I read this book after someone here at PBS recommended it to me as a haunted house story. That it is, indeed. But the book itself is somewhat tedious; it takes almost 200 pages for that good creepy feeling to settle in. The copy I read was badly edited and there were several run-on paragraphs and incomplete sentences. I totally don't agree with the grammar of this book! It made reading this much more difficult. The story itself is a good one, the author certainly had a well thought out story, but it was executed badly. It's a decent haunted house story if you're patient enough with it. If you're not, I would recommend Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House", which is analogous to this book's older, brighter sister.
When I was a teen, I picked this book at the library because I liked the cover. This was flat out one of the best horror books I ever read and I probably read 1 horror book a week. Very scary and I still consider it one of the best(and I'm in my 40s now).