For October 19
Plot:
With her father recently deceased and her mother in failing health, seventeen-year-old Laura must earn a living. She is not (her sister Maggie writes) fit to be a teacher. Even if she were, hearing what Maggie has to say about her own post as an assistant mistress of a high school has put her off from that course.
She offers her services as a paid companion to a lady or an invalid. The agency fixes her up with one Miss Mure, a train trip from her home.
Laura calls the neighborhood “dingy.” Her first glance of her employer’s house is not anymore uplifting. The house “looked old and badly kept.” The garden in the front was shabby.
Laura’s first encounter with the maid Agnes adds a dimension of weirdness. Agnes keeps a pet four-foot-long crocodile. She warns Laura to stay out of the kitchen if she’s not around.
Agnes tells her tales of hauntings in the house. Laura doesn’t believe her and resents her attempts to scare her. Why the crocodile? Why doesn’t she keep a dog?
“They won’t stay,” Agnes tells her.
Someone comes into her room that night and doesn’t answer her call. She figures it’s Agnes, but for what reason?
Agnes tells her she’s been with Miss Mure for fourteen years. Their employer is a spiritualist.
She is an ogre, Laura decides when she meets her. She’s tall and heavy.
Laura’s primary duties consist of reading to Miss Mure, who has bad eyesight. What types of books are these? And the Latin ones? Laura can read Latin, but she understands very little.
Then there’s the night of the séance.
Thoughts:
The tale is told as a letter addressed to Dr. Horace Vesey, an occult investigator. His reply, if any, is not supplied here. Maggie has collected Laura’s journals and letters and sent them to Vesey, seeking to understand what happened to her sister.
The events build suspense, although the reader understands from the beginning that Laura is already in a bad way. The household grows increasingly weird and threatening often without explanation.
Laura’s journal refers to things so terrible she refuses to give details. A half-human “horror” arrives, which she never completely describes. Its keeper beats it.
With all the mysterious goings on—the footsteps, the doors opening and closing—Laura accepts that the house is haunted.
Laura suspects something more sinister is in the works. Her mail to her family is not being posted. She is not allowed out of the house. Men arrive and seem to drag a girl away—who is she? Where are they taking her? Agnes locked her in the room until the whole affair was over.
Why would she do that? What do these people have in mind for her? Agnes tells her she won’t escape but will soon be “an angel.”
When she brings this up to Ms. Mure, she’s told that she’s imagining everything. Is she going crazy? …maybe.
The story resembles Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s “Good Lady Ducayne”(but not its perfectly Pollyanna ending), published a year later.
The ending of the present story is neither as miserable nor as happy as it could be.
Bio: Wirt Gerrare (legal name: William Oliver Greener) (1862-1935) was a British gun expert, journalist, and author. He wrote fiction and nonfiction, including Rufin’s Legacy: A Theosophical Romance (1892), about a Russian spy who astral projects, and Phantasms: Original Stories Illustrating Posthumous Personality and Character (coll 1895) on the exploits of Horace Vesey, occult detective.
I could not find an online text version of this story.
I could not find an audio version of this story.
Title: “Mysterious Maisie”
Author: Wirt Gerrare (legal name: William Oliver Greener) (1862-1935)
First published: Phantasms, 1895
Length: novelette
Reviews of Old and New Stories. Mostly Old 
It seems like a bit of a strange story but interesting. As usual you wrote a great review.