The term "phrogging" (pronounced "frogging") may not be overly familiar to most, but it's the official name given to the surprising phenomenon of a someone living under your roof without your knowledge. It's something Lifetime is exploring in its new 10-part reality series Phrogging: Hider in My House. While it sounds unthinkable, it's quite common, and something the participants of the series all endured. "I work a lot in true crime," explained executive producer Jessica Everleth (who also worked on Lifetime's acclaimed Surviving R. Kelly documentary) in an exclusive interview with MediaVillage. "So, when this came to me, I felt it was right up my alley. I was kind of excited because it was a thriller and didn't necessarily involve a gruesome murderer.
"I thought it was an interesting mystery," she continued. "Then I thought, 'Is this really common? How hard is it going to be to find stories?' To my shock and amazement, I found something like 200 stories very quickly. There are 20 stories in this first season, and we cover two per hour. They are just crazy, scary, chilling and frightening -- you name it! It's just so bizarre."
Everleth stressed that a phrogger is not a squatter, and that some of the stories unearthed proved quite shocking. "These people are living in the home at the same time as the homeowner, and it's not vacant," she explained. "Someone may move into a new home and find that someone's been living in, or has access to their basement, a crawl space, or their attic. Some of the more shocking stories involve stalking of some kind, where the homeowner was a target. They picked the house to be able to watch the target, so the motives as to why they do it differ. It's not that they are after cheap rent or a cheap place to stay. [Rather], they want to observe the person and make them feel like they're going crazy.
"In our first episode, three young women kept finding evidence that someone had been in their home," she continued. "Clothing went missing, they found blonde hair in the bathtub, and the bathtub would get dirty. Then one day they found a man's handprint in the bathroom. At first, they thought their house was haunted before they went to it being an intruder. One thing I discovered while working on Phrogging is that most people were willing to believe they had a ghost in their house before they were willing to accept it was an intruder."
Thanks to advances in home security, those brazen enough to attempt phrogging are more readily being caught today, something the series also explores. "With social media and things like Ring surveillance cameras, people can share their stories more easily now on TikTok and Instagram," she said. "We found a lot of [our] stories that way, of people catching intruders on cameras so they could confirm, 'No, we're not crazy, somebody's been in the house!'" We do have a couple stories like that this season.
"This usually happens very slowly," Everleth added. "Also, a lot of people were at home during the COVID lockdown, so I think that's how a lot of these stories came to light over the last couple of years, as normally people would be away at work and wouldn't catch some of this stuff. Because people were home, they were able to unravel the mysteries going on in their houses. We also have a story this season about these guys living in a college dorm who thought they were being haunted, till it turned out they had a phrogger living with them."
While there was no shortage of experiences to be shared, Everleth did encounter trepidation from some victims. "Some people did not want to come forward, even though the phrogger had been prosecuted," she recalled. "There was a case we found, and didn't do on the show, because it was so traumatizing for them to relive. It really depended on their story. Others were glad to talk, like the people who had just moved into their dream home and found somebody had been living in the crawl space under their house. They were able to find them and bring them to justice. At the end of the day, they had a sense of humor about what happened, but that's not always the case as these are very serious and dangerous situations."
Everleth is hopeful that through the series viewers will become more aware of their surroundings. "The takeaway is I think people should look," she said in closing. "We find new stories every week, so there's no shortage. People should check their basements, attics, crawlspaces. Make sure they're locked, and no one has access."
Phrogging: Hider in My House premieres Monday, July 18 at 10 p.m. on Lifetime.
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