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This episode was suggested by patrons on both the Patreon site and on Discord. Humans are fascinated by gore and violence, but even more so the mysterious and unsolved. Interest in these disturbing and unpleasant subjects is called Morbid Curiosity, and it has grouped millions of people throughout the ages. I am one of those people.
My name is Hallie, and this is the Morbid Curiosity Podcast. Have you ever visited a historic prison, a cemetery, a battlefield, a supposedly haunted house? If so, you've participated in dark tourism. Other names for this practice are grief tourism, the heritage of atrocity, and morbid tourism.
There are subtle differences in the definitions of all these terms, but they all encompass the act of visiting places associated with death and suffering. Many cultures and religions throughout history participate in pilgrimages to locations where religious figures have died, or places that house relics, body parts of religious figures. This most ancient dark tourism practice is called Thanaturism. The word Thanaturism has roots in ancient Greek.
Thanatos means dead or death. Therefore, Thanaturism means death tourism. Today, this specific term denotes traveling to sacred sites where death has occurred. Pilgrims visited Jerusalem for centuries to see the place where Jesus of Nazareth was crucified.
The ancient Greeks ritualized travel to the site of the Battle of Marathon in 140 BCE, but it was visited by tourists long before that to honor the fallen heroes of the battle. People traveled from all over the Roman Empire between the 1st century BCE and the 2nd century CE to witness gladiatorial spectacles which involved violence and death. The public executions of the medieval period in Europe were always well attended wherever they occurred, as were open morgues. The battlefields of Waterloo in 1815, Gettysburg in 1863, as well as the Western Front during World War I, all had visitors as the battles were still raging and immediately after.
Tourists flocked to the site of the Hindenburg explosion in 1937 before all the flames had died down. Some scholars argue that dark tourism stems from the tradition of contemplating death during the Middle Ages in Europe, just after the Black Death. It then intensified in the Romantic period of the late 18th and early 19th century. Advances in travel technology assisted further in the early 20th century.
Interest has only increased since the early 2000s, when the trend of reality TV highlighted hundreds of dark tourism locations via the extremely popular shows like Ghost Hunters, MTV Sphere, Ghost Adventures, Scariest Places on Earth, and Destination Truth. The sites highlighted by these programs were suddenly swamped by visitors, and a bloom of new ghostly tourism attractions cropped up all over the place, which then spawned even more reality ghost hunting and dark history exploration on new platforms like YouTube and TikTok. Research states that modern dark tourism is most popular among women and people with some level of higher education. I happen to be in both those categories.
This podcast exists thanks to these programs sparking my own fascination, albeit from the more scholarly end of things. So why do we do it? Why are humans drawn to places that have seen death and disaster? The answer is complicated and multifaceted, but extremely fascinating.
Deathscapes, or places where death, disaster, tragedy, or suffering has taken place, can have a profound effect on individual people. As a person moves through these sites, their imagination is stimulated. Personal memories, doubts, and expectations may be awakened or revisited. Emotions may be triggered.
Sadness, anger, humiliation, humor, guilt, relief. A person may have sense reactions to, smells, shivers, tastes in the back of the throat. There is a thrill associated with encountering the authentic and real, experiencing death, the most mysterious and frightening, and also universal human experience, from a temporal distance. According to Dr.
Anthony Seton of the University of Limerick, the contemplation of death is common in all cultures, but modern society has concealed death and rendered it taboo. Some researchers think dark tourism is the search for a connection between modernity and authenticity. It's a crossroads where tragic history is used to show how advanced we've become as humans and also the authenticity of that history, the exact location where an event took place. Modern tourists often feel disconnected from reality, authenticity, and history when on holiday, but also in their regular lives.
Therefore, some seek a more genuine experience when on vacation. Far less imagination is needed to understand and feel an event when you're standing right where it happened. Some want to get closer to disaster than TV, movies, or books can get them, but also remain safe. There's an element of reveling in your own safety as well, but also wanting to help those who suffered somehow.
The visitor is pulled in and repelled at the same time. Other times, very inauthentic experiences attract tourists, experiences that use elements of real events to tell stories of heroes and villains, cowards and the courageous. It's a melodrama complete with lessons, the romanticized retelling of a tragedy. According to Dr.
