When a woman believes she is being haunted and runs from her home in terror, Sophie leads Breanna and Parker through a con to convince the two real estate scammers responsible to target Leverage HQ.
Tropes stolen in this job:
- Buffy Speak: Sophie chides Breanna over her Halloween decorations.Sophie: When you draw this much attention to a secret lair, it just becomes a... uhh... not-so-secret lair.
- Continuity Nod: Parker tells Tina that she used to believe in psychics until her teammates helped her realize that they're just another variety of Con Artist.
- Continuity Snarl: However, she specifically mentions that "Sophie and her friends" helped her, and Sophie wasn't in the original scene; Tara was temporarily filling her spot on the team at the time.
- Children Are Innocent: Deke isn't really a child, but he's not even graduated from design school and he's been pushed into the family business... the team gets him on their side and lets him go.
- The Dreaded: The Wraith has earned a reputation as one of the deadliest assassins on the planet.
- Girl's Night Out Episode: Eliot and Harry are mostly absent in this episode, which focuses on Sophie, Breanna, and Parker, although they get a cameo at the very end. The explanation is that they're in Brunei, helping Hardison with an extradition.
- Good Cannot Comprehend Evil: Tina would rather believe she really is being haunted than that someone is twisted enough to drive her crazy just to get her house.
- Halloween Episode: It's set during Halloween week, and the climax takes place during the New Orleans Halloween Parade.
- "Home Alone" Antics: How the team tries to deal with the con men, then later with the Wraith.
- Killed Offscreen: Combined with Sound-Only Death. We hear Deke stab a screaming Sophie, then see her "corpse" while Deke holds a bloody knife over her. Of course, this turns out to be a Faking the Dead hoax they came up with together.
- Knight of Cerebus: The episode, which is almost cartoony while showing Leverage dealing with the bumbling Herberts, becomes a straight Crime Drama when the much more dangerous Wraith shows up.
- Minion with an F in Evil: Deke is a decent guy who's been pulled out of design school and Forced into Evil by his Con Artist uncle, Lyle. He clearly wants nothing to do with "the family business" because Being Evil Sucks, but doesn't see a way out until Team Leverage helps him escape Lyle's influence and return to school.
- Minor Crime Reveals Major Plot: Why are the Herberts clearing out all the houses along the Halloween parade route? At first, it seems like a typical real estate scam, but it's also part of The Wraith's plan to murder Santoro, which requires an empty house where he can snipe the victim from.
- Mood Whiplash: The episode goes from horror (the Herberts' attack on Tina) to comic thriller (when Leverage targets the Herberts, who aren't very good at their jobs) to serious thriller (when The Wraith appears).
- My God, What Have I Done?: Deke pretends to feel this way after "stabbing" Sophie.
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: Christina Killian Santoro, a young East Coast progressive politician with a nationwide fandom, resembles Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
- Pop-Culture Pun Episode Title: It's a reference to the Paranormal Activity franchise.
- Red Baron: We never learn The Wraith's real name, which is just the way he'd want it.
- "Scooby-Doo" Hoax: The Herberts do these for a living; Parker and Breanna install cameras throughout Leverage HQ to show Tina exactly how they do it. Later, they turn this technique on the Herberts and The Wraith themselves, making the crew's base seem like it's haunted by The Wraith's previous victims, which terrifies him so much that he turns himself into the police and confesses all his crimes.
- X-Ray Sparks: Happens to the Herberts when Breanna shocks them by remote control.
