Frederic Chapin who wrote the story and Eustace Hale Ball who wrote the screenplay have put together a very hybrid concotion here. The ocean waif part of the story is lkie somethig out of a Mary Pickford film while the plot about the novelist coming to write in a haunted house is straight out of George Cohan's hit play of 1913, Seven Keys to Baldpate which was actually filmed in 1916 in Australia and would be filmed again, with Cohan himself in the lead, in 1917. It's quite neatly done if one ignores those very tiresome close-ups that were fashionable in nearly all US films 1915-1918. The best thing is perhaps Londoner Edward Norton doing the "British servant" act that he would continue to do for in umpteen films for three further decades......
The glaring close-ups contribute to the even more glaring predictability of the rest of the plot.
The glaring close-ups contribute to the even more glaring predictability of the rest of the plot.