HGTV’s house-hunting spinoff is trading its half-hour format for full hour-long episodes this fall, and Retta is heading back out to judge homes on what the network calls “scary appearance, un-livability and fright factor.” Season 3 of “Scariest House in America” premieres Friday, Sept. 18, at 9 p.m. ET/PT, according to the official announcement from HGTV’s parent company Warner Bros. Discovery.
The series, a spinoff of Retta’s other HGTV hit “Ugliest House in America,” expands to six one-hour episodes this season, up from the shorter half-hour format of its first run. That bump follows real audience growth: HGTV reports Season 2 pulled in more than 10.9 million viewers across linear and streaming platforms, up from the 8.3 million who tuned into Season 1.
Key Points
- Season 3 premieres Friday, Sept. 18, at 9 p.m. ET/PT on HGTV, with six one-hour episodes.
- Retta tours properties nominated by their own owners for paranormal reports, unsettling architecture, or a history that refuses to stay in the past.
- The premiere alone stops in Florida, Ohio, and West Virginia, including a concrete house described as riddled with creepy shadows and rattling doorknobs, a gingerbread-style cottage, a 1920s observatory, and a Victorian home with a paranormal history.
- The winning homeowners get a $150,000 renovation from designer Alison Victoria, revealed in the season finale.
- The season also visits a centuries-old farmhouse, a former nursing home, and an 1800s jailer’s house that the press release describes as home to “ghostly apparitions and unearthly whispers.”
What separates this from a standard haunted-house gimmick show is that the properties are real, occupied or recently occupied homes, not seasonal attractions built for October. Owners nominate their own houses, meaning the “fright factor” HGTV judges is layered on top of actual maintenance issues, odd architectural choices, and, in more than a few cases, houses that are difficult to sell precisely because of their reputations. That is where the $150,000 renovation prize does real work: it is pitched less as a stunt and more as a fix for a home that has been sitting on the margins of its local market.
Production on the season comes from Big Fish Entertainment, the same company behind the “Ugliest House” franchise, and HGTV is positioning the two shows as companion series, one about neglect, the other about things that go bump in the night. With six full episodes this time around instead of six half-hours, there is more room to actually walk through each property’s specific problems, whether that is a drafty 1920s observatory or a farmhouse with a story attached to every room.
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