Do you ever find yourself “rubber-necking” as you drive past a car crash? Perhaps you don’t make it obvious that you’re trying to take a peek. You surreptitiously look out of the corner of your eye or ask a passenger to take a look for you. It’s common to want to see what happened at the scene of a crash, accident, or any other traumatic event. Most people are curious about death because (spoiler alert) we all die.

Our desire to know what lies in the great beyond is strong, so strong that some people have turned death into a tourist attraction. The technical name for this is thanatourism, from the Greek thanatos meaning death. Death tourism is more colloquially called dark tourism.

Philip Stone, of the University of Central Lancashire in the United Kingdom, has defined dark tourism as “the act of travel and visitation to sites, attractions, and exhibitions which has real or recreated death, suffering, or the seemingly macabre as a main theme.”

General examples of dark tourism are tours of battlefields, cemeteries, and haunted houses. More controversial dark tourist attractions include sites of human tragedies, such as the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and World Trade Center footprints.

This time of year, ghosts and ghouls go mainstream. Dark tourism becomes more widely acceptable as people line up to tour haunted houses (both real and fabricated), visit graveyards, and stare into the face of Death, or at least a death mask. The Commonwealth’s tourism Web site, lists “more than 50 spooky places to freak you out.”

Tourism providers the world over use aspects of the macabre to boost sales. These providers generally fall into four categories: historical, entertainment, cultural, or educational. For example, in Leesburg, you can take a tour with actual paranormal investigators from the Virginia Scientific Research Association. The tour includes historical facts and education on the scientific process behind ghost-hunting.

The Leesburg folks are open about what they do, but other providers of tours that fit the definition of dark tourism are less forthright. A 2004 study conducted by Yishai Horowitz explored whether tour providers would categorize themselves as offering “morbidity tourism.” A representative of a company offering battlefield tours responded with, “Our war tours take veterans of the Korean War back to that country to visit battle sites specific to their experience in the country, and help them to understand the culture and history of Korea. This is a very serious endeavor, and not some sort of voyeuristic attempt on the part of damaged individuals to enjoy being around atrocities or death.” Oddly, and conversely, a person in Transylvania who offered tours of sites related to Vlad the I paler (a.k.a. Dracula) wrote, “Shouldn’t you focus on Auschwitz and Holocaust-related sites rather than Transylvania?”

When I first became interested in tourism related to the morbid, I didn’t know there were others actually daring to ask sensitive questions aloud. My questions arose from tragedies out in California, where I was living at the time. The condo in Brentwood where Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were found murdered had become a tourist attraction. Visitors were driving by so frequently that the address eventually had to be changed and the condo renovated to make it more difficult to locate. When Laci Peterson went missing on Christmas Eve of 2002, it was big news because of her near-term pregnancy. Laci was a graduate of the college where I taught at the time. The house she lived in with husband, Scott Peterson, was on a quiet street in Modesto. The street started to look like a freeway with bumper-to-bumper traffic as tourists drove by hoping to catch a glimpse of the ever-elusive something.

And of course, there was the largest terrorist attack on American soil to contend with. The World Trade Center footprints attracted scores of people, looking down at the wreckage, watching the cleanup, observing the new construction. It happened in Somerset County, Pa., too.

The more I learned about dark tourism, the more I wanted to find out why people visited these places. When the television show, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, built a house in Blacksburg, I drove by a couple times. It was fun to see something both on television and in person. When Rodney Startz shot and killed Donna Angelo at the Fairlawn Wal-mart in February 2006, I avoided the place. I didn’t want to see others taking long looks at the check-out counters.

After schoolchildren were killed by a gunman in Nickel Mines, Pa., I prayed for the community and watched television footage of onlookers driving past the schoolhouse. Not everyone respected the Amish families requests for privacy. I wanted to drive up there and survey people to find out what made something so horrible so fascinating. Were they doing it out of respect for the dead … paying homage? What did they expect to see? Researchers from a variety of disciplines are working on a survey instrument that will help inform us as to why dark tourists are motivated to visit places associated with the macabre.

On April 17 of this year, it hit me that what had happened at the Virginia Tech campus the day before was a human tragedy that was making international news. It was inevitable. The Virginia Tech campus was going to become a dark tourist attraction. What had once been a research line I pursued with, more or less, academic detachment was now happening here, affecting people I cared about. I could have headed over to Tech in the days and weeks after the shootings and interviewed people at the memorials, those taking photos of Norris Hall, onlookers gathered around the media vans. I was too close to it, though, physically and emotionally.

So there it is. We can choose to have dark tourism experiences—a ghost walk in Leesburg, a tour of Transylvania, a tram ride through Arlington National Cemetery. But there needs to be some distance between the tourist and the trap. Norbert Elias wrote about the “civilizing process,” a way to fill the void left by reduced opportunities to experience the real thing. That is the root of dark tourism. We try to peer into the void, without being close enough to fall in.

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For additional
information about
dark tourism, check
out these Web sites:

The Dark Tourism Forum; an international Academic Research Facility

—–

The home site for
the Virginia Scientific
Research Association
and hosts of a
legendary ghost tour

—–
The Center for
Paranormal Research
and Investigation,
based near
Richmond, VA

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Teresa O’Bannon is professor in the Recreation, Parks, and Tourism Department at Radford University. She has been interested in the macabre since childhood, much to the dismay of her mother.