Not what I expected. At all. Maybe I should have looked more closely at the blurb, but even that didn't really give any indication that this wasn't actually the ghost story I was looking forward to (and which every film adaptation I'm aware of turned it into) but a tale of entirely human folly, with a dash of greed and jealousy thrown in. 
 Having said that, it was actually very well written, with gloriously vivid descriptions of setting and character alike packed into a short space of pages - this was a quick read squeezed between longer, heavier books.