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Beaches? Cruises? ‘Dark’ Tourists Prefer the Gloomy and Macabre

Travelers who use their off time to visit places like the Chernobyl nuclear plant or current conflict zones say they no longer want a sanitized version of a troubled world.

By Maria Cramer

North Korea. East Timor. Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous enclave that for decades has been a tinderbox for ethnic conflict between Armenians and Azerbaijanis.

They’re not your typical top tourist destinations.

But don’t tell that to Erik Faarlund, the editor of a photography website from Norway, who has visited all three. His next “dream” trip is to tour San Fernando in the Philippines around Easter , when people volunteer to be nailed to a cross to commemorate the suffering of Jesus Christ, a practice discouraged by the Catholic Church.

Mr. Faarlund, whose wife prefers sunning on Mediterranean beaches, said he often travels alone.

“She wonders why on earth I want to go to these places, and I wonder why on earth she goes to the places she goes to,” he said.

Mr. Faarlund, 52, has visited places that fall under a category of travel known as dark tourism , an all-encompassing term that boils down to visiting places associated with death, tragedy and the macabre.

As travel opens up, most people are using their vacation time for the typical goals: to escape reality, relax and recharge. Not so dark tourists, who use their vacation time to plunge deeper into the bleak, even violent corners of the world.

They say going to abandoned nuclear plants or countries where genocides took place is a way to understand the harsh realities of current political turmoil, climate calamities, war and the growing threat of authoritarianism.

“When the whole world is on fire and flooded and no one can afford their energy bills, lying on a beach at a five-star resort feels embarrassing,” said Jodie Joyce, who handles contracts for a genome sequencing company in England and has visited Chernobyl and North Korea .

Mr. Faarlund, who does not see his travels as dark tourism, said he wants to visit places “that function totally differently from the way things are run at home.”

Whatever their motivations, Mr. Faarlund and Ms. Joyce are hardly alone.

Eighty-two percent of American travelers said they have visited at least one dark tourism destination in their lifetime, according to a study published in September by Passport-photo.online, which surveyed more than 900 people. More than half of those surveyed said they preferred visiting “active” or former war zones. About 30 percent said that once the war in Ukraine ends, they wanted to visit the Azovstal steel plant, where Ukrainian soldiers resisted Russian forces for months .

The growing popularity of dark tourism suggests more and more people are resisting vacations that promise escapism, choosing instead to witness firsthand the sites of suffering they have only read about, said Gareth Johnson, a founder of Young Pioneer Tours , which organized trips for Ms. Joyce and Mr. Faarlund.

Tourists, he said, are tired of “getting a sanitized version of the world.”

A pastime that goes back to Gladiator Days

The term “dark tourism” was coined in 1996, by two academics from Scotland, J. John Lennon and Malcolm Foley, who wrote “Dark Tourism: The Attraction to Death and Disaster.”

But people have used their leisure time to witness horror for hundreds of years, said Craig Wight, associate professor of tourism management at Edinburgh Napier University.

“It goes back to the gladiator battles” of ancient Rome, he said. “People coming to watch public hangings. You had tourists sitting comfortably in carriages watching the Battle of Waterloo.”

Professor Wight said the modern dark tourist usually goes to a site defined by tragedy to make a connection to the place, a feeling that is difficult to achieve by just reading about it.

By that definition, anyone can be a dark tourist. A tourist who takes a weekend trip to New York City may visit Ground Zero. Visitors to Boston may drive north to Salem to learn more about the persecution of people accused of witchcraft in the 17th century. Travelers to Germany or Poland might visit a concentration camp. They might have any number of motivations, from honoring victims of genocide to getting a better understanding of history. But in general, a dark tourist is someone who makes a habit of seeking out places that are either tragic, morbid or even dangerous, whether the destinations are local or as far away as Chernobyl.

In recent years, as tour operators have sprung up worldwide promising deep dives into places known for recent tragedy, media attention has followed and so have questions about the intentions of visitors, said Dorina-Maria Buda, a professor of tourism studies at Nottingham Trent University .

Stories of people gawking at neighborhoods in New Orleans destroyed by Hurricane Katrina or posing for selfies at Dachau led to disgust and outrage .

Were people driven to visit these sites out of a “sense of voyeurism or is it a sense of sharing in the pain and showing support?” Professor Buda said.

Most dark tourists are not voyeurs who pose for photos at Auschwitz, said Sian Staudinger, who runs the Austria-based Dark Tourist Trips , which organizes itineraries in the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe and instructs travelers to follow rules like “NO SELFIES!”

“Dark tourists in general ask meaningful questions,” Ms. Staudinger said. “They don’t talk too loud. They don’t laugh. They’re not taking photos at a concentration camp.”

‘Ethically murky territory’

David Farrier , a journalist from New Zealand, spent a year documenting travels to places like Aokigahara , the so-called suicide forest in Japan, the luxury prison Pablo Escobar built for himself in Colombia and McKamey Manor in Tennessee, a notorious haunted house tour where people sign up to be buried alive, submerged in cold water until they feel like they will drown and beaten.

The journey was turned into a show, “Dark Tourist,” that streamed on Netflix in 2018 and was derided by some critics as ghoulish and “sordid.”

Mr. Farrier, 39, said he often questioned the moral implications of his trips.

“It’s very ethically murky territory,” Mr. Farrier said.

But it felt worthwhile to “roll the cameras” on places and rituals that most people want to know about but will never experience, he said.

Visiting places where terrible events unfolded was humbling and helped him confront his fear of death.

He said he felt privileged to have visited most of the places he saw, except McKamey Manor.

“That was deranged,” Mr. Farrier said.

Professor Buda said dark tourists she has interviewed have described feelings of shock and fear at seeing armed soldiers on streets of countries where there is ongoing conflict or that are run by dictatorships.

“When you’re part of a society that is by and large stable and you’ve gotten into an established routine, travel to these places leads you to sort of feel alive,” she said.

But that travel can present real danger.

In 2015, Otto Warmbier , a 21-year-old student from Ohio who traveled with Young Pioneer Tours, was arrested in North Korea after he was accused of stealing a poster off a hotel wall. He was detained for 17 months and was comatose when he was released. He died in 2017, six days after he was brought back to the United States.

The North Korean government said Mr. Warmbier died of botulism but his family said his brain was damaged after he was tortured.

Americans can no longer travel to North Korea unless their passports are validated by the State Department.

A chance to reflect

Even ghost tours — the lighter side of dark tourism — can present dilemmas for tour operators, said Andrea Janes, the owner and founder of Boroughs of the Dead: Macabre New York City Walking Tours.

In 2021, she and her staff questioned whether to restart tours so soon after the pandemic in a city where refrigerated trucks serving as makeshift morgues sat in a marine terminal for months.

They reopened and were surprised when tours booked up fast. People were particularly eager to hear the ghost stories of Roosevelt Island, the site of a shuttered 19th-century hospital where smallpox patients were treated .

“We should have seen as historians that people would want to talk about death in a time of plague,” Ms. Janes said.

Kathy Biehl, who lives in Jefferson Township, N.J., and has gone on a dozen ghost tours with Ms. Janes’s company, recalled taking the tour “Ghosts of the Titanic” along the Hudson River. It was around 2017, when headlines were dominated by President Trump’s tough stance on refugees and immigrants coming into the United States.

Those stories seemed to dovetail with the 100-year-old tales of immigrants trying to make it to New York on a doomed ship, Ms. Biehl said.

It led to “a catharsis” for many on the tour, she said. “People were on the verge of tears over immigration.”

Part of the appeal of dark tourism is its ability to help people process what is happening “as the world gets darker and gloomier,” said Jeffrey S. Podoshen , a professor of marketing at Franklin and Marshall College, who specializes in dark tourism.

“People are trying to understand dark things, trying to understand things like the realities of death, dying and violence,” he said. “They look at this type of tourism as a way to prepare themselves.”

Mr. Faarlund, the photo editor, recalled one trip with his wife and twin sons: a private tour of Cambodia that included a visit to the Killing Fields , where between 1975 and 1979 more than 2 million Cambodians were killed or died of starvation and disease under the Khmer Rouge regime.

His boys, then 14, listened intently to unsparing and brutal stories of the torture center run by the Khmer Rouge. At one point, the boys had to go outside, where they sat quietly for a long time.

“They needed a break,” Mr. Faarlund said. “It was quite mature of them.”

Afterward, they met two of the survivors of the Khmer Rouge, fragile men in their 80s and 90s. The teenagers asked if they could hug them and the men obliged, Mr. Faarlund said.

It was a moving trip that also included visits to temples, among them Angkor Wat in Siem Reap, and meals of frog, oysters and squid at a roadside restaurant.

“They loved it,” Mr. Faarlund said of his family.

Still, he can’t see them coming with him to see people re-enact the crucifixion in the Philippines.

“I don’t think they want to go with me on that one,” Mr. Faarlund said.

52 Places for a Changed World

The 2022 list highlights places around the globe where travelers can be part of the solution.

Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram , Twitter and Facebook . And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places for a Changed World for 2022.

Maria Cramer is a reporter on the Travel desk. Please send her tips, questions and complaints about traveling, especially on cruises. More about Maria Cramer

Open Up Your World

Considering a trip, or just some armchair traveling here are some ideas..

52 Places:  Why do we travel? For food, culture, adventure, natural beauty? Our 2024 list has all those elements, and more .

Mumbai:  Spend 36 hours in this fast-changing Indian city  by exploring ancient caves, catching a concert in a former textile mill and feasting on mangoes.

Kyoto:  The Japanese city’s dry gardens offer spots for quiet contemplation  in an increasingly overtouristed destination.

Iceland:  The country markets itself as a destination to see the northern lights. But they can be elusive, as one writer recently found .

Texas:  Canoeing the Rio Grande near Big Bend National Park can be magical. But as the river dries, it’s getting harder to find where a boat will actually float .

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Dark tourism, explained

Why visitors flock to sites of tragedy.

Every year, millions of tourists around the world venture to some of the unhappiest places on Earth: sites of atrocities, accidents, natural disasters or infamous death. From Auschwitz to Chernobyl, Gettysburg, the site of the Kennedy assassination and the 9/11 Memorial in New York, visitors are making the worst parts of history a piece of their vacation, if not the entire point.

Experts call the phenomenon dark tourism, and they say it has a long tradition. Dark tourism refers to visiting places where some of the darkest events of human history have unfolded. That can include genocide, assassination, incarceration, ethnic cleansing, war or disaster — either natural or accidental. Some might associate the idea with ghost stories and scares, but those who study the practice say it’s unrelated to fear or supernatural elements.

“It’s not a new phenomenon,” says J. John Lennon, a professor of tourism at Glasgow Caledonian University, in Scotland, who coined the term with a colleague in 1996. “There’s evidence that dark tourism goes back to the Battle of Waterloo where people watched from their carriages the battle taking place.”

The hit US drama "Chernobyl" brought a new generation of tourists to the nuclear disaster zone. (Genya Savilov/AFP via Getty Images)

That was in 1815, but he cites an even longer-ago example: crowds gathering to watch public hangings in London in the 16th century. Those are relatively modern compared with the bloody spectacles that unfolded in the Colosseum in Rome.

There aren’t official statistics on how many people participate in dark tourism every year or whether that number is on the rise. An online travel guide run by an enthusiast, Dark-Tourism.com , includes almost 900 places in 112 countries.

But there’s no question the phenomenon is becoming more visible, in part thanks to the Netflix series “Dark Tourist” that was released last year. And popular culture is fueling more visitation to some well-known sites: After the HBO miniseries “Chernobyl,” about the 1986 power plant explosion, came out this spring, travel companies that bring people to the area said they saw a visitor increase of 30 to 40 percent. Ukraine’s government has since declared its intention to make the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone an official tourist spot, despite lingering radiation.

[How to navigate the etiquette of dark tourism]

Philip Stone, executive director of the Institute for Dark Tourism Research at the University of Central Lancashire, in England, says anecdotally that he sees the appetite for such destinations growing.

“I think, for political reasons or cultural reasons, we are turning to the visitor economy to remember aspects of death and dying, disaster,” he says. “There is a kind of memorial mania going on. You could call that growth in dark tourism.”

(Illustrations by Laura Perez for The Washington Post)

Why are tourists so enamored with places that are, as Lennon puts it, “synonymous with the darkest periods of human history?” Academics who study the practice say it’s human nature.

[Ukraine wants Chernobyl to be a tourist trap. But scientists warn: Don’t kick up dust.]

“We’ve just got this cultural fascination with the darker side of history; most history is dark,” Stone says. “I think when we go to these places, we see not strangers, but often we see ourselves and perhaps what we might do in those circumstances.”

“When we go to these places, we see not strangers, but often we see ourselves and perhaps what we might do in those circumstances.”

Philip Stone, executive director, Institute for Dark Tourism Research at the University of Central Lancashire

There is no one type of traveler who engages in dark tourism: It could be a history buff who takes the family on a road trip to Civil War battlefields, a backpacker who treks to the Colosseum in Rome, or a tourist who seeks out the near-abandoned areas near the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster, in 2011, in Japan.

Visitors walk between barbed wire fences at the Auschwitz I memorial concentration camp site in Oswiecim, Poland. (Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

Those who are most familiar with the phenomenon do not condemn it. In fact, they argue that the most meaningful dark-tourism sites can help visitors understand the present and be more thoughtful about the future.

“These are important sites that tell us a lot about what it is to be human,” says Lennon, the tourism professor. “I think they’re important places for us to reflect on and try to better understand the evil that we’re capable of.”

There are even efforts underway to research the way children experience dark tourism, a joint project between the Institute for Dark Tourism Research and the University of Pittsburgh.

Mary Margaret Kerr, a professor of education and psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, says the idea came about when the National Park Service asked her to help create a team to design children’s materials for families who visit the memorial to United Airlines Flight 93, which was hijacked on Sept. 11, 2001, and crashed in a field in Pennsylvania.

Her research team now includes middle-school students who have studied how their peers interact with the National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial, in Washington, or the site of the Johnstown flood, in Pennsylvania, which killed more than 2,200 in 1889.

(Illustration by Laura Perez for The Washington Post)

“We wouldn’t want families to stop traveling, and adults want to see these places for very good reasons,” Kerr says. “It’s not so much making the decision for parents whether you take the children or not, but what are the appropriate safeguards."

She said the goal is to provide appropriate safeguards and ways to experience a site, even for children too young to grasp the history, “so the family can be there together, but each member of the family can take meaning that works out for them at their age and stage.”

As more sites with dark histories become popular spots — even part of organized tour packages — experts say there is a risk that they could become exploited, used to sell tchotchkes or placed as backdrops for unseemly photos.

“It does kind of invite that passive behavior — let’s call it that touristy behavior — that might be out of place,” Stone says.

Visitors look at the bodies of eruption victims exposed in the ruins of ancient Pompeii. (Mario Laporta/AFP via Getty Images)

Bad conduct by tourists at sensitive sites — smiling selfies at concentration camps, for example — has been widely shunned on social media. The online Dark-Tourism.com travel guide cautions against such behavior, as well as the ethically questionable “voyeurism” of visiting an ongoing or very recent tragedy to gape.

“These are important sites that tell us a lot about what it is to be human. I think they’re important places for us to reflect on and try to better understand the evil that we’re capable of.”

J. John Lennon, tourism professor at Glasgow Caledonian University

“What IS endorsed here is respectful and enlightened touristic engagement with contemporary history, and its dark sites/sides, in a sober, educational and non-sensationalist manner,” the site says .

Lennon says he’s sometimes “dumbfounded” by some of the behavior that gets publicized, but he declines to say what the right or wrong way is for tourists to behave. Overall, he says, he still hopes that by visiting places with dark histories, people are becoming better informed about atrocities like racial and ethnic cleansing.

“I’m heartened by the fact that they choose to try to understand this difficult past,” Lennon says.

Berlin’s Holocaust memorial is ‘not a place for fun selfies’

Will gun violence lead to a growing ‘dark tourism’ industry?

A selfie ban in the Czech Republic is the latest effort to combat bad tourist behavior

Hannah Sampson

Hannah Sampson is a staff writer at The Washington Post for By The Way, where she reports on travel news.

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Dark Tourism: Why People Travel to Sites of Death and Tragedy

Droves of tourists frequent concentration camps, sites of famous battles or even places where mass atrocities occurred. what draws us to this dark tourism.

If you've ever traveled somewhere new, there's a good chance you've planned your itinerary around popular destinations to make the most of your trip. That’s why famous museums, parks, restaurants and beaches are commonly filled with people trying to experience what makes a particular location so great. But some of us have a penchant for places that are historically associated with death and tragedy. All around the world, these tourists visit concentration camps, historical grounds of famous battles or even places related to mass atrocities.  

Today, this practice — fittingly called "dark tourism" — is a multi-billion dollar industry. But it's also far from a new phenomenon. Some people have always been drawn to death, and two of the earliest examples are the displays of public executions and the Roman gladiatorial games. The Colosseum in Rome may very well be one of the first dark tourism attractions. But what is it about these locations that make them so engaging? According to experts, there are plenty of factors that help draw us to these lurid locales. 

The Appeal of Death and Tragedy

The motivations of tourists in visiting dark tourist locations often come down to four common themes, according to a 2021 study published in International Hospitality Review . Curiosity appears to be the biggest factor, but personal connection also matters. Many tourists take part because they feel connected — or want to feel a connection — to the events that transpired at a particular location, says Heather Lewis, assistant professor at Troy University who was involved in the 2021 study.  

Others visit for educational purposes, while some just happen to be in the same place and decide to participate after seeing something that might be of interest, she adds. For some people, visiting the graves of celebrities they like is a way to celebrate their lives, and it’s not about focusing on the difficulty of their life, or the tragic circumstances behind their death.

“Dark tourism does not need 'dark' tourists — only people who are socially engaged in the cultural and political fabric of their own life world,” says Philip Stone, executive director of the Institute for Dark Tourism Research. “[It] is the commodification of places of pain and shame and, consequently, shines a mirror on contemporary society of how we memorialize, and who we remember.”  

The concept of dark tourism is culturally nuanced and means different things to different people. It can mediate our sense of mortality through the fatality of others where the dead act as warnings from the history of our own fights, follies, and misfortunes, says Stone. In short, a fascination with death in itself might not be the primary motive for visiting dark tourism sites; it likely has more to do with an individual's interest in cultural heritage and education. 

A Complex Legacy

Still, despite that nuance, dark tourism is often frowned upon. For tourists and travelers, it can seem like a minefield mired in “ moral ambiguities and managerial dilemmas,” says Stone. In many ways, the industry is all about managing our collective memory and providing a memorialized afterlife to those who died tragically or untimely. At the same time, it allows contemporary visitors to consume narratives of death that have been streamlined for their consumption. In other words, the practice can be considered a "touristification" of the places and people steeped in death and tragedy.

“Remembrance is a political process that is selective of what, who, and where is memorialized — and, perhaps more importantly, forgotten,” he adds. “As such, dark tourism showcases our significant dead as spectacular in a society of spectacle where commercialism ensures everything is 'packaged up' and sold, even tragic or calamitous death.” At its core, there is an element of dark tourism that knowingly exploits our fascination with the macabre, stirring up complicated ethical and moral issues about our own behavior.  

For Lewis, dark tourism isn’t necessarily a bad thing as long as it’s properly managed. The increase in tourism can be used to restore or maintain facilities in dark tourism locations, but it should not destroy or diminish the integrity of the location over time. For instance, there are Hurricane Katrina tours that will not visit certain parts of the city out of respect for the individuals living there, she adds.  

People must always be respectful of those who have experienced loss and hardship at dark tourism locations. Traveling responsibly and minimizing its impact on residents remain highly important because old suffering may be reopened, intensified, and prolonged by tourists. 

“The overall concern that we should have with dark tourism is making sure that we are being ethically and morally upright in the marketing and use of these locations as a dark tourism destinations,” says Lewis. “We should never seek economic gain by exploiting others’ suffering and loss.” 

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Dark tourism: when tragedy meets tourism

The likes of Auschwitz, Ground Zero and Chernobyl are seeing increasing numbers of visitors, sparking the term 'dark tourism'. But is it voyeuristic or educational?

Days after 71 people died in a London tower block fire last June, something strange started to happen in the streets around it. Posters, hastily drawn by members of the grieving community of Grenfell Tower, appeared on fences and lamp posts in view of the building's blackened husk.

'Grenfell: A Tragedy Not A Tourist Attraction,' one read, adding — sarcastically — a hashtag and the word 'selfies'. As families still searched for missing inhabitants of the 24-storey block, and the political shock waves were being felt through the capital, people had started to arrive in North Kensington to take photos. Some were posing in selfie mode.

"It's not the Eiffel Tower," one resident told the BBC after the posters attracted the attention of the press. "You don't take a picture." Weeks later, local people were dismayed when a coachload of Chinese tourists pulled up nearby so that its occupants could get out and take photos.

Grenfell Tower, which still dominates the surrounding skyline (it's due to be demolished in late 2018), had become a site for 'dark tourism', a loose label for any sort of tourism that involves visiting places that owe their notoriety to death, disaster, an atrocity or what can also loosely be termed 'difficult heritage'.

It's a phenomenon that's on the rise as established sites such as Auschwitz and the September 11 museum in Manhattan enjoy record visitor numbers. Meanwhile, demand is rising among those more intrepid dark tourists who want to venture to the fallout zones of Chernobyl and Fukushima, as well as North Korea and Rwanda. In Sulawesi, Indonesia, Western tourists wielding GoPros pay to watch elaborate funeral ceremonies in the Toraja region, swapping notes afterwards on TripAdvisor.

Along the increasingly crowded dark-tourist trail, academics, tour operators and the residents of many destinations are asking searching questions about the ethics of modern tourism in an age of the selfie and the Instagram hashtag. When Pompeii, a dark tourist site long before the phrase existed, found itself on the Grand Tour of young European nobility in the 18th century, dozens of visitors scratched their names into its excavated walls. Now we leave our mark in different ways, but where should we draw the boundaries?

Questions like these have become the life's work of Dr Philip Stone , perhaps the world's leading academic expert on dark tourism. He has a background in business and marketing, and once managed a holiday camp in Scotland. But a fascination with societal attitudes to mortality led to a PhD in thanatology, the study of death, and a focus on tourism.

"I'm not even a person who enjoys going to these places," Stone says from the University of Central Lancashire, where he runs the Institute for Dark Tourism Research. "But what I am interested in is the way people face their own mortality by looking at other deaths of significance. Because we've become quite divorced from death yet we have this kind of packaging up of mortality in the visit economy which combines business, sociology, psychology under the banner of dark tourism. It's really fascinating to shine a light on that."

Historical roots

The term 'dark tourism' is far newer than the practice, which long predates Pompeii's emergence as a morbid attraction. Stone considers the Roman Colosseum to be one of the first dark tourist sites, where people travelled long distances to watch death as sport. Later, until the late 18th century, the appeal was starker still in central London, where people paid money to sit in grandstands to watch mass executions. Hawkers would sell pies at the site, which was roughly where Marble Arch   stands today.

It was only in 1996 that 'dark tourism' entered the scholarly lexicon when two academics in Glasgow applied it while looking at sites associated with the assassination of JFK. Those who study dark tourism identify plenty of reasons for the growing phenomenon, including raised awareness of it as an identifiable thing. Access to sites has also improved with the advent of cheap air travel. It's hard to imagine that the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial and museum would now welcome more than two million visitors a year (an average of almost 5,500 a day, more than two-thirds of whom travel to the Polish site from other countries in Europe) were it not for its proximity to Krakow's international airport.

Peter Hohenhaus, a widely travelled dark tourist based in Vienna, also points to the broader rise in off-the-beaten track tourism, beyond the territory of popular guidebooks and TripAdvisor rankings. "A lot of people don't want mainstream tourism and that often means engaging with places that have a more recent history than, say, a Roman ruin," he says. "You go to Sarajevo and most people remember the war being in the news so it feels closer to one's own biography."

Hohenhaus is also a fan of 'beauty in decay', the contemporary cultural movement in which urban ruins have become subject matter for expensive coffee-table books and a thousand Instagram accounts. The crossover with death is clear. "I've always been drawn to derelict things," the 54-year-old says. As a child in Hamburg, he would wonder at the destruction of war still visible around the city's harbour.

That childhood interest has developed into an obsession; Hohenhaus has visited 650 dark tourist sites in 90 countries, logging them all and more besides on his website . He has plans to put together the first dark tourism guidebook. His favourite holiday destination today is Chernobyl and its 'photogenic' ghost town. "You get to time travel back into the Soviet era but also into an apocalyptic future," he says. He also enjoys being emotionally challenged by these places. "I went to Treblinka in 2008 and heard the story of a teacher at an orphanage in Warsaw who was offered a chance to escape but refused and went with his children to the gas chambers. Stories like that are not everyday, you mull over them. Would you have done that?"

But while, like any tourism, dark tourism at its best is thought-provoking and educational, the example of Grenfell Tower hints at the unease felt at some sites about what can look like macabre voyeurism. "I remember the Lonely Planet Bluelist book had a chapter about dark tourism a while ago and one of the rules was 'don't go back too early'," Hohenhaus says. "But that's easier said than calculated. You have to be very aware of reactions and be discreet when you're not in a place with an entrance fee and a booklet." Hohenhaus said he had already thought about Grenfell Tower and admits he would be interested to see it up close. "It's big, it's dramatic, it's black and it's a story you've followed in the news," he says. "I can see the attraction. But I would not stand in the street taking a selfie."

A mirror to mortality

An urge to see and feel a place that has been reduced to disaster shorthand by months of media coverage is perhaps understandable, but Stone is most interested in the draw — conscious or otherwise — of destinations that hold up a mirror to our own mortality. "When we touch the memory of people who've gone what we're looking at is ourselves," he says. "That could have been us in that bombing or atrocity. We make relevant our own mortality." That process looks different across cultures — and generations — and Stone says we should take this into account before despairing of selfie takers at Grenfell Tower or Auschwitz.

"I've heard residents at Grenfell welcoming visitors because it keeps the disaster in the public realm, but they didn't like people taking photos because it's a visual reminder that you're a tourist and therefore somehow defunct of morality," he explains. "We're starting to look at selfies now. Are they selfish?" Stone argues that the language of social media means we no longer say "I was here", but "I am here — see me". He adds: "We live in a secular society where morality guidelines are increasingly blurred. It's easy for us to say that's right or wrong, but for many people it's not as simple as that."

"Travel itself is innately voyeuristic," argues Simon Cockerel, the general manager of Koryo Tours , a North Korea specialist based in Beijing. Cockerel, who has lived in China for 17 years and joined Koryo in 2002, says demand has grown dramatically for trips to Pyongyang and beyond, from 200 people a year in the mid 1990s, when the company started, to more than 5,000 more recently. He has visited the country more than 165 times and says some clients join his tours simply to bag another country, and some for bragging rights. But the majority have a genuine interest in discovering a country — and a people — beyond the headlines.

"I've found everyone who goes there to be sensitive and aware of the issues," he says. "The restrictions do create a framework for it to be a bit like a theme park visit but we work hard to blur those boundaries. More than 25 million people live in North Korea, and 24.99 million of them have nothing to do with what we read in the news and deserve to be seen as people not as zoo animals or lazy caricatures."

More challenging recently has been the US ban on its citizens going to North Korea, imposed last summer after the mysterious death of Otto Warmbier. The American student had been arrested in Pyongyang after being accused of trying to steal a propaganda poster. Americans made up about 20% of Koryo's business, but Cockerel argues the greater loss is to mutual perception in the countries. "The North Korean government represent Americans as literal wolves with sharpened nails," he says. "At least a few hundred Americans going there was a kind of bridgehead against that. Now that's gone."

At Grenfell Tower, responsible tourism may yet serve to keep alive the memory of the disaster, just as it does, after a dignified moratorium, at Auschwitz and the former Ground Zero. Hohenhaus says he will resist the urge to go until some sort of memorial is placed at the site of the tower. At around the time of a commemorative service at St Paul's Cathedral six months after the fire, there were calls for the site eventually to be turned into a memorial garden. The extent to which Hohenhaus and other dark tourists are welcomed will be decided by the people still living there.

Five of the world's dark tourism sites

1. North Korea Opened to visitors in the late 1980s, North Korea now attracts thousands of tourists each year for a peek behind the headlines.

2. Auschwitz-Birkenau The former Nazi death camp became a memorial in 1947 and a museum in 1955. It's grown since and in 2016 attracted a record two million visitors.

3. 9/11 Memorial and Museum Built in the crater left by the twin towers of the World Trade Center, the museum, opened in 2014, has won plaudits for its portrayal of a disaster and its impact.

4. Rwanda Visitor numbers to genocide memorials have grown in Cambodia and Bosnia as well as in Rwanda, where there are several sites dedicated to the 1994 massacre of up to a million people. The skulls of victims are displayed.

5. Chernobyl & Pripyat, Ukraine Several tour companies exist to send visitors to the exclusion zone and ghost town left otherwise empty after the nuclear accident in 1986. All are scanned for radiation as they leave.

Published in the March 2018 issue of National Geographic Traveller (UK)

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Towards a Phenomenology of Dark Tourist Experiences

• First Online: 11 November 2023

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• Gregory Morgan Swer 3  

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Dark Tourism represents the intersection of reflections on mortality with the commodification and consumption of death as a tourist experience. It is a complex and contested concept that has been approached from a variety of theoretical standpoints. In this paper, I suggest that a phenomenological analysis of the experiences of those who engage in dark tourism can provide a means of approaching the subject that can both accommodate the diversity of experiences sought by the dark tourist, and deepen our understanding of the nature and purpose of dark tourism. More specifically, I repurpose Cohen’s (Sociology 13(2):179–201, 1979) typology of tourist experience to suggest a phenomenological typology of dark tourist experiences. Following Cohen, I suggest that we can chart the dark tourist experience as a continuum ranging from a pleasure-seeking experience to a meaning-seeking experience, qualified by authenticity-seeking or alienation-avoiding motivations, and the individual tourist’s proximity to or distance from the “centre” of their worldview. Such an analysis allows us to differentiate between tourists whose motivations are more recreational in nature and those whose motivations are more existential. A phenomenological analysis also enables us to further differentiate amongst the different modes of existential experience sought by the “pure” dark tourist and to consider the conditions of possibility necessary for their realisation.

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It should be noted that the use of the concept of “authenticity” in tourism studies is itself extremely fluid and rather problematic. Cf. Swer 2019 .

Cohen associates this mode, and this mode only, of tourist experience with MacCannell’s account of the authenticity-seeking tourist as a pilgrim (Cohen 1979 , 188). I suggest that Cohen is imposing an overly restrictive interpretation on MacCannell’s position and will argue that MacCannell’s model of the modern tourist straddles all of Cohen’s modes of the tourist experience.

In this section I shall make continuous reference to Philip R. Stone’s ( 2006 ) typology of the suppliers of dark tourist products. Stone describes Dark Fun Factories as sites, tours, etc. that have an “entertainment focus and commercial ethic” and a “high degree of tourism infrastructure” (Stone 2006 , 152). Though such sites may have a clear connection to the death and the macabre, the tone of the tourist attraction is kept light and playful. As instances of such attractions, one might include the London Dungeons or the Zombie Apocalypse Park in Dubai.

The sites preferred by those seeking this mode of experience might well include what Stone ( 2006 ) calls Dark Exhibitions. These sites combine a “commemorative, educational and reflective message” with their death-related product. Examples of such sites include museums with a focus on the morbid, such as the Shrunken Heads Room at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and the Torture Museum in Amsterdam, and attractions like the Body Worlds exhibition.

Such sites might include Stone’s Dark Dungeons, “sites and attractions which present bygone penal and justice codes” and typically “occupy sites which were originally non-purposeful for dark tourism” ( 2006 , 154). These sites combine entertainment with education, both rooted in the historical authenticity of the site itself. Examples include Robben Island and the Bodmin Jail Centre.

Such sites might include, using Stone’s terminology, Dark Conflict Sites such as Isandlwana and Passchendaele, and Dark Camps of Genocide, such as Auschwitz-Birkenau (Stone 2006 , 156–157).

This in turn raises opportunities for further research into the divergences between the dark tourist’s intended experience and the experience actually encountered at the dark tourism site.

There are of course other ways in which a dark tourist site or object could signify. One can imagine a situation in which a tree was planted to commemorate a loved one, or a particular stream known from childhood held some significant reference to mortality. These “marks,” as Schutz terms them, would indeed signify but would have no meaning outside the individual’s subjective interpretational scheme ( 1962 , 308–309). In short, they would not serve as signs in an intersubjective context of meaning.

“[W]henever anything that transcends that which at the moment is concretely given in actual, direct experience can be itself experienced in the same manner as that which it now transcends, one may speak of the ‘little’, spatial and temporal, transcendences of everyday life” (Luckmann 1990 , 129).

Though there is no space to discuss it properly here, the phenomenological analysis of dark tourism in terms of modes of tourist experience offers the possibility of moving beyond Western-centric forms of thanatourism and accommodating other cultural forms of dark tourism. For instance, in cultures in which ancestor worship is prevalent, the dead operate as social actors and thus could be accommodated within the intermediate mode of transcendence as contemporaries with whom we share in a communal experience via the dark tourism site (Schutz 1962 , 318).

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Seaton, Tony. 2018. Encountering Engineered and Orchestrated Remembrance: A Situational Model of Dark Tourism and Its History. In The Palgrave Handbook of Dark Tourism Studies , ed. Philip R. Stone et al., 9–31. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Sharpley, Richard. 2005. Travels to the Edge of Darkness: Towards a Typology of ‘Dark Tourism’. In Taking Tourism to the Limits: Issues, Concepts and Managerial Perspectives , ed. Chris Ryan, Stephen J. Page, and Michelle Aicken, 187–198. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

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Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Jean du Toit of North-West University and Ewa Latecka of the University of Zululand for their comments and suggestions on this paper.

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Swer, G.M. (2023). Towards a Phenomenology of Dark Tourist Experiences. In: Zovko, MÉ., Dillon, J. (eds) Tourism and Culture in Philosophical Perspective. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36659-8_12

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Tourism, Terrorism and Security

ISBN : 978-1-83867-906-4 , eISBN : 978-1-83867-905-7

Publication date: 7 September 2020

Over the years, dark tourism as a theory has become very heterogenous. It has come to mean a lot of different things, according to the vantage points chosen for analysis. The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of the research that has been conducted on the topic of dark tourism including what the accepted definitions are, where it originated from, subcategories of the topic, and tourist motivations for visiting such sites. A discussion regarding the role of cultural differences in perceiving the phenomenon of dark tourism is also included. Dark tourist experience is qualitatively different from that of the leisure tourists, and the theories and frameworks available in the extant tourism literature to understand leisure tourism are insufficient to capture its essence. This means, more foundational conceptualisations and radical theory building are called for – rather than incrementally tweaking the existing ones.

• Dark tourism
• Destruction

Mitchell, V. , Henthorne, T.L. and George, B. (2020), "Making Sense of Dark Tourism: Typologies, Motivations and Future Development of Theory", Korstanje, M.E. and Seraphin, H. (Ed.) Tourism, Terrorism and Security ( Tourism Security-Safety and Post Conflict Destinations ), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 103-114. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-83867-905-720201007

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Dark Tourism as History: Dark Tourism in History

MacAnally Professor of Tourism Behaviour and Travel History, University of Limerick

• Published: 19 December 2022
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Dark tourism or, thanatourism, a term used as an encyclopaedic alternative (Jafari 1996, 578) 1 , only emerged as a collective area of named study in the last decade of the twentieth century. Both terms had their origins in the recognition of the long history and widespread occurrence of traveling encounters with different kinds of engineered and orchestrated remembrance of the dead. Many may have originally been an accidental or incidental by-product of travel, but increasingly they became deliberate goals of different kinds of pilgrimage, the most important being religious, but others being more secular (e.g. visiting the graves of writers, historic battlefields). In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries these occasional, sepulchral encounters were increasingly transformed into purposeful, mass tourism practices, induced by new ideologies of an evolving, European modernity, among them: antiquarianism, Romanticism, the gothic and patriotic displays of national pageantry and imperial display. Dark tourism’s identifying activity, visitation to commemorative sites, inherently makes it a travel form likely to feature more frequently in debates around “the politics of remembrance,” an expanding multi-cultural domain about the continuing status of historical events and figures. The chapter finishes with an illustrative, case history exemplifying some of the main issues in remembrance and remembrancing, in the context of a recent addition to dark tourism repertoires—the visitation of flooded villages as industrial disaster sites.

Dark Tourism is a concept relatively new to the world of tourism studied by social scientists, and even more so in the “real world” of travel and tourism experienced by many millions of global travelers. Yet “dark” encounters are among the oldest of travel encounters, and ones that can be widely recognized in contemporary life once the ideas behind what may seem an odd linguistic conjunction (“dark” plus “tourism”) are recognized.

This chapter is in two parts and addresses two main, historical questions, one of which is academic; the other one of praxis . The first is about the origins of dark tourism as a named entity in the academic study of recreational choice. The second is about its main experiential features in historical travel patterns. The two parts are inextricably linked since academic discussion about what dark tourism is affects what past practices are recognized as its history, and even the extent to which it has a history. The inquiry appraises dark tourism’s defining forms, the similarities and dissimilarities within them, and their significance in social and societal terms.

The chapter ends with a case study of an environmental and community disaster, the flooding and submersion of a village, induced 150 years ago as collateral damage in industrial development that was to be widely repeated around the world later. It has emerged as a new kind of dark tourism attraction. Its trajectory from disaster site to visitor attraction marks a central theme in this chapter about the nature of dark tourism, as remembrance of fatality and mortality that is inherently susceptible to revision, as ways of remembering people, and to remember as events change in society. The case also demonstrates the impact of visual images, particularly photography and film, in effecting and affecting remembrance.

