dark tourism dissertation examples

Motivations and intentions of tourists to visit dark tourism locations

Major Professor

Committee member, journal title, journal issn, volume title, research projects, organizational units.

The Department of Apparel, Education Studies, and Hospitality Management provides an interdisciplinary look into areas of aesthetics, leadership, event planning, entrepreneurship, and multi-channel retailing. It consists of four majors: Apparel, Merchandising, and Design; Event Management; Family and Consumer Education and Studies; and Hospitality Management.

History The Department of Apparel, Education Studies, and Hospitality Management was founded in 2001 from the merging of the Department of Family and Consumer Sciences Education and Studies; the Department of Textiles and Clothing, and the Department of Hotel, Restaurant and Institutional Management.

Dates of Existence 2001 - present

Related Units

• College of Human Sciences ( parent college )
• Department of Family and Consumer Sciences Education and Studies ( predecessor )
• Department of Hotel, Restaurant, and Institutional Management ( predecessor )
• Department of Textiles and Clothing ( predecessor )
• Trend Magazine ( student organization )

Journal Issue

Is version of.

Dark tourism is an increasingly popular research topic for the tourism industry, however it has been lacking in empirical research contribution. This study provides empirical research to demonstrate and analyze the relationships between four dark tourism constructs (i.e., dark experience, engaging entertainment, unique learning experience, and casual interest) and the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) constructs (i.e., attitude, subjective norm, perceived behavioral control, and behavioral intentions). The purpose of the study was to gain a better understanding of the behaviors and intentions of tourists who have either previously visited or plan to visit a dark tourism location.

Utilizing a combination of the Push-Pull Factor Theory, the Theory of Planned Behavior, and dark tourism constructs, a new theoretical framework was created to determine the motivations and intentions of tourists visiting dark tourism locations. A total of 1068 usable questionnaires were sampled using Qualtrics Panels data collection service for data analysis purposes. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to verify satisfactory levels of reliability and validity in regards to the measurement of model fit. After the model fit was adequate, structural equation modeling (SEM) was employed to test the validity of the model and determine the positive and negative relationships between dark tourism constructs and the Theory of Planned Behavior.

Description

Subject categories, collections.

