Dark Tourism
Managing Dark Tourism Sites, Attractions, and Exhibitions
INTRODUCTION...
The term ‘Dark Tourism’ was first coined by Lennon and Foley (1996) to describe the relationship between tourism attractions and an interest in death and the macabre. Other academics have referred to Dark Tourism as ‘Blackspots’ (Rojec, 1993), ‘Morbid Tourism (Blom, 2000) and ‘Thanatourism’ (Seaton, 1998) and these are were fascination of visiting death has occurred. The name created encompasses the travel to sites of death, disaster or the macabre (Stone, 2011). Seaton and Lennon (2004) describe the Dark Tourism process in which travel to the sites of death has now become a leisure activity aswell as many of the locations becoming a popular holiday visit destination. There are many different types of Dark Tourism sites including: sites of natural disasters, terrorism, mass murdering's, ghost sites and wars etc. Many people are attracted to them and it has been suggested that this has been the case since people started to travel, they hav been drawn purposefully or other wise toawards sites, attracions or events that are linked in one way or another with death suffering, violence and disaster (Stone, 2005).
There are many difrent motivations for travelling to Dark Tourism sites. Dunkley (2005) provided a framework for understanding the different reasons and interests for visiting dark tourism sites. These include the following:
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Visiting sites such as cemeteries and gravesites for contemplation for possibly spiritual and retrospective purposes.
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Thrill and risk seeking in the form of visiting attractions such as the running of the bulls in Pamplona.
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Validation and the confirmation of events that may have happened such as crime, murder or disaster.
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Authenticity and the need to acknowledge the reality of a place’s or person’s existence.
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Self-discovery and the intrinsic desire to learn.
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Visiting iconic sites that have immortalized key events, for example assassinations (e.g. the Dakota apartments where John Lennon lived) and significant landmarks (e.g. Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin).
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Convenience when an attraction is located in a famous city (e.g. the Coliseum, Rome).
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Morbid curiosity and visiting sites where death or disaster have only recently occurred.
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Pilgrimage for religious purposes (e.g. to Mecca) or to disaster sites (e.g. Ground Zero).
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Remembrance and empathy when visiting, for example, war cemeteries or the clock tower at Old Trafford to acknowledge the Munich plane crash of 1958.
(Dunkley, 2005)
‘Thanatourism is uniquely distinguished from other kinds of tourism since its defining feature is its association with death and these sites are characterised as sacral/auratic and demand managerial strategies that differ from those in other kinds of tourism’.
(Sharpley and Stone, 2006)
'Visitations to places where tragedies or historically noteworthy death has occurred and that continue to impact our lives'.
(Tarlow, 2005)
‘Dark tourism refers to visits, intentional or otherwise, to purposeful / non-purposeful sites which offer a presentation of death or suffering as the raison d'être'.
(Stone, 2005)