Philip R. Stone, executive director of the Institute for Dark Tourism Research, visitors to dark tourism sites are not sadists enjoying the suffering of others. They are experiencing the possibility of death through that of the other, another human who isn't themselves. This instills a message to society and allows us to learn a lesson from a tragedy, a trauma ever memorialized by survivors in visited sites of suffering.
The fascination with death corresponds to a quest for new experiences that leads visitors to strengthen their social bonding with the suffering community. These locations can explore the human relationship with death and dying, suffering, and grief. They can also highlight the impact of the event at that location and the current impact of touring that location on the victims of the event, their feelings on the tourism of their suffering. Death throws into relief the values by which people live their lives and evaluate their experiences.
Fundamental social and cultural issues are revealed through exploring both the event and the reaction to touring the location it took place. The events open discussions about ethics and morality, death and grief amongst people of all ages that otherwise wouldn't occur. Many dark tourism sites are exceptionally difficult, places where death has occurred in living memory, earthquakes, battles, genocide, murders. These sites could be classified as raw, as the site may be still evolving from a wound to a scar, to a memorial, while still being surrounded by victims and perpetrators who haven't recovered from the tragedy yet.
The people that run the experiences of these locations also impact the interpretation of the event and are impacted by the event themselves. There's a cathartic value in interpreting conflict for outsiders and highlighting the victims' struggle through the presentation of the site and the pursuit of helping the local people come to terms with the incident. The gaze or experience of the tourist is very important at these sites. The gaze is marked, modified, and managed by tourism professionals.
It's mediated by the tourist's personal values, religion, education, age, upbringing, and personal interest. All of this influences how the tourist views the site. For example, in a location where medieval torture devices that were used on site are on display, the tourist is often pushed, through reading the display plaques or listening to audio tours, to see medieval barbarity, the violence, pain, and wrongness of torture. Some sites and events are used to highlight a certain political view or cultural value.
Cultural theorist Maximiliano E. Costange of the University of Palermo, Argentina, suggests that sometimes, this type of directed experience of a tragedy does not create empathy with the victims. Instead, the pain of the other is consumed in order to instill a feeling of uniqueness and affirm the survivor's role as part of a privileged section of society. This happens simply because this feeling of superiority helps survivors balance the frustrations and sentiment of loss after a disaster.
It helps survivors feel that not everything is lost, that they survived due to something special about them, a physical or moral strength. If this type of sentiment isn't regulated, survivors can develop pathological attachments to suffering by blurring pain with pleasure as well as ethnocentric and racist views. The authenticity of the site is also something to consider. While some locations do provide a respectful exploration of a grim subject using documentation and empirical evidence to support and explain the event, many others commodify and exploit the pain of past peoples to draw in tourists and cash.
This is the double-edged sword of dark tourism, humanizing respectful exploration of difficult topics versus dehumanizing exploitation of these topics. Generally, the more gory, gruesome, shock-inducing thrill type of experience is less authentic and more exploitative. We'll get into this type of dark tourism experience more in a moment when we discuss specific types of locations. Taking things is a temptation for many tourists, whatever location they're visiting, and it's no different in dark tourism locations.
But the things taken from dark tourism sites have far more ethical complications. Bones, bullets, buttons, etc. all belonged to victims of the event. They are part of the history of that location.
Some tourists take things in order to sell them on, commodifying the death and disaster that occurred in that location. The interpreters of the site are often the worst offenders in this type of commodification, selling keychains and other tat with images of tragedy and death. Photographs are another story. While they don't often harm the site itself, damage often occurs when someone walks over something as they try to get the perfect photo.
Journalists can be insidious also, with their need to get close to the incident and often their embellishment of it. We've seen this in many of our previous episodes, where news coverage of an incident includes completely fabricated gory details added by journalists in order to sell more papers. However, the commercialization and commodification of a site can ensure the event it explores stays in the public memory. Take for example Auschwitz, a former Nazi concentration and extermination camp just west of Krakow, Poland.
At this location, over a million men, women and children were tortured and killed during World War II. In 2012, the site was visited by 1.5 million tourists. The site is heavily commodified, with dozens of guided tours provided by private companies out of Krakow and further away. There are even some tourist companies that offer stag or bachelor parties at Auschwitz.
