I think one way to make the game more engaging would be to make the fear level of each house individual, and if any of them drop to 0 it's un-haunted and you lose a ghost? But instead each haunting is shorter? So you'd have this cat-and-mouse game of trying to keep all the houses haunted while also trying to take over new ones to get more ghosts so that it's easier to maintain current fear levels. Maybe that would make the game too stressful, but you can always include further mechanics like a "grace period" where haunting a previously-haunted house is quicker than starting a new one, or random events where there's a scary night because of a blackout or something like that and all haunting is 2x faster just to make sure every player eventually reaches the end. Of course I realize any additional features during a jam are no easy feat, I just wanted to spitball some ideas.
Anyway, I'm seconding all the praise for graphics, UI and tutorialization, everything's clear and slick, not just by game jam standards.