The Academic Discovery of Dark Tourism

Dark tourism first entered academic inquiry in 1996 in a collection of articles in a special issue of the International Journal of Heritage ( IJHS ), edited by John Lennon, and later in a book cowritten with Malcolm Foley. 2 The name suggested a striking paradox: that tourism, the recreational form often satirized as the “have-a-nice-day” industry, might not always be the pursuit of light, life, and happiness, but a taste for commercial encounters with death exemplified, for example, in visiting celebrity memorials, genocide sites, and war cemeteries. The notion was one that was to provoke modest, moral panic in the media about commercialization of death, 3 reminiscent of public anxieties about “resurrection men” who sold corpses—murdered or snatched from city graveyards—to medical institutions in the 1830s. 4 In fact, “resurrection men” would not fit Lennon and Foley’s vision of what dark tourism was. They argued that it was a postmodern eruption, “an interest in recent death, disaster and atrocity … in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries … a product of circumstances of the late modern world and a significant influence upon these circumstances.” 5 Though recognizing that earlier kinds of travel encounters with death might resemble dark tourism, they were excluded because there was no evidence of intentional visitation, and they had not happened “within living memory.” The view bore similarities to the hypothesis of postmodern “black spots” by the sociologist Chris Rojek for sites where traumatic events had taken place that were visited as touristic “escape attempts” from the world of everyday life. 6 There was the suggestion that the new tourism was suspect in consumer terms (“a fascination with assassination” was the title of one article on the Kennedy assassination), a commodification of death as spectacle for paying visitors. 7 Since all three hailed dark tourism as postmodern, it logically had no significant history. It was the unprecedented shape of things coming and to come. Research case studies in Lennon and Foley’s book Dark Tourism exemplified this neophiliac premise with the inclusion of four chapters on the Jewish Holocaust, and individual ones on the John F. Kennedy assassination, the war sites of the two world wars, and tourism developments in partitioned North Cyprus. An alternative approach to dark tourism appeared in the same issue of IJHS and a later one. 8 It treated the subject under a different name, thanatourism, defined as: “travel to a location wholly, or partially, motivated by the desire for actual or symbolic encounters with death, particularly, but not exclusively, violent death.” 9 This perspective extended the history of dark tourism and the travel experiences within it from a few major atrocity sites in the present to many more going back into the distant past. Thanatourism, it was argued, was not just travel to view atrocities and disasters that had “happened in living memory.” It derived from older, Judeo-Christian traditions of pilgrimage and thanatopsis, prescribing reflection on mortality to their followers. Such thoughts were induced and aided by devotional texts and artifacts which carried memento mori –messages to the living that one day they must die, and ars moriendi counseling on how to do it well. 10 Thanatourism could thus be seen as travel that brought death to the mind, and pilgrimage a way of paying homage to others who had gone before. “Thanatourism” was a more neutral term than “dark tourism” because it lessened the transgressive associations of the word “dark” in recognition that not all traveling encounters with death held sinister undertones. Though Holocaust and genocide memorials evoked unspeakable crimes, paying homage to fallen soldiers and visiting graves of poets and other revered groups and individuals did not. Moreover, the name thanatourism located it more explicitly as a subset of thanatology. 11 The paper offered a constitutive typology of five thanatouristic and dark tourism travel categories:

travel to witness public enactments of death, a form largely proscribed in modern Western societies, though once common in gladiatorial contests in ancient Rome, and in public executions in Britain until 1868;

travel to see the sites of multiple fatality (e.g. Holocaust sites, the battlefield of Waterloo, the town of Lockerbie, Scotland, where a Pan-Am jet was brought down by a terrorist bomb in 1988), and sites of individual deaths ranging from roadside memorials for accident victims, to “blue plaque” domestic sites where cultural celebrities had died;

travel to internment sites and memorials to the dead in graveyards, catacombs, and war cemeteries;

travel to view material evidence or symbolic representations of death, in locations unconnected with their occurrence including, police and military museums, and many kinds of exhibition, including the “Chamber of Horrors” in Madame Tussaud’s which displayed artifacts of murder (weapons, victims’ clothing) alongside wax effigies of the serial killers responsible; and

travel for reenactments of historic carnage, particularly battlefield simulations, staged by members of societies dedicated to particular wars, e.g., Civil War Societies in Britain and America, and Napoleonic battle societies in Europe.

A Historiography of Dark Tourism

Whatever the differences in periodizing and characterizing it, the notion of tourism as “dark” acted as a “refresh” button for researchers who had previously never made a link between the two. For students it was, and has remained, a popular option for undergraduate and postgraduate studies in leisure and tourism. Whether called “dark tourism” or “thanatourism,” the effect was to detonate a developing literature of journal articles, book chapters and conference papers over the next two decades, as well as journalistic attention. 12

The first decade (1996 to 2005) was dominated by ad hoc case studies of individual sites and events that fell into three of the five, dark tourism categories: travel to death sites; travel to internment sites; and travel to view exhibited evidence and symbolic representations. Research subjects included Holocaust sites, 13 historic battlefields, 14 slavery sites in the United Kingdom and the United States, 15 criminal museums and prisons, 16 cemeteries as visitor attractions, 17 and celebrity death sites. 18

The first phase of dark tourism research also included alternative conceptual typologies to the five-attribute category initially proposed. The late Graham Dann produced a site typology of four alliterative thanatourism categories: “houses of horror, “fields of fatality,” “tours of torment,” and “themed thanatos.” Within each were subsumed eleven constitutive subcategories, also alliteratively named (“Morbid museums,” “the Hell of Holocaust,” “Cemeteries for Celebrities,” etc.), followed by a discussion of eight motivations that included “fear of phantoms,” “chasing change,” and “yearning for yesteryear.” 19 Other typologies included those of Richard Sharpley and Philip R. Stone, 20 who adapted a spectrum model of dark tourism, as originally suggested by Tony Seaton, 21 but using different and more numerous criteria for grading sites and experiences that scored them on a darkest/lightest scale, a line of development later pursued by Rachael Raine. 22

Case study work also included investigations into key questions of motivation for dark travel, and that of whether dark tourists were an identifiable segment whose behavior varied sui generis from that of other kinds of tourist (e.g. cultural tourists, golf tourists etc.), or whether the notion of dark tourism was a concept that concealed several kinds of distinctive behavior, each with its own clients and motivations (e.g., Holocaust visitors, battlefield walkers, churchyard, and graveyard visitors). One attempt to identify an overarching motivation behind all dark tourism was the sequestration thesis, first put by Geoffrey Gorer in 1964, 23 revisited briefly by Seaton, 24 and more extensively by Stone. 25 The thesis proposed that death was a taboo subject, suppressed or, in Stone’s terms, made “absent” in modern living, thus depriving people of opportunities for thanatopsis which had been normal in the past. Dark tourism, it was claimed, restored mediated links between the living and the dead, by allowing tourists an existential space to reflect, through gazing on the death sites of “significant others,” on their own mortality. Problems with the thesis later focused on the meaning of “sequestration” and “death … made absent,” since the notion was capable of three different meanings and interpretations: the silencing of thanatopsis (i.e., social suppression of reflection and discussion of death); the exclusion of cultural representations of death (e.g., in art, literature, and the mass media); and the ways in which modern funerary practices removed custody of the body from home and family, and consigned its storage, treatment, and disposal to industry professionals. Gorer had most in mind the latter effect, one which dark tourism could hardly address since, unlike bodysnatching, 26 it was never an intervention in the physical treatment and disposal of bodies by the funeral industry or anyone else. There were also problems with accepting assertions that modern society sequesters or makes “absent” representations of death, given the volume of coverage of war, violence, and murder which routinely colonize media news and entertainment, in print, broadcasting, and increasingly in the privately supplied and leaked photo exposures of social media. It is only if “absence” is treated as the normative silencing of reflection and discussion of death in society, that dark tourism could appear as a restorative experience, precipitating discussions of mortality which would not otherwise take place. Stone, in his work on responses to a body parts exhibition mounted internationally by Gunter Von Hagen, found it did provoke some ontological discussions of life and death among visitors. 27 Similarly, an exhibition of skeletons from different periods, recovered during building excavations in London, generated involvement and reflections on death among secondary school children, when exhibited at the Welcome Library in the capital in 2008. They were, however, primarily in response to questions asked in a self-completion survey administered as part of the visit. 28

No common, general motivation emerged from any of the many, separate surveys of specific “dark” activities. Indeed, some research respondents, when asked, denied interest in, “encounters with death” as a reason for visits, and named different ones, including, interests in history, heritage, education, and, for Australian and New Zealand tourists traveling to Gallipoli, national pride in viewing the site of Anzac, military coming-of-age during World War I. 29 Except in the case of Holocaust visits and battlefield tours, dark encounters were not always discrete, premeditated choices, but made as part of a multistop, package tour schedules. Thus, after a decade or more, research was no nearer to isolating generic motivations for dark travel, or producing a plausible profile of those who could be definitively hailed as, “the real Dark Tourists revealed.” 30 Dark tourism, it seemed, could not be segmentally profiled like other kinds of niche tourism. Moreover, some suppliers of dark tourism, including battlefield tour operators and cemetery managers, did not accept that the business they were in should be characterized as “dark.” Dark tourism thus appeared to be a transaction involving two groups of missing persons: the consumers and the suppliers. This was a problem that had never existed historically when dark encounters were incidental, and had yet to be viewed and named as a transactional market between consumers and suppliers.

Another problem in dark tourism’s discursive evolution was one from within its own academic ranks. This was about its “theoretical fragility,” a phrase that briefly became something of a mantra. 31 Was it anything but a magpie, a hybrid of ideas derived from other disciplinary areas and applied to an endless case of samples? Questions of disciplinary coherence and overlap were most directed at dark tourism’s relations to heritage studies, and its subaltern forms, “dissonant heritage” and “contested heritage,” first explored by John E. Tunbridge and Gregory J. Ashworth. 32 Tazim Jamal and Linda Lelo commented on its crossover features; “a dark tourist,” they noted, might equally be called a “heritage tourist” or a “secular pilgrim.” 33 Duncan Light appraised dark tourism’s relationship with heritage, calling it a “troubled” field. 34 A year later, a reference text, the Handbook of Dark Tourism Studies made explicit the links between the two in an edited section called, “Tourism and Heritage Landscapes” with coverage of atrocity sites, memorial sites, battlefields, and museums as common areas of interest. 35 In the same year, Glenn Hooper explored the dark tourism/heritage interface in an edited collection of international cases with an introductory chapter by heritage veterans Tunbridge and Ashworth. 36

There was no resolution to these internal debates. In retrospect they look like “turf wars” among academics arguing over disciplinary ownership and proprietary rights to comment on issues raised in dark tourism debate. The most pertinent observation, perhaps, about its existence as a distinct and legitimate field of inquiry was that within a decade work in the new field problematized issues and generated inquiries about the relationship between tourism, travel, and death that had never previously been recognized or addressed in any discipline.

And it went on doing so. Work in dark tourism expanded in the second decade of the twenty-first century in conferences, journals, and books which included four edited collections. 37 The subject also expanded in undergraduate and postgraduate programs internationally. Holocaust studies, the best funded in research terms, dominated the field in number of outputs in disciplinary publications. Other disasters and atrocities appeared in research agendas: the Chernobyl nuclear accident, 38 Rwanda genocide, 39 and Dallen Timothy produced a wide-ranging overview of dark tourism in the USA. 40 The novelty of its name and the focus on modern, mega-instances implicitly made dark tourism seem an ultracontemporary phenomenon; it is difficult to open any guidebook or travel memoir of the last two centuries that does not include the “dark” practices of grave visiting, memorial trips, battlefield tourism, and so forth.

Dark Tourism and the Politics of Remembrance

In the new millennium a number of geopolitical events and trends began to affect the status of dark tourism. The events included continuing conflicts following the break-up of Eastern Europe, particularly in the Crimea and the Ukraine; conflicts and instability in the Middle East; a second, Western invasion of Iraq; the aftermath of the “9/11 attacks” in America and the growth of world terrorism; and unprecedented movements of people as political refugees and economic migrants. The decade also coincided with several historical anniversaries: the start and finish of World War I and II and specific phases within them (the Battle of Britain, Stalingrad, Pearl Harbor, D-Day landings, etc.); the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 ; and the 1916 uprising in Ireland. All of them were issues that came with historical baggage that stirred up feelings about the past, and triggered public debate, among groups inside and outside the countries involved, on what past events had been and how they should be commemorated, if at all. Conflicting versions of historical blame and praise multiplied and, owing to the growth of social media, minority views gained currency that might have gone unheard in predigital times.

The results were rising protests against narratives that were once unchallenged, and direct action at sites where they were commemorated. Monuments, statues, and memorials were vandalized or removed. In Iraq the pulling down of Saddam Hussein’s statue was orchestrated and filmed for international TV news to valorize the triumphant closure of a Western invasion that later created anarchy. Statues of former communist leaders were removed from public spaces in ex-Soviet bloc countries, but provoked protests in Lithuania, when bought by an entrepreneur to exhibit as theme park attractions. At Corpus Christi College, Oxford, students demanded the removal of a statue commemorating Cecil Rhodes, which for nearly a century had celebrated a British imperialist whose legacies funded scholarships at Oxford. In 2019 a Sino-Western war of words broke out at the removal and standardization of Muslim graves in Uyghur cemeteries in Xinjiang Province of China, criticized by Western observers as cultural erasure, and even genocide of a religious minority, which had inhabited the area for centuries.

In academia historians and social scientists had, for a decade, become increasingly interested in forms of ethnic, national, and sectional narratives of the past. The 1990s saw a spate of book-length studies on remembrance and the writing of history, 41 including a Companion to Historiography of almost 1,000 pages. 42 In the social sciences there was exponential growth, following Edward Said’s work on “Orientalism,” of postcolonial studies into the ways Western cultures had historically represented non-Western cultures as inferior, and not infrequently as transgressive kinds of “other.” 43 These developments, which have since become known issues in “the politics of identity and remembrance,” had direct implications for those working in heritage and dark tourism. Heritage discourse and management had previously been a rather genteel world where specialist curators in museums or galleries made aesthetic choices and professional judgments about what was installed and remembered. It increasingly became one fraught with political perils, which were increasingly discussed. 44 Remembrance had traditionally been a semisacred concept, meaning a state of private reflection on loss and bereavement; or, as metonymy for memorials and rituals commemorating national tragedies, as in, “Ceremonies of Remembrance” and “Gardens of Remembrance.” In the 2000s remembrance became a more contentious notion, weaponized by critics for interrogating the legitimacy of some commemorative displays, and the power structures authorizing them.

For dark tourism the questions provoked were fundamental. The protests and direct action at sites of remembrance called into question what dark tourism was or, to borrow Wittgenstein’s interrogative phrase, what “state of affairs” it represented; 45 and particularly whether it was about encounters with death. None of the protests at commemorative sites were encounters with death—which has and always will be an unknown abstraction—but physical tilts directed at physical installations: headstones, statues, monuments, memorial tablets, and ritual ceremonies. Was this not also true of dark tourism encounters? The praxis in dark tourism had, it transpired, never been encounters with death but with visits to sites created or marked as remembrance. Bringing it more in line with what was the real “state of affairs” surely meant abandoning “death” as the focal encounter, and accommodating material remembrance as the experiential goal. A revised definition, aimed to reflect these realities, was proposed that frames dark tourism as “encounters with the engineering and orchestration of remembrance of mortality or fatality” (where mortality was death from natural causes, while fatality was premature decease, in violent, nefarious, or spectacular circumstances). 46 The revised focus revealed a number of “states of affairs” that had not previously been obvious. There were four principal ones: First, that it is the living , not the dead , who have both the first and the last word in remembrance in the control they exert over the engineered choice, siting and orchestration of commemorative measures; and second, they also retain the power to change the nature of remembrance in the future. This power may be limited for family memorials with restricted audiences which are typically extant for only a few generations. Where commemoration is targeted at mass audiences for longer, indefinite periods by national bodies and great public or private corporations, it becomes significant social engineering. In democracies this is likely to involve the active or passive consent of several, or many, stakeholders likely to be exposed to, or affected by, what commemoration is being engineered, and how the orchestration is accomplished. Engineers of public remembrance may thus be called to account before, during, and after commemorative measures are put in place. Third, that the remembrance perspective affects the way the history of dark tourism is viewed. It makes it difficult to imagine it as a latter-day innovation concerned only with atrocity and disasters in modern times. It makes it coeval with the history of human communities on earth, since most known societies have engineered and orchestrated remembrance of the dead in big and small ways. The Assyrians, Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans all erected public monuments and left inscriptions for remembering and honoring religious figures, and inculcating homage to emperors, kings, and other potentates. They were installed in public places for exposure to local and regional populations as they went about their business and, to a lesser extent, to impress foreign visitors. Many people would have had encounters with them, but they would have mainly been incidental and unplanned, except in special circumstances where the memorial itself became the message, rather than the subject it celebrated, and attracted curious visitors in its own right. This was the case, according to enduring myth, with the Seven Wonders of the World. 47 Fourth, crucially, in academic terms, conceptualizing dark tourism as travel encounters with engineered remembrance, makes it a quintessential study area in the wider study of the “politics of remembrance.”

Dark Tourism as Praxis in History

Dark tourism, as travel tastes for visiting sites and spaces commemorating different kinds and intensities of mortality and fatality, only grew to be a generic tourism preoccupation in Britain and Europe in the late-eighteenth century and early nineteenth centuries. Before that for around 200 years, the dominant tourism form had been the Grand Tour, which accorded no particular importance to representations of death sui generis (see Verhoeven , this volume). 48 It was a European ritual tour, routed mainly through France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland for young aristocrats and the gentry. Lasting up to three years, its manifest purpose was as a crash course in classical antiquity, Christian history, and art viewed in galleries, churches, cathedrals and other public buildings. It was also often a form of social bonding and hedonistic indulgence among European elites ( Seaton 2019 ) 49

Representations of mortality and fatality were, in fact, abundant among Christian paintings, sculptures, and buildings viewed by Grand Tourists, but were viewed primarily as religious and artistic exhibits, rather than with any of the cultural relativism that underpins inspection through the prism of the “politics of remembrance.” The default stance of grand tourists was to regard their own cultural assumptions, religious and nationalistic, as normative and universalistic ones. The only sepulchral encounters they had with sites that were coded with less prescriptive cultural meanings were campo santo sites in Rome, Naples, and Pisa, which were mass burial sites for the poor, and ossuaries where the bones of the dead were displayed in catacomb as curiosities rather than homilies. 50 In Rome even catacombs could be viewed as religious shrines rather than macabre spectacles, since they had been early Christian meeting places, and some of their walls bore graffiti that could pass as sacred art. By contrast, dark tourism, as a widespread travel preoccupation with representations of death, was a product of changing material and ideological factors at work in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Some involved reinvention and repurposing. Some were new.

Pilgrimage Renewed and Reinvented

Pilgrimage had been a long-standing tradition in Christendom of visiting sites at home and abroad associated with sacred figures (see Craig , this volume). Abroad meant Palestine, Jerusalem and the Holy Land, and for Catholics, it included Rome. There was also a network of British shrines to lesser Christian saints and martyrs, the most important being that of Thomas Becket (1120–1170) at Canterbury. During the Reformation, Protestant countries abolished pilgrimage as a Catholic superstition that was denounced by religious leaders and humanists, the most notable being Erasmus. It made a “dark” comeback in several ways. The first was during and after the Napoleonic Wars, when English visitors to France began to make excursions to Catholic churches and monasteries—previously seen as the devil’s abodes—to witness the mob destruction or vandalism of ecclesiastical property during the French Revolution. The prime site was Saint Denis, the Cathedral where French kings and queens had been buried. There artifacts and monuments, torn from churches and monasteries were put on display for visitors as a makeshift “museum.” The result appalled English tourists so that after nearly 300 years of demonization, Catholic clergy came to be seen as Christian comrades-in-arms, and victims of an anti-Christ who was no longer the Pope, but Napoleon. My enemy’s enemy had become my friend. Thomas Cook and Son revived pilgrimage to pre-Reformation destinations with tours to Rome, the Vatican, Palestine, and the Holy Land (see Barton , this volume). 51

In addition to these revivals, a new kind of secular pilgrimage grew up during the nineteenth century to places commemorating celebrities of nation and empire. In Britain the graves, memorial monuments and death sites of literary and artistic figures, particularly poets, 52 became shrines that coexisted alongside those for more official figures. In Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s, poets and novelists shared monuments and memorials with royal and ecclesiastical notables. Elsewhere in Britain, the last whereabouts and resting places of celebrities formed a growing dark tourism circuit which were widely publicized in travel memoirs, illustrated guidebooks, and magazine features by writers, some of whom specialized as paparazzi of the posthumous. One was William Howitt whose “Homes and Haunts of the British Poets” comprised essays on the geographical origins and deaths of thirty-six writers. 53 A dozen editions were sold over the next sixty years. He had previously published another much-reprinted book of dark tours in the North that included: celebrity memorials and burial places (St. Bede and Thomas Bewick, the celebrated wood engraver), battlefields (Culloden and Flodden), mining disasters, murders, executions, and apparitions. 54 A work that drew more explicit analogies between “pilgrimage” and dark tourism was by Mrs. Samuel Carter Hall, wife of the editor of the Art Journal who in 1850 published “Pilgrimages to English Shrines.” It was successful enough for her to bring out a sequel two years later which included an authorial aside, hinting at the pleasurable schadenfreude that lurks in certain kinds of dark tourism encounter: “Pilgrimages! what is life but a pilgrimage over graves! The older we grow, the better we comprehend the force of this sad truth; life is indeed a ‘pilgrimage over graves;’ but how different are the ideas and emotions they suggest or excite.” 55 The two volumes included chapters on tombs, death sites and memorials to writers and artists, among them: Christopher Wren, Thomas Flaxman, Thomas Gray, and William Hogarth, with additional chapters on the execution of Lady Jane Grey, and the plague village of Eyam whose residents quarantined themselves to likely death in order not to spread the disease.

A related influence on dark tourism was antiquarianism. Like pilgrimage, this was nothing new. It was a legacy of the Renaissance revival of interest in classical antiquity among educated European elites in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in part politically and patriotically generated by the growth of new nation-states and dynasties such as the Tudors, when rulers and ruled joined forces in discovering evidence of ancient, cultural traditions. This involved enthusiastic searches for written texts, artifacts, and sites of architectural and archaeological significance involving quests to libraries, burial grounds, ruins, and ancient ecclesiastical foundations where they pored over old documents, memorial tablets, tomb inscriptions, and other sepulchral survivals.

Antiquarians increased throughout the seventeenth century, leading to the foundation of the Society of Antiquaries in 1717–1718. 56 Its members were periodically satirized as eccentric old men, shut off from real life by their fixation with musty books, moldering remains, and fragments of broken artifacts. Nonetheless, the antiquarian mindset increased among educated travelers across Europe, particularly after the discovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum in the 1740s, where excavations captivated generations of tourists in Italy. 57 In Britain, antiquarianism became a gentlemanly hobby, often among clerics discovering local history in their parish travels. It resulted in the publication of substantial town and county histories, as well as briefer guidebook information for visitors to individual churches. Antiquarianism, in conjunction with archaeology, led to a desire for take-home mementos, which tempted visitors to chip off fragments from sites at home and abroad. 58

The Dark Appeals of Romanticism

More powerful than pilgrimage or antiquarianism in its impact on dark tourism was that of romanticism, a complex cultural phenomenon characterized as, “a heterogeneous mixture of philosophic, aesthetic, religious and emotional concepts.” 59 It colonized middle-class aesthetic tastes throughout the nineteenth century, providing escapes from the prosaic or oppressive realities of industrialization and urbanization at home, to the imagined worlds of other places and other times in literature, music, and art. Tourism gave physical reality to some of these longed-for romantic contrasts: in landscape tastes (picturesque scenery in Italy, the Lake District, and Wales); among traditional, rural populations (peasant communities in regional dress in Brittany and Scotland); through exposure to traditional myths and folklore in books with titles such as Legends of the Rhine and Border Ballads of Scotland; 60 in attending regional festivals of song and dance; and in brief retreats from the modernity of railway conveyance to retro-travel forms (jaunting-carts in Ireland, camel rides during Holy Land tours, and pony trekking through Iceland, a land with few roads and no railways). 61

Dark tourism offered two of the most powerful forms of escape into romantic otherness. The first was the world of the past and the second was vicarious experience of death, the most feared and mysterious of all “others.” The past was where the dead had lived and died, and there were special places where their presence lingered. Reflections on death, once devotional practices at home, became recreational trips further afield: in visiting celebrity memorials, battle fields, and in enjoying the more frivolous pleasures of ghost trains, haunted houses, and other fairground attractions.

These dark tastes and recreations were critically affected by sociological factors arising from population change and revolutionary developments in the production and consumption of printed words and images from the late-eighteenth century onwards. Printing moved from being a hand-powered craft that had hardly changed in the 300 years since Caxton, to a modern, machine production technology, capable of producing thousands, rather than hundreds, of copies per day of newspapers, magazines, and cheap books. Costs fell, allowing more people to buy them, and literacy grew. The result was an expanding audience for reading of all kinds. It was most potent among the middle classes, but it was also observable among sections of laboring populations where the growing take-up of cheap reading was satirized in the 1830s as the “March of Intellect.” 62 The net effect was that new ideas circulated more quickly than ever before. Without the printed word the concepts and activities, later recognized as romantic, including those that primed dark tourism, would never have taken hold.

Two key ideas that permeated the landscapes and dreamscapes of romanticism were the Gothic and sublime. The Gothic was an aesthetic categorization, variously applied in judgments of architecture, ecclesiastical decoration, and literature from c. 1740 and throughout the nineteenth century, that implicitly drew a binary contrast between the rule-governed styles of classical cultures and the more unruly, plenitude of vernacular ones. In architecture and art the Gothic Revival meant a crusading preference for indigenous Anglo-Saxon styles found, it was claimed, in medieval, Christian church buildings of England, France, and Germany, with their soaring heights, pointed arches, and abundant decorative effects, in opposition to the geometric restraint and laws of classical and Palladian styles from Greece and Italy. Its proponents included Augustus Pugin, John Ruskin, Walter Scott, and less well-known, but important opinion-formers in publishing and graphic reproduction. One was the prolific engraver, John Britton, who published many, finely illustrated viewbooks depicting Gothic buildings at home and abroad; and John Parker, the Oxford religious publisher who specialized in gothic ecclesiastical design. 63 All extended the province of dark tourism.

Of equal impact to dark tourism was Gothic literature, which first emerged in the mid-eighteenth century in the sepulchral travelogues of a literary group who became known as “graveyard” writers. Three of the most successful were Edward Young, with his poem “Night Thoughts” (1749); Robert Blair with his poem, “The Grave” (1743); and in 1746, James Hervey, with a prose work called “Meditations among the Tombs.” The themes they explored—the brevity of life, the inevitability of death, the need to reflect and prepare for eternity—were conventional, thanatoptic ones, common in memento mori and ars moriendi texts going back to the Middle Ages. The difference was that previously “the grave” had been symbolic shorthand for death; in the work of Young, Blair, and Hervey it was also physical location, described at length or imagined in visceral detail as a visitor attraction. Hervey’s book had been inspired by a tour of Cornwall when he had stopped off at a village church in Kilkhampton, Devon, to read epitaphs in the churchyard and memorial tablets within the church. None of these works, however, came close to the crowning achievement of graveyard travelogues by Thomas Gray with his Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard. 64 Published in the 1750, it remains the best-known poem of the eighteenth century and one which has given country churchyards an iconic place in English culture and dark tourism. 65 The precincts of Stoke Poges Church in Buckinghamshire, which is believed to have inspired it, has a large, stone memorial to Gray and his work, and his grave is close to the church entrance. All four works were forerunners of what has been described as, “the therapeutically melancholic side of Romanticism.” 66 William Blake, the most Gothic of all English artists, later illustrated editions of all three works, and William Wordsworth took time off from poetry for writing prose essays on epitaphs and memorials. 67

An even more influential form than graveyard travelogues in dark tourism creation was the Gothic novel. It was a genre of horror and sensation that has been called “literary terrorism,” which was first introduced in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and followed by Anna Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) , and then by a torrent of works that were to fill a bibliography by Montague Summers that was over five hundred pages long. 68 Their plots were characteristically set abroad in Catholic countries, especially Italy, where superstition and transgression reigned in castles, monasteries, and haunted houses, freely equipped with locked rooms, secret cabinets, dungeons, and supernatural apparitions. The villains were evil monks, depraved noblemen and wicked guardians, who preyed on innocent orphans and helpless women relatives. Gothic novels enjoyed a runaway success between 1760 and the 1830s, particularly among women readers, a trend satirized in Jane Austen’s novel, Northanger Abbey published in 1818. It then declined, but morphed into mystery novels with more domestic, contemporary settings by Sheridan Le Fanu, Edgar Alan Poe, and Wilkie Collins. The Gothic played an important part in influencing the perceptions of place that tourists took with them on their travels at home and abroad. It can be found in the attraction of visiting ancient castles, ruined monasteries, haunted houses, and locations with pronounced—which means “promoted”—atmospherics of gloom, decay, and the uncanny. 69 Historians too affected Gothic travel perceptions in offering a Lapsarian view of the world which emphasized the destructive effects of time and change on places and people. In England Edward Gibbon’s work, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1787), became a bestselling sensation. Inspiration for it came when he wandered as a tourist among the ruins of ancient Rome, and then spent more than ten years writing a six-volume work trying to account for how they were all that was left of an empire that had ruled Europe for 600 years. In France, almost coincidentally, Constantin Volney published The Ruins of Empire , 70 a philosophical work which also made the ravages of time, change, and death an underlying leitmotif. Both works were translated and inculcated a mindset among educated, European tourists who made it de rigeur to view landscapes that evoked melancholic reflections on death and oblivion, while enjoying the pleasant, recreational Schadenfreude of knowing that they had not yet become victims, and would soon be returning safe from their excursions to hotel or pensione for a well-earned meal. The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley encapsulated this dark tourism mindset in his sonnet, “Ozymandias,” which describes the metaphorical tears he shed in stumbling upon the bust and remains of a once-great monarch of all that he surveyed, abandoned and half-hidden in the sand. 71

Romanticism and the Gothic incorporated a related ideology that became inscribed in dark tourism praxis. It was that of the sublime, a classical concept given new life by Edmund Burke in a slim volume first printed in 1757. 72 It was a treatise on aesthetics that proposed a simple idea—that aesthetic pleasure was not necessarily tranquil contemplation of beauty in art or life; it could also be found in disturbing natural or man-made phenomena that provoked fear, particularly if they were indistinct or partly obscured (e.g., in mist, semidarkness, or storm clouds). Sublime thrills became desiderata of the dark tourist gaze, in which delight competed with shock and awe in exposure to violence in nature (volcanoes, great waterfalls, storms at sea, etc.); displays of massed human power (scenes of destruction, and orchestrated, military parades); and supernatural narratives. All these ideas account for a long-standing paradox: that what is apparently “seen” with the eye is actually the preconditioned mind encountering and recognizing the cultural coding invested in sights and sites. It is antecedent conditioning which turns spaces into places, and “stuff happening” into significant form and occasion.

Cemeteries and the Transformations of Internment

Dark tourism tastes were not just down to new ideas processed by imagination. There were more visceral factors which affected the repertoires of dark tourism which resonated physically in Britain and Europe. A macabre one in rapidly growing cities was how and where to bury the dead—and keep them buried. Until the mid-eighteenth-century graveyards were plain affairs with burial sites marked, if at all, with a simple, wooden memorial board, featuring a name and, occasionally, an emblematic sign: a cross or a death’s head carving. Only the gentry had more durable memorials, on brass or marble tablets inside churches on walls or floors, and in full body effigies and head-and-shoulder busts arranged around the sides. Church yards and public burial grounds were less sacrosanct and more plebeian and were sometimes used for mundane, or even profane, activities. Booksellers and market stalls flourished round St Paul’s Cathedral in London. Hogarth depicted gambling taking place in a London church yard; and the artist, Thomas Rowlandson, drew burlesque cartoons of sexual activity on “table-top” tombs.

As populations in towns and cities increased, the situation changed. Spaces for burying the dead began to run out. To cope public authorities stacked bodies closer and higher together, in multiplying tiers, under thinner and thinner coverings of soil, so that burials per acre increased exponentially. The result was that in populous areas graveyards became a health hazard for those living near, as the earth gave up its dead and bodies decomposed near the surface of graves, or actually floated free of them in wet weather. The dangers were revealed in a sensational book by a London surgeon in 1839, 73 and a government report which detailed the “dangerous and fatal results produced by the unwise and revolting custom of inhuming the dead in the midst of the living.” 74 It showed that in some parts of London, the density of corpse distribution was over a thousand per acre. It was followed by a supplementary Parliamentary Report, written by Edwin Chadwick, which statistically analyzed the scale of the health hazards between 1830 and 1840, and looked at practices in Europe for dealing with them. 75

The solution was the garden cemetery, located out-of-town, away from populations and, ideally, in elevated settings swept by fresh, clean air. First adopted in Sweden, they spread through other European countries, including Père Lachaise in Paris in 1804, and in Liverpool and Glasgow in the late 1820s and 1830s. 76 By the time Chadwick’s survey was published the cemetery movement was underway in London with cemeteries opening in Highgate, Nunhead, Brompton, West Norwood, Tower Hamlets, Kensal Green, and Abney Park. They followed functional and aesthetic features proposed by George Alfred Walker and Chadwick. They were also influenced J. C. Loudon’s pioneering work “On the Laying Out, Planting, and Managing of Cemeteries and on the Improvement of Churchyards,” which became a classic work on sepulchral design. 77

James Curl has written extensively on the architecture and aesthetics of cemeteries and internment nationally 78 and regionally in the United Kingdom (Curl 1977, 1980 , 1981 , 2001 ). 79 The look and character of cemeteries was also improved by the coming of the railways which made easier and cheaper the transportation of monumental stone, thus putting memorials and headstones within the reach and budgets of people previously restricted to local materials or none at all. Rail also shaped the most macabre of all cemeteries: Brookwood in Surrey, which was built to take the overflow of corpses from London and had its own station for receiving them on a single ticket running direct from Waterloo to their final destination. The aesthetics of internment brought about by the garden cemetery revolution was one of the unanticipated consequences of history. Conceived for health reasons as secure resting places for the dead, they evolved as recreational spaces for the living, designed to be within easy reach of visitors, offering picturesque layout and planting and, as time went on, by the architectural variety of their monuments. Guidebooks to all the main London cemeteries were produced that promoted their funerary functionality, but also their picturesque and elegiac effects for dark tourists. Today more than 400 cemeteries belong to the Association of Significant Cemeteries in Europe, founded two decades ago, to promote them as visitor attractions (Felicori and Zanotti 2004; Seaton 2015 ). 80

Another unintended consequence of the cemetery movement was to add a new pastime to the repertoire of middle-class touring, epitaph collecting. Monumental inscriptions had always been prized by antiquarians studying Greek and Roman culture during the Renaissance and later as primary sources of national and local history. On James Harvey’s grave was inscribed a commendation on the value of epitaphs as history and religious lessons in stone:

What biography is to history, an epitaph is to biography. It is a sketch which marks the great outlines of character and excites curiosity to view the portraits as painted on the pages of history. It is likewise an epitome which teaches us … that time is on the wing,—that every rank and age must fall prey to his depredations … (and) that religion is the only defence against the horrors of death, and the only guide to the joys of eternity. 81

This high-minded view was not always apparent in the epitaph literature that flourished in the nineteenth century. By the 1880s, a bibliography listed more than a hundred separate works with titles suggesting that entertainment as much as improvement was the main attraction. Viewing them promised lively titillation as they were named as: ludicrous, merry, queer, panegyrical, satirical, humorous, whimsical, curious, quaint, monkish, and not to be found in any other collection . 82 Epitaphs were also organized by geographic categories: by continents and subcontinents (America, India, Bengal, and Madras); by country (West Indies, France, and Scotland); by towns and cities (London, Westminster, Rome, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Canterbury, and Winchester); and there were compilations of those in single, country churchyards (Cockermouth, Charlton King, and Framlingham). Magazines and journals also featured epitaphs, suggesting their broad and diverse appeals. They appeared in specialist antiquarian and archaeological publications, in the transactions of local history societies, and in general interest magazines with a popular readership including Chambers’s Journal , Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine , Temple Bar, and Household Words (Charles Dickens’s monthly). There were also entries in encyclopedias, including the Encyclopaedia Britannica , and a society dedicated to sepulchral remembrance, The Society for Preserving Memorials of the Dead, published its own magazine between 1883 and 1885. 83

In the USA sepulchral travel and garden cemetery development more than kept pace with European fashions. Internment space was initially abundant and burials were not confined, as in Europe, to demarcated, walled-off, graveyards. This changed as the density of burials per acre increased in settler towns, along with the problems of maintaining graves that became neglected over time. Mount Auburn, the first garden cemetery, was consecrated in 1831 in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Green-Wood in Brooklyn, New York was opened in 1842. Both published illustrated, coffee table guidebooks, 84 and American cemeteries evolved as picturesque developments, competing for public attention by position, plantations, monumental variety, and history. In the 1880s two hundred copies of the first book-length, sepulchral bibliography in the world was published. 85

The cumulative impact of these developments was to foster a sepulchral mindset that particularly affected educated, middle-class touring behavior and generated guidebook recommendations for excursions that included: trips by candlelight round ruined monasteries and monk’s graveyards at Tintern Abbey and other locations in England; midnight descents into catacombs and ossuaries in Europe, accompanied by servants with burning torches; trips round royal and ecclesiastical memorials in Westminster Abbey, St Paul’s, and great religious sites in Europe; exploration of Campo Santos in Italy; visits to the Paris Morgue to gaze at corpses, found dead in the streets or fished up from the Seine; 86 and reverential reflection at the graveside of dead poets and writers wherever they could be found. 87 It also included taking in the fields of Waterloo, the first European battlefield to become a mass tourism site. This involved an all-day drive out from Brussels to view the immense “lion” monument, buy a guidebook written by Edward Cotton, an old soldier turned on-site gift shop and museum entrepreneur, and returning home with battle souvenirs (buttons, badges, and bullets from the battlefield, some of them manufactured, it was said, in Birmingham to meet demand); and folios of Gerard’s lithographs of the principal skirmishing points, memorials and mausolea, none of which featured the French. 88

Governance and Remembrance: The Urban Wallpaper of Mortality and Fatality

A new and less obvious influence on dark tourism generation in Britain during the later nineteenth century was the Victorian state, and the forms of engineered and orchestrated remembrance of mortality and fatality it promoted. These had been inscribed in Britain’s judicial system since medieval times, in the practice of publicly executing and punishing criminals in front of sightseeing crowds, and then distributing their body parts at crossroads, along highways, and on bridges as a warning of the long reach of the law for enemies of the state. 89 In Queen Victoria’s reign these brutal, outdoor displays were terminated by Parliament, but streets and public spaces were retained and progressively reconfigured as different aides memoires about the might and majesty of the Victorian empire. Three initiatives were to affect dark tourism exposure: the state funeral, the progressive expansion of memorial statuary, and blue plaque signage.

