you're too sweet!
I suspect The Wyoming Effect had something to do with all the Westerns I've read. Except I read mostly Zane Grey, whose setting were mostly Arizona desert. Something about the vast rolling plains of the West felt so familiar. Good writers of historical fiction do a lot to infict upon us a sense of de ja vous when we visit places they've described - cobblestone streets, stucco houses, tiled roofs, candles behind window glass warped with age - reading Dickens must have made it seem like we were really there, so what we pictured in our imaginations as we read may get confused with memory.
I'm thinking someone else already wrote about this so I won't have to, but my internet searches haven't produced a hit so far.
Instead of past lives to explain de ja vous, surely we can credit good writers...