"The Phantom Isle"
The Blue Magazine published "The Phantom Isle" in its August 1920 issue. It is the fourth installment in Ella M. Scrymsour's six-part Shiela Crerar series. While holidaying near Rosslyn Chapel, Shiela Crerar receives an urgent summons from a Mrs. Murdoch of the Isle of Skye. Mrs. Murdoch's daughter, Elspeth, broke off her engagement after a sailing trip left her strangely changed, and she now intends to marry a man who does not exist — Malcolm MacLaurie, a Jacobite laird murdered nearly two centuries earlier by a Murdoch ancestor who betrayed him to the English. Investigating the ruined island of Tath-Gart, Shiela discovers she alone can see a spectral castle, fully staffed and decorated for a wedding, where MacLaurie's vengeful ghost is courting Elspeth as revenge on her bloodline. On the wedding day, as Elspeth stands entranced before an altar of phantoms, Shiela intervenes and drives off the apparitions through sheer force of will, breaking the curse and restoring Elspeth's memory — and her engagement to her real fiancé. "The Wraith of Fergus McGinty" The Blue Magazine published "The Wraith of Fergus McGinty" in its October 1920 issue. It is the sixth and final installment in the Shiela Crerar series. Five years into her career as a psychic investigator, Shiela Crerar — now engaged to her longtime admirer, Stavordale Hartland — takes on one last case while staying with the Chalmers family. A harmless but unsettling ghost, an old man with white hair and a beard, has been haunting their home, unnerving the household. Shiela follows the spirit to a hidden door, a secret staircase, and a concealed room, where she uncovers a chest containing old clothing, a sword, and a fortune in gold — including the long-lost Plate of Strathbolla. The ghost proves to be Fergus McGinty, a loyal valet who hid his employer's fortune generations earlier to protect it from creditors and had lingered ever since to see it returned to the family. With the mystery solved and the gold restored to Lord Strathbolla, Shiela marries Stavordale and retires from psychic detective work.
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"The Room of Fear"
The Blue Magazine published "The Room of Fear," a supernatural mystery short story by Ella M. Scrymsour, in its July 1920 issue. It is the third installment in Scrymsour's six-part Shiela Crerar series. Shiela Crerar travels to Taynuilt, Argyll, Scotland, to investigate a deadly mystery at McKenzie Castle. Over three months, three people have died of sudden heart attacks after sleeping in the castle's Tower Room. The chamber seems pleasant by day, but a lethal atmosphere overtakes it at night. Shiela insists on sleeping there herself and, staying awake into the early morning, confronts phantom shrieks and groans of agony. She ultimately traces the phenomenon to a physical and psychological haunting rooted in the room's newly laid floorboards. "The Death Vapour" The Blue Magazine published "The Death Vapour" in its June 1920 issue. It is the second installment in the Shiela Crerar series. Synopsis: Someone calls on Shiela Crerar to investigate a terrifying entity manifesting as a localized, suffocating mist. Unlike the passive ghosts common in Edwardian ghost stories, Scrymsour renders the vapour as an aggressive, malicious, and quasi-sentient force of doom. The mist creeps into enclosed spaces, overwhelming its victims with dread and physical asphyxiation. Shiela relies on her sharp intellect and inherited psychic sight to withstand the entity, trace it to its origin point, and banish the corrupted spiritual remnants feeding the phantom fog. Ella M. Scrymsour, full name Ella Mary Scrymsour-Nichol (1888–1962), was an early 20th-century British writer and actress. Little is documented about her life, but she wrote across crime, horror, romance, and science fiction, including the 1922 science fiction novel The Perfect World. The Blue Magazine published Scrymsour's six-part occult detective series between May and October 1920. The series follows Shiela Crerar, a young, penniless Scottish woman who inherits her family's psychic gift and takes out newspaper advertisements to solve uncanny mysteries. As a rare female psychic investigator in the pulp fiction of her era, Crerar holds her own against ghosts, werewolves, and other supernatural threats through intellect and nerve rather than passive endurance. 
"The Eyes of Doom"
The Blue Magazine published "The Eyes of Doom" in its May 1920 issue. It is the first installment in Ella M. Scrymsour's six-part Shiela Crerar series and establishes Shiela's origin. After her guardian uncle's sudden death leaves her penniless, Shiela Crerar leases out the family estate and moves to London, where loneliness sharpens her latent psychic sight. A mysterious stranger urges her to put her gift to use, and she advertises her services as a psychic investigator. Her first client, Lady Kildrummie, hires her to solve the "Kildrummie Weird" — a haunting of disembodied, malevolent eyes that appears every twenty-three years and has already driven two family members to suicide, and now torments Lady Kildrummie's surviving son, Duncan. Night after night, the spectral eyes drag Shiela to a locked tower and leave her temporarily blinded, until she finally manages to perceive what they are trying to communicate: a centuries-old atrocity in which twenty-three people were blinded, murdered, and buried without a Christian rite. Shiela leads the household in exhuming and properly reburying the remains, laying the haunting to rest and restoring Duncan's health. On her way home, Lady Kildrummie's nephew, Stavordale Hartland, proposes marriage; Shiela gently declines, unwilling to give up her newfound calling, though he resolves to wait for her. "The Werewolf of Rannoch" The Blue Magazine published "The Werewolf of Rannoch" in its September 1920 issue. It is the fifth installment in the Shiela Crerar series. A Highland minister summons Shiela to the village of Dhuvhair, where a savage creature has been killing livestock and people alike, its throat-torn victims fueling rumors of a werewolf. Boarding with Dr. Chisholm, his sister Mary, and Mary's suitor, a Danish physician named Olaf Sylmak, Shiela investigates repeated sightings of a shaggy, red-eyed beast. Distrustful of the taciturn Sylmak, she becomes convinced he is the werewolf, tracking the creature to a hidden cave lair and confronting it directly in her bedroom, where it briefly disguises itself as a wounded kitten before she wounds it with a pistol shot — only to find Sylmak nursing a grazed hand moments later. Returning to spy on the cave, Shiela witnesses a hooded sorcerer performing a dark ritual, including a child sacrifice and a curse worked against her and Mary through clay effigies. She shoots the sorcerer, banishing both him and the werewolf — and returns home to learn that Dr. Chisholm has been found shot dead, his face frozen in a fanged snarl. Sylmak reveals he had long suspected his partner was the killer, leaving Shiela to reckon with having wrongly suspected an innocent man. |
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