HERE’S AN IDEA: come October, don’t drape your shrubs in fake spiderwebs or wedge plastic tombstones in the yard. Don’t bother blacking out your windows and carving up a pumpkin to glare at trick-or-treaters. Skip the pointy hat and talon-like fake fingernails. Just pack up the kids and drive them to an abandoned housing development in, say, Phoenix, or the outskirts of Las Vegas. Plywood skeletons of McMansions. Weeds up to your waist. Concrete paths that peter out into gravel, then end abruptly. What could be creepier? You don’t even need a costume, since you might already resemble the ghosts of these empty estates: middle-class strivers who jumped at the promise of wall-to-wall carpeting and a finished basement, and signed on the sub-prime line.
