The Green Man

The Green Man is a 1969 novel by Kingsley Amis. It's a ghost story/comic novel that was adapted in 1990 as a BBC 3-part series starring Albert Finney.

from Wikipedia:

The novel is set in and around The Green Man, an inn between London and Cambridge owned by Maurice Allington, a 53-year-old man with a second wife, a teenage daughter and an 80-year-old father living with him in the inn's upstairs apartment. The inn and its name date back to the 14th century, and the inn's charm is further embellished by a history of haunting related to a 17th-century owner, Thomas Underhill, a Cambridge scholar who dabbled in the occult. Underhill was associated with two unsolved murders, including that of his wife, which could not be traced back to him.

As the novel unfolds, Allington is beset by a number of difficulties

New York Review Books says, "The Green Man is a ghost story that hits a live nerve, a very black comedy with an uncannily happy ending: in other words, Kingsley Amis at his best." LA Review of Books closes their review with this: "A ghost story about the incapacity of realism or modernism to address death, The Green Man deploys the resources of science fiction to disclose, however fleetingly, the precariousness and destructibility of existence. Now that’s a ghost story."

Strange Horizons says, "This is a masterpiece of speculative fiction at the highest level, with little in the English ghost story canon to to rival it, at least at novel length, until the appearance of Nicola Barker's Darkmans (2007) almost forty years later."