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Sounds great. Let us know how it turns out!

I wish i had your idea of early haunting/nightmares so that i could have made it a recurring thing - as i see it any slow build up of them as antagonism really adds depth to the story.
Hope your players have fun!

Thank you for your kind words.

My group probably have a habit of going a bit overboard with role playing and accept cheesy and cliche elements in the name of a good game. We also tend to avoid too much mechanics outside of combat (For instance we never use the diplomacy or sense motive skills to decide the outcome on important interaction, they are just mood setters pre-negotiation or slight modifiers/ways to remember tactical mannerisms etc). So my way of dealing with the items/5 spirits somewhat reflects this.

Regarding the items what happened in our game was that the aspect of the Splatter man contacted the PCs in pretty much the way i describe above using the spirit planchette. It should be noted that this was BEFORE the players actually found said items. All this conversation really resulted in was hinting to them that they needed to find the items and remembering the Spirit Planchette.
I plan to keep using the planchette as a sort of spirit radio in our further adventures - picking up static, dying wishes, strong emotions and such from departed spirit in its vicinity.

Originally i wanted to have the planchette give out the details for the items and further exposition, but found it rather cumbersome to do. I wanted to avoid having to spell out stats or even short line them (your will better be able to resist the mental control of X.. etc) and wanted to use the opportunity to create more connection to the prisoners, whom the players by this time already had done the research on.
I figured that if i had to go cliche to make an event i might as well go all the way. What happened was that the night after they found the items all the players (four of them) entered into a deep dream. Here they each experienced the life and death, in first person, of one of the 5 inmates (Lopper being the odd man out). They saw flashes of the murders committed, the time spent in jail and their non-so-final death. Each experienced the dreams as if it was their own doing and felt the strong connection to their items that each of these men had when alive.
When they woke in the morning each player simply 'knew' approximately what affect (somewhat different then per RAW) it would have using their own weapons against the spirits.

Probably a somewhat cumbersome and railroady way of doing things - but we did this between sessions and it was a good way for each player to build up great appetite for the next session, and made hunting down the spirits both more personal and, surprisingly, more scary. (having seen first hand what mosswater marauder did with his club while alive, or the careful meticulous psychopathic way splatter man dealt with his victims added expectancy and fright towards their fights)

The intention was to keep the mystery of the Spirit Planchette on one side (which i'm sure will be an interesting item further into the campaign) - but also help build personal connection to the antagonists using the weapons.

I agree with what is said in the thread, by "RAW" the Spirit Planchette seems to be the best use.
If you want to reintroduce it to your campaign giving a knowledge religion roll to remember that these items are a way to get information from spirits is nice. If you are heavy on role playing/immersive game play you might want to do something else ... like having the needle start moving on its own.

And remember, at times, the APs are rushed, time is spent on the wrong items, contradict the rules or simply does not mesh with a particular group. The thing to remember with these APs is that ever GM should take care to modify and fit them in with what their players prefer. The AP authors, while excellent and creative men and women, are not capable of writing something that fits perfectly with every group. Us GMs are the ones who have the privilege of taking the SUGGESTIONS they make and fitting them in to what our group wants.
The Harrowstone module is good, one of the best i have ever seen, and my group have been enjoying it immensely - but there are weak spots: The mechanics of the Father Charlatan fight, the items and how to identify them, the shallowness of the village population and the trust issues (if not entire system) and the spirit Planchette.
All of these issues are particularly annoying because they had such potential.The fluff is fantastic and they all have really great potential but, at least for some groups, falls short due to mechanic issues.
The Spirit Planchette, besides its awesome fluff, is somewhat boring and forgettable mechanically - especially in how it interacts with the 5 items. If one wants to change it there are some excellent suggestions in This thread.
The reasons why i found the Planchette "too much mechanics and too little fun" is that it is too slow (not an issue for a general fall-back to have in your bag - but if you are forced to use it for 5 items in a row before going on......) and have a too high chance of failure. This can discourage groups who are either in a hurry/having nothing else to do or those who are interested in role playing solution since having to spend 5-10 5-minute-days questioning it with 50% miss chance is more of a drag then "fun". And it feels a bit anti climatic to have spirits from beyond the grave spell out "+-2-t-o-w-i-l-l-s-a-v-e-s-a-g-a-i-n-s-t-h-i-s-g-u-y".