The horrific history of the place has become trivialized. However, it's still a major draw for tourists. The camp has been reshaped, remolded and commodified, yet it retains its historic notoriety in part through its commercial function as a visitor attraction. Lesser known camps such as Chelmno extermination camp, which is halfway between Warsaw and Poznan in Poland, only get around 50,000 visitors a year, despite large numbers of exterminations that occurred there too, between 152 and 350,000.
Chelmno is smaller, somewhat neglected, but also less exploitative and commodified. It remains unknown to most tourists. Marketing clearly influences the number of visitors. When it comes to dark tourism, public historians, who are the people that interpret history for the public, such as people who run museums, historic sites, and consult with the government, television, and film companies, tend not to get involved.
Dr. Tony Johnson of the University of Shannon suggests that the industry of dark tourism has put them off. The topics and presentation are seen as distasteful, trivial, or simply unsupported by serious and constant research. But this is precisely why historians, scientists, and other researchers should get involved.
We need more research, more respect, when presenting these difficult events to the public. Now, let's explore what kinds of tours and experiences count as dark tourism. Although most dark tourism locations are associated with death, places of suffering, grief, violence, mystery, and tragedy also fall under the umbrella of dark tourism. As I mentioned, one of the oldest forms of dark tourism occurred as part of religious pilgrimages, the sites of martyrdom, or death of religious figures.
For example, St. Peter's Basilica at Vatican City in Italy, now the seat of the Catholic faith, was built at the location where St. Peter supposedly took his last breath. I would include a travel to visit incorruptible corpses and relics in this category as well.
Another ancient form of dark tourism is visiting battlefield sites. As I mentioned, the ancient Greeks traveled to visit the site of the Battle of Marathon, which took place in 490 BCE during the Persian invasion of Greece. The battle was a significant victory for the Greeks as it was a defining moment for the Athenian democracy. People traveled from all over the Greek world to honor those who fought in the battle.
In more recent history, American civil war sites like Gettysburg and Yorktown are incredibly popular tourist destinations. The battlefields of both world wars are also popular dark tourism locations. The Western Front, the battlefields of France and Belgium during World War I, were the scene of some of the bloodiest battles of the war. Infamous killing fields such as the Somme, Verdun, and Ypres are included in these.
World War II dark tourism includes both battlefield sites and Holocaust locations, concentration camps, former ghettos, and locations where the Nazis planned the mass death of the Jewish people, which peaked in 1942 and 1943. It's commonly estimated that around 6 million Jews were murdered by the Nazi party. Holocaust tourism is a part of another branch of dark tourism known as genocide tourism. Popular sites in this subset are found in Cambodia, where 1.5 to 2.5 million people were killed by the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot between 1975 and 1979, and Rwanda, where in 1994 between 800,000 and 1 million Tutsi people, an ethnic minority, were killed by organized extremists of the Hutu majority.
Another branch of dark tourism is disaster tourism, which includes sites of devastating natural disasters such as volcanic eruptions, floods, and fires. These include the site of Pompeii and the wreckage of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. With more recent incidents like Hurricane Katrina, issues have occurred with people flocking to the site to witness the devastation. Those that are only there to look are often referred to as rubberneckers or looky-loos.
They go to stare, not to help, and can actively hinder recovery efforts. Man-made disasters are also part of disaster tourism. This includes plane crashes, shipwrecks, nuclear bombings such as Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, and nuclear accidents such as those that occurred at Chernobyl and Pripyat in Ukraine in 1986 and in Fukushima, Japan in 2011. The remains of reactor 4 at Pripyat draws people despite the personal safety risks of radiation poisoning.
The presence of actual danger fuels some people to experience these more risky places. Another branch of the dark tourism tree is prison and persecution tourism. Sites in this branch include prisons in all their forms, gulags, political prison camps, and POW camps, asylums, and anywhere people have been incarcerated. There are hundreds of these types of sites all over the world.
Some of the more popular prisons for tourists include Alcatraz, Eastern State Penitentiary, the Tower of London, Port Arthur in Tasmania, and S-21 prison in Cambodia. Decommissioned mental asylums open to tourists are also plentiful and include Penhurst Asylum in Pennsylvania, Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia, Aspidale Psiquiatico in Italy, Arredale Asylum in Victoria, Australia, Bethlehem Royal Hospital, also called Bedlam Asylum in London, and so many more. These asylums are long since abandoned, but asylum tourism occurred while some of them were still housing patients. Asylum tourism before the 1800s was much like visiting a human zoo.