Royal funerals had always been ceremonial occasions of “pageants and power,” 90 but until the early nineteenth century they were conducted semi-privately with less overt street-level orchestration. The two earliest to approach the status of national occasions were Nelson’s funeral in 1805 and fifteen years later, that of George III, which drew large crowds on to the streets, with the tolling of church bells, and memorial sermons in London churches and across the provinces. 91

The number and scale of state funerals in Victorian England increased and were extended to nonroyal, national, and imperial celebrities. Their impact was first seen at the funeral of the Duke of Wellington in 1852. He had died on September 14, but agreement between the Crown, the Government, and Parliament on the details of the ceremony took two months, and the funeral did not take place until November 15. It was an unprecedented PR success and tourism bonanza, filling lodging houses and hotels in the metropolis before, during, and after the event. It started with a week during which Wellington’s body lay in state for visitors to pay their respects. A quarter of a million people filed past his coffin. The day itself brought more than a million sightseers on to the streets to watch a processional cortege that took two hours to pass by. They came from all over London. There were also invited VIPs from the provinces: mayors, provosts, and chairs of municipalities and county councils, representatives from religious groups, and from the universities. Also lining the route were thousands of day trippers from across England, who had bought cheap excursion tickets that the railways had refused to allow until the 1850s. It has been estimated that the funeral was watched by half of London and 5 percent of all the people of Great Britain. 92 In towns and cities across the country shops and businesses closed for the day, and people joined the party by proxy, as spectators or participants of memorial services held in provincial churches and cathedrals. The week after another 100,000 visited St Paul’s to see where the great event had taken place. State funerals for non-royal figures later included William Gladstone, David Livingstone, and Major General Charles Gordon of Khartoum. 93 The climactic one of the era was Queen Victoria’s own funeral in 1901, the epic scale of which, as imperial theater and civil religion, can still be witnessed in its processional, gun-carriaged, street-thronged splendor, as the first royal funeral to be filmed and widely photographed. Great royal funerals were necessarily in short supply, and even when royal marriages and jubilees were added to the roll call of national rejoicing, great open-air occasions were still infrequent. However, during the latter half of the century and into the next, two more ubiquitous kinds of street commemoration advanced in London and cities throughout the Empire. The first was the spread of public statues to political, cultural, and military heroes. In 1844 there were only 22 statues; by 1867 there were 41; by 1920, 215; by 1928, 350. In 1981 there were 370 on the outside of Parliament alone, and other government buildings had many more. 94

The second was the development of “blue plaque” signage on London houses and buildings of historic interest, recording, among other things, where national celebrities had lived and died. Until 1900 there were only thirty-four, but in 1901 the new Greater London Council took over responsibility for them, and by 1935 had published five volumes of additions to the stock. 95 Each building was inventoried: by original owner, private, or institutional; by address; and by sponsoring agency when not the Council. Blue plaque signage was official exploitation of the already established tourism fashion for visiting places where the famous had worked and died. The result was that in London, statues, blue plaque sites and memorials, all sited for maximum impact and exposure, surrounded native Londoners and still do so for the 20 million visitors who arrive annually in the metropolis, to wander the streets, or sit out in London’s parks and public gardens.

In addition to these Victorian initiatives, two world wars in the twentieth century have produced an international array of British war memorials, the most numerous being the 1,400 or more in France and Belgium as part of the Imperial, later the Commonwealth, War Graves Commission. 96 Others exist in churchyards, village greens, and on buildings and city walls, throughout Britain.

These official investments in historical remembrance, and other more tourist-oriented animations of Britain’s past, have provoked criticism. Robert Hewison viewed the British “heritage industry” as nostalgic excess, 97 and Patrick Wight saw the presented culture of Britain as fixation with, “living in an old country.” 98 But they miss the point. Irrespective of tourism generation, remembrance of national mortality and fatality have evolved as essential features of governance and state craft across the developed world. They mold historical identity of a country and its people by providing exemplary, or cautionary, role models, to follow or reject, as personification of national values. But no version of remembrance is ever final closure. Historical memory of individuals and events changes according to when they were written and, crucially, by those who control remembrance policies and the resources to implement them. The VE Day celebrations in Western Europe in 2020 provided a suggestive instance of the moving politics of commemoration. Russia was an ally of Britain and America in the victory over Germany, and the Red Army were mythologized at the time as iconic comrades, with a government-backed campaign in the United States and United Kingdom. Russia’s losses to the Nazis amounted to 27 million fatalities. Yet seventy-five years later Russia was written out of official VE celebration agendas in Europe, a “state of affairs” that supports the observations made earlier, that it is the living who engineer and orchestrate remembrance, or silence it.

Although governments and large corporate interests may shape the form and location of commemorative sites of mortality and fatality, their impact as dark tourism may be limited. In London few visitors come specially to view statues or houses, except in rare cases such as the Albert Memorial or Nelson’s Column. More commonly they may register with visitors, if at all, as fleeting, pass-by encounters, that some may stop briefly to read, and, in the case of a blue plaque house, visit when open to the public. This question of impact is crucial. Dark tourism involves a spectrum of different events and locations, ranging from individual street memorials to a few mega-events that dominate media and academic agendas (e.g., Holocaust and other disaster sites). All share a generic identity as engineered and orchestrated remembrance of fatality and mortality, but the volume and quality of the encounters they represent may vary profoundly. Is, for example, being briefly exposed to a blue plaque sign a dark tourism encounter? How long must site contact last “to count” as a significant encounter? How intentional must an encounter be to be authentic? These are difficult questions yet to be answered.

The case history that follows exemplifies some of these issues raised and the ways in which remembrance of fatality and mortality may evolve and change over time. Its subject is one that has received little attention in dark tourism research, that of occupational fatality and community displacement in industrial development. This has not just been about technological change in the production of goods, it also involved new transport networks accompanied by disruptive physical transformation. Canal and railway building required land appropriation, demolition of residential areas, mainly among the urban poor, and often human fatalities in the construction and operation of new transit forms. The case focuses on dam building and urban water supply, and the spectacular obliteration of communities accompanying them, seen on an epic scale in Wales in the 1880s and later internationally. It is the story of the flooding of community spaces and the creation of, perhaps, the most bizarre of all remembered dark tourism sites, the sunken village under the water.

Case Study: Dark Tourism and Remembrance: Vyrnwy, Llanwddyn, and Whalley Bridge 1888–2020

In the summer of 2019 a disaster threatened Whalley Bridge, a small town in Derbyshire, UK. After weeks of unprecedented rainfall, a nearby dam wall threatened to collapse and flood the town below. Residents were evacuated and the nation looked on as engineers fought to prevent the disaster. After six weeks they were successful and evacuees began to return to their homes, only to encounter a new inundation, not of water, but tourists, including “busloads of Chinese” arriving to view the disaster scene that never was. The press, hearing of the tourism revenues among local shopkeepers, hailed a unique situation with the headline: “Disaster tourism arrives in Whaley Bridge after dam incident.” 99 In fact, it was not such a tourism novelty. While Whalley’s fate hung in the balance a rarely seen photographic record had come to light of a dam flooding in rural Wales, more than 130 years before. Llanwddyn was a village of 450 inhabitants in the River Vyrnwy valley, sixty miles from Liverpool, an English industrial city with a population that had more than quadrupled in 50 years. The city’s growth had created recurrent crises in water supply and, after running out of suitable, local options, the Municipal Council identified Llanwddyn as the site for a new reservoir, and sought Parliamentary permission to build a dam, flood the village, and create a lake there. In 1881 an Act was passed allowing development.

Despite local opposition work began on the dam foundations in October 1882. For the next five years a work force of one thousand stone masons and laborers worked on the construction. Forty of them lost their lives in the process. Once the dam was completed the flooding began submerging a church, two chapels, four pubs and around 100 houses. In mitigation of the community catastrophe, the Liverpool Council re-housed residents in a new settlement near the created lake, built a new church on a hillside above it and, nearby a sloping burial ground to which they transferred the bodies and gravestones from the old churchyard. 100

A Council concern throughout the project was the management of public relations in engineering and orchestrating remembrance of the dam development for posterity. Official details of the choice of location, geographical features, costs and engineering features were recorded and publicized. The development was promoted as the first, all-masonry dam in Britain, and the artificial reservoir as the largest in Europe. These details made news in specialist publications and attracted technical sightseers to the Vyrnwy site, during and after the construction. 101

As the development progressed engineered remembrance of the construction was cast more durably in iron, memorial tablets, struck successively to mark three phases of the project: the laying of the foundation stone in 1881; the official Parliamentary conclusion, unveiled by the Prince of Wales in 1910; and changes made between 1933 and 1938. The tablets were sited and mounted at the entrance to the bridge across the dam top, so all visitors had to pass them in crossing on to, or off, the bridge. However, the most powerful form of engineered remembrance, and one that was to establish Vyrnwy’s tourism identity for a century or more, was not textual, but architectural. It was the building of a sporting lodge-cum-hotel above the dam with spectacular views down the lake, and a twelve-mile path around it planted with tree cover. For a century the area became a noted sporting resort for hunting, shooting, and fishing. In 1992 an illustrated hotel history was published. The first chapter described the creation of Vyrnwy as “one of the greatest feats of engineering in the Victorian era,” but the main content was of shooting and fishing records, grand social occasions, and fine dining. 102 The flooding and fatalities in construction received brief mention but the numbers of the dead, it was said, were about the norm for workers killed in comparable industrial projects at the time. There was no mention of resident feelings or opposition to displacement at the unprecedented sinking of a whole village which survive in the disparate evidence of oral tradition and regional news accounts to this day. 103 These can also be sensed in the unexpected reappearance after a century of a large, leather-bound, photographic album, produced by the Liverpool Council for their records, but never widely exhibited. It is in two parts and comprises 21 full-page, before-and-after photographs of the dam construction which lends weight to Lennon’s recent notes on the resonance of photographic imaging in dark tourism generation. 104 Part one depicts the titanic scale of the project: the cavernous excavations, the earth moving-machines (Figure 1 ) and the rise of the dam towering seventy-five feet above the disappeared village, and the pygmy figures of workers among it all (Figure 2 ).

Dam Construction 1.

Dam Construction 2.

Part two offers an elegiac, slower movement to this percussive spectacle. It shows two images of Llanwddyn on a summer afternoon before the flood: a tiny village street, an ancient church, an old-fashioned general store, brothers and sisters holding the hand of little ones (Figure 3 ); and women gossiping at a garden gate, a hen pecking its way through dust, and villagers in working clothes staring, unsmiling, at the camera (Figure 4 ).

Llanwddyn before.

Llanwddyn to be submerged.

For the modern viewer the juxtaposed photographs act as allegorical emblems of a dark effacement, that of a traditional way-of-life buried under the juggernaut of industrial advance. It is remembrance that resonates with walkers who leave the path around Lake Vyrnwy and climb to the church and the memorials in the graveyard on the hill where a hundred exhumed bodies from the flooded churchyard were carried in carts, and reburied, by local people who had lived in the houses that were lost. Similar images exist of demolition during early Victorian railway building but, as lithographic prints, they cast a softer, more picturesque halo over devastation compared with the starker realism of photography that came later. 105

Vyrnwy and Whalley Bridge represent chapters in dark tourism created by flooding in dam and reservoir building that was to be repeated in Britain at: Mardale in Cumbria (1935), 106 Ashopton in Derbyshire (1943), 107 and in the 1960s at Capel Celyn in Wales, less than two hours away from Llanwddyn. 108 All became causes célèbres in which local communities clashed with governmental authorities invoking the primacy of the public good over claims of minority rights. Internationally sunken villages multiplied throughout the twentieth century, becoming collateral damage as mega-water projects proliferated across continents. In the new millennium they have begun to attract website coverage from bloggers, planners, and regional tourism promoters. In 2014 an urban heritage posting hailed the gothic appeal of, “Underwater Ghost Cities & Buildings.” 109 A year later they were identified as a network of generic tourism attractions under the headline, “10 Drowned Towns You Can Visit.” 110 The ten included Villa Epecuén in Argentina which had been an elite resort for the rich and famous since the 1920s, but was submerged when a dam broke in 1985; 111 Shi Cheng, flooded in 1959 to become “China’s ‘Atlantis in the East’” with monuments below the waves going back to 1777; 112 as well as Potosi in Venezuela; 113 and Port Royal in Jamaica. 114 In the United States there were more than sixty locations “flooded by the creation of dams, destroyed by the advancing sea, or washed away in floods and never rebuilt.” They stretched from California to Maryland and New York. 115 Canada became part of this network of nemesis by water with a posting of ten communities submerged in the construction of the Saint Lawrence Seaway. 116 The global spread is so great it has been suggested as an air tour opportunity. 117

The fascination of sunken villages as dark tourism sites—what Bess Lovejoy terms their “mental floss”—rests in their appeals to the mind and imagination. 118 At the outset this lies in their prospective power to obliterate and transform place and community by flood. Once constructed it is the nightmare possibility of technological failure causing dams to break, bridges to collapse, and in modern times, nuclear catastrophe to inundate power stations; all of them, visions of mega-death by water.

Death by water on a grand scale also holds unique, mythic terrors evoking memories of biblical and classical catastrophe of Noah’s Ark, Atlantis, Santorini, 119 and other flood myths in world religions, explored in the anthropology of Sir James Frazer. 120 Sunken villages also represent a variation of the aesthetic Rose Macaulay: once called “the pleasure of ruins,” 121 a gothic disposition that is turbo-charged under water as townscapes mutate into submerged wastelands of “mildewed crosses, lonely spires, barely-visible stone foundations, and rusting bed frames.” 122 More than any kind of dark tourism, sunken villages come closest to delivering encounters with the uncanny in its most quintessential guise, as haunted landscapes of spectral reappearance and the returning undead. This revenant fantasy seems close to reality during hot summers when the waters of lakes and reservoirs shrink and what once was, reappears as what is. Such special effects happen intermittently at a number of sunken villages. At Vilarinho Da Furnas, flooded by the Portuguese Electricity Company, part of the village reappears in autumn and winter, and there is a nearby museum to tell the story. 123 At Kalyazin, in Russia, church steeples rise above the waves and bells, lost below the water, are rumored to ring out again. 124 In St. Thomas, Nevada, certain buildings remained visible which now include houses, a square, and a cemetery. 125 In Flagstaff, Arizona, a historical society archives and exhibits memorials to the sinking in 1949. 126

Llandwddyn’s first reappearance was in 1933, the year the Loch Ness Monster made news. Today visitors to Lake Vyrnwy do not have to wait for hot summers for the revenant experience. It can be imagined in viewing the engine house at the edge of the lake, which was built to look like a medieval, Bavarian tower. It is there all the year round and on a grey day, seen through enveloping mist, it resembles the spectral castle in Grimm’s Norse Mythology that sank under the waters. A photograph of the view is on sale at the hotel.

Dark Tourism History: Making the Dead Work for the Living

Encounters with forms of “engineered and orchestrated remembrance”—seen here as the defining features of dark tourism—have existed throughout history, and are ones that everyone has incidentally engaged in from time to time. The sepulchral features they comprise only became a prime consideration set in traveling and recreational tastes and practices in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This was because of social and ideological factors which included: the aftermath of pilgrimage, the growth of antiquarian tastes, and the many, revolutionary effects of Romanticism—particularly the discursive coding of landscape as travel spectacle with sublime and gothic, as well as picturesque, features. Romanticism and cemetery development also valorized the celebration and acting out of elegiac displays of sentiment at memorials and grave sides, encouraged in guidebooks, which became part of an aestheticized cult of “beautiful death” for which the Victorians became famous. 127 The recency of dark tourism as a named recreational form is why there have been, and continue to be, academic debates over its meaning, temporal origins (traditional, modern, or postmodern?), and its position in relation to other disciplines and travel concepts (heritage studies, human geography, the history of pilgrimage, etc.). A less-parochial issue is where its history is leading. In the past dark tourism has been mainly situated and studied as an agenda in the private sphere: the world of lifestyle, personal taste, and recreational choice. This may be changing. In the new millennium there are winds of ideological change, drawing it into a more public and controversial arena, that of “the politics of commemoration,” 128 a movement that began in academia in the 1990s as critical, postcolonial history, and has since gone viral in news agendas internationally. It has stimulated organized protests involving direct action at sites commemorating colonial figures and events through demonstrations, vandalism of memorials, and attempts to remove statues. Dark tourism has been, and will be, unavoidably affected, since its central activity is travel to view engineered and orchestrated remembrance that includes many such sites.” 129

The consequences may be two-fold. One is mounting threats to specific sites that may require protection, a contingency the English Parliament recognized in February 2021 in preparing a law making the taking down of monuments illegal without planning permission. The second may be the growth of a more informed, dark tourist, whose gaze is turned on those commemorated, but equally directed to the pragmatics of commemorative choices: who is commemorated and who might have been, but is not, and the features of their memorials (forms, events, number, siting, scale, etc.).

The sunken village material represents continuing research that dramatizes issues about the evolution of “engineered and orchestrated remembrance” as dark tourism’s “trademark” feature. Unlike death and the dead, previously assumed to be the visitor encounters in dark tourism, remembrance has no closure. It is always susceptible to change by the living. Over time remembrance of Llanwddyn went from being a traditional, rural village with a history published by the local vicar a decade before to obliteration and metamorphosis as a dam development. 130 It was then commemorated at different times as a necessity in regional water supply; a monument to British engineering; an elite sporting lodge and luxury hotel; and an intermittent, dark tourism phenomenon. The rediscovery of the photographic album offers a striking discursive text to add to those in circulation as supporting this emerging interest in sunken locations.

The case illustrates how what people and events are remembered at commemorative sites over time, reflect the interests, power, and resources of the living. It is they who metaphorically ventriloquize the form and content of memorial messages, through which the dead seem to speak. Sunken villages are new as collective, dark tourism locations. They may, however, be seen as a subset of a larger and neglected domain of spaces in the “politics of commemoration,” that of industrial devastation and fatality which for two centuries has included mining disasters, losses at sea, toxic factory conditions, transport accidents, and catastrophes of industrial pollution affecting human communities and natural habitats. These and associated effects of climate change, may in the future become more explicit agendas in dark tourism visits, not just as sights to see, but as lessons that stimulate reflection and engagement.

Further Reading

Curl, James Stevens.   The Victorian Celebration of Death . Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1980 .

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Curl, James Stevens.   A Celebration of Death . London: Batsford, 1981 .

Dann, Graham. M. S. , and Seaton, A. V. ( 2001 ): Slavery, Contested Heritage and Thanatourism . New York: Haworth Hospitality Press.

Hooper, G. , and J. J. Lennon . Dark Tourism: Practice and Interpretation . Aldershot: Ashgate, 2018 .

Lennon, J. J. , and M. Foley . Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster . London: Continuum, 2000 .

Lloyd, D.   Battlefield Tourism: Pilgrimage and the Commemoration of the Great War in Britain, Australia, 1919–1939 . Oxford: Berg, 1998 .

Macaulay, Rose.   The Pleasure of Ruins , 2nd ed. Thames and Hudson, 1964 .

Seaton, A. V. “ Guided by the Dark: From Thanatopsis to Thanatourism. ” International Journal of Heritage Studies 2, no. 4 ( 1996 ): 234–244.

Seaton A. V. “ Thanatourism at Waterloo. ” Annals of Tourism Research 26, no. 1 ( 1997 ): 130–158.

Seaton, Tony. “Cultivated Pursuits: Cultural tourism as Metempsychosis and Metensomatosis,” in Routledge Handbook of Cultural Tourism , ed. Melanie Smith and Greg Richards . London: Routledge, 2013 , 19–27.

Sharpley, R. and P. R. Stone (eds.), The Darker Side of Travel: The Theory and Practice of Dark Tourism . Bristol: Channel View, 2009 , 23–38.

Stone, P. P. , Hartmann, R. , Seaton, A.V. , Sharpley, R. and L. White (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Dark Tourism Studies . London: MacMillan, 2018 , 377–507

Wolffe, John.   Great Deaths Grieving, Religion, and Nationhood in Victorian and Edwardian Britain . London: The British Academy, 2000 .

1   Jafar Jafari   Encyclopaedia of Tourism : 578. (London and New York: Routledge, 2000)

2   International Journal of Heritage Studies 2, no. 4 (1996): 578. This is the issue that introduced dark tourism and proposed the two the main approaches; J. J. Lennon , and M. Foley , Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster (London: Continuum, 2000).

3   A. V. Seaton , and J. Lennon , “Thanatourism in the Early 21st Century: Moral Panics, Ulterior Motives and Alterior Desires,” in New Horizons in Tourism: Strange Experiences and Stranger Practices , ed. T. V. Singh (Oxford: CABI Publishing, 2004), 64–68.

4   James Moores Ball , The Sack-Em’Up Men: An Account of the Rise and Fall of the Modern Resurrectionists (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1928).

  Lennon, Foley, Dark Tourism , 3.

6   Chris Rojek , Ways of Escape (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993).

7   M. Foley , and J.J. Lennon “JFK and Dark Tourism: A Fascination with Assassination,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 2, no. 4 (1996): 198–211.

8   A. V. Seaton , “Guided by the Dark: From Thanatopsis to Thanatourism,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 2, no. 4 (1996): 234–244 ; A. V. Seaton , “Thanatourism and Its discontents: An Appraisal of a Decade’s Work with Some Future Directions,” in The Sage Handbook of Tourism Studies , eds. Tazim Jamal , and Mike Robinson (London: Sage, 2009), 521–542.

  Seaton, “Guided by the Dark,” 234–244.

10 M emento mori aids comprised a variety of literary and artistic texts, and artifacts that were read, worn, kept at hand, and studied including death’s head rings, desk-top skulls and other emblems of death. A major literary and artistic convention promoting memento mori reflections was the “Dance of Death,” a parade of people from all walks of life being led away to their doom by Death, a skeletal figure dancing ahead of them which was featured in books, drama, and dances. Ars Moriendi were Catholic texts on how to face and endure dying. The classic study of the genre is by Mary Catharine O’Connor , The Art of Dying Well: The Development of the Ars Moriendi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942). An account of the Ars Moriendi in England is by Nancy Lee Beaty , The Craft of Dying The Tradition of the Ars Moriendi in England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970).

11   Tony Seaton , “Thanatourism and Its Discontents,” in The Sage Handbook of Tourism Studies , eds. Tazim Jamal and Mike Robinson (Los Angeles and London: Sage, 2009), 534–536.

12   D. Joly , The Dark Tourist: Sightseeing in the World’s Most Unlikely Destinations (London: Simon and Schuster, 2010).

13   G. Ashworth “Holocaust Tourism and Jewish Culture: The Lessons of Krakow-Kazimierz,” in Tourism and Cultural Change , eds. M. Robinson , M., Evans , and N. Callaghan (Newcastle: University of Northumbria, 2002), 363–367 ; W. Miles , “Auschwitz: Interpretation and Darker Tourism,” Annals of Tourism Research 29, no. 4 (2002): 1175–1178 ; Lennon and Foley, Dark Tourism ; G. Ashworth , and R. Hartmann . Horror and Human Tragedy Revisited: The Management of Sites of Atrocity for Tourism (New York: Cognizant, 2005).

14   J. Henderson , “War as a Tourist Attraction: The Case of Vietnam,” International Journal of Tourism Research 6, no. 2 (2000): 97–117 ; D. Lloyd , Battlefield Tourism: Pilgrimage and the Commemoration of the Great War in Britain, Australia, 1919–1939 (Oxford: Berg, 1998) ; A. V. Seaton , “Thanatourism at Waterloo,” Annals of Tourism Research 26, no. 1 (1997): 130–158 ; A. V. Seaton , “Another Weekend Away Looking for Dead Bodies’: Battlefield Tourism on the Somme and in Flanders,” Journal of Tourism and Recreational Research 25, no. 3 (2000): 63–78 ; J. H. Iles , “Recalling the Ghosts of War: Performing Tourism on the Battlefields of the Western Front,” Text and Performance Quarterly 26 (2006): 162–180 ; J. H. Iles , “Consuming the Contested Heritage of War: Tourism, Territoriality and the Memorial Landscapes of the Western Front,” in Heritage at the Interface , ed. G. Hopper (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2018).

15   G. M. S. Dann , and A. V. Seaton , Slavery, Contested Heritage and Thanatourism (New York: The Haworth Hospitality Press, 2001).

16   C. Strange , and M. Kempa ,“Shades of Dark Tourism: Alcatraz and Robben Island,” Annals of Tourism Research 30, no. 2 (2003): 386–403 ; S. Hodgkinson , and D. Urquhart , “Prison Tourism: Exploring the Spectacle of Punishment in the UK,” in Dark Tourism: Practice and Interpretation , eds. G. Hooper and J. J. Lennon (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 40–54.

17   A. V. Seaton , “Thanatourism’s Final frontiers? Internment Sites and Memorials as Sacred and Secular Pilgrimage,” Journal of Tourism Recreation Research 27, no. 2 (2002):73–82 ; Tony Seaton , M. North , and G. Gajda , “Last Resting Places? Recreational Spaces or Thanatourism Attractions—the Future of Historic Cemeteries and Churchyards in Europe,” in Landscapes of Leisure: Space, Place and Identities , eds. Sean Gammon , and Sam Elkington (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 79.

18   Derek H. Alderman , “Writing on the Graceland Wall: On the Importance of Authorship in Pilgrimage Landscape,” Tourism Recreation Research 27, no. 2 (2002): 27–35 ; T. Blom , “Morbid Tourism: A Postmodern Market Niche with an Example from Althorpe,” Norwegian Journal of Geography 54 (2000): 29–36 ; Robert Ryan , “Standing Where Hitler fell,” Sunday Times , December 15, 2002, T3.

19   Graham M. S. Dann , “The Dark Side of Tourism,” in Studies and Reports, Serie L. Sociologie/Psychologies/Philosophie/Anthropology 14 (1998), Aix-en-Provence, France: Centre International de Recherches et d’Etudes Touristiques.

20   R. Sharpley , “Travels to the Edge of Darkness: Towards a Typology of ‘Dark Tourism’’, in Taking Tourism to the Limits: Issues, Concepts and Managerial Perspectives , eds. C. Ryan , S. J. Page , and M. Aicken (London: Elsevier Ltd., 2005), 215–226 ; P. R. Stone , “A Dark Tourism Spectrum: Towards a Typology of Death and Macabre Related Tourist Sites, Attractions and Exhibitions,” Tourism: An Interdisciplinary Journal 54, no. 2 (2006): 145–160 ; Rachel Raine , “A Dark Tourism Spectrum,” International Journal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research 7, no. 3 (2006): 242–256.

  Seaton, ”Guided by the Dark,” 240, 243.

  Raine, “A Dark Tourism Spectrum.”

23   Geoffrey Gorer , Death, Grief and Mourning (New York: Doubleday, 1965).

  Seaton, ”Guided by the Dark,” 243.

25   P. Stone , “Making Absent Death Present: Consuming Dark Tourism in Contemporary Society,” in The Darker Side of Travel: The Theory and Practice of Dark Tourism , eds. R. Sharpley and P. R. Stone (Bristol: Channel View, 2009), 23–38.

26   James Moore Ball , The Sack-‘Em-Up Men: An Account of the Rise and Fall of the Modern Resurrectionists (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1928).

27   P. Stone , ‘Dark Tourism and Significant Other Death: Towards a Model of Mortality Mediation’, Annals of Tourism Research , 39(3): 1565–1587.

28   Tony Seaton , “Purposeful Otherness: Approaches to the Management of Thanatourism”, in The Darker Side of Travel , R. Sharpley and P. R. Stone , (Bristol: Channel, 2009), 75–108.

29   P. Slade , “Gallipoli Thanatourism: The Meaning of ANZAC,” Annals of Tourism Research 30, no. 4 (2003): 779–794.

  Seaton and Lennon. “Thanatourism in the Early 21st Century.”

  Stone, ”Making Absent Death.”

32   J.E. Tunbridge , J. E. and G.J. Ashworth , “Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict” (Chichester: Wiley, 1996).

33   Tazim Jamal , and Linda Lelo , “Exploring the Conceptual and Analytical Framing of Dark Tourism: From Darkness to Intentionality,” in Tourist Experience Contemporary Perspectives , R. Sharpley and B. Stone (Bristol: Channel View, 2011), 29–42.

34   D. Light , “Progress in Dark Tourism and Thanatourism Research: An Uneasy Relationship with Heritage Tourism,” Tourism Management 61 (2016): 275–301.

35   Philip. Stone , Rudi. Hartmann , Tony. Seaton , Richard. Sharpley , and Leanne. White , eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Dark Tourism Studies : 377–507 (London: MacMillan Publishers Ltd, 2018).

36   G. E. Tunbridge and G. J. Ashworth , “Is All Tourism Dark?” in Dark Tourism: Practice and Interpretation , eds. G. Hooper , and J.J. Lennon (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 12–25.

37   Sharpley and Stone , The Darker Side of Travel Dark Tourism and Place Identity: Managing and Interpreting Dark Places , eds. L. White , and E. Frew (Routledge, Oxford, 2013) ; G. Hooper, G. , and J.J. Lennon , eds., Dark Tourism: Practice and Interpretation (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017) ; Philip R. Stone , Rudi Hartmann , Tony Seaton , Richard Sharpley and Leanne White , The Palgrave Handbook of Dark Tourism Studies (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

38   G. Bird , M.Westcott , and N. Thiessen , “Marketing Dark Heritage: Building Brands, Myth-Making and Social Marketing,” in The Palgrave Handbook , P. Stone et al., 645–665 ; K. Hannam , and Ganna Yakovska , “Tourism, Mobilities, Spectralities, and the Hauntings of Chernobyl” in, P. Stone et al. The Palgrave Handbook , op. cit. 318–333.

39   R. Sharpley , and Mona Friederich , “Genocide Tourism in Rwanda: Contesting the Concept of “The Dark Tourist,” in Dark Tourism: Practice and Interpretation , eds. G. Hooper . and J. J. Lennon (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 134–136.

40   D. Timothy , “Sites of Suffering, Tourism, and the Heritage of Darkness: Illustrations from the United States,” in The Palgrave Handbook , ed. P. Stone et al. (2018) op. cit., 381–398.

41   M. T. Clanchy , From Memory to Written record. England 1066-1307 (Blackwell: Oxford and Cambridge, 1993) ; Mary Carruthers , The Book of Memory. A Study of Memory in |Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) ; Janet Coleman , Ancient and Medieval Memoirs: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) ; Donald R. Kelley , ed, Versions of History from Antiquity to the Enlightenment (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,, 1991) ; Gabrielle M. Spiegel , The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

42   Michael Bentley , Companion to Historiography (London: Routledge, 1997).

43   Edward Said , Orientalism (London: Penguin Books, 1978, 1995) ; Edward Said , Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993) ; Homi Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1992) ; Homi Bhabba , The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).

44   Nataliya Danilova , The Politics of War Commemoration in the UK and Russia (London: Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, 2015) ; A. Erll, A. and A. Nunning (eds.), Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008) ; B. Graham and P. Howard (eds.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Heritage and Identity (Aldergate: Ashgate, 2007) ; A. King , Memorials of the Great War in Britain: The Symbolism and Politics of Remembrance (London: Bloomsbury, 2014) ; D. Viejo-Rose , “Memorial Functions: Intent, Impact and the Right to Remember,” Memory Studies 4, no. 4 (2011): 465–480 ; Craig Wight “Contested National Tragedies: An Ethical Dimension,” in The Darker Side of Travel , eds. Sharpley and Stone , 129–144 ; C. A. Wight , and J. Lennon , “Selective Interpretation and Eclectic Human Heritage in Lithuania,” Tourism Management 28, no. 2 (2007): 234–254 ; Paul Williams , Memorial Museums: The Global Rush to Commemorate Atrocities (Oxford: Berg, 2007).

45   Ludwig Wittgenstein , Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge, 1922). In this famous and formidable treatise on language, logic, and meaning, Wittgenstein started with disarmingly, simple phrases to engage the reader in pursuing a revolutionary track of complex, theoretical dissidence that was argued in several hundred axioms and assertions. The aim of the “Tractatus” was to demonstrate how the meaning of language was anchored in basic and underlying social contexts, not just a matter of formal, linguistic logic. “State of affairs” and, “that which is the case” were two of the phrases he used to contrast what he saw as the reality of language in actual use , compared to its status as grammatical and syntactical logic. The real “state of affairs” in dark tourism, it is here argued, is “remembrance” as the focal issue, not “death” as previously supposed. “Engineered remembrance” is the actual “state of affairs” confronting both dark tourism consumers and suppliers. “Remembrance” in material form, not “death,” is “that which is the case”—the de facto object of “the tourist gaze.”

46   Tony Seaton , “Patrimony, Engineered Remembrance and Ancestral Vampires: Appraising Thanatouristic Resources in Ireland and Italy,” in Hooper Lennon , Dark Tourism , 55–68 ; A. V. Seaton , “Encountering Engineered and Orchestrated Remembrance: A Situational Model of Dark Tourism and Its History,” in P. Stone et al., The Palgrave Handbook , 9–33.

47   John and Elizabeth Romer . The Seven Wonders of the World (London: Michael O’Mara Books Limited, 1995).

48   Jeremy Black , The British and the Grand Tour (London: Routledge, 1985) ; Edward Chaney , The Evolution of the Grand Tour: Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations since the Renaissance (London: Frank Cass, 1998) ; John Towner , An Historical Geography of Recreation and Tourism in the Western World 1540–1940 (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 1996) ; A. V. Seaton , in Keywords for Travel Writing Studies , eds. C. Fosdick , C. , Z. Kinsley , Z and K. Walchester (2019), 108–110.

49   A. V. Seaton , in Keywords for Travel Writing Studies , eds. C. Fosdick , C. , Z. Kinsley , Z and K. Walchester (2019), 108–110.

50   Paul Koudounaris , The Empire of Death. A Cultural History of Ossuaries and Charnel Houses (London: Thames and Hudson, 2011).

51   R. Fraser Rae , The Business of Travel: A Fifty Year’s Record of Progress (London: Thomas Cook and Son, 1891) ; John Pudney , The Thomas Cook Story (London: Michael Joseph, 1953) ; Piers Brendon , Thomas Cook’s 150 years of Popular Tourism (London: Martin Secker and Warburg, 1992).

52   Paul Westover , Necroromanticism: Travelling to Meet the Dead, 1750–1860 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

53   William Howittt , Homes and Haunts of English Poets , 2 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1847).

54   William Howitt , Visits to Remarkable Places: Old Halls, Battlefields etc. , 2 vols. (London: Longman, Orme, Green Brown and Longmans, 1840).

55   S. Carter Hall , Pilgrimages to English Shrines , vol 2 (London: Arthur Hall, Virtue and Co., 1853), 154.

56   Joan Evans , A History of the Society of Antiquaries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), 1–60.

Jonathan Skinner “The Smoke of an Eruption and the Dust of an Earthquake: Dark Tourism, the Sublime, and the Reanimation of the Disaster Location,” in Stone et al., 125–150.

Two of the sites that suffered most from take-away memento seekers were Shakespeare’s Stratford, and the Catacombs at Rome.

59   John Howes Gleason , The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain 22 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950), 22.

For Scottish lore and legend see, Walter Scott’s works which were intended to sell Caledonia to the world. His “Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border Consisting of Historical and Romantic Ballads,” first published in 1802 in 2 vols. in Kelso by James Ballantyne, was reprinted throughout the century. It abounds in battles, blood, and thunder.

Jaunting-cart in Ireland, camel rides during Holy Land tours, and pony trekking through Iceland, a land with few roads and no railways.

62 “The March of Intellect” was an ironical, journalistic name for the growth in popular reading in the 1830s brought about by technological advances in the speed and volume of printing, and reduced cost of publishing, Entrepreneurs like Charles Knight exploited these to democratize reading by publishing cheap editions of classic works, including Shakespeare’s works, and a “Penny Encyclopaedia” issued in weekly parts. The name was seized upon by graphic satirists like Robert Seymour and George Cruikshank who depicted dustmen reading books, cockneys discussing philosophy and politics. In London their caricatures were hung in shop windows, for the middle classes they were bought as single items or sets, but also hired in scrap books of caricatures lent out for dinner parties and chic weekend entertainment. Graphic satire offers the major artistic record of tourism taste in the 19th century; Tony Seaton , “The Tourist Experience in Graphic Satire 1796-1914”in Tijana Rakic , and Jo-Anne Lester , Travel, Tourism and Art: 13–34 .

63 There is abundant contemporary and modern literature on the Gothic. A classic, often revised, is Kenneth Clark , The Gothic Revival: Essays in the History of Taste (London: John Murray, 1928, rev. 1950 and 1962). Michael Charlesworth has edited a substantial compilation of extracts from Gothic texts: The Gothic revival 1720–1870 , 3 vols. (Robertsbridge, East SussexHelm Information, 2002). Britton’s life and career are described in his neglected, two-volume autobiography which includes a catalogue of his topographical works, as well as interesting contextual material relevant to dark tourism’s expansion on landscape, ecclesiastical illustration, and commercial engraving. John Britton , The Auto-Biography of John Britton , 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, 1850).

