The elements of a literary ghost story

Just to prove (or at least in part to prove) that I don't disapprove of all ghost stories - only those in which ghosts are used as a device to close narrative gaps - I started reading a classic ghost story, Susan Hill's The Woman in Black (1983). The trick w/ any good ghost story is to get the skeptics to buy in - and that's best done, as here (see also the great James' class Turn of the Screw) via a frame narrative, generally told by someone "like us," i.e., I never believed in ghosts until ...  In this novel, the narrator is a middle-aged lawyer, gathered w/ his family - (2nd) wife Esme, her four adult children, plus some (3 boys?) grandchildren - for an xmas gathering at his how in rural, isolated south of London. The adult children begin a game of telling ghost stories one night, which seems to freak out the narrator, who retreats, then crossly says he won't play along. That evening he pledges to himself to write out his experience w/ ghosts and to keep it sealed until after his death - so that's the narrative we're reading, which begins when he is a young atty., engaged to the woman who will become his first wife, and he's sent off to the remote waterlands NE of London where he's to close out an estate of a woman who left no family or friends. En route and in the small village near her home he is rebuffed every time he tries to inquire about her strangeness. At her funeral, he sees the eponymous woman in black, who looks to be about 30 and seriously ill w/ a "wasting disease." It's not clear if others see her at all, but when he mentions her to the local agent he sets off a fright and a panic. Against all recommendations, he insists on going to the woman's house, alone (and it's cut off from the mainland by high tides) to go through her paperwork. Se we have the classic set-up: the strange person in the village, the specter seen but not acknowledged by anybody else, the warnings disregarded, the approach to an isolated, inaccessible locale, and I will add to this that Hill's writing is quite good, including some really fine descriptions of remote landscapes and of London steeped in fog - this novel is much more "literary" in style than the typical work of this genre. She's obviously steeped in the Bronte style.