Why visitors flock to sites of tragedy
An explanation behind the trend of dark tourism A tour of the 9/11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan.
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 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.”
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 fuelling more visitation to some wellknown 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 per cent. Ukraine’s government has since declared its intention to make the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone an official tourist spot, despite lingering radiation.
Why are tourists so enamoured 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.
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.
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 behaviour, as well as the ethically questionable “voyeurism” of visiting an ongoing or very recent tragedy to gape.
Lennon says he’s sometimes “dumbfounded” by some of the behaviour that gets publicized, but he declines to say what the right or wrong way is for tourists to behave.
“I’m heartened by the fact that they choose to try to understand this difficult past,” Lennon says.