I've been reading up on the panic of 1873 lately and it's provided quite a few parallels with our current problems today, namely that inflation of the monetary supply causes more problems than it helps: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1873
The most interesting thing about that one was the way people walked away from their homes, so much so that the abandoned "haunted" Victorian house came to take its place in our literature. Hmmm. Maybe empty tracts of suburbia will be the next evolution of the ghost story?