64 For Gray’s life, see Robert L. Mack , Thomas Gray: A Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000).

65   Ronald Fletcher , In a Country Churchyard (Batsford, London, 1976).

66   Ian Ousby , The Englishman’s England. Taste, Travel and the Rise of Tourism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 387–388.

67   William Wordsworth , “Upon Epitaphs,” in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth , ed. Alexander Grosart , vol. 3 (London: Edward Moxon, 1876), 25–75.

68   Montague Summers , A Gothic Bibliography (London: Fortune Press, n.d. [1940]).

69 The gothic has attracted exhibitions and an enormous and continuing literature since its appearance in the late eighteenth century. It was one of the first cultural developments to be named as an influence in Dark Tourism/Thanatourism ( Seaton. op. cit. 1996 : 237–238). Its history may be pleasurably sampled in many, modern illustrated studies including: Richard Davenport-Hines , Gothic Four hundred years of excess, horror, evil and ruin (London: Fourth Estate 1998) ; and, Terror and Wonder. The Gothic Imagination which accompanied a major exhibition at the British Library in 2015 London: British Library 2014).

70   Constantin Volney , Les Ruines ou Meditations sur les Revolutions des Empires (Paris. Translated into English 1802. [publisher?]

Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote the sonnet “Ozymandias” in 1817. It was first included in volume 3 of his collected, poetical works, chosen and edited in four volumes in 1839 by his wife Mary, the author of Frankenstein .

72 Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful was first published in an edition of 500 in 1757. It was quickly translated into other languages, achieving European influence. The best critical edition is by J. T. Boulton (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958). Earlier in the century the Sublime had attracted a book length study published anonymously in London with no publisher “A Treatise on the Sublime … Translated from the Greek of Longinus with Critical Reflections, Remarks and Observations, by M. Boileau, M. Dacier, and M. Boivin” (1712). Samuel H. Monk , The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, 1935) ; Richard John Hipple , The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetic Theory (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957) ; Marjorie Hope Nicolson , Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory. The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1959). A recent selection of short readings on aspects of the Sublime is by Cian Duffy and Peter Howell , Cultures of the Sublime: Selected Readings 1750–1830 (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015).

73   G. A. Walker , Gatherings from Graveyards (London: Longman and Company, 1830).

74   Report from the Select Committee of Improvement of the Health of Towns … Effect of Internment of Bodies in Town (London: The House of Commons, 1842).

75   Edwin Chadwick , Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain Supplementary Report on the Results of a Special Inquiry into the Practice of Internment in Towns (London: C. Clowes and Sons, 1843).

76 Pere La Chaise; Michel Dansel , Au Pere-Lachaise. Son histoires, ses secrets, ses promenades . (Nancy: Fayard, 1972) ; George Blair , Biographic and Descriptive Sketches of Glasgow Necropoli s (Glasgow: Ogle and Son,1857). For Sweden and Liverpool, see James Stevens Curl   A Celebration of Death : 151–154 and 206–210 (London: Batsford, 1981).

77   J.C. Loudon ,. On the Laying Out, Planting and Managing of Cemeteries and on the Improvements of Churchyards (London: Printed for the author, and sold by Longmans, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1843, 1981).

78 Since the 1970s James Stevens Curl has been a notable and continuing campaigner on behalf of historic cemeteries. His two most important book-length, general studies have been A Celebration of Death (New York: Scribners, 1980). The Victorian Celebration of Death (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2000)

79 Curl’s works on specific cemeteries have included: “Nunhead Cemetery, London,” Transactions of the Ancient Monuments Society 1980: 14–22 , 1980; “Northern Cemetery under Threat: Jesmond, Newcastle on Tyne,” Country Life , June 12, 1981: 68–69 [pages]; Kensal Green Cemetery: The Origins and Development of the General Cemetery of All Souls, Kensal Green, London, 1824 – 2001 (London: Phillimore, 2001). An extensive bibliography of Curl’s pioneering studies on cemeteries and funerary culture can be found at, http://www.jamesstevenscurl.com/james-stevens-curl-complete-works , accessed 18.6.22

80 The Association of Significant Cemeteries in Europe was inaugurated in Bologna in 2001. It quickly attracted 59 members, which grew to 130 in 99 countries by 2015, and numbered over 200 in 2020. See Mauro Felicori and Annalisa Zanotti, “Cemeteries of Europe: A Historical Heritage to Appreciate and Restore”; Tony Seaton , “Last Resting Places? Recreational Spaces? or Thanatourism Attractions? The Future of Historic Cemeteries and Churchyards in Europe” in Landscapes of Leisure: Space, Place and Identities , eds. Sean Gammon and Sam Elkington (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 71–95.

81 Anonymous, Herveiana (Scarborough: John Cole, 1823), 114–115.

82   William Andrews , Curious Epitaphs (London: Hamilton, Adams and Company, 1883).

  The Society for Preserving Memorials of the Dead, published from 1883 to 1885.

84   James Smillie , Green-wood Illustrated … with Descriptive Notices by Nehemiah Cleaveland (New York: Robert Martin, 1847) ; Mount Auburn Illustrated …with Descriptive Notices by Cornelia W. Walter ” (New York: Martin and Johnson, (n.d. [c. 1850]).

85   John Townshend , Sepulchral Literature: A Catalogue of Some Books Relating to the Disposal of the Bodies and Perpetuating the Memories of the Dead (New York, 1887)

86   John Edmondson , Death and Tourist : Dark Encounters in Mid-Nineteenth Century London via the Paris Morgue , in,, Stone et al., 2018, op. cit., 77–102.

87   Paul Westover , Necromanticism Travelling to Meet the Dead, 1750–1860 (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan).

88   A.V. Seaton , “War and Thanatourism: Waterloo 1815–1914,” Annals of Tourism Research , 26, No 1 (1999): 130–158.

89   Stony Seaton and Graham M. S. “Dann, “Crime and Dark Tourism: The Carnivalesque Spectacles of the English Judicial System,” in, Stone 2018, op. cit. 33–76

90   John Wolffe , Great Deaths Grieving, Religion, and Nationhood in Victorian and Edwardian Britain (London: British Academy, 2000).

91   E. Pierce , A Concise Biographical Memoir of George III … also an Account of his Lying in State at Windsor; the Procession and other Solemnities observed at the Royal Funeral (London: Sherwood, Neely and Jones, 1820).

  Wolffe, Great Deaths , 44–45.

  Wolffe, Great Deaths .

94   Lord Edward Gleichan , London’s Open-Air Statuary (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1928), xv ; Arthur Byron , London Statues: A Guide to London’s Outdoor Statues and Sculpture (London: Constable, 1928)

95   London County Council, Indications of Houses of Historical Interest in London , 6 vols. (London: London County Council, 1901–1930).

96 Memorials of the two World Wars have been well documented. They include Sydney Hurst, The Silent Cities: An Illustrated Guide to the War Cemeteries and memorials to the “Missing” in France and Flanders: 1914–1918 (London: Methuen, 1929, 1933) ; Philip Longworth , The Unending Vigil: A History of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission 1917–1967 (London: Constable, 1967) ; Trefor Jones , On Fame’s Eternal Camping Ground: A study of First World War Epitaphs in the British Cemeteries of the Western Front (Pinner: T. G. Jones, 2007) ; Gaynor Kavanagh , Museums and the First World War: A Social History (London: Leicester University Press, 1994) ; David Saunders , Britain’s Maritime Memorials and Mementoes (Sparkford: Haynes Publishing, 1996) ; David and Betty Beaty   Light Perpetual: Aviators’ Memorial Windows (Shrewsbury: Airlife, 1995).

97   Robert Hewison , The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline (London: Methuen, 1987).

98   Patrick Wright , On Living in an Old Country: National Past in Contemporary Britain (London: Verso Books, 1986).

99   The Guardian (2019): “Disaster tourism arrives in Whaley Bridge after dam incident,” https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/sep/09/disaster-tourism-arrives-in-whaley-bridge-after-dam , accessed July 28, 2020.

100   Rowlands, D. W. L. , History and Description of Llanwyddn and Lake Vyrnwy (Llanwyddn Parochial Church Council: Llanwddyn Parochial Church Council: Welshpool Printing Company, 1974), 12–15.

101 The Council kept a record of the development in a large album of photographs from which the four illustrations here are taken. One of the technical site visitors was G.F. Deacon a leading authority on water supply engineering who later praised it, See, G. F. Deacon , “Vyrnwy,” Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers , Vol cx1: 111–113, July; 1892. The dam was also described in a standard reference work on water supply which featured Vyrnwy as the photographic frontispiece, see W.K. Burton , (1898): “The Water Supply of Towns and the Construction of Waterworks” (London: Crosby Lockwood and Son, 1898): 76–78.

102   John Baynes , George Westropp George , and Simon Baynes , Lake Vyrnwy The Story of a Sporting Hotel (Shrewsbury: Quiller, 2019), 3–13.

Newspaper accounts and stories passed down to current residents have been identified, but the COVID crisis of 2020 and 2021 has delayed recording and analysis, planned for late 2021.

104   J. J. Lennon , “Dark Tourism Visualisation: Some Reflections on the Role of Photography,” in Stone et al, The Palgrave Handbook , 585–603.

105 The best-known graphic records of railway constructions are the lithographs of John Bourne , Drawings of the London and Birmingham Railway (London: Ackermann and Co. and C. Tilt, 1839) ; John Bourne , The History and description of the Great Western Railway (London: David Bogue, 1846).

108   Capel Celyn , “The Drowning of Capel Celyn,” Medium.com (1963), https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/the-drowning-of-capel-celyn-109496dc611e ; and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ui2rFSP6AM , both accessed March 11, 2020.

109   WebUrbanist, “Drowned Towns,” WebUrbanist (2014) https://weburbanist.com/2014/03/10/drowned-towns-10-underwater-ghost-cities-buildings/2/ , accessed May 12, 2022.

110   Bess Lovejoy , “Ten Drowned Cities You Can Visit,” Mental Floss , 2015, https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/66680/10-drowned-towns-you-can-visit , accessed December 30, 2020.

111   “The Ruins of Villa Epecuan,” The Atlantic , 2011, https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2011/07/the-ruins-of-villa-epecuen/100110/ .

Si Cheng (2014): “China’s Atlantis of the East.” Si Cheng was flooded in 1959 to make way for Qiandao lake (also known as Thousand Island lake) for the Xin’an River Dam project. Nearly 300,000 people had to relocate, some of whom had families that had lived in the area for centuries; http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20140711-chinas-atlantis-of-the-east , accessed June 8, 2022.

Potosi in Venezuela was flooded in 1985 but over the next thirty years the church spire has gradually emerged from beneath the waters; https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/drowned-church-potosi , accessed June 6, 2022.

Port Royal in Jamaica was a “sunken pirate city” that disappeared in the 1690s due to a natural disaster. Today most of the remains of the 17th century city lie under up to 40 feet of water. In 1969, Edwin Link discovered the most famous artifact: a pocket watch dated 1686, stopped at exactly 11:43; https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/sunken-pirate-stronghold-at-port-royal , accessed June 4, 2022.

115 “ “Flooded Towns of America,” Wikipedia, 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_flooded_towns_in_the_United_States ; Pinterest https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/347621664966005596/ , accessed January 21, 2021.

116   “Lost Villages of the St. Lawrence River, Canada’s Atlantis,” Global News , 2018, https://globalnews.ca/news/4369620/lost-villages-of-the-st-lawrence-river-canadas-atlantis/ , accessed January 1, 2021.

117   “Airtours,” Ar-Tour.com , http://ar-tour.com/guides/stories-of-submerged-towns-1/the-lost-villages.aspx .

Santorini was an earthquake disaster site in the past that has produced floods and sunamis. See, Jonathan Skinner, “The Smoke of an Eruption and the Dust of an Earthquake. Dark Tourism, the Sublime, and the Reanimation of the Disaster Location” in, Stone et al., op. cit. 2018 : 125–150. In the present Santorini offers tourists the double appeal of earthquakes and inundations as day tours. https://www.viator.com/tours/Santorini/Volcano-and-Hot-Springs-Tour/d959-156401P1 , accessed June 3, 2022.

120 Floods received brief mentions in James Frazer’s twelve-volume study of myths and superstitions, The Golden Bough (1890–1915), and extended treatment later in, James Frazer , Folk-lore in the Old Testament. Studies in Comparative Religion Legend and Law, vol. 3 (London: Macmillan, 1919).

121   Rose Macaulay , The Pleasure of Ruins (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1953).

  http://www.weburbanist.com/2014/03/10/ , accessed January 30, 2021.

Vilarinho Da Furnas Portugal had origins going back 2,000 years. It was flooded by the Portuguese Electricity Company in 1972. Parts reappear in Autumn and Winter. The Museum was opened in 1981; www.atlasobscura.com/places/vilarinho-da-fuma/ , accessed January 30, 2021.

Stalin ordered the flooding of Kalyazin in 1939 to build Uglich Reservoir. Submerged buildings have reappeared and Christian Services still take place inside the Tower; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uglich_Reservoir , accessed January 17, 2021.

St Thomas, Monument City, Nevada, was flooded in 1985 in creation of the Hoover Dam, leaving only the church steeple visible. In 2008 many houses, a square, and a cemetery reappeared; https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/indiana/underwater-ghost-town-in/ , accessed January 16, 2021.

Flagstaff was flooded in 1949 in the construction of the Long Falls Dam; https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/maine/underwater-city-me/ , accessed January 16, 2021. The Dead River Historical Society Museum includes a memorial exhibit to the “lost” towns of Flagstaff Village and Dead River Plantation; https://sites.google.com/site/deadriverareahistory/home/the-flooding-of-flagstaff/ , accessed January 16, 2021.

127 The sentimentalized aesthetics surrounding dying and funerary practices have been the subject of many studies, including those by James Curll,   The Victorian Celebration of Death (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1980) and A Celebration of Death (London: Batsford, 1981) ; John Morley , Death, Heaven and the Victorians (London: Studio Vista, 1971) ; and in David Robinson , and Dean Koontz , Beautiful Death. Art of the Cemetery (London: Studio Vista, 1996).

128 “Politics of commemoration,” and the related areas of “Politics of History” and “Politics of Remembrance,” have been widely debated by historians and social scientists since the Millennium. See six national examples at “Politics of Memory,” Wikipedia , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_memory ; and Maria Bucur and Nancy M. Wingfield , Staging the Past: The Politics of Commemoration in Habsburg Central Europe, 1848 to the Present (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2001).

129 For discussion of modern dark tourism and the politics of remembrance see, Tony Seaton , “Remembrancing, Remembrance Gangs, and Co-opted Encounters: Loading and Reloading Dark Tourism Experiences,” in The Routledge Handbook of the Tourist Experience , ed. Richard Sharpley (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022).

130   Thomas Henry , “History of the Parish of Llanwddyn,” Montgomeryshire: Collections Historical and Archaeological (Vol 4, 1873): 391–406.

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Dark Tourism

A brief look at the seedier side of extreme holidays..

Posted December 9, 2019 | Reviewed by Kaja Perina

In a previous article , I briefly examined ‘disaster tourism’, a form of ‘dark tourism’ and 'niche tourism'. Since writing that article I came across an interesting book chapter by the Slovenian researcher Dr. Lea Kuznik entitled ‘Fifty shades of dark stories’ examining the many motivations for engaging in the seedier side of tourism. Dark tourism is something that I have been guilty of myself. For instance, as a Beatles fanatic , when I first went to New York, I went to the Dakota apartments where John Lennon had been shot by Mark David Chapman . In her chapter, Dr. Kuznik notes that:

“Dark tourism is a special type of tourism, which involves visits to tourist attractions and destinations that are associated with death, suffering, disasters and tragedies venues. Visiting dark tourist destinations in the world is the phenomenon of the twenty-first century, but also has a very long heritage. Number of visitors of war areas, scenes of accidents, tragedies, disasters, places connected with ghosts, paranormal activities, witches and witchhunt trials, cursed places, is rising steeply”.

As I noted in my previous article, the motivations for such behaviour is varied. Those working in the print and broadcast media often live by the maxim that ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ (meaning that death and disaster sell). Clearly whenever anything hits the front of newspapers or is the lead story on radio and television, it gains notoriety and infamy. This applies to bad things as well as good things and is one of the reasons why dark tourism has become so popular. Kuznik notes that although dark tourism has a long history, it has only become a topic for academic study since the mid-1990s. Dr. Kuznik observes that:

“The term dark tourism was coined by Foley and Lennon (1996) to describe the attraction of visitors to tourism sites associated with death, disaster, and depravity. Other notable definitions of dark tourism include the act of travel to sites associated with death, suffering and the seemingly macabre (Stone, 2006), and as visitations to places where tragedies or historically noteworthy death has occurred and that continue to impact our lives (Tarlow, 2005). Scholars have further developed and applied alternative terminology in dealing with such travel and visitation, including thanatourism (Seaton, 1996), black spot tourism (Rojek, 1993), atrocity heritage tourism (Tunbridge & Ashworth, 1996), and morbid tourism (Blom, 2000). In a context similar to ‘dark tourism’, terms like ‘macabre tourism’, ‘tourism of mourning’ and ‘dark heritage tourism’ are also in use. Among these terms, dark tourism remains the most widely applied in academic research (Sharpley, 2009)”.

Kuznik also notes that dark tourism has been referred to as “place-specific tourism”. Consequently, some researchers began to classify dark tourism sites based upon their defining characteristics. As Kuznik notes:

“Miles (2002) proposed a darker-lighter tourism paradigm in which there remains a distinction between dark and darker tourism according to the greater or lesser extent of the macabre and the morose. In this way, the sites of the holocaust, for example, can be divided into dark and darker tourism when it comes to their authenticity and scope of interpretation…On the basis of the dark tourism paradigm of Miles (2002), Stone (2006) proposed a spectrum of dark tourism supply which classifies sites according to their perceived features, and from these, the degree or shade of darkness (darkest to lightest) with which they can be characterised. This spectrum has seven types of dark tourism suppliers, ranging from Dark Fun Factories as the lightest, to Dark Camps of Genocide as the darkest. A specific example of the lightest suppliers would be dungeon attractions, such as London Dungeon, or planned ventures such as Dracula Park in Romania. In contrast, examples of the darkest sites include genocide sites in Rwanda, Cambodia, or Kosovo, as well as holocaust sites such as Auschwitz-Birkenau”.

In relation to the reasons for visiting dark tourism sites, Kuznik came up with seven main motivations for why we as humans seek out such experiences (i.e., curiosity, education , survivor guilt , remembrance, nostalgia , empathy, and horror ) that are outlined below (please note that the descriptions are edited verbatim from Kuznik’s chapter)

Curiosity: “Many tourists are interested in the unusual and the unique, whether this be a natural phenomenon (e.g. Niagara Falls), an artistic or historical structure (e.g. the pyramids in Egypt), or spectacular events (e.g. a royal wedding). Importantly, the reasons why tourists are attracted to dark tourism sites derive, at least in part, from the same curiosity which motivates a visit to Niagara Falls. Visiting dark tourism sites is an out of the ordinary experience, and thus attractive for its uniqueness and as a means of satisfying human curiosity. So the main reason is the experience of the unusual”.

Empathy: “One of the reasons for visiting dark tourism sites may be empathy, which is an acceptable way of expressing a fascination with horror…In many respects, the interpretation of dark tourism sites can be difficult and sensitive, given the message of the site as forwarded by exhibition curators can at times conflict with the understandings of visitors”.

Horror: “Horror is regarded as one of the key reasons for visiting dark tourism sites, and in particular, sites of atrocity…Relating atrocity as heritage at a site is thus as entertaining as any media depiction of a story, and for precisely the same reasons and with the same moral overtones. Such tourism products or examples are: Ghost Walks around sites of execution or murder (Ghost Tour of Prague), Murder Trails found in many cities like Jack the Ripper in London”.

Education: “In much tourism literature it has been claimed that one of the main motivations for travel is the gaining of knowledge, and the quest for authentic experiences. One of the core missions of cultural and heritage tourism in particular is to provide educational opportunities to visitors through guided tours and interpretation. Similarly, individual visits to dark tourism sites to gain knowledge, understanding, and educational opportunities, continue to have intrinsic educational value…many dark tourism attractions or sites are considered important destinations for school educational field trips, achieving education through experiential learning”.

Nostalgia: “Nostalgia can be broadly described as yearning for the past…or as a wistful mood that an object, a scene, a smell or a strain of music evokes…In this respect Smith (1996) examined war tourism sites and concluded that old soldiers do go back to the battlefields, to revisit and remember the days of their youth”.

Remembrance: “Remembrance is a vital human activity connecting us to our past…Remembrance helps people formulate an identity , allowing them to learn from past mistakes, and to go forward with a clear vision of the future. In the context of dark tourism, remembrance and memory are considered key elements in the importance of sites”.

Survivor’s guilt : “One of the distinctive characteristics of dark tourism is the type of visitors such sites attract, which include survivors and victim‘s families returning to the scene of death or disaster. These types of visitors are particularly prevalent at sites associated with Second World War and the holocaust. For many survivors returning to the scene of death and atrocity can achieve a therapeutic effect by resolving grief , and can build understanding of how terrible things came to have happened. This can be very emotional experience”.

Dr. Kuznik also developed a new typology of “dark places in nature”. The typology comprised 17 types of dark places and are briefly outlined below.

* Disaster area tourism: Visiting places of natural disaster after hurricanes, tsunamis, volcanic destructions, etc.

* Grave tourism: Visiting famous cemeteries, or graves and mausoleums of famous individuals.

* War or battlefield tourism: Visiting places where wars and battles took place.

* Holocaust tourism: Visiting Nazi concentration camps, memorial sites, memorial museums, etc.

* Genocide tourism: Visiting places where genocide took place such as the killing fields in Cambodia.

* Prison tourism: Visiting former prisons such as Alcatraz.

* Communism tourism: Visiting places like North Korea.

* Cold war and iron curtain tourism: Visiting places and remains associated with the cold war such as the Berlin Wall.

* Nuclear tourism: Visiting sites where nuclear disasters took place (e.g. Chernobyl in the Ukraine) or where nuclear bombs were exploded (e.g., Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan).

* Murderers and murderous places tourism: Visiting sites where killers and serial killers murdered their victims (‘Jack the Ripper’ walks in London, where Lee Harvey Oswald killed J.F. Kennedy in Dallas)

* Slum tourism: Visiting impoverished and slum areas in countries such as India and Brazil, Kenya.

* Terrorist tourism: Visiting places such Ground Zero (where the Twin Towers used to be) in New York City

* Paranormal tourism: Visiting crop circle sites, places where UFO sightings took place, haunted houses (e.g., Amityville), etc.

* Witched tourism: Visiting towns or cities where witches congregated (e.g., Salem in Massachusetts).

* Accident tourism: Visiting places where infamous accidents took place (e.g. the Paris tunnel where Princess Diana died in a car accident).

* Icky medical tourism: Visiting medical museums and body exhibitions.

* Dark amusement tourism: Visiting themed walks and amusement parks that are based on ghosts and horror figures (e.g., Dracula).

Looking at these different types quickly I reached the conclusion that I would class myself as a ‘dark tourist’ as I have engaged in many of these and no doubt reflects my own interest in the more extreme aspects of the lived human experience.

Ashworth, G., & Hartmann, R. (2005). Introduction: managing atrocity for tourism. In G. Ashworth & R. Hartmann (Eds.), Horror and human tragedy revisited: the management of sites of atrocities for tourism (pp. 1–14). Sydney: Cognizant Communication Corporation.

Blom, T. (2000). Morbid tourism – a postmodern market niche with an example from Althorp. Norwegian Journal of Geography, 54( 1), 29–36.

Dann, G. M., & Seaton, A. V. (2001). Slavery, contested heritage and thanatourism. International Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Administration, 2 (3-4), 1-29.

Foley, M., & Lennon, J. (1996). JFK and dark tourism: A fascination with assassination.International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2 (4), 198–211.

Foley, M., & Lennon, J. (2000). Dark tourism. Annals of Tourism Research, 19 (1), 68-78.

Kuznik, L. (2018). Fifty shades of dark stories. In Mehdi Khosrow-Pour, D.B.A. (Ed.). Encyclopedia of Information Science and Technology (Fourth Edition). (pp.4077-4087). Pennsylvania: IGI Global.

Miles, W.F. (2002). Auschwitz: Museum interpretation and darker tourism. Annals of Tourism Research, 29 (4), 1175-1178.

Podoshen, J. S. (2013). Dark tourism motivations: Simulation, emotional contagion and topographic comparison. Tourism Management, 35, 263-271.

Rojek, C. (1993). Ways of escape. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan.

Seaton, A. V. (1996). From thanatopsis to thanatourism: Guided by the dark. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2 (4), 234–244.

Sharpley, R., & Stone, P. R. (Eds.). (2009). The darker side of travel: the theory and practice of dark tourism. Bristol: Channel View.

Smith, V. L. (1996). War and its tourist attractions. In A. Pizam & Y. Mansfeld (Eds.), Tourism, crime and international security issues (pp. 247–264). New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Stone, P. R. (2006). A dark tourism spectrum: Towards a typology of death and macabre related tourist sites, attractions and exhibitions. Tourism, 54 (2), 145–160.

Strange, C., & Kempa, M. (2003). Shades of dark tourism: Alcatraz and Robben Island. Annals of Tourism Research, 30 (2), 386-405.

Tarlow, P.E. (2005). Dark tourism: the appealing dark side of tourism and more. In M. Novelli (Ed.), Niche tourism – Contemporary issues, trends and cases (pp. 47–58). Oxford, UK: Butterworth-Heinemann.

Tunbridge, J.E., & Ashworth, G. (1996). Dissonant heritage: The management of the past as a resource in conflict. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Mark Griffiths, Ph.D., is a chartered psychologist and Director of the International Gaming Research Unit in the Psychology Division at Nottingham Trent University.

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Everything about Dark Tourism | Concept, Types, Examples

What is dark tourism.

Who are Dark Tourists? 

The term “dark tourist” refers to a person interested in visiting dark tourism sites and knowing about the dark past and a brighter future, where everything happened. This genre is getting increasingly popular among tourists from all over the world and might act as a factor influencing tourism . There is also an increase in searches for the term dark tourism and a few dedicated tourism management agencies, tour guides also exist. Guided tours help you to understand the very recent history, long traditions, exclusion zones etc.

Dark tourism destinations extend globally over 60 years, including places like Bogot, Colombia, Cusco, Peru, Bolivia, Togo, Chernobyl, Romania, Florence, Moscow, Camillo, and many more. All these sites focus on the strong links between history, disasters that they have incurred, have dark histories and are associated with death. A grief tourism destination for a dark tourist can advance and shape their travel experience when visiting a site. Therefore, a person’s identity comes into play when they visit these places. Dark tourism is often confused and considered similar to disaster tourism. Disaster tourism is the practice of visiting locations at which an environmental disaster, either natural or man-made, has occurred. The dark outcome makes it relevant when talking about dark tourism and discussing dark tourist attractions.

An essential quality of dark tourists is the desire to know tragic history and understand deeply twisted history. They have the perspective that the dark destination is a reflection of the past that needs more attention. That’s why they are attracted to these grief places. They have a natural attraction to sites or events related to disasters, war, or other natural calamities. More information is available in the video below if you prefer watching to reading!

Related Article: 6 Reasons Why People Pursue Dark Tourism

Types of Dark Tourism

Many objectives can drive the dark tourist’s motivation to visit any dark sites. Various types of tourism can be linked to dark places that are listed below. 

Holocaust Tourism

History is vast, which accounts for many intriguing stories. One such interesting and devastating time is World War II that is still remembered and studied. It holds a lot of death and destruction. Dark tourism mainly started in Nazi-ruled Germany. The dark sites of that period showcase the memorials, nature, politics, and the grief of children and citizens. 

The horrific stories prompted travelers from all across the globe to visit memorial parks and memorial museums, like Auschwitz, other Nazi concentration camps, or the Holocaust Memorial site. They highlight the remembrance of young and old Jews who lost their lives because of the execution by the government. The place also establishes a contrast between the past and the modern-day. The memorial site attracts a huge mass of events, and the photography becomes souvenirs for people. Movies such as pearl harbor also highlights some examples.

Two places in Poland that are worth mentioning in the context of Holocaust tourism are Warsaw and Oswiecim. Also, these places have served as a location for many big films to recreate authentic events of suffering. Warsaw is the capital city of Poland and one of the major dark tourism destinations. The people suffered the worst living conditions during the Nazi-led government, deportations during the Holocaust, infrastructure loss of almost all the old buildings, and inhuman treatment. 

Grave Tourism

Many people are drawn to visit cemeteries that represent a sad historical time frame. Some people might like to visit because it is a final resting place of a famous person. The burial sites give away interesting storylines that draw people towards them. These places tend to bridge the void between the present and the past, the living and the dead. Like Père Lachaise in Paris receives almost 3.5 million visitors per year. Other famous examples include Burma, Vandayasana, Weave, Cherub in Cambodia, and Garden Cemeteries of the Venerable Buddha. 

Heritage tourism:

Heritage tourism is not limited to travel, but it also gives an exposure to access and preserve the intangible cultural heritage. Any type of monument or heritage site that reminds people of a tragedy also gives knowledge about the context of events. The common ground of history combines heritage and dark tourism together. People travel there to discover the treasures of tragedy, war zones in the historic sites. For example, Auschwitz (Death Camp), or Vimy Ridge (war memorial) people get to know the history of a world war period and heritage through travel. Sedlec ossuary in the Czech Republic also can be viewed as an example. These areas are known to have long tradition and places historically important.

Heritage tourism boosts the local economy and enhances tourism development. All the hot spots of cultural heritage can become authentic potential destinations in nature. It also helps the tourist acquire knowledge about important cultural and historical places. It also gives a more profound sense of what can be preserved.

Communism Tourism

Even in the 21st era, a portion of the world is still under the control of communists. But it draws as an attraction for people to visit those areas and interact with the people, like North Korea. Also, it is impossible to know the natural history of communism in a country without seeing that place. 

Another example is Red Tourism, a subset of “tourism in the People’s Republic of China,” in which Chinese people visit locations that give a glimpse of Chinese Communism. It’s widely promoted to establish them as a cultural foundation for future generations. It is visited by many other people from Korean Peninsula and Chinese from eastern Europe. 

Battlefield Tourism:

The visiting of battlefields and war ruins, a dark tourism destination, is not new. There are World War One sites at the Somme, Verdun, or Ypres. Also, a recent example, the areas in the Falklands of the 1982 war are visited. There are also historical re-enactments in period costumes to give a real experience to the people. Mass graves and war zones are also popular examples of battlefield tourism.

Other Types

Other types and form of dark tourism include famous cemeteries, robben island, site of Vietnam war, site of cold war, bombing sites, dark fun factories and even London dungeon, morbid tourism, memorial park, nuclear tourism, slum tourism, macabre tourism etc. Tourists like to explore the darker side of such places and events.

Also Read: 5 Factors Influencing Tourist Destination and Tourism

Famous Dark Tourism Destinations:

Kigali genocide memorial, africa:.

The dark tourism sector is famous in Southeast Asia. Because of its fusion of rich heritage and tragedy. One such example was the Rwanda genocide in 1994. For about 100 days, members of the Tutsi minority and Hutu ethnic group were slaughtered by armed militias. It is estimated around 500,000 to 600,000 people were brutally killed. After these vulnerable stories came to light, people developed an attraction to the victims, which later generated tourism.

The Kigali Genocide Memorial has the remains of over 250,000 people. There is a visitor center for students and tourist who wants to gain more information about the events leading up to the genocide 1994. It is the principal entry point for foreign visitors and offers a few more sites that are worth exploring. Till now, this incident is a sensitive issue in Rwanda, and it is illegal to talk about ethnicity over there.

Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Poland:

People who were intrigued by the events of the World war will be familiar with the Auschwitz concentration camp. The German higher authorities established it in 1940 in the suburbs of Oświęcim. By 1942 it became one of the largest networks of Nazi death camps. The prisoners were pushed into forced labor, inhumane medical experiments, and mass killings. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum is a memorial and museum in the memory of the people killed in the camps. It is one of the major attractions of Holocaust Tourism. Also, Auschwitz is called the “epitome of all dark tourism.” 

Garden of the Fugitives, Italy:

Pompeii is a world-famous heritage site and attracts Italy’s tourist attention. Additionally, it is one of the most important archaeological sites on Earth for its Roman remains. The ancient town is famous for volcanic ash caused by the eruptions of Mount Vesuvius in the year 79 AD. Even after so many years, it is still well-preserved roman town in history. It was rediscovered in the 18th century with the excavation process going on since the 19th century. One-third of the site is still under the ash.

Many mosaics, cultural relics, and remains of human bodies have been found. The archaeologists poured liquid chalk into the hollow cavities left by the decaying bodies to showcase the look of petrified bodies. Some of the plaster casts show a facial expression of calm and falling asleep.

Chernobyl and Pripyat, Ukraine:

In 1986, Chernobyl witnessed the worst nuclear disaster. It resulted from a series of mistakes at the power plant that caused explosions releasing radioactive material into the atmosphere. The winds amplified the destruction by carrying the toxic air over Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, contaminating millions of acres of land that had to be permanently evacuated. Pripyat is also known as the ghost town where tourists worldwide flock to see the amusement park, a moss-covered Ferris wheel, and other examples that give evidence of how lively the town was before the unfortunate incident.

People visiting there get a natural feeling of erosion and disruption that could be seen in the atmosphere of a destination. Chernobyl has not yet reached the final stage of its development and introduction.  However, it is still gaining a  lot of attention from dark tourists worldwide, especially after the famous web series on this tragic event.  

Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, Cambodia

The Cambodian genocide at the hands of the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot is considered one of the worst crimes against humanity. The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum recalls the genocide and the torture of the victims in prison. It is located in Phnom Penh. The site is a former secondary school used as Security Prison 21 from 1975 to 1979. Around 14,000 to 20,000 victims were captured in prison and tortured. Almost all of them were ended up in the killing fields of Choeung Ek.

Be more educated on Dark Tourism, if it fascinates you

If you think you cannot wait to visit Chernobyl, hike in an authentic mountain in South Africa, visit Mummified Corpse and Museum in Phnom Penh or even attend a Christmas party haunted forest in North Korea. In that case, you are a dark tourist! And, it’s fine to embrace it. Heritage studies also dedicate some part of the syllabus to this field now due to increased academic attention.

Dark Tourism as a field of study:

Dark tourism is a self-professed destination industry and has been defined by the principles of importance, prestige, and high-quality tourism. Tourism research aims to understand society’s problems. It is an application to research the world’s problems from the mistakes done in the past, such as war and terrorism. There are over a million people who are dark tourists which is an evidence that dark tourism is gaining interest.

Dark tourism is known as ‘thanatourism’ in academic literature. It is a broader sense to understand the tourist thinking, history, and re-learning of the events that led to the destruction and later attraction for people. It also understands the effect of the resources in the economy and the upcoming environment. Therefore, dark tourism research is related to the development of the tourism destination. 

Many types of research are going for Tourism development in the context of dark tourism. The Institute for Dark Tourism Research (iDTR) is a world-leading academic center for dark tourism scholarship, research, and teaching.  

Travel Blogs on Dark Tourism:

There are many blogs on Dark Tourism to increase the knowledge about captivating stories of these destinations. They also give an insight on how to behave and follow the protocols on these types of destinations. it is also depicted in museums, historical and spiritual sites, theatres, films, which can give a lot of information. 

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• v.9(1); 2023 Jan

Dark tourism, the holocaust, and well-being: A systematic review

José magano.

a Research Center in Business and Economics (CICEE), Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa, Rua Sta. Marta 47, 5.° Andar, 1150-293 Lisboa, Portugal

José António Fraiz-Brea

b Department of Business Organization, Business Administration and Tourism School, University of Vigo, 32004 Ourense, Spain

Ângela Leite

c Center for Philosophical and Humanistic Studies, Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences, Portuguese Catholic University, Rua de Camões 60, 4710-362 Braga, Portugal

Associated Data

No data was used for the research described in the article.

Dark tourists experience negative and positive feelings in Holocaust places, suggesting emotional ambivalence. The research question of this study is, “is feeling well-being, as a consequence of dark tourism, a way of banalizing the horror?”. The purpose of this study is threefold: to provide an updated systematic literature review (SLR) of dark tourism associated with Holocaust sites and visitors' well-being; to structure the findings into categories that provide a comprehensive overview of the topics; and to identify which topics are not well covered, thus suggesting knowledge gaps. Records to be included should be retrievable articles in peer-reviewed academic journals, books, and book chapters, all focused on the SLR's aims and the research question; other types of publications were outrightly excluded. The search was performed in Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar databases with three keywords and combinations: “dark tourism”, “Holocaust”, and “well-being”. Methodological decisions were based on the Risk of Bias Assessment Tool for Nonrandomized Studies (RoBANS). This systematic review adheres to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. During the process, 144 documents were included, of which 126 were journal articles, 8 were books, and 10 were book chapters. The results point out a hierarchical structure with the main category (Dark tourism - Holocaust - Well-being) and three second-order categories (Dark tourism - Holocaust, Dark tourism - Well-being, and Holocaust - Well-being), from which different subcategories emerge: motivations for visiting places and guiding; ambivalent emotional experience that leads to the transformation of the self; and intergenerational trauma. The gaps identified were the trivialization of horror in Holocaust places; dark tourist profile; motivations and constraints behind visiting dark places; Holocaust survivors and their descendants' well-being; how dark tourism associated with the Holocaust positively or negatively impacts well-being. Major limitations included: lack of randomized allocation; lack of standard outcome definitions; and suboptimal comparison groups. Positive and negative impacts on the well-being of the Holocaust dark tourist were sought, as they are associated with the marketing and management, promotion, digital communication, guiding, or storytelling design of such locations.

