This the second full-length film version of Henrik Ibsen's stage tragedy Ghosts (the first was a Russian production directed by Vladimir Gardin) starred Henry B. Walthall as the benighted hero Oswald. In the original play, Oswald inherits his father's syphilis: in the film, he falls heir to his dad's alcoholism and epilepsy. This alteration aside, the film builds inexorably to Ibsen's startling denouement in which Oswald discovers that Regina (Loretta Blake), the woman he loves, is actually his own half-sister. (Mary Alden), who like Walthall had previously co-starred in D.W.Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, was here cast as Mrs. Alving. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi