Plot
An empty lot in a neighborhood overlooking the Statue of Liberty is occupied overnight by a house. At the firehouse the Ghostbusters are bored, with no calls all week. Winston Zeddemore jokes they are simply too good and catch everything, and Egon Spengler agrees. When the phone finally rings with a real job, Peter Venkman is unimpressed, since the last several haunted-house calls were false alarms. The address is 1313 13th Street. Egon's P.K.E. Meter registers a major psychic force inside, then overheats and shorts out.
Mrs. Rogers answers the door holding her pet canary in a cage. As the team enters, Peter sends Ray Stantz to drive Rogers back to headquarters for safety while he stays to write up the bill. Inside, the house turns hostile: haunted kitchenware reverts to normal whenever Egon is near, and a door opens with a voice saying "Wat" before Peter is pulled in.
Consulting Tobin's Spirit Guide, Egon explains that Wat is a dominant force in the underworld, the leader of a legion of demons, who intends to invade and conquer the living world. Back at the firehouse, Janine Melnitz gives Mrs. Rogers a tour. Slimer eyes some cookies but is scared off when Rogers' canary, Precious, morphs into a monstrous flaming bird. Janine shows off the Containment Unit's new fail-safe, which requires the fingerprints and voice of the four Ghostbusters to access it. A monstrous silhouette readies to attack Janine, but vanishes when she states she does not have clearance to open the Unit.
At the house, the team is ambushed: hands reach out of the walls, gravity shifts, and the room turns into a throat-like tunnel as an anthropomorphic furnace climbs toward them breathing fire. Ray asks Peter for ideas; Peter has none, but asks if anyone has marshmallows. Egon takes readings in Rogers' bedroom closet and finds an enormous P.K.E. signature on her dress. Peter asks whether that means the dress is Wat, and Egon answers that Mrs. Rogers is Wat. The whole thing is a trap. Winston tells Ray to drop a trap; the furnace eats it and explodes, blasting the team outside, where two stone lions attack and Ray traps them.
Returning to the firehouse, the team searches for Wat. Peter is pulled into the bathroom and possessed. Peter, controlled by Wat, heads to the basement with Precious to open the Containment Unit. The others follow, and Egon's meter confirms the possession. Winston instinctively raises his thrower, but Ray stops him: they cannot blast Wat without harming Peter. Egon's solution is to tune two throwers, one to Peter's electro-metabolic frequency and the other to Wat's exact frequency, to pull the two apart, though a mistake could tear Peter to pieces. Slimer kicks Precious aside and Janine traps the canary, then restores the Containment Unit. Wat is pulled into a trap and Peter is freed. At the same moment, Mrs. Rogers' house collapses in on itself and is sucked into a chest, which then blows up and inverts. Peter, fed up with haunted houses and annoyed about his messed-up hair, ends up chasing Slimer through the streets after Slimer slimes him in an attempt to help.
Production
The episode was recorded on June 3, 1986.1 It belongs to the show's first season and appears on Volume 1, Disc 1 of the boxed set. Like the rest of season one, it uses a track from the program's soundtrack, in this case the song "Don't Play Her Game."
Voice work in the original recording came from Frank Welker, Maurice LaMarche, Arsenio Hall, Lorenzo Music and Laura Summer, with guest voices Billie Hayes and Leo DeLyon. It is one of seven early episodes later re-dubbed with Dave Coulier and Kath Soucie replacing several of the original cast, and was rebroadcast in that form as part of season four. The redubbed version was not included on the DVD release.
In the boxed-set storyboards, Ray throws an "Ecto-Gernade" (spelled that way in the boards) rather than a trap at the furnace monster.3
Legacy
The episode's imagery has resurfaced in IDW Publishing's Ghostbusters comics. Ray and Peter's file photos in Ghostbusters: Crossing Over issue 2 are taken from "Mrs. Roger's Neighborhood," and Peter's possessed design in issue 5 is based on his appearance while possessed by Wat. In issue 6, an alternate-dimension Egon modifies his thrower with a red-handled screwdriver, echoing the episode's climax.
Ghostbusters: IDW 20/20 retells a version of the Wat story with the Sanctum of Slime team of a different dimension. The two accounts share the broad premise, Wat trying to pull an army out of a secured Containment Unit, but differ in many details: the house appears by day rather than overnight, Precious is an ordinary canary instead of a servant ghost, Wat kidnaps Egon rather than possessing Peter, and the team there confronts Wat directly instead of fighting through a houseful of ghosts.
