The House On Bathory Lane
SURREALESTATE – Season 1 Episode 8 – SPOILERS
Negative publicity surrounding two recent supernaturally generated tragedies that he could not prevent has made Luke (Tim Rozon) consider giving up curing and selling haunted properties and taking the Agency mainstream. Susan (Sarah Levy) tracks Luke down at the Funland bowling alley and gives him a bit of a pep talk. The two of them are the only bowlers there and it does seem like he owns the place. (Before Susan arrives, Luke’s dad turns up. After hearing about Luke’s encounter with his mother’s ghost (in Episode 3), he tells his son that Victoria was never cruel, and that didn’t sound like her.) Susan, who knocks down a couple of pins with her telekinetic abilities, tries to reassure her boss that some tragedies are bound to happen in their line of work. Luke seems unconvinced.

Teen Luke (Marcus Zane) and Teen Phil (Matthew Isen) concentrating on a video game circa 2000
Next morning, Luke is called upon to clear out and sell a property in his old neighbourhood. (As a boy, he mowed the lawn for the mysterious lady who lived there.) The owner, Nellie Neal (Frankie O’Neill), was 90 when she died, apparently of natural causes, but after Luke goes to look the place over, Father Phil (Adam Korson) finds out that Nellie’s parents died under strange circumstances. (They each fell from a different attic window at exactly the same time.) Nellie, who was sixteen at the time, never left the house after that. It isn’t specified, but one might guess that when Nellie’s parents died, Nellie somehow invoked a glamour spell. (Did she stumble upon a wish-granting demon who did that for her?)
The spell made her perpetually sixteen and granted her whatever she wanted, so long as she did not leave the house. When Nellie realized she was dying, she told the house it was time to leave and was found dead on the front porch looking her correct age. When Luke enters, the house tries to do the same for him as it did for Nellie. Then the rest of the gang shows up and all of them enter and all are regressed to the age of sixteen. The episode’s title is “Baba O’Reilley” which (except for the fact that it has a double ‘L’) is the name of a 1971 song also known as Teenage Wasteland, by The Who.
We learn that Luke and Phil were both born in 1984, August was born in 1965, and Zooey’s birth year was 1998. The house is located at 113 Bathory Lane, probably a reference to Countess Elizabeth Bathory (1560-1614) who allegedly employed a much more grisly method to achieve perpetual youth. The house ejects everyone but Luke by throwing them out a window (leading one to believe that the house demon might specialize in defenestration and may have been responsible for the deaths of Nellie’s parents)
Luke’s special talents enable a conversation between sixteen year-old Luke and the house demon in the form of his thirty-six year-old self. Teen Luke rejects the comfortable, unchanging world the house has to offer, and at the same time decides not to play it safe in his professional life. “Ships are safe in harbour,” he quotes his father as saying. “But that’s not what ships are for.”
Meanwhile, back at the Donovan house, Megan (Tennille Read) wakes up on her couch to find the house has been trashed, and discovers she has missed twelve messages from Luke. Since Luke is otherwise occupied, Susan tries to help, and discovers that Megan has been possessed by a third Roadie demon. (Father Phil says that Roadies never travel in even numbers.) Susan gets to punch demon-possessed Megan, something she has probably wanted to do for a while because she’s a bit jealous of Megan’s relationship with Luke. (Remember last episode when she was forced to be honest by the demon possessing her.) Then she uses Augie’s demon killing device (which he conveniently left in her trunk) to suck the Roadie from Megan and destroy it. The ending of this episode is quite scary, but describing it might detract from its effectiveness. Suffice to say that ghosts remain in the Donovan house.