1. Introduction

For a long time, places that have been the scene of wars, disasters, deaths, and atrocities have always fascinated people, motivating them to travel [ 1 , 2 ], giving rise to a type of tourism that has been addressed in different ways, namely, as negative sightseeing [ 3 ], black spots tourism [ 4 ], thanatourism [ 5 ], tragic tourism [ 6 ], atrocity tourism [ 7 , 8 ], morbid tourism [ 9 ], and dark tourism [ 10 ]. The term dark tourism , the most profusely used by the scientific community and the general public [ 11 ], was first introduced by Foley and Lennon [ 10 ], who refer to these phenomena as embracing “the presentation and consumption (by visitors) of real and commodified death and disaster sites” and the “commodification of anxiety and doubt” [ 12 ]. According to Stone [ 13 ], dark tourism is “an old concept in a new world”, and the novelty lies in the growing commodification of dark tourism sites; it “refers to visits, intentional or otherwise, to purposeful/non-purposeful sites which offer a presentation of death or suffering as the raison d'être” [ 13 ]. Dark tourism involves traveling to sites related to death, suffering and the macabre, a generally accepted definition [ 1 ], and disgrace [ 14 , 15 ]. Tarlow [ 16 ] suggests the phenomenon is complex by describing it as “visits to places where noteworthy historical tragedies or deaths have occurred that continue to impact our lives”, which raises the question about the inherent motives to consume dark tourism.

Stone's conception of dark tourism goes beyond its related attractions [ 14 ]. From his perspective, various well-visited tourist sites may become places of dark tourism due to their history associated with death – e.g., the Eiffel Tower (suicides), the pyramids of Egypt or the Valley of the Kings (tombs), the Cairo Museum (funeral art), the Taj Mahal (tomb), or Ground Zero (terrorist attacks) [ 17 ]. Ashworth and Isaac [ 18 ] also suggest that a tourist site has a higher or lower potential to be perceived as dark, evoking different experiences in different visitors (e.g., a site one visitor sees as “dark” may not be for another). Thus, the authors argue that no site is intrinsically, automatically, and universally “dark” as, although they may be labeled as dark, they are not always perceived as such by all visitors. According to Stone [ 14 ], the dark tourism offers fall within a spectrum whose intensity is positioned on a continuum between the darkest and the lightest, given the characteristics and perceptions of the dark tourism product. The offer ranked as the darkest in the dark tourism spectrum corresponds to sites where death, or another event involving suffering, occurred on a closer timescale. Those places hold greater symbolic meaning due to a stronger ideological and political influence, as they are evocative and focused on the conservation, preservation, and celebration of memory, and have serve pedagogical purposes. On the contrary, the lighter dark tourism attractions correspond to places that were originally conceived as tourist attractions, which explore the romanticized and commodified association or representation of death and suffering that occurred on an older temporal scale and, therefore, with a weaker emotional impact [ 14 ]. Light [ 19 ] posits that the existence of the “dark tourist” is questionable, in contrast to Seaton [ 5 ], who considers it central. Museums, memorials, cemeteries, prisons, battlefields, concentration camps, scenes of attacks and other tragedies, slums, and sites that intentionally recreate death and suffering can be considered places of dark tourism with different intensity levels of dark [ 14 ]. Whereas in some places there were, in reality, deaths and atrocities, other places are intentionally built to recreate dark events. Dale and Robinson [ 20 ] discussed the internationalization of the dark with the ‘Disneyization’ and ‘McDonaldization’ of dark tourism attractions. The growth in dark tourism demand [ 21 ] does not forget that death and suffering are increasingly transformed into a spectacle, largely due to the role played by the media and cultural industries, such as cinema, television, music, or literature [ 4 , 22 ]. Related exhibitions, museums, memorials, and television documentaries can be seen as edutainment; the “dead may be encountered for educational purposes” [ 22 ].

Dark tourism has become a field of interest and a subsequent debate, around the offer (supply) and demand sides, has focused on definitions and typologies, ethical issues, the political role of these sites, motivations, behaviors, and experiences of visitors, management, interpretation, and marketing [ 19 ]. Although some authors consider dark tourism as one of the oldest forms of tourism, it only gained popularity amongst academics from the 1990s onwards [ 23 ], confirmed by the growing amount of literature published ever since, which includes an increasing number of empirical studies on the reasons for visiting those sites [ 11 , 24 , 25 ], although still underdeveloped [ 13 ]. However, the understanding of the demand for this type of tourism remains an understudied area, poorly defined and theoretically fragile [ 23 , 24 , 26 , 27 ]. However, “a fresh academic wave, recently emerged, redefines dark tourism from the pilgrimage-based paradigm arguing that societies often elaborate shared discourses and narratives to placate the negative psychological effects of trauma” [ 28 ]. Biran and Hyde [ 29 ] moved beyond a discussion of classifications of dark tourism to the recognition of dark tourism as both an individual experience and a complex socio-cultural phenomenon, thus moving from a purely descriptive to an experiential and critical investigation of dark tourism.

Despite death being a part of the history of many dark tourism sites, it is not always the primary or explicitly recognized motivation behind a visit. Walter [ 22 ] states that most dark tourism is not specifically motivated, constituting only parallel visits inserted in a trip with a wider reach. The intentions to visit dark tourism sites could be related to dark tourism as an “anthropological attempt to domesticate death”, in contrast with the morbid nature of dark consumption [ 30 ]. Nevertheless, the literature suggests that tourists who visit dark sites are not a homogeneous group, and the factors inherent to the visitation are also not the same. Furthermore, the “darker” nature of the motivation can assume different levels of intensity. As such, in addition to the fascination and interest in death [ 5 , 18 , 31 ], the visit to this type of site is also motivated by personal, cultural, and psychological reasons [ 24 ]. Educational experience, the desire to learn and understand past events, and historical interest have been mentioned [ 19 , 26 , [32] , [33] , [34] ], as well as self-discovery [ 32 ], identity [ 26 ], memory, remembrance, celebration, nostalgia, empathy, contemplation, and homage [ 16 , 32 , 34 ], curiosity [ 32 – 35 ], the search for novelty, authenticity, and adventure [ 1 , 34 ], leisure [ 26 ], convenience when visiting other places [ 33 ], and also status, prestige, affirmation, and recognition that these visits provide [ 36 ]. To a lesser extent, the literature also mentions religious and pilgrimage reasons, feelings of guilt, search for social responsibility, or heritage experience. A death site is often viewed from the perspectives of religion and spirituality; dark tourists identify with the “belief, comfort, reflection, ethics, and awe on God and their relationships with other people”, allowing them to “understand the meaning of life, love, and living” [ 30 ]. Iliev [ 24 ] concludes that although tourists visit places related to death, they may not necessarily be considered dark tourists; as already acknowledged, those sites may not be experienced as “dark” by each visitor. It is, therefore, imperative that the so-called dark tourists are considered as such based on their experience. Some visitors may show a strong desire for an emotional experience and connection to their heritage, engaging, in the words of Slade [ 37 ], in a “profound heritage experience”; other visitors may be knowledge seekers, who are more interested in a knowledge-enriching experience [ 38 ] than an emotional one and look for gaining a deeper understanding. This latter perspective relates to eudemonic well-being, which takes place when one experiences meaning and self-fulfillment in life [ 39 ] and long-term life satisfaction and positive functioning [ 40 ].

Holocaust-related places attract many visitors and constitute a specific segment of dark tourism, referred to as Holocaust tourism by Griffiths [ 41 ], and are often seen as the darkest dark tourism [ 14 ]. For example, Tarlow [ 16 ] considered the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, a site that reached 2.2 million visitors in 2018 [ 42 ], as the pinnacle of European dark tourism. However, that site holds different meanings to people of different ethnicities and religious beliefs [ 26 ], which is reflected in the wide appeal of this site to a variety of people. All tourists to Auschwitz are usually seen as dark tourists [ 26 ], an approach that overlooks the possibility that the reasons for visiting and the experiences sought might be completely devoid of interest in death. In a study of visitors to Auschwitz, Biran et al. [ 26 ] reported that interest in death was the least common reason for visiting and that the main reasons were the desire to ‘see it to believe it’, learning and understanding, showing empathy for victims, and a desire for a connection with one's personal heritage [ 43 ]. Visitors to Holocaust-related sites may experience positive or negative impacts on their well-being [e.g., 44, 45], and positive and negative emotions may play a role as motivators behind visiting those sites [ 46 ]. A study by Magano et al. [ 47 ] found that people who visit more dark places and have more pronounced negative personality characteristics present higher values of tourist wellbeing.

Three main theories have been preponderant in studying the psychological well-being associated with dark tourism in the context of the Holocaust: i) Attention Restoration Theory (ART), ii) Stress Reduction Theory (SRT), and iii) Biophilia Hypothesis (BH). Attention Restoration Theory (ART) was used to elucidate the potential cognitive benefits of nature immersion. Ulrich's Stress Reduction Theory (SRT) focuses on restoration, which pertains to cognitive and behavioral functioning and physiological activity levels. Ulrich (1993) argues that humanity has historically spent most of its time in nature and that, despite modernization, humans have an inherent love of nature (i.e., biophilia). Consistent with this prominent theory, a systematic review by Shaffee and Shukor [ 48 ] established consistencies between research findings and the claims of the SRT. As with the previous theoretical frameworks, the Biophilia Hypothesis suggests nature immersion generates positive emotions.

A better understanding of the positive and negative impacts on the dark tourist's well-being could be helpful for the marketing and management of Holocaust memorial sites, as the promotion, digital communication, guiding, or storytelling design efforts could trigger visitors' interest and motivation for visiting the sites, thus increasing the number of visitors, and improving their satisfaction and well-being.

Is feeling well-being, as a consequence of dark tourism, a way of banalizing the horror? To answer our research question, we hypothesized that although dark tourism generates negative emotions, it also creates positive emotions that contribute to well-being.

The purpose of this study is threefold. Firstly, we intended to provide an updated SLR of dark tourism associated with Holocaust sites and visitors’ well-being. The second goal is to structure the findings into categories that provide a comprehensive overview of the topics. Lastly, the third goal is to identify which topics are not well covered, thus suggesting knowledge gaps.

The SLR includes contributions from 1985 to February 2022, namely, peer-review journals and books from reputable publishers. The paper includes a description of the applied methodology in Section 2 , followed by the presentation of findings in Section 3 , the analysis and discussion in Section 4 , and the concluding aspects, including a summary of gaps and possible approaches for future research.

2.1. Systematic literature review

A literature review is a fundamental component of any research study. It can generally be described as a systematic way of collecting and synthesizing previous research [ 49 ]; a systematic literature review can be seen as a research method and process for identifying and critically analyzing relevant research, as well as for collecting and processing the respective data [ 50 , 51 ]. Literature reviews “play an important role as a foundation for all types of research”; a systematic literature review could “serve as the grounds for future research and theory” [ 51 ]. An SLR is specifically helpful in pinpointing and assessing arising tendencies within multi/inter-disciplinary research, and it is more suitable for framing and synthesizing a considerable volume of literature [ 52 ]. From the relevant literature assessment and analysis, possible research gaps may be identified [ 49 ].

The “Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses” (PRISMA) presents guidelines that allow for a “more transparent, complete, and accurate reporting of systematic reviews” in a way that the methods and results of the systematic reviews should provide enough “detail to allow users to assess the trustworthiness and applicability of the review findings” [ 53 ]. The PRISMA statement consists of a checklist of 27 items and a flow diagram made up of four phases (Identification, Screening, Eligibility, and Inclusion); it aims to help authors improve the reporting of systematic reviews and meta-analyses [ 54 ].

2.2. Eligibility criteria

This systematic review adheres to the PRISMA guidelines [ 54 ], consisting of the mapping, analysis, and synthesis of the existing literature on Holocaust-related dark tourism and well-being. The criteria for the literature selection included articles in peer-reviewed academic journals, books, and book chapters written in English, published from 1985 to February 2022. The inclusion of records was not restricted based on when or where studies were developed; records that did not meet the inclusion criteria ( Table 1 ) were outrightly excluded. Methodological decisions were based on the Risk of Bias Assessment Tool for Nonrandomized Studies (RoBANS) [ 55 ]. The seven domains of bias addressed in the ROBINS-I assessment tool are: Confounding (selection bias, allocation bias, case-mix bias, channeling bias); Selection bias (inception bias, lead-time bias, immortal time bias); Bias in measurement classification of interventions (misclassification bias, information bias, recall bias, measurement bias, observer bias); Bias due to deviations from intended interventions (related terms: performance bias, time-varying confounding); Bias due to missing data (attrition bias, selection bias); Bias in the measurement of outcomes (detection bias, recall bias, information bias, misclassification bias, observer bias, measurement bias); and Bias in the selection of the reported result (outcome reporting bias, analysis reporting bias). Studies identified as meeting inclusion criteria were graded using the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development, and Evaluation (GRADE) approach, generating a quality rating for each article [ 56 ] the components of which are: problem; values and preferences; quality of the evidence; benefits and harms and burden; resource implications; equity; acceptability; and feasibility.

Inclusion criteria.

The primary objective of this review was to provide an updated SLR of dark tourism associated with Holocaust sites and visitors’ well-being. The studies had to include at least two of the following three aspects: i) dark tourism, ii) the Holocaust, and iii) well-being.

Dark tourism was defined as visits or traveling, intentional or otherwise, to locations related to death, suffering, the macabre, and disgrace [ 1 , [13] , [14] , [15] ]. Holocaust tourism includes the description of sites related to World War II and the atrocities perpetrated against Jewish and other people. Well-being is defined as the emotional, psychological, and cognitive aspects of a person's life [ 57 ].

2.3. Information sources and search strategy

Carrying out the Identification stage of the PRISMA process, literature was identified by searching within the following databases: Web of Science (WoS), Scopus, and Google Scholar. The searches were carried out by two researchers (JM and AL) who carried out the tasks independently. Three keywords were used in the search: “dark tourism”, “Holocaust”, and “well-being” (and the derivative “wellbeing”). Firstly, the researchers searched for the keywords together on Google Scholar's website, using the query string “dark tourism” and “Holocaust” and “wellbeing”/“well-being”, yielding 536 records. The same procedure was repeated on the scholarly database platforms of WoS and Scopus, searching abstracts, titles, and keywords, resulting in only one record from each database. For this reason, subsequent searches in WoS and Scopus databases combined any two of the referred three keywords. Keyword combinations are provided in Table 2 .

Database search queries (key word combinations used).

2.4. Study selection

Search results were downloaded and to increase consistency and confirmation, each researcher, using a complete list, removed any duplicates. The resulting lists were compared and consolidated into one main list. Ordered alphabetically, the list of articles was divided into two sets (A-K and L-Z). Two researchers (JM and AL) independently and thoroughly scanned the records by title, abstract and full text to avoid personal bias while ensuring consistency with the review objectives. The motives for exclusion of records at the full-text screening stage were in accordance with the GRADE framework. At the full-text level, article eligibility was decided collaboratively. A database of information, based on the data extracted from each article, included type of record, language, authors, title, abstract, keywords, number of citations, year, URL, and DOI (if available).

As a result, a total of 766 records were identified. Duplicates were flagged by comparing DOI identifiers and document titles. Each potential duplicate was manually compared, removed, and merged when necessary. As a result, 113 duplicate records were removed. The Identification phase resulted in the screening of 653 records. Then, 21 non-English documents identified were removed. The remaining documents were re-checked for isolating and all publications other than peer-reviewed academic articles, books, and book chapters (e.g., conference papers/proceedings, book reviews, editorial notes, reports, bibliography lists, no full-text publications, and theses) were excluded to ensure a consistent standard for analysis; 495 documents were considered for retrieval, of which 34 were not retrieved. Consequently, the eligibility of 461 retrieved records was assessed. After discussion and resolution of eventual discrepancies between the researchers, by consensus, 189 publications were considered eligible. The subsequent step of full-text reading led to the exclusion of another 68 documents, although they would have been useful to contextualize the review (these records are referred to in the Introduction section). The last step allowed the inclusion of 23 articles identified after the record references had been cross-checked. Finally, 144 records were included (each cited) in the review for subsequent classification and analysis ( Table 3 ). Fig. 1 depicts the PRISMA flowchart of the process carried out to identify the studies to be included in narrative synthesis.

Included publications.

Flow diagram of data identification, screening, eligibility, and inclusion process.

2.5. Study risk of bias assessment

This primary aim of the review was to determine the psychological impact on participants who visit Holocaust dark tourism sites from quantitative and qualitative studies. Secondary outcomes include other measures indirectly related to psychological well-being (depression, anxiety, positive and negative emotions) included in the studies. Quality was assessed using the GRADE system that provides a quality rating for each article [ 56 ] concerning consistency, precision, publication bias, risk of bias, and directedness. Of the 144 eligible studies ( Table 4 ), we assessed 59.72% (86 of 144) as weak (high risk of bias), 21.53% (31 of 144) as moderate (moderate risk of bias) and 18.75% (27 of 144) as strong (low risk of bias). Only six studies did not fall under any category and scored 3 (high risk of bias).

Studies by type of outcome.

Note. Multiple types of outcomes were found within individual studies. Categories were measured once within each study. Well-being included subjective self-report measures based on positive and negative affect, and mood. Dark Tourism included the description of the dark places where the study took place. Holocaust included the description of the places associated with World War II.

3.1. Descriptive statistics

3.1.1. year wise publications.

Fig. 2 depicts the publications spanning from 1988 to 2021, revealing a clear increase in recent years. About 77% of the publications included in the SLR were published in the last ten years, whereas 51% were published in the last five years, which signals the growing interest of researchers in the fields of dark tourism, the Holocaust, and well-being.

Distribution of included publications in the period 1988–2021.

3.1.2. Contributions from journals

The articles included in the SLR were published in 76 journals, 14 of which published more than one article, as seen in Fig. 3 . The journals Tourism Management (10), Current Issues in Tourism (9), and Journal of Heritage Tourism and Annals of Tourism Research (8) made the top-4 publishing journals, as nine journals were predominantly in the field of tourism, travel, and the Holocaust.

–Number of publications by journal. Note. The chart in the figure only includes journals (14) with more than one article.

3.2. Categorization

To answer our research question, we hypothesized that although dark tourism generates negative emotions, it also creates positive emotions that contribute to well-being. As such, we carried out our SLR to summarize the link between dark tourism, the Holocaust, and well-being.

The results of the systematic literature review carried out globally point out a hierarchical structure of the following categories identified: the main category (Dark tourism - Holocaust - Well-being) and three second-order categories (Dark tourism - Holocaust, Dark tourism - Well-being, and Holocaust - Well-being). Furthermore, from these three second-order categories, different subcategories emerge that represent the most discussed topics in the respective second-order categories ( Fig. 4 ). Therefore, we will analyze the main category and each second-order category separately.

SLR results: categories and sub-categories.

Regarding the second-order category “Dark tourism – Holocaust”, the sub-themes that deserve more attention from the authors are the motivations behind visiting such places and guiding. Concerning the second-order category “Dark tourism - Well-being”, the emphasis is on the ambivalent emotional experience that leads to the transformation of the self. Regarding the second-order category “Holocaust - Well-being”, the populations studied are mainly Holocaust survivors and their descendants, pointing toward intergenerational trauma.

3.2.1. Main category: dark tourism - holocaust - well-being

The main category resulting from this literature review is “Dark Tourism - Holocaust - Well-being”. Two major themes emerge from it: dark motives, dark places [ 82 ], dark tourism intensity [ 81 ], and another one related to the impact on well-being (negative and positive). Concerning dark motives [ 61 ], dark fascination [ 69 ], nostalgia [ 16 ], thanatourism [ 67 ], and the existence of the dark tourist [ 121 ] stand out, whose characteristics (possibly psychopathological) bring the tourist/person closer to this type of tourism. Dark tourism occurs in dark places (places alluding to the Holocaust), which are places of self-identity and self-reflection [ 82 ] but are also dark attractions in a continuum of intensity that promotes action (lighter dark tourism) or meaning (darker dark tourism) [ 81 ]. Moreover, this dark experience negatively impacts well-being, highlighting depersonalization [ 83 ] and moral panic [ 82 ]. However, it still also has positive consequences on well-being, especially recovery [ 186 ] and reconciliation [ 65 ]. Those positive consequences allow us to view dark tourism as being positive in its educational [ 2 , 80 ], cultural [ 15 , 62 , 80 ], and spiritual aspects [ 44 , 80 , 85 , 130 , 141 ], constituting tourism of reconciliation [ 65 ], episodic and hedonic [ 80 ] ( Fig. 5 ).

Main category: Dark tourism – Holocaust – Well-being.

3.2.2. Second-order categories

3.2.2.1. dark tourism – holocaust.

In this second-order category, “Dark tourism – Holocaust”, the different types of tourism according to intensity (lighter/darker) [ 14 , 187 ] stand out. It is also worth noting the different nomenclature used to refer to dark tourism (Holocaust tourism [ 19 ], difficult heritage tourism [ 94 ]), as well as the characterization of the dark tourist [ 7 , 26 , 117 , 121 ]. In relation to the Holocaust, its memory is preserved in places (or non-sites of memory) [ 114 ] and tourists appropriate this memory not only emotionally but also cognitively. Moreover, the literature highlights the controversy concerning taking photographs/selfies [ 91 , 110 , 115 ] in these places, either considering this practice disrespectful and inappropriate [ 115 ], or an active production of historical knowledge [ 110 ]. As a whole, this second-order category presents motivations, constraints, guiding, and Jewish dark tourism as subcategories. There is abundant literature on the motivations that lead people to visit Holocaust-related places [ 8 , 34 , 35 , 142 ], and some literature on the motivations for preserving those places [e.g., 104]. While the former is very different from the latter, from curiosity to the search for meaning, looking at the specific characteristics of dark tourists, the motivations for preserving this heritage are reduced to guilt, respect for victims, and economic benefits (Petrevska et al., 2018). With regards to the constraints suggested by the literature for not visiting these places (much fewer constraints than motivations), incuriousness and escapism stand out [ 83 , 118 ].

One of the subcategories of this second-order category is guiding, which analyzes the instruments available for contact between the visitor and the places. Essentially, the authors refer to the four realms of the experience model (entertainment, education, esthetic, and escapist) [ 106 ], theming [ 102 ], and interpretational tools [ 93 , 187 ]. Furthermore, the literature also discusses the roles of communication and information technologies in this activity. However, the binary paradox seems more salient in this subcategory [ 41 ], occurring in these Holocaust places, which often constitute repositories of artifacts in contrast with a history of absence [ 89 ].

Guiding is an activity that can lead to secondary trauma; educators [ 112 ] and guiding people [ 98 ], as well as Israeli soldiers (witnesses in uniform [ 86 ]) visiting sites of the Holocaust, can suffer from this secondary trauma. Dark tourism carried out by Jewish people often has a transformative effect [ 109 ], despite the negative emotional impact it can have on these dark tourists [ 87 , 107 , 108 ] ( Fig. 6 ).

Second-order category: Dark tourism – Holocaust.

3.2.2.2. Dark tourism – well-being

From the articles selected to be included in the first category of secondary dimension, Dark tourism - Well-being, two subcategories emerged. On the one hand, dark tourism and, on the other hand, well-being. With regards to dark tourism, two themes were found, namely: characterization of dark tourism as a type of transformational tourism [ 138 ] and the ambivalent emotional experience [ 85 ] translated by expressions such as: “emotional souvenirs process” [ 122 ], “emotionally laden” [ 131 ], and “emodiversity” [ 140 ]. Concerning the second subcategory, Well-being stems from the ambivalent emotional experience of dark tourism as a driver of the transformation of the self [ 133 ], as well as the “embodiment” [ 139 ] that allows the relationship between feelings and the body ( Fig. 7 ).

Second-order category: Dark tourism – Well-being.

3.2.2.3. Holocaust – well-being

From the articles selected to be included in the second category of secondary dimension, Holocaust and Well-being, two themes stand out: Holocaust survivors and Holocaust survivors' descendants and their well-being. While the literature presents the Holocaust survivors’ well-being as being both positively and negatively impacted, the descendants of Holocaust survivors only show negative impact on well-being. The negative impact on the well-being of Holocaust survivors is consistent with the survivor-specific effect hypothesis [ 154 ], marked by loss and lack [ 143 , 163 , 167 ]. This impact manifests itself through cognitive deterioration [ 184 ], worse quality of life, worse health perception [ 174 ], and mood changes [ 143 , 173 ]. However, these survivors also show well-being, despite the Holocaust, through proactive and cognitive adaptation [ 160 ] and socio-emotional selectivity [ 165 ]. In turn, the descendants of Holocaust survivors seem to receive intergenerationally [ 158 ], secondary [ 150 , 168 ] and sequential trauma [ 169 ]; above all, the negative impact on well-being following a conspiracy of silence [ 151 ] ( Fig. 8 ).

Second-order category: Holocaust – Well-being.

4. Discussion

Most people have never heard the term dark tourism, also known as “difficult heritage tourism” and “Holocaust tourism” [ 94 ]. However, they may have been to dark tourist sites where they fulfill their curiosity and have an authentic experience that is communicated by interpreting the place and context [ 101 ]. Also, these transitory spaces may act as important moments in dark tourism experience [ 36 ]. The dark tourism spectrum in dark tourism sites is a continuum of less dark to most dark [ 14 ]; according to Stone [ 14 ], the darkest tourist sites have a history-centric educational orientation and locational authenticity; the ‘lightest’ sites ‘dark fun factories’ are places where “death and suffering are the backdrop for tourism sites with a strong entertainment component” [ 187 ]. In fact, “it is difficult to interpret these impulses as more than the simple gratification of curiosity or (…) a more profound metaphysical gloss on it, for the purposes of considering their own mortality. Dark tourism has always existed in some form or other. What did not exist was the term itself [ 188 ]. Richardson [ 112 ], through the lens of ‘emotional labor’, studied how educators manage their emotions in situ, finding a “complex interplay of emotion work and self-preservation that results in educators variously altering the extent to which they are ‘present’ and how they choose to withdraw themselves emotionally” (p. 247). Tourist guides are subjected to a form of secondary trauma (guiding tourists across themes and sites of death, horror, and genocide); Leshem [ 98 ] coined this phenomenon as Guiding the Dark Accumulative Psychological Stress. Richardson [ 111 ] also studied the emotional experience of teenage visitors and found that young people experience their visit as “an incomplete and ongoing process in their learning” (p. 77). Applboim and Poria [ 86 ] studied a heritage tourism experience – ‘Witnesses in Uniform’ (a trip to concentration camps in Poland for Israeli Defense Forces personnel), having found that this journey was a reward for their subordinates' good behavior, with the aim of affecting their functioning as military personnel and as citizens. Despite all criticism, Oren and Shani [ 102 ] referred to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum as an example of a well-conducted theming with potential for dark tourism sites by reaching broad audiences and emotionally engaged visitors. Also, “participants' evaluations of seminars for European teachers at Yad Vashem indicate that the location is an important aspect of a meaningful encounter with the subject” [ 2 ]. Griffiths [ 41 ] identified a binary paradox of the guided group tours offered by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum: “the tours assert presence through artifacts, which diminishes a history characterized by absence; they are presented as vehicles of fact when they rely on fictional mechanisms for their narrative constructions; they claim to represent victims, yet employ problematic models of representation; and they assert the significance of the Judecoide, yet downplay the importance of the Birkenau site” (p. 195). The Four Realms of the Experience model (entertainment, education, esthetic, and escapist) [ 106 ] supposes that the more guests are engaged in the experience, the more likely it is that the experience is meaningful or transformational [ 92 ]. Theming consists of five principles: Theme the experience; Harmonize impressions with positive cues; Eliminate negative cues; Mix in memorabilia; and Engage the five senses - THEME [ 106 , 187 ]. The THEME Model [ 106 ] is based on a framework to develop a particular theme or motif for a site, a dominant idea or organizing principle that influences every staged element of an experience. Ward and Hill [ 187 ] stated that some interpretational tools enhance the visitor experience, as provocation is particularly well-suited to Holocaust tourism experiences because it allows visitors to think deeply about the experience. Fisher and Schoemann [ 93 ] proposed that visits to dark tourism sites with virtual reality should accompany current models of dark tourism and “utilize the affordances of the medium to facilitate new opportunities for ethical compassion and understanding in the mediation of mortality” (p. 577). Also, Krisjanous [ 96 ] stated that “websites are a reservoir of multimodal semiotic meaning” (p. 348).

“The attitude of locals towards dark heritage sites (…)” cannot be perceived “without understanding the attitude towards death sites and cemeteries in the cultural context” [ 113 ]. However, including places of death and tragedy in tourism product promotions creates many problems. Phelan [ 105 ] studied the relationship between dark tourism consumption and mortality within contemporary society and considered mortality contemplation a major motivation to visit dark places. Smith [ 115 ] identified three troubling features: the pre-internet phenomenon of dark tourism, the post-internet trope of ‘selfies at Auschwitz’, and genealogy websites. In contrast, Reynolds [ 110 ] stated that “tourists to Holocaust memorial sites become active producers of historical knowledge as they generate their own representations of historical trauma” (p. 334), reflecting on the authentic and inauthentic dimensions of their experiences. Also, Dalziel [ 91 ] revealed that numerous pictures taken at the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial site are not taken mindlessly and enumerated the reasons why individuals take photographs in those dark places: (i) visitors photograph recognizable sights as evidence of their experience, confirming they were there; (ii) aesthetically “pleasing” pictures that provide a distance between the photographer and the horrific views; (iii) educational role as they are records of the experience; (iv) celebrate the victims by apprehending other scenes of remembering: the placing of stones, according to the custom in Jewish culture; flowers and garlands left at locations like the Wall of Death; Jewish youth groups carrying Israeli flags, assembling to pray or celebrate the continuation of Jewish life; (v) express the value of life and survival through their pictures, standing as a testament; and (vi) visitors attempted to position themselves as prisoners and feel the emotions they may have had. Sendyka [ 114 ] considered that Susan Silas (photographer) problematizes the memory and identified various types of non-memory, whereas her camera is driven to places that are “the non-sites of memory” (p. 1). Also, Cole [ 89 ] explained the concept of memory tourism of absence (directing visitors to see the places where Jews lived before the Holocaust) and considered that it can and needs to be historicized. Lennon and Foley [ 97 ] reported that the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., contains more than 5000 artifacts (photographs, uniforms, letters, and a rail car used to take Jewish prisoners to the death camps), as this concern with replication is central to Holocaust memory. Hodgkinson [ 189 ] identified the moral dilemmas of Holocaust representation, such as its commodification for entertainment and tourism. However, according to Wright [ 116 ], if the brutal and murderous nature of humans continues, the potential for tourism in which death is a product of entertainment for a wealthy elite is a reality in the future. Auschwitz-Birkenau is the main example provided by researchers of the darkest tourism sites and was used to distinguish dark tourism and thanatourism; however, Mionel [ 100 ] found that dark tourism comprises thanatourism, but it does not constitute a distinctive form of tourism. Also, Light [ 19 ] considered that research had not yet demonstrated that dark tourism and thanatourism are distinct forms of tourism, and they appear to be little different from heritage tourism.

4.1. Dark tourists’ trivialization of the holocaust dark tourism

Our working hypothesis raised the question as to whether the positive impact of dark tourism on well-being is a way of banalizing the horror? The results of the systematic literature review do not allow the hypothesis to be confirmed, as the positive impact is almost always seen as the result of something transformative [ 92 , 109 , 127 , 133 , 138 ]. The trivialization of horror is not a new concept in the scope of dark tourism. In fact, and according to Heidelberg [ 95 ], dark tourism “commodification of death and suffering could lead to a trivialization of the dark event itself, a ‘Disneyfication’ of tragedy“ (p. 76). Also, concerning the Holocaust, Commane and Potton [ 90 ] stated that “the hint of pleasure in trivializing trauma and horror shows how generic narratives about the Holocaust are neutralized and mocked, even if the user (…) is fully aware of the cultural conditions, ethics, and conscience that shape appropriate response and respect” (p. 175). However, most authors approach the trivialization of horror from the perspective of the promoter of the tourist event or site and not from the point of view of the dark tourist, the only exceptions being those visitors who address the role of selfies and photographs in the context of dark places [ 62 , 82 , 115 ]. There seems to be a gap in the literature regarding the trivialization of horror in the context of dark tourism related to the Holocaust from the perspective of the dark tourist. Indeed, there are not many studies about dark tourists.

4.2. The impact of tourists’ personality dimensions on the ability to banalize the horror

According to Lewis et al. [ 99 ], dark tourists are “curious, interested, and intrigued by dark experiences with paranormal activity, resulting in travel choices made for themselves based on personal beliefs and preferences, with minimal outside influence from others” (p. 1); those that exist [e.g., 76, 126] focus on dimensions of the tourist's personality, per se, but do not establish the relationship between these characteristics and the ability to vulgarize or even neutralize horror. Beech [ 7 ] found two distinct types of visitors: those with personal connections to the site and those more general visitors. For the first type, a concentration camp is not comparable with other tourism products, but, with the progression of time, it is most likely that it will become a more conventional tourist attraction; for this type of visitor, a concentration camp such as Buchenwald exists in an ethical dimension. Also, Yan et al. [ 117 ] identified two types of dark tourists: the curious one that engages cognitively by learning about the issue and the emotional one that reacts emotionally to the “dark” space influence. Based on Deleuze and Guattari's work on aesthetics, Golańska [ 94 ] developed the concept of ‘affective aesthetics’ which refers to a “bodily process, a vital movement that triggers the subject's passionate becoming-other, where ‘becoming’ stands for an intensive flow of affective (micro)perceptions” (p.773). Those who are interested in experiencing the death and suffering of others [ 61 ] for enjoyment, pleasure, and satisfaction are dark tourists [ 121 ]. Furthermore, the notion of benign masochism describes a person's tendency to embrace and seek pleasure through safely playing with a stimulating level of physical pain and negative emotions [ 76 ]. Jovanovic et al. [ 126 ] found that Machiavellianism was positively related to the preference for dark exhibitions; psychopathy to a preference for visiting conflict/battle sites; and sadism was negatively related to the preference for fun factories as an additional type of dark tourism site. However, do these personality dimensions precede the ability to trivialize the horror? Another gap in the literature concerns the personality dimensions of the tourist who does not visit dark places, in light of what has already been studied with dark tourists.

4.3. Understanding the constraints to visiting dark tourism places

There are several reasons for tourist fascination with sites associated with death and tragedy [ 61 ], namely, the interest in specific macabre exhibitions and museums out of curiosity and interest in death [ 190 ]; the entertainment-based museums of torture [ 121 ]; the fascination towards evil [ 69 ]; the nostalgia [ 16 ]; educational purposes [ 2 ]; the interest in genealogy [ 60 ]; cultural interests [ 63 ]; and ‘pilgrimage’ tourism [ 64 ]. However, Sharpley's model [ 191 ], that integrated dark tourism’ supply and demand, stated that not all ‘dark tourism attractions’ are intended to be ‘attractions’, and not all tourists who visit these attractions are strongly interested in death. Ashworth [ 35 ] and Ashworth and Hartmann [ 8 ] suggested three main reasons for visiting dark sites: curiosity about the unusual, attraction to horror, and a desire for empathy or identification with the victims of atrocity. Other authors presented other reasons: secular pilgrimage; a desire for inner purification; schadenfreude or malicious joy; “ghoulish titillation”; a search for the otherness of death; an interest in personal genealogy and family history; nostalgia; a search for ‘authentic’ places in a commodified world; a fascination with evil; and a desire to encounter the pure/impure sacred [ 19 ]. Petrevska et al. [ 104 ] also found several motivations for dark tourism, such as guilt, interest in national history, the revival of a glorious past, economic benefits, display of sympathy, and dark tourism development. Zheng et al. [ 142 ] also found three motivational factors, the most important being the respondents' obligation to visit the site. The motivations found by Isaac et al. [ 34 ] were memory, gaining knowledge and awareness, and exclusivity. Also, Petrevska et al. [ 104 ] stated that the motivations for preserving such dark sites are guilt, facing harsh history, emphasis on dark tourism, the revival of a harmonious past, respect, and economic benefits. Brown [ 88 ] considered that “retail operations of dark tourism sites are highly complex and fraught with potential issues relating to taste and decency” (p. 272). However, there is not the same number of studies on the constraints to visiting dark places. Zhang et al. [ 118 ] studied the intrapersonal constraints to visiting dark sites and found four sub-dimensions: culture, emotion, escape, and incuriousness. Zheng et al. [ 142 ] found seven dimensions of constraints with the most important being an interest in other leisure activities. This asymmetry in the (greater) interest in the motivations behind visiting dark places to the (lesser) detriment of constraints raises some questions, namely, whether it is more difficult to access tourists who do not visit dark places than those who visit them. This gap in the literature (the need to better understand the constraints that prevent tourists from visiting dark places) prevents a broader knowledge of the true dark tourist.

