, and his plays have been produced around the country. He holds an MFA in Dramatic Writing from Carnegie Mellon and a BFA in Theatre from Wayne State. After growing up in the Detroit suburbs, Polito lived in New York City for 18 years before moving to Pleasant Ridge, Michigan with his partner Craig Bentley and their two dogs. They live in a 1924 Craftsman Colonial that they purchased on HGTV’s House Hunters and have been renovating together since 2013. He can be found online at facebook.com/frankanthonypolito.