I find it quite interesting reading the inner stories of how the story came to be, so thanks for that Jmack.
'What readers want' is a common writing world phrase I've been wrestling with a fair bit in recent years, and seeing the writers' own struggles in this contest and how the voting turns out is rather insightful.
So here you had this idea of this troupe of ghosts which in and of itself is awesome. There's no part of me that doesn't like this concept. But from your own story, it seems like you were trying to find this way of introducing a character or human element into the tale that met the theme. That's the thing always preached 'character driven, character, character, character'. And for myself it was definitely that character element of the jaded ghost that I found most interesting and grabbed my attention after the initial swoon of 'this seems like a cool world' that the ghosts going to the house delivered. Yet I imagine that in the voting a large amount of the votes for this story rode off the cool concept of the ghosts alone, and it was certainly why I suspected this story was contesting the top spot when Bea posted her update.
So it makes me wonder just how much the character, character, character push really matters to wider audiences, where a bunch of wild antics from random ghosts could well have satisfied more and have been less stressful to write than trying to shoehorn in a deeper character arc with the midwife.