Steve Di Schiavi doesn’t want to hear about your mild-mannered ghost.

A happy haunting isn’t a problem.

Someone getting pushed, taunted or scared — that’s someone who needs Di Schiavi’s help.

So panicky, worried homeowners only, please.

Like the ones he met in Maine.

Di Schiavi, one half of the team on Travel Channel’s hit show, “The Dead Files,” said he didn’t come to the paranormal reality show lightly. He was a retired New York City homicide detective with only his reputation — “I don’t even have looks, so that’s it for me” — when producers called and wanted to pair him with a medium to investigate hauntings.

When he heard Amy Allan knew things she shouldn’t have, things he’d only uncovered with hours of research and interviews, he was sold.

The show attracts 2 million viewers per week.

Di Schiavi and Allan filmed their first Maine episode, in his first trip to the state, in August. It’s set to air Friday, Dec. 20.

In an interview at an Augusta hotel the morning before filming the episode’s big reveal scene, he described himself as open-minded. He’s never seen a ghost and isn’t really looking to.

“I’m not a skeptic if there’s paranormal; I’m a skeptic of people,” said Di Schiavi, 50.

The man who wrote to the show and claimed his private parts were haunted, and supplied pictures, was not worth their time.

The woman in Western Maine whose elderly parents were suddenly victims of violent, mystifying attacks?

Worth a visit.

‘Are you crazy?’

Di Schiavi is fit, tan and wearing the NYPD police ring that the show’s cameras zoom in on at least once per episode. The New York native appeared in the ABC news documentary “NYPD 24/7” before leaving the force in 2005 and catching Hollywood’s eye.

“I had just retired,” Di Schiavi said. “I got a phone call. I thought it was a joke. I hung up on him three times, I swear to God, because nobody has my cellphone number.”

It was a producer calling with a pitch: a new reality show centered on retired detectives. Was he interested?

“I was doing some body-guard work at the time, thought, ‘Yeah, what the hell?'” he said. “He says, ‘I’ll be in touch.’ A year later, I get an email.” They eventually filmed footage. “I didn’t get picked up for the pilot because they said I was too New York.”

The producer kept in touch and came back with another pitch that would be “The Dead Files.”

“I’m like, ‘I’m not doing a paranormal show, are you crazy?'” Di Schiavi said.

He had used psychics in a pinch on a few police cases. It had never worked.

“He called me, ‘No, no, no; believe me, we can do this the right way,'” Di Schiavi said.

Di Schiavi eventually agreed to a test episode in Denver at the scene of a 1971 double homicide. He interviewed family, dug up details of the case. One by one, Allan and a few other mediums and psychics walked through the scene, describing what had gone down and who was left.

“Amy was the only one who really nailed it,” he said. “She nailed it. I saw all the walks on camera (and said), ‘If I’m going to do it, I’m working with her.'”

The show is now in its third season. Filming takes eight days per episode, 80 hours of footage winnowed to 42 minutes.

Before arriving in town, Di Schiavi runs a background check on the clients — if they’ve ever been convicted of fraud, that’s a red flag that they also might lie about their ghosts — and he digs up as much background as he can on the property.

“We have 8,000 requests in our queue,” he said. “Most of it’s nonsense.”

The famous and formerly famous are passed over. Situations with children and the elderly take priority.

A typical episode has Di Schiavi interviewing homeowners and local historians and researching property records for anything that could explain present-day issues (an old massacre on the site, a family tragedy).

His scenes are balanced with a stream-of-consciousness nighttime walk by Allan describing the dead she’s seeing, the things they’re telling her and, sometimes, ways they’re trying to hurt her.

“We’re not ghost hunters; I try to explain to people, we’re not ghost hunters,” Di Schiavi said. “You don’t see me going around with an (electronic voice phenomenon recorder); you don’t see me taking pictures. (Amy) has a gift that she utilizes to help people. It’s not like she’s going to look for (ghosts); she’s there to help somebody.

Di Schiavi has issues with ghost hunters, he said.

“For me, they’re doing it for self-gratification,” he said. “They want to see if they can see something, and then they tell a person, ‘Oh, your house is haunted, take care. A lot of times they go in and make it worse. I’ll aways ask the clients, ‘Have you had anyone in?'”

The pair come together at the end of an episode to share findings with the client.

“A lot of B.S. was called on Amy” in the beginning, Di Schiavi said. He maintains that she doesn’t know where the crew is going and isn’t armed with any location background.

“I get very protective of her,” Di Schiavi said. “Even my old partners call bulls—,” he said. “When you meet her and see what she’s capable of, then you talk to me. Until then, keep your mouth shut, you know?”

Di Schiavi’s occasional choice words are edited out of the show. He laughs about it.

“I’ll get in people’s faces that I think are lying to me, like I did with this kid the other night (in Maine),” he said. “I got in his grille. I do it a lot. You’re never going to see it. If you saw the way I can be: ‘I’m not going to let this guy come to my house.’ I tell them, ‘I find out you’re lying, me and you are going to have a problem, you understand that? You think I’m here to play games, you get somebody else.'”

Do your homework

He could only talk in vague teases about the Maine case. The night before, he’d filmed in a cemetery.

“It’s a home that a woman and her elderly parents live in,” Di Schiavi said. “They’ve been there about 13 years. Things were active when they first moved in, but they became violent very recently. Really violent. And the tease on that is: When you buy a home, you never know what was on the property before you bought it. Really do your research. You’ll know what I mean when you see the episode.” 

His research brought him to a former occupant.

“Some very bad tragedy happened to him and his wife,” Di Schiavi said. “He was actually willing to talk about it, which I was surprised at, but he being a Marine, I’m a Marine, (there was) a little bit of a bonding.”

After filming the five-hour reveal that night — less than 10 minutes in TV time — he, Allan and the crew were hopping a plane for the next episode in Texas.

He said he still looks forward to Allan’s sketches at each reveal and the potential solutions she’ll suggest.

“She told one couple that you need to do an exorcism and also do yoga,” he said. “Yoga, really? She says, no, it’ll work.'”

What isn’t shown on camera is Allan giving clients her contact information for extra help, he said. Sometimes tracking down a warlock on one’s own, for instance, isn’t the easiest.

“I get, ‘Doesn’t that place creep you out?'” Di Schiavi said. “No. Places don’t creep me out, people creep me out. I’ve never been shot at by a ghost. I’ve been in three gun battles, trapped in 9/11, so I don’t … a place is not going to creep me out. You come at me with a gun, that is going to creep me out.”

Weird, Wicked Weird is a monthly feature on the strange, intriguing and unexplained in Maine. Send ideas, photos and yoga moves to kskelton@sunjournal.com.

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