4.4. Holocaust survivors and their descendants’ well-being

Holocaust survivors (HSs) (direct and indirect) presented worse well-being than the control groups. Fňašková et al. [ 162 ] found that the psychological and neurobiological changes across the life of people who outlived severe stress were identified more than seven decades after the Holocaust; severe stress in children and young adults has an irreparable lifelong effect on the brain. Also, Ben-Zur and Zimmerman [ 148 ] found that the Holocaust groups scored higher than the comparison group on ambivalence and negative affect above emotional expression and scored lower on psychosocial adjustment; the authors also found that the consequences of the Holocaust are unmistakable sixty years later, emphasizing the role of ambivalence over emotional expression in the Holocaust survivors' well-being. Amir and Lev-Wiesel [ 143 ] studied post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms, subjective quality of life, and psychological distress in a group of adults who were child Holocaust survivors and who were not aware of their identity. Results showed that survivors unaware of their origin had a lower psychological, physical, and social quality of life (QoL) and higher somatization, depression, and anxiety scores than survivors with a known identity. Jaspal and Yampolsky [ 166 ] studied how a group of young Israeli Jews understood and defined their ethnonational identities, focusing on the role of social representations of the Holocaust in the construction of Israeli-Jewish identity; three themes were reported: perceptions of the Holocaust as a personal and shared loss; re-conceptualizing the Holocaust and its impact on intra/intergroup relations; and the Holocaust as a heuristic lens for understanding the Israeli-Arab conflict. Shmotkin et al. [ 180 ] found that women were more likely to be Inflated (high happiness and high suffering) whereas men were more likely to be Deflated (low happiness and low suffering); it was more probable that Holocaust survivors would be Deflated and Unhappy in the negative though not in the positive moments. Weinstein et al. [ 184 ] found that concentration camp/ghetto survivors had poorer global cognitive performance and attention compared to individuals who were not exposed to Holocaust conditions. Isaacowitz et al. [ 165 ] discovered that socioemotional selectivity related to positive mental health in all groups besides the Holocaust survivors, who usually exhibit high negative affect, and social networks of other survivors also undergoing distress. Ohana et al. [ 174 ] found that the Holocaust survivors' subjective health was significantly lower and associated with decreased quality of life. O'Rourke et al. [ 173 ] found that levels of depressive symptoms reported by HSs were significantly greater than other Israelis and older Canadians. Canham et al. [ 152 ] found a higher level of subjective well-being among Canadians in comparison to both comparative Israeli groups HS vs. non-HS; also, depressive symptoms were significantly more elevated among female survivors than in the other two groups; the Israeli women groups had higher levels of anxiety than Canadians. Glicksman [ 163 ] examined the experience of Holocaust survivors in community-based and facility-based long-term care and found differences in certain aspects of mental health and emotional well-being and also found that these differences are associated with the lack of a network of family members as compared to American-born Jews. Shemesh et al. [ 177 ] found that elderly survivors were significantly more distressed than the comparison group. People in hiding, ghettos, labor, or death camps scored higher than survivors in countries occupied by the Nazis that bypassed those experiences; sleep disorders were more frequent among survivors than their counterparts. In addition, among survivors, social activities contributing to well-being were more confined. Podoshen and Hunt [ 107 ] studied why many Jewish tourists avoid tourism to historical heritage sites and found that some tourists avoid travel because of the paucity of Jewish life in the areas surrounding sacred sites, leading to the perception that anti-Semitism is still there. Podoshen et al. [ 108 ] studied the psychological processes of global Jewish tourists and local hosts surrounding historic Holocaust sites in Europe; they found the following processes: stereotyping, the perseverance effect, and the role of atypical information with consequences for collective memory and narrative. Podoshen et al. [ 108 ] feared that current Holocaust tourism and its marketing strategies might bring a disconnect between tourists and hosts in Eastern Europe. Podoshen [ 109 ] explored how Jewish Holocaust tourists organized discourses, made sense of meanings, and engaged with material geographies in an environment of renewed global anti-Semitism and found that certain happenings have a transformative effect. Blankenship [ 87 ] stated that many Jews feel apprehension about visiting Germany; however, numerous memorials and museums dedicated to the Holocaust assure Jewish tourists that the nation is devoted to educating and repairing their relationship with the global Jewish community.

Shmotkin and Lomranz [ 179 ] found that the long-term effects of the Holocaust on the survivors' subjective well-being are traceable but require a differential approach to the study groups and the facets of subjective well-being. Nevertheless, although Kahana et al. [ 167 ] stated that holocaust survivors living in Hungary experienced several postwar periods as highly stressful in addition to the trauma of the Holocaust, they also found that survivors living in the United States, particularly those living in Israel, portray better family life and social and psychological outcomes; on the other hand, survivors living in Hungary point to a lack of social integration and ongoing threats to identity, along with fears about the rise of anti-Semitism, as factors that may adversely impact the maintenance of psychosocial well-being. Bar-Tur et al. [ 146 ] found that past traumatic losses had an impact on well-being in the aging; however, while Holocaust losses had a negative impact, traumatic personal losses had a positive impact. Zeidner and Aharoni-David [ 185 ] found no evidence for the moderating or “buffering” effect of survivors’ sense of coherence (SOC), but supported indirect impacts of SOC on the relationship between memory traces of precise traumatic experiences and adaptive effects; it is very likely that survivors who had painful experiences throughout the Holocaust had to use their strength and coping ability and that prevailing during those horrific years, might have led to a more powerful feeling of meaning and coherence, leading to a greater sense of mental health as they grew old.

However, HSs present high life satisfaction; Bachner et al. [ 144 ] found that it may be not despite but because of experiencing early life trauma, juxtaposing early years with the comparatively good conditions of their lives today. Cohen and Shmotkin [ 155 ] found that Holocaust survivors reported significantly lower happiness in their anchor periods than the comparison groups; happiness and suffering in Holocaust periods (i.e., anchor periods during the Holocaust), when juxtaposed with happiness and suffering in non-Holocaust anchor periods (i.e., anchor periods which occurred before or after the Holocaust), significantly related to the survivors' present happiness and suffering. Elran-Barak et al. [ 160 ] argued that aging Holocaust survivors leaned to concentrate on more vital necessities (e.g., health); in contrast, their peers tended to focus on a broader range of needs (e.g., enjoyment). Aging people in Israel employ proactive (e.g., health) and cognitive (e.g., abiding by the present) adaptation processes, no matter what their known history during the war. Harel et al. [ 164 ] concluded that better health, lower emotional coping, higher instrumental coping, and lesser social concern were important predictors of psychological well-being in survivors and control groups. Amidst survivors, those four variables, together with being married, having more infrequent life crises, contact with co-workers, and not being surrendered to fate, explained 52% of the psychological well-being variance. Among control groups, these four variables, along with an easygoing personality style and good communication with one's spouse, explained 36% of the psychological well-being variance. Bar-Tur and Levy-Shiff [ 145 ] and Shrira and Shmotkin [ 181 ] found that even after immense trauma and rush decline related to old age, the past can hold life agreeable, as suggested by the more powerful relation of past happiness, compared to past grief, with life satisfaction. Nonetheless, past suffering was related to life satisfaction among the Holocaust survivors and displayed a more substantial effect among most old parties. Canham et al. [ 152 ] indicated that perseverance, survival, and resilience were essential to participants across the war and how these topics explained their choices and understanding of their lives. Resilience and remembrance are continuous and interconnected processes through which survivors adjust their previous lives to the present. O'Rourke et al. [ 173 ] found that early life trauma does not appear to fundamentally affect associations between reminiscence and health, as these findings underscore the resilience of Holocaust survivors. Barel et al. [ 147 ] studied the long-term sequelae of genocide and found that Holocaust survivors were less well adjusted; in particular, they showed substantially more posttraumatic stress symptoms yet remarkable resilience; also, the coexistence of stress-related signs and adequate adaptation in other areas of functioning may be attributed to the distinctive characteristics of the symptoms of the Holocaust survivors, who combine resilience with defensive processes. Finally, living in Israel instead of elsewhere can be a protective factor regarding psychological well-being [ 147 ]. Corley [ 156 ] discussed the intersection of the creativity and resilience of artists who survived the Holocaust and how these creative expressions have enhanced personal and community well-being.

The Holocaust disrupted the generational transmission of family health, and daily efforts are needed to invert the consequences of the Holocaust and establish relations with succeeding generations. Shrira et al. [ 182 ] noted that transgenerational impacts of the Holocaust may be more substantial among middle-aged OHS as they once suffered from early turbulent natal and postnatal conditions and now confront age-related decline. Nevertheless, middle-aged OHS may successfully preserve the strength they presented at a younger age. OHS, specifically those with two survivor parents, conveyed a more elevated sense of well-being but more physical health issues than the comparison group. Parental trauma incidents could evolve into family secrets, promoting the intergenerational transmission of behavioral patterns and suffering similar to the patterns seen in families where incest and violence have been transmitted across generations [ 172 ]. Dalgaard and Montgomery [ 157 ] carried out a systematic review of trauma communication in refugee families and found that a “conspiracy of silence” was the cause of suffering within the families of Holocaust survivors [ 151 ]. Bezo and Maggi [ 149 ] investigated the perceived intergenerational impact of the forced starvation-genocide and reported adverse physical health outcomes and adverse well-being across three generations. Primarily survivors' descendants declared that the mass trauma generated psychological, biological, and social processes that have negatively impacted physical health throughout generations. Dashorst et al. [ 158 ] studied the intergenerational consequences of the Holocaust on offsprings' mental health and found that parent and child characteristics and their interaction contributed to the development of psychological symptoms and biological and epigenetic variations; also, parental mental health issues, attachment quality, perceived parenting, and parental gender impacted the mental well-being of their descendants. Moreover, bearing two survivor parents led to more mental health issues than holding one parent. At last, Dashorst et al. [ 158 ] found that Holocaust survivor offspring showed a heightened vulnerability to stress in the face of actual danger. Letzter-Pouw and Werner [ 171 ] found that survivors' intrusive memories were related to the loss of parents in the Holocaust and their symptoms of distress. The latter was related to the offspring's perceived transmission of the trauma of the mothers, which was associated with more symptoms of distress among offspring. According to Letzter-Pouw and Werner [ 171 ], due to female survivors' uncompleted mourning processes and subsequent suffering from intrusive memories, the emotional burden of the Holocaust was transmitted to the eldest offspring and caused them more symptoms of distress. Kalmijn [ 168 ] stated that the hypothesis of secondary traumatization supposes that youngsters brought up by parents who were traumatized by warfare show more mental health issues than other children. Adults whose parents suffered from World War II held poorer mental health and underwent more negative life circumstances. Furthermore, traumatized parents have more unsatisfactory relationships with their children when they become adults. Bilewicz and Wojcik [ 150 ] concluded that the syndrome of secondary traumatic strain was observed among 13.2% of high school visitors to the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial museum. Furthermore, empathic responses to the visit to Auschwitz (e.g., more prominent inclusion of victims into the self) were related to increased secondary traumatic stress one month after the visit.

Felsen [ 161 ] stated that adult children of Holocaust survivors presented “accentuated sibling differentiation and de-identification, manifested in the respective family roles of each sibling, their relationships vis a vis the parents, and also in the siblings' general adaptation styles” (p. 1), accompanied by a negative quality of the sibling relationships. Felsen [ 161 ] proposed that “(dissociated) affects and enactments of un-synthesized parental trauma infuse implicit and explicit interactions in family life with survival themes and with intense concerns for the parents' emotional well-being and polarize normative processes of sibling differentiation” (p.1). Felsen [ 161 ] stated that resentments cause dissolution of ties between siblings and their families in adulthood as these processes are an “intergenerational transmission of effects related to parental trauma that extend beyond the parent-child dyad, influencing the matrix of relationships in the family-as-a-system, and damaging the siblings' bond” (p.1). Raalte et al. [ 176 ] found that the quality of postwar care arrangements and existing physical health alone forecasted a lack of well-being at an old age. Moreover, the lack of fine care after the ending of World War II is related to lower youngest Holocaust child survivors' well-being, even after an intervening time span of six decades, validating Keilson's idea of sequential traumatization [ 169 ] enhancing after-trauma care in lowering the consequence of early childhood trauma. Weinberg and Cummins [ 183 ] found that offspring of Holocaust survivors (with two survivor parents) reported lower general positive mood than non-OHS. Oren and Shavit [ 175 ] examined how the Subjective Holocaust Influence Level (SHIL) of Holocaust survivors' offspring (OHS) is reflected in their daily life, habits, and well-being and found that higher SHIL correlated with increased worry, as they are more suspicious of others, have higher anxiety concerns about the future, feel the need to survive, risk aversion, self-rated health, and unwillingness to discard food. Kidron et al. [ 170 ] questioned the pathologized and vulnerable descendants of the Holocaust and found unique local configurations of emotional vulnerability and strength in these descendants. “Respondents normalize and valorize emotional wounds describing them as a “scratch” and as a “badge of honor” (…). Results point to ways that resilience and vulnerability may interact, qualifying one another in the process of meaning-making” (p. 1). Diamond and Ronel [ 159 ] started from the principle that forgiveness is effective in helping to reduce anger, stress, and despair and in cultivating an overall sense of well-being following man-made traumatic experiences and studied the case of Eva Mozes-Kor, a child Holocaust survivor and a “Mengele twin,” who extended forgiveness to her direct perpetrators. Findings indicate a life-changing conversion with the lasting effects of high interpersonal, intrapersonal, and spiritual integration levels. Carbone [ 153 ] questioned the causal relationship between the representation of war and the promotion of peace and suggested the use of the ‘the forgiveness model’ to give rise to a different kind of war museum narrative along with a “theoretical model on tourism and peace based on the conception of war-related attractions as local infrastructures for peace” (p. 565). Vollhardt et al. [ 178 ] carried out four experiments in the context of dark events (namely, the Holocaust) and studied the consequences of experiencing acknowledgment (as opposed to the lack of acknowledgment) of documented ingroup victimization on psychological well-being and intergroup concerns. Players in the acknowledgment condition noted higher psychological well-being and remarkable readiness to reconcile with the former perpetrator group compared to participants in the no acknowledgment condition and a neutral baseline control condition. In short, although some authors found a negative impact on the well-being of Holocaust survivors, others managed to find positive aspects despite the negative ones. However, when addressing the well-being of the survivors' descendants, most authors find a negative impact of this transgenerationality on well-being. This “apparent” contradiction may constitute another gap in the literature, with the need to study the few survivors that remain and their own descent.

4.5. Holocaust dark tourism's positive and negative impacts on well-being

Dark tourism's negative impact on well-being is well documented. The literature presents the negative impact of dark tourism on well-being; the negative and positive aspects; and, finally, the positive aspects.

Sharpley and Stone [ 1 ] identified five factors that ensure the effectiveness of heritage sites (the nature of the cruelty perpetrated; the nature of the victims; the nature of the perpetrators; the high-profile visibility of the original event; and the survival of the record), by ensuring emotional impact. Liyanage et al. [ 72 ] showed that the feelings of sadness, depression, anger, and existential questions could haunt visitors for some time after visiting a concentration camp. Abraham et al. [ 58 ] studied the emotions of the victims' descendants in visiting dark tourism sites and found that the image of these sites was a mediator between emotions of animosity and grief. Bauer [ 59 ] studied the impact of death as an attraction of travelers whose scars remain invisible, especially on those with a diagnosed mental illness. Moreover, Prayag et al. [ 77 ] apprised mortality salience and significance in life for locals visiting dark tourism sites. Finally, Zhang et al. [ 83 ] stated that self-categorization was evident in visitors' experience of disaster sites, as depersonalizing statements tended to be other-focused. According to Knudsen and Waade [ 67 ], thanatourism is a means of producing ‘authentic feelings’, as visiting thanatouristic sites triggers certain emotions [ 192 ], namely, ‘dark’ emotions [e.g., pain, horror, sadness; [ 193 ]]. Wight [ 82 ] stated that besides emotions typically identified in studies of dark tourism (e.g., sadness, empathy), there is some moral panic towards ‘other’ tourists at Holocaust heritage sites and anxieties towards the Holocaust spaces as tourist attractions. Wight [ 82 ] discussed the selfies at Holocaust memorial sites, considering them an offense and a normalized form of self-expression; Wight [ 82 ] also considered that museums are places of ‘self-identity work’ and profound self-reflection. However, simplistic interpretations of dark selfies deny the complexity of the “trauma selfie as a cultural practice and what this act might reveal about new modes of witnessing stemming from new technologies” [ 62 ].

However, Kidron [ 66 ] found that “co-presence in sites of atrocity enables the performance of survivor emotions tacitly present in the home, thereby evoking descendant empathy and identification” (p. 175). Also, Nawijn and Fricke [ 74 ] showed that visitor emotions in a concentration camp are more intensely negative than positive emotions, despite certain negative emotions also having the power to broaden and build. Liyanage et al. [ 72 ] also found that other forms of existential self-reflection were common, including a sense of appreciation for the value of life, freedom, and quality of life. Oren et al. [ 103 ] reported the co-existence of positive/ pleasant and negative/ unpleasant emotions such as pride, satisfaction, frustration, sadness, and anger that emerge at a heritage site, yet expressed the centrality of negative emotions. Oren et al. [ 44 ] found that negative emotions contribute to visitors’ satisfaction, and the perceived benefits derived from the visit. Furthermore, it is important to “reveal how the balance between fear and loathing, and laughter and liking are reconciled in the dark tourism experience” [ 78 ]. Nawijn et al. [ 75 ] stated that the effects of personality on meaning in life were marginal; only emotion of interest positively contributes to finding positive meaning in life. Also, Nawijn et al. [ 46 ] found that although most respondents expect to feel disgust, shock, compassion, and sadness, individuals close to the Holocaust expect to feel most emotions more intensely (mainly positive emotions, such as pride, love, joy, inspiration, excitement, and affection); from the viewpoint of the offenders, they mainly expect to feel negative emotions, whereas from the point of view of the victims, they also expect positive emotions. Concerning the positive impact of dark tourism on well-being, Smith and Diekmann [ 80 ] demonstrated the complexity of the relationship between well-being and tourism with a diversity of experiences: (i) episodic, hedonic forms of tourism; (ii) educational, cultural tourism; (iii) spiritual pilgrimage trips that enhance a sense of existential authenticity; and (iv) trips that imply altruistic or ethical dimensions (e.g., volunteer tourism).

Several authors tried to answer the question of how dark tourism can convey well-being: some see dark tourism as a mechanism of resilience that helps a community to recover after a disaster; others see the pedagogical functions of dark tourism as a way to develop empathy with the Other's pain [ 79 ]. Other authors considered that dark tourism improves tourists' emotional and spiritual well-being [ 44 , 130 ]. Reconciliation is the common aim of the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, based on the Holocaust, the New York Tolerance Center, and the Jerusalem Centre for Human Dignity, as it improves well-being, as interpretation is central to reconciliation [ 65 ]. According to Wang et al. [ 194 ], interpretation quality is essential for tourists to appreciate the benefits of dark tourism sites; besides, dark tourists' interpretation satisfaction and benefits gained will positively impact their overall satisfaction. Some criteria must be observed in the tourism of reconciliation, namely, location (a site to which visitors are attracted), presentation (should ensure a sense of place), development and maintenance (especially through donation), and collaboration with non-tourism interests [ 65 ]. Wang et al. [ 194 ] also identified some benefits of dark tourism: individual spiritual sublimation and thoughts and feelings for the collective and the country. Social capital happens through social interaction and ultimately contributes to community well-being [Bowdin, 2011, cit in 186]. According to Wang et al. [ 194 ], interpretation quality is an important antecedent for tourists to appreciate the benefits they obtained from dark tourism sites; in addition, their interpretation satisfaction and benefits gained will positively impact their overall satisfaction.

Lacanienta et al. [ 45 ] found that lighter dark tourism experiences (e.g., execution square and the ghost tour) were more affectively pleasing and raised a stronger sense of agency (inclination to act) than darker tourism experiences; the latter (e.g., Auschwitz and Schindler's Factory) were more provocative, valued, and meaningful. Also, Lee and Jeong [ 68 ] found that a sense of sadness contributes to establishing meaning [ 46 ]; some tourists reported less satisfaction when a visit is not ‘sad enough’ [ 118 ]. “Indeed, consuming dark tourism may allow the individual a sense of meaning and understanding of past disaster and macabre events that have perturbed life projects” [ 1 ]. Human identity could become salient during the Holocaust [ 195 ], contributing to the psychological shift [ 84 ]. Zheng et al. [ 85 ] stated that positive emotional experiences (i.e., appreciation) have a direct positive effect on spiritual meaning, but not negative emotional experiences: sorrow, shock, and depression only indirectly create meaning. Lin and Nawijn [ 70 ] stated that positive emotions fluctuate during the tourist experience, peaking during vacation [ 73 ]; negative emotions remain less intense and constant throughout vacations [ 71 ], except in specific contexts, such as in darker forms of dark tourism [ 74 ].

Nawijn and Fricke [ 74 ] consider that dark tourism is emotionally laden, as experiencing it is subjective and personal [ 131 ], and includes positive and negative experiences [ 124 , 134 , 135 ]. Cave and Buda [ 122 ] called it the “emotional souvenirs process” (p. 707–726). According to Wang et al. [ 140 ], emodiversity is an empirical construct in tourism stating that tourists experience diverse emotions when traveling; also, emodiversity (involving positive or negative emotions) is consistently linked to greater well-being. Wang et al. [ 140 ] claim positive outcomes of negative emotions: when tourists experience several negative emotions, they are less likely to be dominated by detrimental emotions (e.g., anxiety), and they are more likely to show adequate cognitive resources to catharsis and achieve self-enhancement. Also, Nawijn and Biran [ 133 ] found that negative emotions are part of the tourist experience, specifically in dark tourism and trips concerning the changeover of the self; undoubtedly, the authors found that negative emotions have numerous positive results in hedonic and non-hedonic tourism contexts; similarly, negative emotions contribute to eudaimonic experiences by involving various types of meaning in life. Sharpley and Stone [ 136 ] wondered why tourism, a form of contemporary consumption, has come to be considered a potential source of happiness and well-being. Undoubtedly, in dark tourism, emotional value was found to be the strongest influencer of satisfaction [ 134 ]. At the same time, dark tourism sites contribute to the well-being of residents by becoming a place for reflection and assessment of one's journey of recovery post-disaster [ 125 ].

Accordingly, Laing and Frost [ 128 ] and Martini and Buda [ 131 ] stated that there are psychological benefits from engagement in dark tourism experiences [ 119 ]: to fulfill an obligation, develop the memory, become resilient, escape, relax [ 118 ], and to confront personal fears of death [ 19 ]. In addition, dark tourism develops curiosity and satisfies the desire for knowledge of past suffering and pain [ 136 ]. Zheng et al. [ 85 ] stated that dark tourism experiences raise a mixed and ambivalent emotional experience and confirmed the usefulness of these experiences for the five emotions: fear, sorrow, shock, appreciation, and depression. Wang et al. [ 141 ] studied the awe emotion in dark tourist destinations and found that the experience of authenticity is one of the antecedents of this emotion.

According to Magee and Gilmore [ 130 ], heritage sites no longer want to be seen as dark places; they want to become sites of sensitive heritage focused on visitor and social engagement. Understanding how service organizations may improve the welfare of individuals and communities is important to promoting human well-being and is the aspiration of transformative service research [ 130 ]. Transformative tourism is a process where tourists engage in an inner journey [ 138 ] as a part of the awakening of consciousness, creating more self-awareness, self-inquiry into the purpose of life, and living by a higher set of values [ 137 ]. Collins [ 123 ] studied the symbols and images that transformed tourists associate with their life-changing experiences [ 127 ], after creating a list of ingredients that must be present for any ritual interaction to be successful, which applies to creating a transformative tourism experience. Tourists' emotional experience can be strengthened by acquiring knowledge and contact with tangible objects [ 121 ]. If tourists perceive their visit to dark tourism as valuable, their satisfaction level will increase [ 134 ]. Indeed, the goal of self-search is an existential search for happiness, well-being, and life satisfaction [ 132 ].

The concept of embodiment studied the connection between feeling and body in dark tourism [ 139 ]. In embodiment cognition theory, sensory experiences and bodily feelings are the information sources that subconsciously influence people's cognition, emotions, and behavior [ 120 ]. These authors showed that the dark experience exerts an effect on the participants' sensory expression in a mind-to-body pathway; the authors also showed that others could decode the expressions of darkness in another body-to-mind pathway; finally, the authors stated that different dark levels of a product (e.g., photos) on a website affect tourists' feelings: the darker they feel, the darker the photos they took. Lv et al. [ 129 ] found that visual sensory experience directly affects tourists' psychological experience and behavior. The body's influence on psychology is unconscious and does not come from the meaning of the information; this suggests that besides mental processing, there are non-mental paths between body and mind [ 129 ]. There is abundant literature concerned with this theme of well-being (or not) raised by dark tourism, although it is somewhat contradictory. It is important to identify this contradiction as a gap in the literature to clarify under what circumstances dark tourism associated with the Holocaust can have a positive or negative impact on well-being.

Major methodological limitations were the lack of randomized allocation, standardized outcome definitions, and suboptimal comparison groups. The vast majority of papers included in this systematic review are theoretical, which makes it difficult to compare and generalize the results, introducing biases. Thus, more empirical studies are needed to achieve a future systematic review including only empirical works. With the aim to minimize threats to the validity of the results of this study, potential issues were identified, and mitigation strategies were applied. In systematic reviews, the risk of the omission of relevant studies is a concern. Thus, in this study, snowballing was conducted in order to minimize this risk. Also, detailed inclusion/exclusion and quality criteria were applied during the selection stage. Finally, data extraction was carefully carried out by both authors until consensus was achieved.

5. Conclusion

In this study, we have performed a systematic literature review focused on peer-review articles and books, after analyzing their contributions to the topics related to our research question: is feeling well-being, as a consequence of dark tourism, a way of banalizing the horror? Following PRISMA's recommendations, the authors are confident that the review was thoroughly carried out and that the relevant contributions were identified. As such, this article contributes to research in several ways. First, it delivers a systematic review of the topics, which are dark tourism, the Holocaust, and well-being, based on a selection of 144 references (126 research articles and 18 books and book chapters), whose relevant contributions have been categorized comprehensively and given way to discussion. We hypothesized that dark tourism that generates negative emotions, also creates positive emotions that contribute to well-being. The findings enhance such positive impacts on well-being under different circumstances; however, the hypothesis could not be confirmed, as the positive impact is almost always seen as the result of something transformative.

The SLR provided the identification of several gaps: the trivialization of horror in the context of Holocaust-related dark tourism from the perspective of the dark tourist; the personality dimensions of the tourist who does not visit dark places (in light of what has already been carried out vis-à-vis dark tourists); understanding of the constraints for tourists to visit dark tourism destinations; explaining Holocaust survivors and their descendants’ well-being (somehow contradictory); and the lack of clarification concerning under what circumstances dark tourism associated with the Holocaust can positively or negatively impact well-being. Addressing these gaps and their inherent ambiguities and contradictions could constitute areas for future research.

Positive and negative impacts on Holocaust dark tourists' well-being are associated with the marketing and management, promotion, digital communication, guiding, or storytelling design of such locations. Tailored promotion, for example, could trigger the target visitors’ interest and motivation for visiting Holocaust and Holocaust-related destinations, thus increasing the number of visitors, their satisfaction, and well-being.

Author contribution statement

José Magano, José António Fraiz-Brea, Ângela Leite: Conceived and designed the experiments; Analyzed and interpreted the data; Contributed materials, analysis tools or data; Wrote the paper.

Funding statement

This research received no external funding.

Data availability statement

Declaration of interest statement.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Additional information

No additional information is available for this paper.

Dark Tourism

As the name already suggests, “dark tourism” is related to the activity of tourist, which is stimulated by an enthusiasm in the more somber facets of human reality (Smith et al., 2010).Dark Tourism is that tourism which involves visiting to places which have some events related to death, disaster, violence, massacre etc. (Sharpley and Stone, 2009).

Dark tourism is also famous by the names of Grief Tourism and Black Tourism. Dark Tourism is now becoming a popular form of tourism and tourists are becoming anxious to experience this type of tourism as it helps in gaining educational knowledge from it.  Prison tourism and disaster tourism are also considered to be a part of dark tourism.  

History of dark tourism

Since time immemorial people have taken a keen interest in activities related to death and it is evident from the fact that from medieval period to nineteenth century their used to be a large gathering whenever there was any public execution taking place. Also in Roman era there were lot of gladiator fights used to take place which were of a great joy for the audience. It is commonly said that the Roman Colosseum were the first dark sites for the people who are interested in the tourism associated with it.

The first research on dark tourism was done in International Journal of Science of cultural and historical heritage by Foley & Lennon in 1996, since then there are so many theories and models were made in order to clarify the concept of dark tourism. The concept of pilgrimage tourism is often coinciding with dark tourism due the fact that both involve a psychological journey for tourists. 

Dark tourism is “travelling towards sites, attractions or events that are somehow linked to negative historical events where death, violence, suffering or disaster may have taken place” (Sharpley and Stone, 2009).

As the name already suggests, “dark tourism” is related to the activity of tourist, which is stimulated by an enthusiasm in the more somber facets of human reality (Smith et al., 2010). In 2005, Stone suitably described it as the “travel to sites of death and suffering”. 

Pilgrimage has a sacred or, at least, holy significance, which contains fundamentals of both a personal physical as well as often a psychological journey for participants. Sometimes this can be related with attaining social

Huge chunk of researchers have started taking interest in dark tourism since 2001.As per the various reports of UNWTO (World Tourism Organisation) and WTTC (World Travel and Tourism Council) tourism is measured as one of the biggest and fastest growing industry.

As it is already mentioned about the popularity of dark tourism in older times keeping the view these days it has become one of the unique form of tourism which needs to be pondered upon. There is a sudden thrust in the popularity of this form of tourism due to its unique nature. Huge number of tourists are now diverting towards dark tourism. Ground Zero in New York is the most famous dark tourism site.

Types of dark tourism

1. fun factories:  .

This concept revolves around superficial deaths and it includes all the places which have good tourism infrastructure. A Dark Fun Factory refers to the place or attraction that has some amusement focus and financial ethic. Dark Fun Factories offer hygienic products in terms of representation and are anticipated as less original. Dark Fun Factories acquire a high level of tourism infrastructure. One of the examples of Dark Fun Factories was the intended “Dracula Park” in Romania. Where the schemes for the 460 hectare theme park were cancelled on environmental grounds rather than the real product content. This project revolved around the life of” Vlad the Impaler”, who supposedly distressed his prisoners by making them to run on the spikes and leaving them to die. 

2. Dark Demonstrations:  

This concept revolves around death and misery and it has a unique education leaning for the tourists. Dark Exhibition is those sites, places and exhibitions that essentially amalgamate the product design to portray education and potential opportunities. Dark Exhibitions offer products which go around death and suffering. They also present built in dedicatory, educational and speculative message. So these Dark Exhibitions are anticipated as more original and serious sites. These are declared with a large product range and these are located away from the real side of the death event. Various museums situated around the world offering the concept of death and misery is the best examples of dark fun factories.

3. Dark Dungeons:  

All the places related with matters regarding criminal offence and injustice is been included in Dungeons. It also provides education to the tourists about the history associated with it. Dark Dungeons are the sites; places revolve around earlier prisons and courthouses. These sites provide the benefit of both education and amusement.

For example, the galleries of justice visitor sites ( in Nottingham) promoted as the “ Family Attraction of the Year” under displaying line “Fell the Fear”, these were built from the buildings which were really as prisons and courthouses in 1780’s until recently as 1980’s. With an illustration of ruthless penal codes from days gone by, the attraction seeks to amuse the visitor through heritage whilst promoting educational and historical content.

4. Dark buried Places:  

Dark Resting Places emphasis on the cemetery or graveyards as products for Dark Tourism. Cemetery is being used to popularize visiting to an area, preserve the goodness and structural integrity of landscape and be friend to the ecology. These places include open air museums and various sculptures which are based on the theme of graveyards. In Paris, the largest park is the Pere-Lachaise cemetery; this has been converted into an open museum and garden. Few other examples of resting places are National cemetery of Arlington and academy of la-recoleta.  

5. Dark Sacred places :  

These are shrines which are being promoted as tourist’s spots though not those much popular sites. Location of these sites is nearby to the sites of death and misery. These sites are less attractive to the eyes. The main purpose of visiting these sites are to pay homage and respect to the deceased. In terms of infrastructure these sites are not well developed and are temporary in nature. Best examples are Isles of Solomon and Guadalcanal battle.

6. Dark Conflict places:  

These sites and attractions are associated with some major battles fought in the past. These sites are very much historical in nature and great for learning and research purpose. Again in India context the battle of Jhansi, battle of Buxar and battle of plasi.

7. Dark places of Mass killing :  

These are the sites associated with atrocities and deaths. Places of genocide also associated with dark camps. These have been divided into various categories from darkest to lightest. darkest are the sites which cannot be developed fully in terms of tourism and here the death is really occurred or it is the original place of death where the lightest are the places which have been recreated in terms of deaths. Auschwitz is said to be the darkest place in the world whereas the lightest one is Dracula Park. Stone has given the model of dark campus

Top Dark tourism Destinations

• Sedlec ossuary : It is very historical site associated with Hussite war in 15th century. Location of this site is Sledec, below the saint’s cemetery church. It acquires around 40,000 to 70,000 skeletons of humans which are been arranged in a very decorative manner. It is most widely visited place of the world. On an average around 200,000 tourists visit this place every year. It is the most famous spot of burying the dead.
• Salem, Massachusetts : Salem, Massachusetts has become famous all over the globe as the place of disreputable Salem witch trials of 1692. These results in the killing of 20 individuals liable of witchcraft and magic most of who were women. These trials were conducted in a few of small villages in the area that is now called as the City of Salem. Salem is now a very popular site for those who are passionate for the history of attraction. 
• Catacombs of Paris :   The Catacombs of Paris have ossuaries beneath the city of Paris. It has the remains of six million of people, acquiring its prestige as “The World’s Largest Grave”. The catacombs of Paris were opened their doors for visitors in 19th century and this place is believed to be the world’s darkest site. As a tourist spot and from that time it has become one of the most popular and famous dark tourism spot in the world. An estimated 30,000 tourists visit this place every year.
• Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary : Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary is located on Alcatraz Island it is a prison which used to keep the most dangerous criminals of America, now it has been converted into a museum for tourist. It was opened in 1934. Till 1963, it acted as a supreme security prison. It can be treated as the terrifying prison when the prisoners themselves reported forceful mistreatment and cruelty while being captured there. But now the prison has been converted into a museum and it attracts a lot of tourists from all over the world. Around 1.5 million tourists visit this place every year.
• The Tower of London : The Tower of London is one of the finest dark tourism destinations in the United Kingdom. In 1078, the first section of the tower was made on the bank of River Thames. This tower is also famous for its various functions like it acts a treasury, an armory, a public record office etc. The exterior of the tower was popularized in the 16 th and 17 th centuries. The Tower of London is so famous and popular all over the world because of its history

Also read Dark Tourism in India

Dark tourism in india.

Generally people are influenced by social and cultural behavior. An anxious tourist gets persuaded over the perception of others. The tourist simply needs a motivation or an inspiration for that particular place. Whatever a person is, he is made by the environment and the surrounding. A person who wants to have an experience or entertainment instead, would surely try to find a particular place to complete his wish.

A spot which sounds appealing attracts tourist from all over the world. It is the choice of the tourist that where he wishes to go for amusement, entertainment, business, holiday etc. The person who loves to explore the unexplored things may be fascinated in knowing about what happened to the fatalities of a non –happening or at disturbed places, by visiting that place and exploring it.

Almost every type of tourism exists in India because of diversified cultures, religions, festivals. In India, Dark Tourism is not much famous but there are many spots in India that comes under the category of Dark Tourism. Some of them are:

• Bhangarh Fort: It is in the state of Rajasthan, built by Man Singh. It is the most haunted place in India as it is considered to be cursed by a magician. Visiting to this place after sunset is strictly banned .
• Kuldhara: It is a place in Rajasthan where it is said that 83 villages lost their existence in just one night. This place is believed to be cursed by the villagers and there is no one sustaining there right now.
• Jallianwala Bagh : On 13 th April, 1919 a mass of people gathered at the “Jallianwala Bagh” in Amritsar as it was the day of Baisakhi, the main Sikh festival. On knowing that the mass is supposed to gather in the garden, the British General Dyer ordered to shoot the common mass. The shooting continued for nearly ten minutes and the whole ground was colored with blood of people.
• Dumas Beach : It is situated in Surat, Gujarat. This beach is enclosed with black sand and various mystic activities have been observed here. It is believed that the persons walking around the beach at night could vanish. This is also considered as a Dark Spot in India.
• Three Kings Church : It is in Goa. It is believed that Three Kings killed each other so as to rule over the property of this church and the inhabitants still believe that their spirits wander in the church.  
• Mussoorie : Mussoorie is a famous recreational destinationfor tourist. Dark Tourism also exists there. “The Lambi Dehar Mines” in Mussoorie is one of the haunted places in India. Millions of workers died in the mine while working. Unusual deaths and activities have also been observed.  
• Savoy Hotel: Savoy hotel at Mussoorie is yet again a haunted place in India. Various strange activities have been observed in this hotel. This attractive hill station has many hotels but this hotel makes the tourists to be scary of this place.
• Shaniwarwada Fort : ShaniwarwardaFort is in Pune. It is believed that a Prince was unkindly murdered and there have been many supernatural activities experienced by people there.  
• Hyderabad’s disreputable Ramoji film city is one of the major and famous film cities of India, where there are many hotels and in these hotels, supernatural activities have been observed. Eccentric marks are left on the mirror, the leftover food scatters around the room and the invisible powers tear’s one’s clothes and so on.  

Challenges to growth of Dark Tourism in India

There are many famous type of tourism in India but the Dark tourism is not so much famous.  We have to overcome all the problems as well as the challenges that come in the promotion of Dark Tourism.Some of the challenges that dark tourism faces are given as under:

• Lack of promotion: Promotion is very much required in any aspect. When it comes to tourism, promotion is a vital component. One of the reasons for dark tourism to lack behind is less promotion as well as less publicity.
• Less Local support: When it comes to tourism, local support is very important. Locals do not give their proper coordination to develop such type of peculiar tourism.
• Less tourist services at destination: As the tourist destination is not well known, various agencies and organizations are not able to give the required services to the tourist. That is why a tourist takes a back foot to visit such places. 
• Inappropriate Maintenance of Dark Tourism sites: As it is a form of tourism, so the particular tourist spot or place must be well maintained as well as cleaned. The manifestation of a particular spot must be attractive so that the tourist gets fascinated towards that spot.
• Less accessibility : These places are not well recognized, there is not any proper arrangement to access these places. Due to less convenience, the tourist cannot comfortably access all the places they desire to.

Strategies to overcome the challenges

• Pr omoting India as a Diversified Nation for Destinations : India is known all over the world for her cultures, religions, festivals etc. It is a place where a tourist can enjoy different things in the same time. India offers various domains of tourism; Dark tourism must also be promoted as one of them.
• Local support : People living near the particular spot have sufficient knowledge about that place. They must cope up with the tourist as well as the government and should be protective and supportive towards the tourists. Participation of locals will also help them to earn their livelihood.
• Suggest government to transform the policies : The people in relation to tourism sector must suggest the government to alter the useless policies and implement such policies which must have a positive impact.
• Proper maintenance of the spots: Teams should be selected or a number of people should be elected for the maintenance of the spots. Updating the resources and implementing the strategy for maintenance should be done and followed properly.
• Formulate policies to promote untapped places associated with dark tourism.