• Search Menu
• Sign in through your institution
• Browse content in Arts and Humanities
• Browse content in Archaeology
• Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Archaeology
• Archaeological Methodology and Techniques
• Archaeology by Region
• Archaeology of Religion
• Archaeology of Trade and Exchange
• Biblical Archaeology
• Contemporary and Public Archaeology
• Environmental Archaeology
• Historical Archaeology
• History and Theory of Archaeology
• Industrial Archaeology
• Landscape Archaeology
• Mortuary Archaeology
• Prehistoric Archaeology
• Underwater Archaeology
• Urban Archaeology
• Zooarchaeology
• Browse content in Architecture
• Architectural Structure and Design
• History of Architecture
• Residential and Domestic Buildings
• Theory of Architecture
• Browse content in Art
• Art Subjects and Themes
• History of Art
• Industrial and Commercial Art
• Theory of Art
• Biographical Studies
• Byzantine Studies
• Browse content in Classical Studies
• Classical History
• Classical Philosophy
• Classical Mythology
• Classical Literature
• Classical Reception
• Classical Art and Architecture
• Classical Oratory and Rhetoric
• Greek and Roman Papyrology
• Greek and Roman Epigraphy
• Greek and Roman Law
• Greek and Roman Archaeology
• Late Antiquity
• Religion in the Ancient World
• Digital Humanities
• Browse content in History
• Colonialism and Imperialism
• Diplomatic History
• Environmental History
• Genealogy, Heraldry, Names, and Honours
• Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing
• Historical Geography
• History by Period
• History of Emotions
• History of Agriculture
• History of Education
• History of Gender and Sexuality
• Industrial History
• Intellectual History
• International History
• Labour History
• Legal and Constitutional History
• Local and Family History
• Maritime History
• Military History
• National Liberation and Post-Colonialism
• Oral History
• Political History
• Public History
• Regional and National History
• Revolutions and Rebellions
• Slavery and Abolition of Slavery
• Social and Cultural History
• Theory, Methods, and Historiography
• Urban History
• World History
• Browse content in Language Teaching and Learning
• Language Learning (Specific Skills)
• Language Teaching Theory and Methods
• Browse content in Linguistics
• Applied Linguistics
• Cognitive Linguistics
• Computational Linguistics
• Forensic Linguistics
• Grammar, Syntax and Morphology
• Historical and Diachronic Linguistics
• History of English
• Language Evolution
• Language Reference
• Language Acquisition
• Language Variation
• Language Families
• Lexicography
• Linguistic Anthropology
• Linguistic Theories
• Linguistic Typology
• Phonetics and Phonology
• Psycholinguistics
• Sociolinguistics
• Translation and Interpretation
• Writing Systems
• Browse content in Literature
• Bibliography
• Children's Literature Studies
• Literary Studies (Romanticism)
• Literary Studies (American)
• Literary Studies (Asian)
• Literary Studies (European)
• Literary Studies (Eco-criticism)
• Literary Studies (Modernism)
• Literary Studies - World
• Literary Studies (1500 to 1800)
• Literary Studies (19th Century)
• Literary Studies (20th Century onwards)
• Literary Studies (African American Literature)
• Literary Studies (British and Irish)
• Literary Studies (Early and Medieval)
• Literary Studies (Fiction, Novelists, and Prose Writers)
• Literary Studies (Gender Studies)
• Literary Studies (Graphic Novels)
• Literary Studies (History of the Book)
• Literary Studies (Plays and Playwrights)
• Literary Studies (Poetry and Poets)
• Literary Studies (Postcolonial Literature)
• Literary Studies (Queer Studies)
• Literary Studies (Science Fiction)
• Literary Studies (Travel Literature)
• Literary Studies (War Literature)
• Literary Studies (Women's Writing)
• Literary Theory and Cultural Studies
• Mythology and Folklore
• Shakespeare Studies and Criticism
• Browse content in Media Studies
• Browse content in Music
• Applied Music
• Dance and Music
• Ethics in Music
• Ethnomusicology
• Gender and Sexuality in Music
• Medicine and Music
• Music Cultures
• Music and Media
• Music and Religion
• Music and Culture
• Music Education and Pedagogy
• Music Theory and Analysis
• Musical Scores, Lyrics, and Libretti
• Musical Structures, Styles, and Techniques
• Musicology and Music History
• Performance Practice and Studies
• Race and Ethnicity in Music
• Sound Studies
• Browse content in Performing Arts
• Browse content in Philosophy
• Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art
• Epistemology
• Feminist Philosophy
• History of Western Philosophy
• Metaphysics
• Moral Philosophy
• Non-Western Philosophy
• Philosophy of Language
• Philosophy of Mind
• Philosophy of Perception
• Philosophy of Science
• Philosophy of Action
• Philosophy of Law
• Philosophy of Religion
• Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic
• Practical Ethics
• Social and Political Philosophy
• Browse content in Religion
• Biblical Studies
• Christianity
• East Asian Religions
• History of Religion
• Judaism and Jewish Studies
• Qumran Studies
• Religion and Education
• Religion and Health
• Religion and Politics
• Religion and Science
• Religion and Law
• Religion and Art, Literature, and Music
• Religious Studies
• Browse content in Society and Culture
• Cookery, Food, and Drink
• Cultural Studies
• Customs and Traditions
• Ethical Issues and Debates
• Hobbies, Games, Arts and Crafts
• Natural world, Country Life, and Pets
• Popular Beliefs and Controversial Knowledge
• Sports and Outdoor Recreation
• Technology and Society
• Travel and Holiday
• Visual Culture
• Browse content in Law
• Arbitration
• Browse content in Company and Commercial Law
• Commercial Law
• Company Law
• Browse content in Comparative Law
• Systems of Law
• Competition Law
• Browse content in Constitutional and Administrative Law
• Government Powers
• Judicial Review
• Local Government Law
• Military and Defence Law
• Parliamentary and Legislative Practice
• Construction Law
• Contract Law
• Browse content in Criminal Law
• Criminal Procedure
• Criminal Evidence Law
• Sentencing and Punishment
• Employment and Labour Law
• Environment and Energy Law
• Browse content in Financial Law
• Banking Law
• Insolvency Law
• History of Law
• Human Rights and Immigration
• Intellectual Property Law
• Browse content in International Law
• Private International Law and Conflict of Laws