Ways to fix this is to either make them learn-able through magic means and keep the planchette as a "look beyond the veil of death and face the consequences" kind of thing and not a replacement and equal to good old boring identify.
Alternatively, and the route i somewhat went with, was to have the items volunteer the information themselves.

So on a DC 20 or 23 spellcraft check, they could learn of the beneficial properties of the items, but need a 30 or 33 to learn that there is bad stuff, and can then make the DC 20 or 23 checks to understand the bad stuff.

That sounds very reasonable. I've been thinking over how to best let the players find out the properties of these items - it is obviously that they need to know if they are to be of any help, but i did not blatantly want to give out all the details either. I like the way of separating the good and the bad abilities of the items like this.

Your best bet to learn how they work is to use the Spirit Planchet over the course of a few days.

I would not. For my group that would ruin the "mysticism" and "scariness" of the Spirit Planchet. As i see it the Spirit Planchet is a perfect tool for adding some scariness and group controlled exposition by having it contact the departed spirits. Nothing ruins that by having it spell out "y-o-u--g-e-t--+-2--t-o--w-i-l-l--s-a-v-e-s".(yes you could say "more resistant to ghost intrusions from X" or something instead). Not to mention it would take forever and really trivialize the use of the Spirit Planchet to us. It would no longer be a dangerous tool to ask forbidden questions, but something the players is forced to use continuously to "clear" the items after they find them.

The optional rules of questioning Rapping Spirit Haunts are another good source to figure things out.

Is a nice way of doing it. But seems to me to not be a very intuitive way for the players to stumble upon - and also raises the question... how would they know?

Good idea about the exorcism spell. It certainly seems like an obvious cleric spell, of maybe 3rd or 4th level.

I would arguably conclude that positive energy IS the exorcism spells/effects (vs undead) of Golarion - I and my group have certainly been playing them as such. Especially now with the haunts.

Positive energy has the ability to damage undead already, it works on haunts and according to the rules it already functions as to destroy/dissipate the lingering evil undead spirits (i.e exorcism).If there were to be any exorcism spells beyond this i'd have them effect demons/devils or general evil instead. Undead life force on our material plane is already well handled by positive energy.

I can vividly imagine a cleric that puts his hand on the forehead of a possessed child and channels positive energy or casts a cure light wounds AT the child to damage the (undead) spirit inside. I can also see wizard confronting the same child by repeatedly casting disrupt undead at the child (and undead spirit) while repeatedly condemning the spirit to return to whence it came. Likewise i can easily see the same cleric or wizard standing inside the area of a haunt - targeting the air, or possessed fixtures of the room, with their channels and disrupts to force the malevolent force into submission.

How exactly is it RAW that you can't target the haunt?

The rules for haunt clearly stipulates that the players can both detect it ahead of time and can target it will targetable spells (that hits a AC 10). There should not be anything in the Piper that directly contradicts this, and if so i would argue it was no longer a haunt.
The haunts fill a certain area - the easiest way to translate this to your players is to describe that there is a malevolent force that inhabits the area - the hairs on the arms stand up, there is a crushing negative presence that you can feel that is ALMOST tangible. The music is droning into your ears.They feel they can see a shadow holding playing a pipe out of the corner of your eyes - but when you turn he is gone. There is an eerie ghostly fog/darkness to the area and so on. (if the piper is invisible that is)

The rules stipulate that any player who targets a cure light wounds or disrupt undead "at the haunt" hits against an AC of 10. How to play this with this haunt is that if the players catch on that this is a haunt (or simply go crazy) and start shooting into the dark/the walls/at the invisible source of the music etcor simply "at the invisible force in the air" and are within the area haunt they roll against an AC of 10. If they hit they hit the invisible malevolent presence that is the haunt - if they miss their "shot" dissipates into thin air/goes through and hit the far wall etc.