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What Is Dark Tourism

Published: December 12, 2023

Modified: December 28, 2023

by Clair Bolinger

• Weird & Amazing

Introduction

When planning a vacation or trip, most people envision relaxing on a tropical beach, exploring stunning natural landscapes, or immersing themselves in vibrant city cultures. However, there is a subset of travelers who seek out a different kind of experience – one that delves into the darker side of human history and explores sites associated with tragedy, death, and disaster. This type of travel is known as “dark tourism.”

Dark tourism, also referred to as grief tourism or thanatourism, involves visiting locations that are associated with death, suffering, and historical events of a macabre nature. It may sound strange to some, but for many individuals, dark tourism offers a unique opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of the past, pay respects to victims, and engage with aspects of history that are often neglected or overlooked.

While the concept of dark tourism has gained popularity in recent years, its roots can be traced back to ancient times. Pilgrimages to religious sites known for miracles or martyrdom can be considered an early form of dark tourism. However, it was not until the 1980s that the term “dark tourism” was coined by academics John Lennon and Malcolm Foley to describe the phenomenon of visiting sites associated with death and suffering.

Since then, dark tourism has evolved to include a wide range of destinations, from Holocaust memorials and former concentration camps to war zones, disaster sites, haunted locations, and even crime scenes. Some prominent examples of dark tourism sites include Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, Ground Zero in New York City, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in Ukraine, and the Killing Fields in Cambodia.

The motivations behind dark tourism can vary greatly from person to person. For some, it is a quest for knowledge and understanding, a way to confront the dark aspects of humanity and bear witness to history. Others may be driven by curiosity or a fascination with the macabre. Additionally, dark tourism can serve as a form of remembrance, providing an opportunity for individuals to pay tribute to the victims of past atrocities or disasters.

While dark tourism has its supporters, it is not without controversy. Critics argue that it is exploitative, insensitive, or voyeuristic, as it involves commodifying tragedy and profiting from the misfortune of others. The debate surrounding the ethics of dark tourism is ongoing, with proponents asserting that it can contribute to education, empathy, and the preservation of historical memory.

Understanding the motivations, controversies, ethical considerations, and psychological aspects of dark tourism is important to fully grasp the complexity of this unique form of travel. In the following sections, we will delve deeper into these aspects and explore the future trends of dark tourism.

Definition of Dark Tourism

Dark tourism can be defined as the act of visiting places that are associated with death, tragedy, suffering, or other morbid events. It is a niche form of tourism that explores the darker side of human history and culture. Instead of seeking relaxation and traditional sightseeing, dark tourists are attracted to sites that have a macabre or somber significance.

The term “dark tourism” was first coined by academics John Lennon and Malcolm Foley in 1996, who used it to describe the phenomenon of visiting sites associated with death and disaster. Since then, the concept has gained recognition and has become an established area of study within tourism and cultural studies.

Dark tourism sites can encompass a wide range of locations, including historical sites, museums, memorials, war zones, disaster sites, former concentration camps, and even crime scenes. These places have often witnessed significant human suffering, acts of violence, or natural disasters, making them locations of historical and cultural interest.

It is important to note that dark tourism is distinct from “normal” tourism in that it does not simply involve visiting a place for leisure or entertainment. Dark tourists are driven by a desire to engage with the past, confront difficult historical events, and gain a deeper understanding of the human condition.

Dark tourism is a complex and multi-faceted phenomenon. It encompasses a diverse range of motivations, experiences, and reactions. Some individuals may seek out dark tourism sites out of a genuine interest in history and a desire to learn from past tragedies. Others may be drawn to the morbid or sensational aspects of these sites, seeking a thrill or unique experience.

While the term “dark tourism” may imply a morbid fascination with death and tragedy, it is important to recognize that it is not always driven by voyeurism or insensitivity. For many visitors, dark tourism serves as a form of remembrance and tribute, allowing them to pay respects to victims and reflect on the consequences of past events.

Overall, the defining characteristic of dark tourism lies in its exploration of the darker side of human history and its engagement with places associated with suffering and tragedy. It offers a unique perspective on the past and provides opportunities for learning, empathy, and reflection.

Historical Background of Dark Tourism

While the term “dark tourism” may be relatively new, the concept of visiting sites associated with death, tragedy, and suffering dates back centuries. Throughout history, individuals have been drawn to places of historic importance, including those with dark and somber pasts. By exploring the historical background of dark tourism, we can gain a deeper understanding of its evolution and enduring appeal.

One of the earliest forms of dark tourism can be traced back to ancient Rome, where tourists flocked to the Colosseum to witness brutal gladiatorial fights and public executions. These spectacles of violence and death attracted crowds seeking entertainment and a glimpse into the darker side of society.

In medieval Europe, pilgrimage sites associated with martyrdom and relics of saints became popular attractions for religious travelers. Cathedrals and shrines dedicated to saints who had suffered and died for their faith drew pilgrims seeking spiritual connection and a sense of awe in the face of tragedy.

The rise of the Grand Tour in the 17th and 18th centuries added a new dimension to dark tourism. Wealthy European travelers embarked on journeys to visit historically significant sites, including ruins, battlegrounds, and sites of ancient disasters. Exploring these somber locations became an essential part of their cultural education and intellectual development.

The 19th and early 20th centuries saw the emergence of tourism associated with war and conflict. Following the American Civil War and World Wars I and II, tourists visited battlefields, war memorials, and cemeteries to honor the fallen and remember the sacrifices made during these tumultuous periods of history.

The development of mass tourism in the 20th century brought dark tourism to a wider audience. The opening of the Holocaust memorial and museum at Auschwitz-Birkenau in the 1970s marked a significant moment in the history of dark tourism. It provided a powerful and emotional experience for visitors, facilitating a deeper understanding of one of the darkest chapters in human history.

In recent decades, advancements in transportation and technology have made dark tourism more accessible than ever before. From the tragic events of 9/11 in New York City to the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in Ukraine, these modern-day tragedies have attracted numerous visitors seeking to comprehend the magnitude of the events and pay their respects.

The historical background of dark tourism reveals that the desire to explore and engage with the darker aspects of human history has been ingrained in our collective consciousness for centuries. Today, dark tourism continues to evolve as new sites gain recognition and the motivations of travelers become increasingly diverse.

Motivations for Dark Tourism

Dark tourism draws a diverse range of individuals, each with their own unique motivations for seeking out sites associated with death, tragedy, and suffering. Understanding these motivations is crucial to comprehending the appeal and significance of dark tourism as a form of travel.

One common motivation for engaging in dark tourism is the desire for educational and historical enrichment. Many visitors are driven by a thirst for knowledge and a deep curiosity about the past. They view dark tourism as an opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of historical events, their causes, and their lasting consequences. By visiting places like Holocaust memorials, concentration camps, or battlefields, individuals can witness firsthand the impact of these significant moments in history and learn from the mistakes of the past.

For some individuals, dark tourism is driven by a personal connection or a sense of empathy. They may have family members who were directly affected by a historical event, or they may identify with a particular group or cause associated with a tragedy. In visiting dark tourism sites, they hope to pay their respects, connect with their heritage, or foster a sense of solidarity with those who have experienced loss and suffering.

There is also a segment of dark tourism enthusiasts who are drawn to the sensation and thrill of exploring somber and macabre locations. They seek unique and unconventional experiences that challenge their perceptions of the world. The unconventional nature of dark tourism provides a sense of adventure and excitement that traditional tourism may not offer.

Another motivation for engaging in dark tourism is the opportunity for personal reflection and introspection. These individuals view dark tourism as a form of self-exploration and personal growth. By visiting dark sites, they are confronted with the fragility of life and the realities of human suffering. This can lead to a deeper appreciation for life, a reevaluation of personal priorities, and a greater sense of empathy and compassion towards others.

Social and cultural curiosity can also drive individuals to engage in dark tourism. They are fascinated by the cultural practices, rituals, and memorialization strategies surrounding death and tragedy in different societies. By engaging with these practices, they gain insights into the ways in which different cultures and societies cope with and commemorate their dark histories.

It is essential to acknowledge that motivations for engaging in dark tourism can vary greatly from person to person. While some motivations may be rooted in genuine empathy, education, or personal growth, others may be driven by curiosity or a morbid fascination with death and tragedy. Nevertheless, engaging with the motivations of dark tourists helps us understand the complex and multifaceted nature of dark tourism as a form of travel.

Types of Dark Tourism

Dark tourism encompasses a wide range of destinations and sites associated with death, tragedy, and suffering. These sites can be categorized into several distinct types, each offering a unique perspective on history, culture, and the human experience. Understanding the different types of dark tourism can help visitors choose destinations that align with their interests and motivations.

Historical Dark Tourism

Historical dark tourism focuses on visiting sites that have significant historical importance due to tragic events. These sites may include former concentration camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, where visitors can learn about the atrocities of the Holocaust. Other historical dark tourism sites include war memorials, battlefields, and sites associated with genocides, civil wars, or other conflicts. These destinations provide opportunities for reflection, education, and remembrance.

Disaster Dark Tourism

Disaster dark tourism centers around visiting locations affected by natural or man-made disasters. Examples include sites like the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in Ukraine, where the Chernobyl nuclear disaster occurred, or the Titanic Museum in Belfast, which offers insights into the ill-fated luxury liner’s tragic sinking. Disaster dark tourism allows visitors to witness the consequences of catastrophic events and gain a deeper understanding of their impact on communities and individuals.

Dark Heritage Tourism

Dark heritage tourism involves visiting sites associated with dark elements of a region’s cultural heritage. This can include places like Alcatraz Island, which was once a notorious prison, or the Tower of London, known for its history of torture and executions. These sites allow visitors to explore the darker aspects of a culture’s past and understand the social, political, and historical context in which they occurred.

Holocaust Tourism

Holocaust tourism is a specific type of dark tourism that focuses on visiting sites related to the Holocaust. This includes concentration camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau, museums dedicated to preserving the memory of the Holocaust, and memorial sites such as the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. Holocaust tourism provides a powerful and emotional experience that helps educate people about one of the most tragic events in human history.

War Tourism

War tourism revolves around visiting locations associated with battles, armed conflicts, and military history. This can include visiting battlefields like Gettysburg in the United States, exploring World War I trenches in France, or touring the Imperial War Museum in London. War tourism offers insights into the military strategies, sacrifices, and human experiences associated with past conflicts.

Dark Cultural Tourism

Dark cultural tourism encompasses sites that highlight cultural practices and rituals associated with death and mourning. This can include visiting ancient burial grounds, exploring catacombs such as the Catacombs of Paris, or participating in Day of the Dead celebrations in Mexico. Dark cultural tourism provides a perspective on the diversity of cultural responses to death and allows for a deeper understanding of the human experience.

These are just a few examples of the different types of dark tourism. Each type offers a unique lens through which visitors can engage with the darker aspects of human history, culture, and the human experience. By exploring these types of dark tourism, travelers can gain a deeper understanding of the past and connect with the stories of those who have suffered and endured.

Controversies surrounding Dark Tourism

Dark tourism is not without its fair share of controversies, as it involves visiting sites associated with death, tragedy, and suffering. These controversies arise from ethical concerns, questions of exploitation, and debates around the commodification of grief and tragedy. Understanding the controversies surrounding dark tourism is essential in order to engage with this form of travel critically and ethically.

One of the primary controversies surrounding dark tourism is the question of ethics. Critics argue that these sites are places of mourning and remembrance and that tourists visiting them may disrupt the solemnity and dignity of these spaces. They suggest that dark tourism may treat tragedy as a form of entertainment, and that it trivializes the suffering of those who experienced it.

Another concern is the potential for exploitation. Some argue that dark tourism sites may exploit the tragedies associated with them for profit or sensationalism. This commercialization of grief and tragedy raises ethical questions about the boundaries between education, memorialization, and the tourism industry. Critics contend that dark tourism can trivialize the suffering of victims and commodify their experiences for the sake of attracting visitors and generating revenue.

The presentation and interpretation of these sites is also a contentious issue. There is debate about how these sites should be portrayed and whether they should be solely educational or include elements of entertainment. Striking a delicate balance between educating visitors and respecting the gravity of the events can be challenging and subjective.

Another point of controversy is the potential impact of dark tourism on local communities. Concerns have been raised about the potential for voyeurism and insensitivity among tourists, as well as the potential disruption of local rituals and practices associated with mourning. Additionally, the influx of tourists can place strain on local resources and infrastructure.

Furthermore, dark tourism can raise questions about the responsibility of visitors in engaging with these spaces. It is important for visitors to approach these sites with sensitivity and respect, to understand their historical and cultural context, and to recognize the human tragedy behind them. Failure to do so can perpetuate the controversies surrounding dark tourism and contribute to the negative impact on local communities and the exploitation of suffering.

Despite these controversies, proponents of dark tourism argue that it can serve as a valuable educational tool, fostering empathy, dialogue, and understanding. They contend that carefully managed and responsible tourism can contribute to the preservation of historical memory, promote healing and reconciliation, and facilitate conversations about past atrocities and tragedies.

Ultimately, the controversies surrounding dark tourism highlight the necessity for thoughtful engagement, ethical considerations, and responsible travel practices when visiting sites associated with death, tragedy, and suffering. By approaching dark tourism with sensitivity and respect, visitors can help mitigate these controversies and ensure a more meaningful and responsible experience.

Ethical Considerations in Dark Tourism

As with any form of tourism that involves visiting sites associated with death, tragedy, and suffering, there are important ethical considerations to be mindful of when engaging in dark tourism. These considerations revolve around respect for the victims, preservation of cultural heritage, responsible tourism practices, and the impact on local communities.

One of the primary ethical considerations in dark tourism is the importance of respecting the dignity and memory of the victims of the tragedies being visited. Visitors should approach these sites with sensitivity, empathy, and a genuine desire to learn and understand. It is crucial to remember that these places are not tourist attractions but sites of historical significance and human tragedy.

Responsible tourism practices are vital in dark tourism. Visitors should follow guidelines and regulations set by authorities and site administrators to ensure the preservation and protection of the sites. This may include respecting restricted areas, maintaining appropriate behavior, and refraining from disrespectful actions such as posing for inappropriate photographs or removing artifacts.

It is also crucial to consider the impact of tourism on local communities. Dark tourism can attract a large influx of tourists to areas that might already be struggling to cope with the consequences of past tragedies. Visitors must be mindful of the strain they may place on local resources and infrastructure. Supporting local businesses, respecting local customs and traditions, and considering the well-being and privacy of local residents are important ethical considerations.

Another ethical consideration in dark tourism is the depiction and interpretation of the sites. It is essential for site administrators to provide accurate and sensitive historical information, ensuring that the narrative surrounding these places is respectful and empathetic. Balancing education, memorialization, and the potential for respectful tourism experiences is paramount in maintaining appropriate ethical standards.

Additionally, tourists must critically reflect on their motivations for engaging in dark tourism. It is essential to examine personal intentions and ensure they do not stem from voyeurism, insensitivity, or a desire for sensationalism. Dark tourism should be approached with a genuine intent to learn, understand, and reflect on the historical events and human experiences associated with these sites.

Engaging with local communities, paying respect to the victims, following responsible tourism practices, and being mindful of the impact of one’s presence are all ethical considerations that can help ensure that dark tourism is approached in a respectful and responsible manner.

By upholding ethical considerations in dark tourism, visitors can contribute to the preservation of historical memory, foster empathy and understanding, and engage in responsible travel practices that respect the dignity of the victims and the communities associated with these sites.

Psychological Aspects of Dark Tourism

Dark tourism evokes a range of psychological responses and experiences for visitors. Exploring sites associated with death, tragedy, and suffering can have profound emotional impacts and trigger a complex mix of emotions. Understanding the psychological aspects of dark tourism helps shed light on why individuals are drawn to these experiences and how they are affected by them.

One of the primary psychological aspects of dark tourism is the concept of “dark fascination.” There is a natural human curiosity about the darker sides of life, and visiting dark tourism sites allows individuals to satisfy this curiosity. It appeals to our innate desire to explore the unknown and confront the darker aspects of human existence.

Experiencing dark tourism has the potential to evoke a wide range of emotions such as sadness, grief, anger, and even guilt. Standing in the presence of tragedy and contemplating the suffering of others can elicit a deep sense of empathy and compassion. Visitors may also experience a sense of relief and gratitude for their own lives and the fortune of not having personally endured such tragedies.

Visiting dark tourism sites also offers a unique opportunity for reflection and introspection. Being confronted with the reality of death and suffering can prompt existential questions about the meaning of life, the fragility of existence, and the importance of living fully in the present. This introspective aspect of dark tourism can lead to personal growth, self-reflection, and a renewed appreciation for life and its complexities.

Dark tourism can elicit a form of cognitive dissonance as well. Individuals may be simultaneously attracted to and repelled by the sites they visit. The fascination with tragedy and the discomfort associated with confronting it creates a paradoxical emotional experience. This internal conflict can lead to a deeper engagement and reflection on the moral and ethical implications of dark tourism.

Psychologically, dark tourism can be a form of coping and healing. Some visitors may be survivors of similar tragedies or have personal connections to the events being commemorated. By visiting these sites, individuals can find solace, closure, and a sense of connection with others who have experienced similar pain and loss.

Furthermore, dark tourism can contribute to historical and cultural understanding. It allows visitors to bear witness to history and engage with the stories of those who have suffered. By experiencing these sites, visitors gain a deeper understanding of the human capacity for resilience, the consequences of past actions, and the importance of preserving historical memory.

It is important to note that the psychological impact of dark tourism can vary greatly from person to person. Some individuals may find it cathartic and transformative, while others may feel overwhelmed or distressed. Visitors should be mindful of their emotional well-being and seek support when needed, whether it be through engaging with site staff, seeking counseling, or discussing their experiences with others.

Overall, the psychological aspects of dark tourism highlight the profound emotional impact it can have on visitors. From dark fascination to introspection and healing, engaging in dark tourism can lead to a deeper understanding of the self, history, and the human experience.

The Future of Dark Tourism

The future of dark tourism is shaped by evolving societal, cultural, and technological developments, as well as changing visitor expectations and interests. As we look ahead, several trends and possibilities emerge for the future of this unique form of travel.

One significant aspect of the future of dark tourism is the continued expansion of destinations and sites. As awareness and interest in dark tourism grow, new sites associated with death, tragedy, and suffering are being recognized and developed. Historical events and cultural traumas that were previously overlooked may gain prominence as dark tourism destinations, allowing for a broader exploration of the past and a wider range of visitor experiences.

Advancements in technology are also likely to shape the future of dark tourism. Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) have the potential to provide immersive and educational experiences, allowing visitors to virtually explore or digitally reenact historical events. These technologies can enhance the educational value of dark tourism and make it more accessible to individuals who may not be able to physically visit sites themselves.

Another emerging trend is the integration of sustainability and responsible tourism practices within dark tourism. As the environmental impact of tourism becomes a pressing concern, there is a growing emphasis on minimizing the ecological footprint of travel. Dark tourism sites can implement sustainable practices, support local communities, and engage in responsible conservation efforts, ensuring the preservation of historical sites while mitigating negative impacts.

Furthermore, the development of interactive and participatory experiences is likely to shape the future of dark tourism. Visitors may have opportunities to engage in storytelling, reenactments, or personal narratives that allow for a more immersive and emotional connection to the events being commemorated. This interactive approach can deepen the visitor experience, foster empathy, and encourage a more profound understanding of the historical and cultural contexts.

Public engagement with dark tourism is expected to evolve as well. As societal perspectives and values change, the conversations surrounding dark tourism will continue to evolve. There may be an increased focus on ethical considerations, memorialization, and the representation of diverse perspectives within the narratives presented at these sites. Visitors may be encouraged to actively reflect on the complex legacies of the past and engage in dialogue about the impact of historical events on contemporary society.

The future of dark tourism is likely to be shaped by a balance between educational experiences, responsible tourism practices, and ethical considerations. As interest in this form of travel continues to grow, it will be essential for stakeholders, including site administrators, tourists, and local communities, to collaborate to ensure that dark tourism remains a meaningful and respectful way to engage with the darker aspects of human history and culture.

Ultimately, the future of dark tourism holds the potential for continued growth, innovation, and the exploration of new perspectives on the past. By embracing responsible practices and ethical considerations, dark tourism can continue to educate, provoke thought, and foster empathy for generations to come.

In conclusion, dark tourism offers a unique and thought-provoking way to engage with the darker aspects of human history and culture. From sites associated with tragedy, death, and suffering to locations of historical significance, dark tourism allows visitors to delve into the past and gain a deeper understanding of the human experience.

Throughout this article, we have explored the definition of dark tourism and its historical background, motivations, types, controversies, ethical considerations, psychological aspects, and the future of this form of travel. It is important to emphasize that engaging in dark tourism requires sensitivity, respect, and responsible tourism practices.

Dark tourism appeals to a diverse range of individuals, driven by motivations such as education, remembrance, cultural curiosity, personal reflection, and the fascination with the darker aspects of life. However, dark tourism is not without controversy. Ethical concerns and questions of exploitation arise due to the sensitive nature of these sites and the potential commodification of grief and tragedy.

Understanding the psychological aspects of dark tourism is crucial, as it involves navigating a range of emotions and introspective experiences. It encourages reflection on the past, the fragility of life, and the resilience of human beings. Dark tourism evokes empathy, fascination, and helps individuals gain a deeper appreciation for history and the preservation of cultural memory.

The future of dark tourism holds exciting possibilities, including the development of new sites, advancements in technology, sustainability efforts, interactive experiences, and evolving societal conversations. Responsible tourism practices and ethical considerations will continue to be central in shaping the future of dark tourism, ensuring that these experiences remain meaningful, respectful, and educational for generations to come.

In engaging with dark tourism, it is essential for visitors to approach these sites with empathy, respect, and a commitment to learning and understanding. By doing so, individuals can foster empathy, promote cultural understanding, and contribute to the preservation of historical memory.

Dark tourism serves as a powerful reminder of the tragedies and hardships endured by others throughout history. It challenges us to confront the darker aspects of human existence and prompts us to reflect on our place in the world. Through responsible engagement, dark tourism has the potential to foster empathy, promote cultural understanding, and contribute to a more compassionate and informed society.

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20 Unique Dark Tourism Sites Around The World

Disclosure: Advertising and affiliate services, including Amazon Associates, help the cost of running my blog. Clicking ads or making purchases through affiliate links may, at no additional cost to you, earn me a small commission. I appreciate your support .

One of the most unique tourism trends in recent years might have to be the fascination with so-called dark tourism sites. There’s always been a curiosity when it comes to places that might have a historic connection with tragic events. But while there are many reasons for people wanting to visit such sites, dark tourism is not a bad thing.

You might argue that visiting these dark tourism sites is a way of preserving the past. Or making sure the same horrific things don’t happen again . And while you might get some mixed reactions from people about your travel plans, they are fascinating places. And I believe they are places that the world should know about.

Disclaimer: The following article has travel suggestions in both Russia and Ukraine, however was written before the current events unfolded. I have chosen to leave them in this article in the spirit of the original topic covered here, however I am in no way recommending visiting either Russia or Ukraine at this time . Please check current travel conditions for any country you plan on visiting and travel safely.

What is Dark Tourism?

Dark tourism sites are places which we can associate with death, destruction or some kind of disaster. While some might see them as morbid, you’d be surprised at how many places you’ve visited with such connotations. For example, have you ever been to the Tower of London? Full of torture chambers and stories of gruesome events. What about the Colosseum in Rome? The deadly gladiator events here were some of the most bloody spectator sports in history.

We think of them as historical sites in a way we don’t think of some of the following places in the same way. Is it because that was so long ago? Does the length of time before we start exploring these sites really make a difference in how our visiting them should be perceived?

How should I behave at dark tourism sites?

Societal rules about museums are ingrained in us from an early age. But a lot of people worry about what to do while visiting somewhere with such a dark past. How do you behave? What if you do the wrong thing?

Respect is key . Remember that these sites, while open for you to enjoy, learn and experience, are the sites of some pretty bad and horrific things . Be aware of those around you as you never know if they might have a connection to where you are.

While it’s unfair to say you shouldn’t talk or show enthusiasm, use common sense and read the room . A concentration camp is nowhere to be giggling with your friends, a memorial park is not somewhere to be shouting…you get the idea.

Unique Dark Tourism Sites To Visit

Whether you’re a big history buff or just curious in anything a little macabre, these are some dark tourism sites around the world you likely don’t want to miss. From recent tragic events to centuries-old historical happenings, you can’t deny how incredibly interesting these places are.

Alcatraz Prison – San Francisco, USA

Possibly one of the most eerie and fascinating dark tourism sites you will ever visit is Alcatraz . A prison so notorious that it still receives millions of visitors a year. Located on an island in San Francisco ‘s bay area, you now get to experience seeing it from the inside like a prisoner. So close to land but so far away.

The only way to reach Alcatraz island is by a pre-booked boat tour . The tour is popular and often sells out months in advance. There are no food or drinks allowed except at the boat dock area, so plan your day accordingly. You also have a steep walk to the prison at the top of the hill, but there are motorized vehicle transfers for those with mobility issues.

Explore the prison and the grounds with an impeccably narrated audio tour by former guards and inmates. You’ll be led through cells, the recreation areas, the kitchen and more. Learn about the riots, the escapes and the deaths that happened here, and the most famous prisoners to ever call Alcatraz home.

Gravensteen Castle – Ghent, Belgium

Contributed by Cecilie from Worldwide Walkers

Gravensteen Castle in Ghent  is a classic example of dark tourism sites in Europe. The castle was built back in 1180 and housed the Count of Flanders for many centuries until it became a court, a prison, and even a cotton factory.

It’s the dark horror stories of torture that really attract visitors to Gravensteen castle. While visiting, you’ll walk through torture rooms and see all the different tools used to punish criminals back in the Middle Ages.

Many people have died within the castle walls in the most horrific ways, which creates a dark haunted feeling to the place. It’s this uncomfortable feeling that leaves you both intrigued and distressed after your visit.

While it might sound very disturbing, the free audio guide does a wonderful job carrying out all the stories in an interesting way with respect to history. It’s a great place to learn about the history of Belgium’s city Ghent . You can even get one of the greatest city views from the castle roof.

Silver Mines – Potosi, Bolivia

Contributed by Deb from The Visa Project

While there are many landmarks to see in Potosi , a unique attraction is to visit one of these working mines. A guided tour let’s you witness the working conditions of the miners.

If you  live in Bolivia , you would come across many extreme tourist offerings but this one would probably be one of the darkest. The  Cerro Rico  mountains silver mines made Potosi a major economic center of the Spanish empire back in the colonial times.

Mining is more or less still done in 18th century style – using old tools, hand and dynamite. No modern safety equipment or protocols. Although you would be introduced to  El Diablo,  the mountain’s devil-god to who the miners offer cigarettes, liquor as well as blood of an animal slaughtered on the spot for their protection. Child labor is pretty common and you can buy dynamite in the local market!

You will be advised to chew on coca leaves to help with breathlessness if taking a tour through the mines . The miners work in really harsh and dangerous conditions and many get lung diseases afterwards. If you visit, definitely leave a generous tip for the miners.

Port Arthur Penal Colony – Tasmania, Australia

Contributed by Mark from Wyld Family Travel

Port Arthur lies at the bottom of the world in southern Tasmania Australia . Port Arthur was a British penal colony set up in Australia, designed to break prisoners both mentally and physically. To be sent here from England was being sent as far away from your home as possible.

The youngest prisoner was 11 years old and around 70,000 prisoners called Port Arthur home. Prisoners at Port Arthur endured harsh working gangs that built much of Tasmania. The Asylum at the site pays testament to the mental torture these convicts were put through with many slowly losing their minds. Prisoners were regularly flogged to break them into submission.

Port Arthur prison was opened 20 years from 1833-1853 and 7,000 convicts died there. In modern times Port Arthur is also the location for the largest mass shooting in Australian history. This was the catalyst for the strict gun rules Australia lives by now. 

Port Arthur  is today one of the most interesting places to visit when in Tasmania. The prison site has been preserved with original building and tours explaining the history of the location.

Museum of the Occupation of Latvia – Riga, Latvia

As a former Soviet occupied country, Latvia still has many historic sites linked to the KGB. One of the most interesting activities you can do in Riga is visit the Corner House. This was the old headquarters of the Soviet KGB in Latvia.

True KGB style, if you didn’t know this museum existed you might not be able to find it. A inconspicuous doorway leads into a building straight out of the 50s. Here you can find out about the KGB in the city at that time.

The museum is free or you can pay 10 EUR for a guided tour. The tour might be worth it to see parts of the museum you wouldn’t otherwise get to. Walk through the rooms where the KGB worked and to areas of the building where the prisoners would have been taken.

The storyboards depict historical stories of the KGB in Riga, Latvia , and the “criminals” they arrested, tortured and killed here. This is really one of the most unique dark tourism sites in the Baltic states.

Jallianwala Bagh Memorial Park – India

Contributed by Neha from Travelmelodies

Etched in the history of India as a dark moment, is the incident of Jallianwala Bagh. Located in the holy city of Amritsar in Punjab, it remains one of the most popular  places to visit in Amritsar . Jallianwala Bagh is a memorial park in the honor the people that were wounded and lost lives on the fateful day of 13 April, 1919.

Back in 1919, India was under the rule of British and the people of India were protesting for Independence. Over a thousand people had gathered in the Jallianwala park on the festive day of Baisakhi to silently protest the arrest of few national leaders. But General Dyer opened fire unannounced on these people killing and injuring many.

The Jallianwala Bagh now houses a museum with pictures and documents related to the event and some memorial structures in honor of the martyrs.  There is a ‘Martyrs Well’ in which some people jumped to save themselves from the bullets. There’s even a wall with bullet markings on it. 

Every evening there is a light and sound show that throws light on the unfolding of the event. It is a must visit place and is located next to the Golden temple.

Gori, Georgia

Contributed by Emily from Wander-Lush

The small city of Gori,Georgia has a rather dark claim to fame. It’s the birthplace of Ioseb Jughashvili, better known as former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

An  easy day trip from Tbilisi , Gori has become one of the most-visited places in Georgia because of its Stalin connection. The main attraction is the Stalin State Museum, a grandiose sandstone building in the center of the city.

In the yard is one of few remaining Stalin statues still standing in Georgia today. Also the small wooden house where Stalin was born in 1878, and the armored railway carriage he used to travel around the USSR.

The museum opened in 1957 and exhibits remain much the same – that is to say, very Soviet-style. It has a very selective curatorial approach with most artefacts relating to Stalin’s early years and some pretty glaring gaps. With limited information in English it’s recommended to take the guided tour for a few extra dollars.

Visiting the museum is a totally bizarre experience, but it gives an interesting insight into how Stalin’s memory is treated in Georgia today. Some people in Gori (and elsewhere in Georgia) still venerate the dictator, but the younger generations less so.

There are plenty of things to do in Gori that have nothing to do with Stalin. The magnificent Gori Castle, the old town, and the hilltop Gori Jvari church. It’s these attractions that most residents would prefer you remember Gori for.

Tham Piew Cave – Laos

Contributed by Marie from A Life Without Borders

Laos holds the unfortunate title of the most heavily bombed country on Earth. It bore the brunt of clandestine bombing campaigns waged by the USA on Laos during the 1960s and 1970s. Phonsavan  in the province of Xieng Khouang, was particularly decimated. In fact, unexploded ordnance still affects local communities to this day.

Many visitors to the region enjoy Phonsavan’s major tourist sights such as the UNESCO site Plain of Jars. But few venture off the beaten track to discover the site of one of the worst days in Lao history.

On 24 November 1968, just one single missile fired from a US fighter plane killing 374 innocent villagers taking refuge in Tham Piew Cave. Just 60 kilometers from Phonsavan city, the cave is a somber and emotional place to visit. But it is important in the turbulent history of Laos, even if little known throughout the rest of the world.

The site’s information center holds extremely confronting photographs of the immediate aftermath of that fateful day, together with the history of the Secret War in Laos. A moving statue of a man carrying a lifeless child marks the entrance to the memorial park. Walk through a peaceful forest to the mouth of the charred cave. Here visitors can leave offerings of incense at the small shrine for those who perished within.

Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, Ukraine

Contributed by Kami from My Wanderlust

The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is a well-known place all over the world. On April 26th, 1986 the biggest nuclear disaster in the world took place here, changing people’s lives forever. As a result of the catastrophe, the whole area around the power plant became a closed zone. Inhabitants of numerous towns and villages had to move away.

Today you can visit the Exclusion Zone but you need to do it with an official  Chernobyl tour . There are plenty of them departing from Kyiv daily and you can choose between day trips and multiday tours. Now, all these years after the disaster the area is safe to visit and the radiation is low.

During your trip, you will see numerous places in the zone, including the power plant itself. But the biggest highlight is the abandoned town of Pripyat. When the disaster happened it was one of the most modern cities in the former USSR, but now nature has taken over the place.

Keep in mind that even if the Chernobyl zone is a very touristy and popular place, it is also a place of great tragedy. Make sure to visit the place with respect and follow your guide’s instructions. Still, this is a fascinating place to visit and everyone visiting Ukraine should include a Chernobyl tour in their itinerary .

Catacombs – Paris, France

Contributed by Debbie from World Adventurists

Even the City of Light and Love has a dark history. One of the most fascinating places to visit is the  Catacombs of Paris . The Catacombs have a sad history, full of bones of the unknown. In the 17th century, Paris cemeteries were overflowing so badly that there was no longer space to properly bury their dead. Overflowing graves led to the solution of using the underground tunnels to house the bones.

Approximately six million people have been laid to rest underground. Today the bones are neatly stacked, including some designs made from the bones. At some points there are femurs arranged from the floor almost to the ceiling, with rows of skulls in between, or formed into shapes like a cross.

Visiting the Catacombs, it will make you really wonder what their lives were like back then, who they were, and the cause of each death. It is very humbling.

The Catacombs of Paris are extremely popular. It is more expensive, but to skip the line, you will want to buy your ticket in advance . It can also get chilly down there, so bring a light sweater with you. Allow for at least an hour and a half to wander the Catacombs once you are inside.

Lenin Mausoleum – Moscow, Russia

Contributed by De Wet & Jin, Museum of Wander

In the center of the Red Square in Moscow is a somewhat inconspicuous structure which reminds somewhat of a pyramid. But the long line of Russians and tourists is a giveaway that it is one of the most popular  things to do in Moscow .

Inside this step pyramid is where the embalmed body of Vladimir Lenin is on display. Everyone is welcome to visit and pay their respects, or simply come and look at the former Soviet leader for bragging rights.

Visitors to Lenin’s Mausoleum visitors are first searched by military personnel, and bags (and cameras) have to be deposited. There are also a few strictly enforced rules while inside the mausoleum: no talking, hands out of your pockets, no hats and the line must keep moving at all times. Disobey, and a Russian soldier will reprimand you.

The atmosphere as well as the temperature inside the mausoleum is chilling. The line moves quite slowly, so you’ll get a good look at Lenin’s body, which has been on display here for almost a hundred years.

The mausoleum is free to enter and open on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays from 10:00–13:00. Behind the mausoleum is the gravesite of former Soviet ruler, Joseph Stalin, another interesting place to see.

Tianenmen Square – Beijing, China

Dark tourism sites don’t come more secretive than that of one of the world’s biggest massacres in recent history. Tianenmen Square, the public square in China’s capital, Beijing . While most visitors to China will have heard of the Tianenmen Square Massacre, the event is so censored within China that many people don’t know the full extent of it.

In 1989 students led a 6 week long protest after the death of a pro-reform official from the Communist Party of China. The fear was that the country would fall into economic decline and that the corruption in place would become worse. As the protests continued the military were brought in and things quickly got out of hand.

There are varying reports of anywhere from 300-3000 deaths of the tens of thousands of people who protested. While the square is peaceful now, there is always a high security presence as well as airport-style check points.

The square is used for many important national celebrations and Chairman Mao Zedong announced the founding of the People’s Republic of China here in 1949. His embalmed body is now on display in a mausoleum there.

Other than that there’s not a lot happening in the square now. However, the Imperial Palace (also known as the Forbidden City) is across from Tianenmen and is an impressive place to visit.

Bodie ghost town, California USA

Contributed by Olivia from Girl With Blue Sails

Bodie State Historic Park, once a booming California gold town, is now a notorious ghost town. It sits in a memorialized state of “arrested decay” with dilapidated buildings preserved in their state of abandonment from the late 1800’s. Walking down the dusty, dirt roads of Bodie invokes a bit of a dark appreciation and wonder about what happened to the people that lived here. 

Visitors can walk through the main streets of the town, seeing the various houses, stores, and saloons. Canned goods still on store shelves, original newspapers in the buildings, and old wooden pews still in the church. There are old forgotten cars in the grass, rusting and being overgrown by nature.  

Bodie is most popular with history buffs, photographers, and those who love to visit dark tourism sites. Plan your trip to Bodie in the morning to avoid the peak desert heat. While walking through Bodie can be a grim experience, it also provides a unique and realistic glimpse of 1800s California mining life.  

Choeung Ek Killing Fields – Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Contributed by Tasha Amy from Backpackers Wanderlust

The Killing Fields, also known as Choeung Ek Geocidal Centre, is located just a short 17 kilometer journey from Phnom Penh city center . This closeness is important considering the horrible events which occurred here between 1975 and 1979.

During this period, Cambodia was run by the Khmer Rouge Regime communist party who arrested and executed anyone they saw as a threat. This included people with education, opposing beliefs, or anyone who stood up for what was right.

Quite a few foreigners even got executed after accidentally stumbling upon Cambodia during this period. Children were trained as soldiers and those who were disobedient were killed. For a greater understanding of life under the direction of the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot watch the film First They Killed My Father .

The Killing Fields outside of Phnom Penh is just one of many locations across the country. Though this one is the most known due to the fact of the horrible acts performed here.