In London, people could pay a small fee to see the so-called beasts of bedlam asylum in the late 1800s this tourism was less voyeuristic than earlier the administration of the asylums wanted to give tours to show how humanely their patients were treated and the state-of-the-art treatments that were available there most institutions still had issues with overcrowding and mistreatment but these issues were covered up not displayed some asylum tourism sites blurred together with another branch of dark tourism medical history tourism or medical specimen tourism which i'll get to in a moment a subsection of persecution tourism is locations associated with trade in enslaved peoples this includes plantation houses and slave trade locations like amina castle in ghana or gori island in senegal both of which were places where people were imprisoned and then sold into slavery the presentation of this type site is a delicate matter as the history is complex contested and unresolved issues of site ownership management marketing and negotiation of the histories of race and slavery all contribute to whether these sites are exploitative or respectful each site carries stories of historic abuse racial divides and death some also include the fabrication of historical characters in the form of ghosts for example myrtle's plantation in louisiana is one of the more famous plantation tourist sites because it's thought to be haunted its most famous ghost is chloe an enslaved woman who was disfigured by the owner of the plantation house the story of chloe the ghost illuminates the dark violent history of the site but there's little evidence that she actually existed a great book on this topic is tales from haunted south dark tourism and memories of slavery from the civil war era by tia miles miles suggests that ghost tours of locations associated with enslavement often reduce complex racial histories and lack any engagement with modern political issues of race she also suggested that many of the tours and stories fixated on histories of slavery and black history which romanticize as much as they exoticize in ways that are not applied to the histories of white cultures and experiences public history could assist here not by saying the ghost stories themselves are not significant but are a form of intangible heritage that reflects the anxiety of their time but to do justice to the real enslaved people who labored and died in these sites public historians should at least contextualize complicate and politicize the ghosts as for ghost tourism i'll do a full episode deep dive on this topic soon medical history tourism encompasses both medical specimen collections and exhibitions and hospital museums as well as places where gruesome medical experiments or treatments occurred specimen collections are large museums full of medical specimens usually preserved human body parts that were used to teach medical students about disease these include the hunterian museum in london and the mutter museum in philadelphia anatomical medical and hospital museums also draw hundreds each year such as the thackeray museum in leeds the international museum of surgical science in chicago and the meguro parasitological museum in tokyo exhibitions include the body world's traveling exhibit and others like it sites where medical experimentation was conducted on humans include some nazi concentration camps like auschwitz dachau and bookenwald in germany and the unit 731 museum in harbin china i would also include open morgues in this category historically open morgues were large places where unidentified bodies were laid out for the public to identify the most famous of these was the parisian open morgue located near notre dame cathedral it was open every day and displayed bodies that had washed up on the shores of the scene or were found in alleyways few visitors were actually trying to identify the bodies most were curiosity seekers pretending to look for loved ones new york's bellevue morgue also had an open morgue with similar visitors people looking at nakedness and death one of the more common less dark types of dark tourism is grave tourism this includes locations like famous graves cemeteries catacombs and ossuaries monumental cemeteries like pere le chaise in paris and highgate in london are some of the most popular but smaller historical cemeteries also receive a lot of visitors that aren't mourning loved ones i would include museums of funeral culture in this category as well another popular dark tourism category is true crime locations this includes jack the whipper tours police museums and places associated with famous serial killers suicide locations are also popular such as au kikahata in japan beachy head in the south of england and the golden gate bridge in san francisco there are of course other locations that feature a combination of all these categories such as the museum of death in los angeles there are also other categories that don't involve human tragedy such as taxidermy museums poison gardens and caves full of bats so does dark tourism benefit humans and if so how it seems to attract them like moths to flame every human must die and every human must deal with loved ones dying it's a universal constant seeing what humans have done to each other to themselves or how other cultures deal or have dealt with death is informative unless it's being exploited for cash this is a fine line to walk with information being on one side and exaggeration on the other keep this in mind the next time you visit one of these locations take a moment to research the location learn a little more about it from reputable sources ask questions while you're there remain loudly curious the morbid curiosity podcast is produced by h lloyd if you'd like to get in touch or suggest a morbid topic you can do so on facebook and instagram at morbid curiosity podcast on twitter at morbid podcast and our website www.morbidcuriositypodcast.com if you 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