Sick Houses: Haunted Homes and the Architecture of Dread by Leila Taylor. Repeater, 240 pp., $17.
I was on a family trip in Natural Bridge, Virginia—taking in such sylvan sights and quizzical attractions as Foamhenge, a replica of Stonehenge made out of (yes) oam; and the eponymous bridge, a limestone arch looming above a roughly two-hundred-foot gorge—when I entered my first haunted house. It was clearly a tourist trap. A crudely painted sign, I remember, directed passersby to take a chance on the “monster museum” down the road from the main parking lot: a stone cottage with some goofy plaster skeletons attached here and there. But I felt uneasy nonetheless—something about being in the boonies, the absence of other visitors, the house’s ramshackle façade. We were sat down in a creaky drawing room and left to wait for an uncomfortably long while behind locked doors. My anxiety tipped toward panic. Eventually a door opened, beckoning us through a pitch-black labyrinth that required us to feel our way through to the exit. Along the way, some…