You can book a tour or visit by tuk tuk. The tuk tuk ride for the day should cost you around $12.00. Once at the Killing Fields make sure you hire the audio guide for the stories of those who lived through these events.

Nazi Rally Grounds – Nuremberg, Germany

Contributed by LeAnna from Wander In Germany

It’s no secret that Germany is riddled with a dark, difficult, and oppressing past.  However, decades after WWII, the country does a phenomenal job of walking the fine line between erasing the atrocities and showing respect as well as raising awareness of exactly just what happened. 

One such place is the unfinished Nazi Rally Grounds in  Nuremberg . These huge grounds were Hitler’s vision for an enormous epi-center and headquarters for the Third Reich. 

Walking around the lake at the site, it’s almost easy to not realize exactly what you are standing on. However, on the grounds is the Nazi Dokumentation Zentrum. Here you can see all the blueprints and plans for the grand scheme Hitler envisioned. It makes walking the grounds that much more realistic. 

The museum does an exceptional job of showing exactly how a man with such polarizing, disgusting, racist views could enchant not only an entire nation, but take over much of Europe.  

While in Germany, doing any sort of Nazi salute or tribute in public is illegal.  Therefore, this site is not flocked to by Neo Nazis, but instead is seen as a place of learning from the past. 

Guanajuato Mummy Museum – Mexico

Contributed by Shelley from Travel Mexico Solo

The Museo de las Momias (Museum of the Mummies) is one of the most popular places to visit, and  best things to do in Guanajuato City, Mexico . 

One of the most famous of Mexico’s dark tourism sites has about 100 mummified human bodies on display, in both glass cases and in the open. Most of the bodies are from older adults, but the museum also claims to have the “world’s smallest mummy” of an approximately nine-month-old child.

While not for everyone, it is the most visited place in Guanajuato City . When visiting, you’ll notice Mexican families with children of all ages. In Mexico, death is a much less taboo subject than in other countries — evidenced by annual festivals like Día de Muretos (Day of the Dead).

The story of the mummies is as fascinating (and bizarre) as seeing them in person. Between 1865-1958, Guanajuato’s government decided to start collecting a “grave tax” on buried bodies. If left unpaid by the living relatives for three years, the body was exhumed.

Located in arid Central Mexico, Guanajuato has extremely dry soil and the bodies came out of the ground incredibly well preserved. When the government ended the grave tax in 1958, they had so many mummified bodies that they created this museum.

House of Terror – Budapest, Hungary

Contributed by Marco from Nomadic Fire

Budapest is popular with both tourists and expats for stunning architecture, gorgeous scenery along the Danube river, and affordable cost of living . The city is also home to the infamous museum: the House of Terror.

This museum juxtaposes two of the cruelest regimes of the 20th century: Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Fittingly located in a building that was once the headquarters of both the Nazi and Communist secret police, the museum is an important reminder of both the crimes perpetrated by those regimes and their victims’ courage and resistance. 

Stepping into the House of Terror transports visitors back to a terrifying time in Europe’s history. The museum’s artifacts include personal items confiscated by the secret police. It also tells stories such as a family’s desperate attempt to hide a young boy and baby girl from the Nazis during the Holocaust. Although now a museum, many rooms remain exactly as they were when the headquarters were operational. This includes prison cells, rooms filled with torture devices, and a guillotine scale model.

You can spend anywhere from 45 minutes to a few hours wandering around this well-curated museum. Through exhibits of movie posters, photos, and re-created scenes.

9/11 Memorial and Museum – New York City, USA

One of the most emotional activities on a trip to New York is visiting the 9/11 museum. Built below the original location of the Twin Towers, the World Trade Center site of the 2001 disaster. Entering the museum from the street level, you descend past the twisted metal remains of the massive steel beams that once held the tower up.

The museum is a somber place which stirs up a lot of raw feelings from anyone who visits. It guides you on a journey from the history of the WTC towers to a timeline of the events of that morning.

With witness testimonials, photographs and messages left by those who didn’t make it, the museum is very hard to experience. But the exhibits also talk about what has happened since, what they have learned and why this site is so important. Outdoors, the footprints of the original towers have now been turned into two giant pools. The name of every single victim is engraved around them.

Did you know that white roses are placed at the name of any victim whose birthday it would have been that day? As dark tourism sites go, this one is especially somber given how recently the event took place. But it’s well worth a visit if you’re in New York .

Imperial Crypt – Vienna, Austria

Contributed by Martina & Jürgen from PlacesofJuma

A really cool spot and interesting dark tourism site not to be missed on any visit to Vienna is the Imperial Crypt. It is a real insider tip among  Vienna’s best attractions  and a visit is an eerie experience.

The Imperial Crypt is the final resting place of many of the most famous Habsburgs from Europe. Hidden under the Capuchin Church, it can be visited on a guided tour daily from 10:00 to 18:00.

The crypt is the final resting place of 150 members of the Habsburgs. Among the most famous are Emperor Franz Joseph I, Empress Sisi and Crown Prince Rudolf and Maria Theresa. Walking through the ten dark rooms of the imperial crypt, you travel through a 400-year-long stylistic epoch. You’ll see richly decorated coffins are sometimes even adorned with skulls.

The Habsburgs were preoccupied with their death and therefore had the sarcophagus made according to their wishes. Why not take a tour where you will get lots of information about the funeral rituals?

Auschwitz Concentration Camp – Poland

Contributed by Sean from LivingOutLau

Auschwitz is arguably one of the most tragic sites in the entire world. It was the largest of many German Nazi concentration camp and extermination center in World War II. Over 1.1 million men, women, and children, mostly Jews, lost their lives here. The collective genocide of WWII, known as the Holocaust, is one of the most horrific events in human history.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum is now a site where visitors can learn more about how the events unfolded, living conditions, defenses that were set up to prevent the captives from escaping and more.

Auschwitz is more than just a popular attraction in Poland; it is a place where visitors can understand human nature. Auschwitz is the standing testimony of the terror that humans can do to each other. It warns out what happens when an ethnic group is dehumanized. A visit to Auschwitz is solemn and eye-opening.

The best way to visit Auschwitz is to take a tour from Krakow , the nearest touristy city from Auschwitz. As part of your Krakow itinerary , don’t forget to book your tour as early as possible. There are multiple languages you can choose to have the tour in and the English-speaking tours are always the first ones to run out!

Visiting popular dark tourism sites

There’s no denying that visiting many of these dark tourism sites around the world is uncomfortable. The atrocities that happened there or the stories they tell are often unfathomable. But dark tourism sites are just as important as any museum or regular attraction.

Whether or not you want to visit any (or all) of the sites on this post, you have to agree that they are truly fascinating. As long as you have good reasons for wanting to visit, and a respectful attitude towards them you will be welcomed.

If you’ve enjoyed reading this post leave a comment or share using the social media buttons below. Which of these dark tourism sites are you most interested in visiting to learn more about?

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37 thoughts on “20 Unique Dark Tourism Sites Around The World”

I really appreciate this post and how you emphasized that respect is key. I so agree! I think visiting these places can be very powerful and very educational. I’ve visited four on this list, as well as a few others not mentioned, and am so grateful for those experiences to learn more and witness humanity’s dark history.

Absolutely love the unique concept of this post. I especially appreciated how you included the section on mindfulness and respect. Hope to pay many of these places a visit.

this was a great post… and while these sites aren’t for everyone, i think it’s important to connect with ‘dark’ parts of the past, so we don’t repeat those same mistakes.

It is very rare to come across such posts. I absolutely loved the concept. Keep up the awesome work.

This is such an interesting guide! I have been to a few of these places and I’ve also visited some older prisons around the world that have a dark past to them. I definitely have to visit some of these in the future. Especially the ones in Europe!

This is one of the most unique posts I’ve seen in a while! I honestly haven’t been to most of the places on this list, but I’m bookmarking it for later.

I have visited a number if these sites but never heard of the them, ‘dark tourism’ before. I can understand how the term has come about. I always leave these sites very reflective. There’s no denying they have an enormous impact on me. I have pinned the post because, in my opinion, ‘dark tourisn’ is an important aspect of world travel.

I have been to a few of them and wrote about the profound realizations I went through. Thanks for sharing a thought-provoking post.

I love how you mentioned the importance of respect when visiting these places. These places really make you think! It’s important to not forget the ‘dark’ parts of history so it doesn’t happen again.

I definitely find places that would class as ‘dark tourism’ interesting. Although to be fair, we very rarely remember the ‘good’ and ‘peaceful parts of history so I think most places could be considered ‘dark’ in one way or another! I’ve only visited Alcatraz from the places on this list but it was definitely a fascinating place and I’d love to go back. I’d like to visit the catacombs in Paris too. There’s also a lot on this list that I haven’t heard of before but I’d definitely love to check them out. Thanks for the great guide!

This list is very important given the history of these places! It’s also interesting to note the different feelings at each of them. I haven’t been to every single one, but Auschwitz, Alcatraz, 9/11, the House of Terror, Catacombs, and Gravensteen Castle (wow, I didn’t realize how many I had been to) but all of them were so uniquely dark. I think Auschwitz was my most striking and moving, though.

This is such an interesting post. It’s so heartbreaking to read through some of the dark things that have happened around the world. I believe it’s important that we visit these places to pay our respects and remember the people whose lives were drastically impacted by these places. I appreciated how you emphasized the importance of showing respect at these places. Thank you for sharing this post!

You can learn so much at these dark tourism sites. The 911 memorial has moved me to tears. I’m not sure I could visit the mummy museum.

I’ve been to Alcatraz and the Catacombs, but it was interesting to discover some new ideas from this list. And yes, mindfulness and respect are so important, particularly for several entries on the list.

As a historian I’m interested in visiting these sites, although we’ve skipped them the last years, since we found our son to young for them. I’ve been to 2 of the sites mentioned.

What a great list of dark tourism places to visit! I’ve been to many of these such as Alcatraz, Bodie, Ghent and 9/11 memorial. I’d love to visit Chernobyl and the catacombs in Paris.

What an interesting article and list of places to visit. I’ve visited a few on this list and I agree with you, visiting these places can be very educational, but we need to be respectful.

What a great post. Yes, I have been to a few of these dark tourist sites and am now adding a few more to my bucket list.

What an utterly informative and sobering post. I visited the Killing Fields in Cambodia back in 2013 but today still hold it so close to my heart.

Lenin’s Mausoleum was a surreal experience to say the least. No stopping, no taking photos, only getting a quick glance at Lenin before being ushered out. Auschwitz was another one that was really eye opening for me and a unique although sad experience.

What a fascinating post! I have never visited any of those sites other than the World Trade Center site in NYC. I would be interested in seeing several of them. sites like that are so educational and bring history to the forefront.

Thank you for this important post. I think sites of dark tourism are important for exposing atrocities of the past for many reasons. They allow us to pay tribute to those who have suffered, but more importantly, hopefully they instil in visitors the importance of playing a role in ensuring that history isn’t repeated.

I’m not sure that ‘penal tourism’ (sites such as Alcatraz and Eastern State Penitentiary) need to be included in the category of ‘dark tourism.’ My visits to S-21 and Cheoung Ek in Cambodia can’t be equated to the failings of a penal system. My visits to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, Dachau in Germany, or Auschwitz in Poland can’t be compared to Alcatraz.

‘Dark tourism’ and ‘penal tourism’ are important, but… separate.

Thank you for bringing attention to this issue.

that’s a fair point, and I’m in no way comparing one of these places to another, but understand that many people also have different levels of comfort in where they might want to visit so wanted to include a wide range of places. There are certain sites (like the ones you mentioned) that are always going to be the worst of the worst with regards to history. Thanks for reading

Very cool article! Haven’t seen many like this one. I’m actually in Tasmania right now!!

I have not done a lot of tourist type things alone, but one was Alcatraz. Fascinating experience walking that prison by myself and the audio tour.

I love this! I really want to try dark tourism after I saw “Dark Tourist” on Netflix! I totally agree with you, visiting these sites is very educational and an eye opener. And yes, respect is the key. It applies to everywhere we go! I will definitely save this for my future travels! 🙂

This is an interesting list. We’ve visited some already – like the catacombs in Paris. And some – like Tschernobyl are on our bucketlist!

Great compilation! There are so many places to go for dark tourism. And I know I can’t brave to most of them. I guess I can do it with museums. Opss how I missed the Crypt museum in Vienna!

What an interesting and informative article. I’ve been to a few of these sites, as well as a few more that didn’t make your list. I think that travelling is learning- and it’s important to visit places such as these to honour, respect and learn from our past.

In a way, I am really into some aspects of dark tourism, I love things that are creepy or have a ghost story behind it. I did find a few spots on this list that interest me such as the castle in Belgium. Looks beautiful and with an interesting story!

Dark tourism is no doubt not everyone’s cuppa tea. Travel ushers understanding and these sites may serve as monuments that will remind humanity about life itself and not taking the same dark path twice.

Great post Emma, I love visiting places like these (or, in some cases, “love” would definitely not be the appropriate word, but I think they’re important to visit). The hardest place I’ve ever visited is the Killing Fields in Cambodia. Horrendous. The genocide museum in Sarajevo in Bosnia was hard-hitting too. I’d be really interested to visit that KGB museum in Latvia!

Very good topic and original. i agree in most of the places listed, indeed most of them are scenario of some of the darkest moments of humanitty. I have only one thing that I don’t understand by you choose to put Lenin Mausoleum? Independently of the personal believes of rach one, Lenin led the biggest and most sucessul revolution in history . Poeple can like it more or less but I don’t how his resting place is part of dark tourist places….If would be Stalin inside ok, but this one i don’t get it. Great work overall, I am argentinian and I really appreciate that you brought-up the story of Potosi…. Well done! Looking forward for your next post!

Thanks for reading. For this one it’s also more about the fact that you can visit the body of Lenin and that it is on display as dark tourism is focused around often morbid places. There are a few countries that have former leaders on display – Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, Chairman Mao in China – and I think the idea of visiting one of these places to see an embalmed body on display is a little dark in itself

Got your point! You know that is the same guy who embalmed Lenin and Ho Chi Minh? 😁

Great post! Especially seeing these are all easily accessible, no trespassing required. I have only been to a few, but I really recommend the Nuremberg Ralley Ground and the adjacent museum. Few people visit, and it is quite eerie. Also, the 1936 Olympic Village in Berlin which is similar architecture to Nuremberg rallye grounds, it was really abandoned a few years ago, I think more touristic now.

Have definitely been to a few dark tourist sites but Chernobyl has been on my list for ages now!

One of the most eye opening museums was the Anne Frank in Amsterdam but definitely want to keep visiting some new ones.

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Top 10 dark tourism destinations (including WUHAN!)

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The top dark tourism destinations in the world are macabre and sorrowful. Yet, this attract millions of tourists each year.

What?! Hang on a minute, I thought holidays were supposed to be fun ? Well, it turns out that as our needs and desires change as tourists , we are seeking more unusual, authentic, cultural and educational experiences as part of our overall tourist experience. No, the vast majority of people are not laughing and joking as they walk around cemeteries or former death sites. Instead, they are gaining and insightful and valuable experience.

But what is dark tourism all about? And what are the top dark tourism destinations? Read on to find out…

What is dark tourism?

#1 wuhan, china, #2 chernobyl, ukraine, #3 fukushima, japan, #4 auschwitz concentration camps, poland, #5 sedlec ossuary, czechia, #6 oradour-sur-glane, france, #7 aokigahara suicide forest, japan, #8 volcano creeks in pompeii, italy, #9 killing fields, cambodia, #10 robben island, south africa, dark tourism destinations: further reading.

Dark tourism , also known as black tourism, thanatourism or grief tourism, is tourism that is associated with death or tragedy. It is a type of niche tourism .

The act of dark tourism is somewhat controversial, with some viewing it as an act of respect and others as unethical practice. At the same time, many have argued that the best way to understand history is to see it for yourself- and dark tourism attractions do just this.

Dark tourism attractions can be world-famous, such as Auschwitz, Chernobyl and Ground Zero. Dark tourism can also occur in places that are less well known, such as small cemeteries, zombie-themed events or historical museums.

Dark tourism attractions allow us to able to emotionally absorb ourselves in a place of tragedy. This is an excellent facilitator of educational tourism and cultural tourism . By visiting dark tourism sites, we are able to give ourselves time to reflect on history.

Dark tourism takes many different shapes and forms. Some types of dark tourism are extreme and serious (e.g. visiting a concentration camp), whilst others are of a more light-hearted nature (e.g. a zombie-themed running race). To learn more about the dark tourism spectrum and the different types of dark tourism, head on over to my article dark tourism explained .

The top 10 dark tourism destinations in the world

OK, so now we understand what dark tourism is, lets take a look at the top dark tourism destinations in the world…

When it comes to new dark tourism destinations, Wuhan is set to top the list.

If you haven’t heard of this somewhat uninspiring Chinese city, then you must have spent 2020 living under a rock! Wuhan was the birthplace of the Coronavirus outbreak…. and apparently it holds plenty of fascination for travellers from across the globe….

Motivated by curiosity and a desire to visit a city that was unwillingly thrust into a global spotlight, tourists and avid travellers have been quick to express their Wuhan desires on social media. People are keen to see for themselves the impact that Covid has had on the city.

Quoted in Vice , Beijing resident Niu Chen said of her September 2020 trip to Wuhan: “I wanted to know more about what was going on and to see it firsthand […] To get a sense of how things were and how people are living their lives now, as well as to look back on what happened.”

Many people see a trip to Wuhan as a way to learn about the pandemic and the way it has changed the world as we know it. Whilst this fascination is yet to be put into practice in large numbers, I foresee an influx of tourists in the coming years.

Personally, I find this one a little scary still, but evidently not everyone shares my apprehension. The Chernobyl disaster site welcomes thousands of tourists each year, despite ongoing radiation concerns.

So what happened at Chernobyl?

The Chernobyl disaster of April 1986 was one that rocked the entire world, and still impacts local residents to this day. It is considered the worst nuclear disaster in history.

The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant is located near the city of Pripyat in the north of what was then the Ukrainian SSR. This area is now a ghost town, but one that attracts curious tourists every single year.

Being that it is one of the most well-known disasters to have ever happened, people are keen to see where the events unfolded….

Read more: Chernobyl – 2019 Sky Atlantic Drama [DVD]

Visitors must apply for a day pass at least 10 days in advance, and these are only available through certain established tour operators ; you’ll need to show your passport and this permit at various checkpoints at Chernobyl.

Tour operators have professional monitoring equipment with them throughout the tour, meaning they can gauge how much radiation guests are being exposed to; it is safe to visit Chernobyl, but it is recommended that you wear throwaway overalls. 

A trip to Chernobyl feels dystopian. It’s like getting a glimpse into the apocalypse, and this is a huge draw for a lot of people.

Regardless, the Chernobyl disaster is fascinating to most people – and the 2019 HBO dramatisation has definitely piqued a lot of peoples’ interest in one of the world’s most popular dark tourism destinations.

The only other nuclear disaster to be labelled as a level 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale was the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.

Similarly to its Ukrainian counterpart, the location of this nuclear accident is one of the world’s leading dark tourism destinations. Caused by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, this nuclear disaster caused 18 injuries and one indirect death. 

A visit to Fukushima can again only be arranged with a tour company. Real Fukushima offer an unbiased look at the disaster and the recovery efforts. This is thanks to permission from the Fukushima Prefectural Government. You can enter the red zone, and see the impact of the disaster. From abandoned cars to bags of contaminated soil, there is plenty to see here.

You can also visit the abandoned town centre of Okuma. It once had a population of 11,000 and now lies empty and semi-destroyed: shops with stock still hanging from rails, a street frozen in time. The tour shows visitors how the earthquake and subsequent nuclear disaster affected the area, and how the local people are trying to rebuild their community.

Poland, and Krakow in particular, has shot up the rankings in terms of popular tourist destinations . And many people visit Krakow because it is a gateway to Auschwitz, the most famous World War II concentration camp – and probably the most visited of the world’s dark tourism destinations. Visiting a concentration camp is an incredibly sombre experience. It is also very educational, and helps tourists understand the sheer scale of the holocaust.

Now a museum, Auschwitz can be visited independently or as part of a tour . There is a wealth of information here explaining each part of the camp, and you can see various artefacts here. There are toys belonging to children who were killed, hair shaved from the victims’ heads, suitcases that were packed when the owners believed they were heading somewhere safe.

Read more: The Twins of Auschwitz: The inspiring true story of a young girl surviving Mengele’s hell

World War II is a topic that fascinates many people, and is a topic taught in educational settings too; therefore it is no wonder that visiting concentration camps is something many people aim to do.

Sedlec Ossuary is one of the lesser-known dark tourism destinations, but still one that is worth visiting. I certainly found it fascinating!

Not far from Prague, Sedlec Ossuary is a church decorated entirely with human bones. It is located in Kutna Hora, which is a short train ride from the Czech capital. The church itself is around 10 minutes from the station on foot, and you can buy a ticket that grants you access to the ossuary itself as well as Saint Barbara’s Cathedral. The money goes towards the upkeep of the churches.

The Sedlec Ossuary is breathtaking – there are bones everywhere. They form chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, and they make words on the walls.

You’re face to face with death and morbidity inside this chapel in the middle of Bohemia. It really is a once in a lifetime opportunity, and somewhere you should definitely consider visiting if you’re already in Prague. Death is a huge part of dark tourism, which is why the Sedlec Ossuary is the perfect example. It is pretty much the only guarantee when it comes to human existence, so it’s no wonder that it is a subject which fascinates so many of us.

Another disaster site linked to World War II, the village of Oradour-our-Glane was massacred just days after D Day. Nobody is quite sure why, but it doesn’t matter – the impact is still felt today as you walk the ruined streets.

You can enter the church where the women and children were rounded up and killed, and see the residential streets where the 642 victims lived.

From rusted bicycles to abandoned sewing machines, evidence of daily life remains here. President Charles de Gaulle ordered that the village remain as a permanent memorial, and there is a museum on site where tourists can learn about this massacre.

It is again one of the less popular dark tourism sites, but still one that captures the curiosity and imagination of visitors. If you are travelling through France, this fascinating tourist attraction should definitely be on your itinerary.

Aokigahara Suicide Forest is one of the most intriguing and eery dark tourism destinations in the world. This stunning forest in Japan, located on the north-west flank of Mount Fuji, has become warped over the years. It is a location where thousands of people have tried to take their own lives, and many have succeeded.

The forest is littered with shoes, photographs, bottles, letters and more – evidence of those who entered the depths of Aokigahara with one clear motive…

Suicide is fascinating to many. People who have no first hand experience of feeling suicidal are often curious about the subject – and for those affected by suicide in terms of having lost someone in this way, a trip to the Suicide Forest might help them feel closer to understanding why.

At any rate, it is certainly one of the more well-known dark tourism destinations. It was boosted by controversial YouTuber Logan Paul’s visit , where he filmed himself discovering the body of one of the forest’s victims.

A visit to Pompeii is a must for any history lover. However, it does also form one of Europe’s most popular dark tourism destinations!

The city was completely frozen in time when Mt. Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D. causing most of the inhabitants to flee. Some were not so lucky, however. When the city was rediscovered 1700 years later, bodies were found that had almost been turned into statues by the layers of ash and pumice that fell upon Pompeii. You can visit the city on tours from Rome and Naples.

And you can also visit the volcano itself, Mt. Vesuvius, and see for yourself the impact that nature can have. Tourists can get close to the crater rim. This serves as a reminder that the destruction of Pompeii is something that could happen again, here or elsewhere. This seems to be why it is popular in terms of dark tourism.

The killing fields at Phnom Penh are chilling. They will shock and horrify you, providing vital education about the genocide that occurred under the Khmer Rouge regime.

Across four years in the late 1970s, around 1 in 5 Cambodian citizens were killed under dictator Pol Pot. There are actually around 300 killing fields across Cambodia, but the Choeung Ek Killing Fields are one of the world’s most visited dark tourism destinations.

On the surface, the fields are beautiful. But any tour guide or historian will be able to tell you about the horrors that unfolded here. You can see the remnants for yourself: mass graves, holding rooms, trees where soldiers would hang speakers to drown out the cries of those being savagely beaten to death.

There is a pagoda, closed in with glass walls, where you’ll find a tower made from bones and skulls. It climbs higher and higher, a stark reminder of just how many people were killed at this one site alone. It really is a harrowing experience, but again one that does serve to educate visitors.

Located just outside Cape Town , Robben Island is a prison island.

This is where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned alongside many others, and subject to some of the harshest conditions. It is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and tourists can visit on tours led by ex-prisoners .

The island was once also a leper colony, and later an asylum. But it was its use as a prison during the Apartheid years that has led to its notoriety.

This is why it is one of the top 10 dark tourism destinations in the world. Crime and punishment is a topic that so many of us are eager to learn about. A tour of this prison island is sure to educate you as well as leave you with some burning questions…

Dark tourism is a fascinating subject and is extremely educational. I personally find that reading a book with personal accounts and stories helps me to really understand the dark tourism sights that I visit. Here are some of my recommendations:

• Chernobyl – 2019 Sky Atlantic Drama [DVD]
• Hell Hole, Robben Island: Reminiscences of a Political Prisoner
• The Last Road to Cambodia
• By Loung Ung First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers (New Ed)
• Apocalypse Pompeii
• The Twins of Auschwitz: The inspiring true story of a young girl surviving Mengele’s hell

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Money latest: Gameboys, Sindy dolls, designer shoes, 1950s furniture - the items in your attic that could be worth a small fortune

Gumtree's most popular items include rare stamps, Gameboys and Pokemon cards. Read this and all the latest consumer and personal finance news below, plus leave a comment or submit a consumer dispute or money problem in the box.

Monday 29 April 2024 19:46, UK

• Three of UK's biggest lenders up mortgage rates
• Annual mortgage repayments have increased by up to 70% since 2021
• Higher food prices and shortages warning - as new Brexit checks begin this week
• People on disability benefits could receive vouchers rather than cash

Essential reads

• Gameboys, Sindy dolls, designer shoes, 1950s furniture: The items in your attic that could be worth a small fortune
• Money Problem : 'A company isn't abiding by written warranty for dodgy building work - what can I do?'  
• '£2,000 landed in my account' - The people who say they're manifesting riches
• The world of dark tourism - what is it, is it ethical and where can you go?

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Strikes at Heathrow Airport are taking place over the next few weeks, with the first one already under way.

Staff at the UK's biggest airport are set to walk out during the early bank holiday in May, with their union warning planes could be "delayed, disrupted and grounded".

Click here to find out when all the strikes are, what disruption is expected and which airlines are affected...

The average price paid for comprehensive motor insurance rose 1% in the first quarter of the year, according to industry data indicating an easing in the steep rises seen last year.

The latest tracker issued by the Association of British Insurers (ABI) showed a 1% increase on the previous three months to £635.

That was despite the average claim paid rising 8% to reach a record of £4,800, the body said.

The ABI said the disparity showed that its members were "absorbing" additional costs and not passing them on.

Nevertheless, the average policy was still 33%, or £157, higher between January and March compared to the same period last year.

Read the full story here ...

Getir , the grocery delivery app, has abandoned a European expansion that is set to result in the loss of around 1,500 jobs in the UK.

Sky News had previously revealed that the Turkey-based company, which means "to bring" in Turkish, had  successfully raised money from investors to fund its withdrawals  from the UK, Germany and the Netherlands.

It had already departed other countries including Italy and Spain.

The exits were prompted by growing losses linked to the company's rapid expansion.

Waitrose is launching an exclusive range of products with popular chef Yotam Ottolenghi today. 

The Israeli-British chef is famous for his Middle Eastern and Mediterranean-inspired food, and has worked with the supermarket to release products including a pasta sauce, spice blend and shawarma marinade. 

It is the first time Ottolenghi has partnered with a supermarket in such a way. 

The full range will be available in Waitrose shops, Waitrose.com and Ottolenghi.co.uk from today, while a selection of products will be available from the supermarket on Deliveroo and Uber Eats. 

An introductory 20% off offer is being launched until 18 June. 

The range includes: 

• Ottolenghi Miso Pesto 165g (£4)
• Ottolenghi Kalamata Olive & Harissa Sauce  350g (£4.50)
• Ottolenghi Pomegranate, Rose & Preserved Lemon Harissa 170g (£5)
• Ottolenghi Green Harissa 170g (£5)
• Ottolenghi Aleppo & Other Chillies Blend (£3.95)
• Ottolenghi Sweet & Smokey Blend (£3.95)
• Ottolenghi Citrus & Spice Blend (£3.95)
• Ottolenghi Red Chilli Sauce (£4.50)
• Ottolenghi Shawarma Marinade (£4)

Ottolenghi said he had "always been super eager to get our flavours onto people's dinner plates nationwide, not just in London, without having to cook it from scratch every single time". 

He added: "I hate to admit it but the pasta sauce already features heavily in my home kitchen, when no one is looking."

The cost of bread, biscuits and beer could increase this year due to the impact of the unusually wet autumn and winter on UK harvests.

Research suggests that production of wheat, oats, barley and oilseed rape could drop by four million tonnes (17.5%) compared with 2023.

The wet weather has resulted in lower levels of planting, while flooding and storms over winter caused farmers more losses.

The predictions come just as the rate of price increases on many food items begins to slow as inflation falls.

The Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) analysed forecasts from the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHBD) and government yield data.

It found a "real risk" of beer, biscuits and bread becoming more expensive if the poor harvest increases costs for producers, according to its lead analyst Tom Lancaster.

Beer prices could be affected because the wet weather is still disrupting the planting of spring crops such as barley, the ECIU said.

And potatoes might also see a price hike in the coming months, with growers warning of a major shortage in the autumn due to persistent wet weather.

By Emily Mee , Money team

When I think about the toys of my childhood - my pink Barbie car, my Gameboy Micro, my collection of Pokemon cards - I can't tell you where they went. 

Maybe they were shipped off to a charity shop at some point... Or perhaps they're in the attic? 

While my hot pink Gameboy Micro is lost to the void of time (or a cardboard box somewhere in my mum's house), other versions of it are selling on eBay for £100 or more. 

And there are Pokemon cards selling for anything from a tenner to hundreds or even thousands of pounds. 

It's possible you also have items at home that are a collector's dream. 

Gumtree says its collectables category is already proving to be a "hotbed of activity" this year, with listings up 22% in 2024 so far. 

Its most popular items include rare stamps, coins, war memorabilia and Pokemon cards. 

Spring is often the most popular time for buying and selling collectibles, with demand spiking in March and April. 

We've enlisted the help of TV presenter and collectables expert Tracy Martin to give an idea of what could make you an easy buck. 

Old toys making a 'retro comeback'

Tracy explains that while trends change, vintage toys tend to stand the test of time. 

"Toys are always going to be popular because they tap into nostalgia, our childhood memories," she says, explaining that adults like to buy the toys they used to have. 

Perhaps you were into cars, and you've got some old diecast vehicles from Matchbox, Corgi or Dinky Toys. 

A quick look on toy auction site Vectis.co.uk shows a Corgi Toys "James Bond" Aston Martin estimated to sell for between £600 to £700 - while others are likely to fetch £50 to £60. 

Sindy dolls are also particularly sought after - particularly those from the 1960s - and Barbie dolls from the 1990s too. 

Pokemon cards have seen a "massive surge", Tracy says, with people paying "thousands and thousands of pounds" for good unopened sets. 

She's even seen examples of people paying £16,000 upwards. 

Another up-and-coming market is games consoles, such as Gameboys, vintage consoles and PlayStations, which are making a "retro comeback".

What else could earn you some cash?

Tracy says there's currently a surge in people wanting to buy "mid century" furniture, which is dated to roughly 1945 to 1965 and typically uses clean lines and has a timeless feel. 

Vintage Danish furniture is sought after, particularly tables and chairs with good designer names such as Wegner, Verner Panton and Arne Jacobsen.

Prices range from the low hundreds into the thousands.

People will also look out for vintage framed prints by artists such as Tretchikoff, J.H. Lynch and Shabner - these can range in price from £50 upwards to a few hundred pounds plus. 

Vintage clothes, handbags and shoes can fetch a good price - but you can also invest in modern pieces. 

Tracy suggests looking out for good classic designs with high-end designer names such as Gucci, Chanel, Dior and Louis Vuitton. 

Modern designers such as Irregular Choice, Vendula and Lulu Guinness are also collected. 

Collaborations with designers and celebrities can do well as they're often limited edition. 

For example, Tracy says the H&M x Paco Rabanne maxi silver sequin dress retailed at £279.99 last year but now sells for in excess of £600. 

When it comes to shoes, "the quirkier the design the better" - so look out for brands such as Irregular Choice and Joe Browns. 

Converse and Dr Martens collaborations also do well, depending on the design and condition, as well as Adidas and Nike limited edition trainers. 

What's the best way to sell?  

Tracy recommends to always research before selling your items, as they might perform better on different platforms and you can also get an idea of how much they sell for. 

For example, Vinted can be a good place to sell clothes and shoes, while other items might be better suited for sale on Gumtree, eBay or Etsy. 

Tracy's favourite way to sell is through auction - especially if there are specialist sales. 

Vectis is one of the biggest and most popular for toy selling. 

Interests in different periods and items can go up and down, but for the time being vintage pieces from the 1980s and 90s are popular. 

How much you'll be able to get from an item often takes into account its rarity, condition, whether it reflects a period in time, and if it's got a good name behind it. 

You never know - you might be sitting on a treasure trove. 

Annual mortgage repayments have increased by up to 70% since 2021, according to new data from Zoopla .

The biggest impact of rising interest rates has been in southern England where house prices are higher.

Across the South West, South East and East of England, the annual mortgage cost for an average home is £5,000 higher than previously. This rises to £7,500 in London.

But the universal uptick in mortgage costs has been less pronounced in other parts of the UK, with the North East seeing a £2,350 increase.

In a bid to tackle inflation, the Bank of England has raised the base rate from 0.1% in December 2021 to a 16-year high of 5.25% now.

The Zoopla research looked at the average home buyer taking out a 70% loan-to-value mortgage.

This week seems to be starting where last week left off - with three major lenders announcing further hikes in mortgage rates.

Amid uncertainty of the timing of interest rate cuts from the Bank of England  this year, swap rates (which dictate how much it costs lenders to lend) have been rising in recent weeks.

Financial markets currently see two rate cuts by the Bank of England this year.

We've reported on a string of rate bumps from the high street over the last 10 days, and this morning NatWest, Santander and Nationwide moved.

In its second hikes announcement in less than a week, NatWest laid out increases across its full range of residential and buy-to-let fixed deals of up to 0.22%.

Santander, meanwhile, announced increases for both fixed and tracker deals across their residential and buy-to-let products - up to 0.25%.

The same hikes are being imposed for a range of Nationwide deals.

All of these will kick in tomorrow.

Amit Patel, adviser at Trinity Finance, told Newspage it was "not a great start to the week". 

"This is not good news for borrowers," he said.

Where will the base rate go this year?

The majority of the bets, according to LSEG data, are on the first cut coming in August (previously this was June) and the second in December.

This would take Bank rate from the current level of 5.25% to 4.75%.

Disabled people could receive vouchers instead of monthly payments under proposed changes to Personal Independence Payment (PIP).

The changes could see people being provided with either one-off grants for specific costs such as home adaptation, or being directed to "alternative means of support" rather than financial support.

Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride is set to announce plans today to overhaul the way disability benefits work.

In a Green Paper due to be published alongside Mr Stride's statement to the Commons, ministers will set out plans to reform Personal Independence Payments (PIP), the main disability benefit, through changes to eligibility criteria and assessments.

The plans also include proposals to "move away from a fixed cash benefit system", meaning people with some conditions, such as depression and anxiety, will no longer receive regular payments but rather get improved access to treatment if their condition does not involve extra costs.

Speaking to Sky News earlier, Mr Stride said: "I want us to have a grown-up, sensible conversation about a benefit called PIP that has not been reviewed in over a decade.

"And I want to ask the question, is it fit for purpose given the world that we're in today, in which mental health issues sadly present more of an issue than they did a decade ago."

By James Sillars , business reporter

A fresh high for the FTSE 100 to start the week.

The index of leading shares in London was 0.5% up at 8,179 in early dealing.

The gains were led by miners and financial stocks.

Dragging on the performance were some consumer-facing brands including JD Sports and Flutter Entertainment.

One other development of note to mention is that stubbornly high oil price.

A barrel of Brent crude is currently trading almost 1% down on the day.

But it remains at $88 a barrel.

The market has been pulled by various forces this month, with hopes of a rebound in demand in China among them.

The latest decline is said to reflect peace talks being held between Israel and Hamas.

A demand for smaller homes has driven growth in UK property prices early in 2024, according to research by Halifax.

Data from the bank's house price index suggests annual property price growth hit 1.9% in February this year - a significant rise from -4.1% just three months prior.

That equates to a rise in prices of £5,318 over the past year.

It follows interest rates stabilising, Halifax says, after a sharp rise over the past two years which squeezed mortgage affordability.

A key driver behind rising prices, Halifax says, has been first-time buyers, who made up 53% of all homes bought with a mortgage in 2023 - the highest proportion since 1995.

And it's smaller homes that have recorded the biggest increases in price growth in the early part of this year - with buyers adjusting their expectations to compensate for higher borrowing costs.

Flats and terraced houses made up 57% of all homes purchased by first-time buyers last year.

This varies by region - for example, in London, flats and terraced homes accounted for 90% of all first-time buyer purchases.

Challenges remain

However, Amanda Bryden, head of Halifax mortgages, said "it's important not to gloss over the challenges" facing the UK housing market, given the "impact of higher interest rates on mortgage affordability" and "continued lack of supply of new homes".

"But scratch beneath the surface and there is a more nuanced story, one which shows that demand for different property types in different parts of the country can vary hugely," she added.

"As interest rates have stabilised and buyers adjust to the new economic reality of owning a home, one way to compensate for higher borrowing costs is to target smaller properties.

"This is especially true among first-time buyers, who have proven to be resilient over recent years, and now account for the largest proportion of homes purchased with a mortgage in almost 30 years."

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