• Public International Law
• IT and Communications Law
• Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law
• Law and Politics
• Law and Society
• Browse content in Legal System and Practice
• Courts and Procedure
• Legal Skills and Practice
• Primary Sources of Law
• Regulation of Legal Profession
• Medical and Healthcare Law
• Browse content in Policing
• Criminal Investigation and Detection
• Police and Security Services
• Police Procedure and Law
• Police Regional Planning
• Browse content in Property Law
• Personal Property Law
• Study and Revision
• Terrorism and National Security Law
• Browse content in Trusts Law
• Wills and Probate or Succession
• Browse content in Medicine and Health
• Browse content in Allied Health Professions
• Arts Therapies
• Clinical Science
• Dietetics and Nutrition
• Occupational Therapy
• Operating Department Practice
• Physiotherapy
• Radiography
• Speech and Language Therapy
• Browse content in Anaesthetics
• General Anaesthesia
• Neuroanaesthesia
• Clinical Neuroscience
• Browse content in Clinical Medicine
• Acute Medicine
• Cardiovascular Medicine
• Clinical Genetics
• Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics
• Dermatology
• Endocrinology and Diabetes
• Gastroenterology
• Genito-urinary Medicine
• Geriatric Medicine
• Infectious Diseases
• Medical Toxicology
• Medical Oncology
• Pain Medicine
• Palliative Medicine
• Rehabilitation Medicine
• Respiratory Medicine and Pulmonology
• Rheumatology
• Sleep Medicine
• Sports and Exercise Medicine
• Community Medical Services
• Critical Care
• Emergency Medicine
• Forensic Medicine
• Haematology
• History of Medicine
• Browse content in Medical Skills
• Clinical Skills
• Communication Skills
• Nursing Skills
• Surgical Skills
• Browse content in Medical Dentistry
• Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery
• Paediatric Dentistry
• Restorative Dentistry and Orthodontics
• Surgical Dentistry
• Medical Ethics
• Medical Statistics and Methodology
• Browse content in Neurology
• Clinical Neurophysiology
• Neuropathology
• Nursing Studies
• Browse content in Obstetrics and Gynaecology
• Gynaecology
• Occupational Medicine
• Ophthalmology
• Otolaryngology (ENT)
• Browse content in Paediatrics
• Neonatology
• Browse content in Pathology
• Chemical Pathology
• Clinical Cytogenetics and Molecular Genetics
• Histopathology
• Medical Microbiology and Virology
• Patient Education and Information
• Browse content in Pharmacology
• Psychopharmacology
• Browse content in Popular Health
• Caring for Others
• Complementary and Alternative Medicine
• Self-help and Personal Development
• Browse content in Preclinical Medicine
• Cell Biology
• Molecular Biology and Genetics
• Reproduction, Growth and Development
• Primary Care
• Professional Development in Medicine
• Browse content in Psychiatry
• Addiction Medicine
• Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
• Forensic Psychiatry
• Learning Disabilities
• Old Age Psychiatry
• Psychotherapy
• Browse content in Public Health and Epidemiology
• Epidemiology
• Public Health
• Browse content in Radiology
• Clinical Radiology
• Interventional Radiology
• Nuclear Medicine
• Radiation Oncology
• Reproductive Medicine
• Browse content in Surgery
• Cardiothoracic Surgery
• Gastro-intestinal and Colorectal Surgery
• General Surgery
• Neurosurgery
• Paediatric Surgery
• Peri-operative Care
• Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery
• Surgical Oncology
• Transplant Surgery
• Trauma and Orthopaedic Surgery
• Vascular Surgery
• Browse content in Science and Mathematics
• Browse content in Biological Sciences
• Aquatic Biology
• Biochemistry
• Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
• Developmental Biology
• Ecology and Conservation
• Evolutionary Biology
• Genetics and Genomics
• Microbiology
• Molecular and Cell Biology
• Natural History
• Plant Sciences and Forestry
• Research Methods in Life Sciences
• Structural Biology
• Systems Biology
• Zoology and Animal Sciences
• Browse content in Chemistry
• Analytical Chemistry
• Computational Chemistry
• Crystallography
• Environmental Chemistry
• Industrial Chemistry
• Inorganic Chemistry
• Materials Chemistry
• Medicinal Chemistry
• Mineralogy and Gems
• Organic Chemistry
• Physical Chemistry
• Polymer Chemistry
• Study and Communication Skills in Chemistry
• Theoretical Chemistry
• Browse content in Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Architecture and Logic Design
• Game Studies
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Mathematical Theory of Computation
• Programming Languages
• Software Engineering
• Systems Analysis and Design
• Virtual Reality
• Browse content in Computing
• Business Applications
• Computer Security
• Computer Games
• Computer Networking and Communications
• Digital Lifestyle
• Graphical and Digital Media Applications
• Operating Systems
• Browse content in Earth Sciences and Geography
• Atmospheric Sciences
• Environmental Geography
• Geology and the Lithosphere
• Maps and Map-making
• Meteorology and Climatology
• Oceanography and Hydrology
• Palaeontology
• Physical Geography and Topography
• Regional Geography
• Soil Science
• Urban Geography
• Browse content in Engineering and Technology
• Agriculture and Farming
• Biological Engineering
• Civil Engineering, Surveying, and Building
• Electronics and Communications Engineering
• Energy Technology
• Engineering (General)
• Environmental Science, Engineering, and Technology
• History of Engineering and Technology
• Mechanical Engineering and Materials
• Technology of Industrial Chemistry
• Transport Technology and Trades
• Browse content in Environmental Science
• Applied Ecology (Environmental Science)
• Conservation of the Environment (Environmental Science)
• Environmental Sustainability
• Environmentalist Thought and Ideology (Environmental Science)
• Management of Land and Natural Resources (Environmental Science)
• Natural Disasters (Environmental Science)
• Nuclear Issues (Environmental Science)
• Pollution and Threats to the Environment (Environmental Science)
• Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Environmental Science)
• History of Science and Technology
• Browse content in Materials Science
• Ceramics and Glasses
• Composite Materials
• Metals, Alloying, and Corrosion
• Nanotechnology
• Browse content in Mathematics
• Applied Mathematics
• Biomathematics and Statistics
• History of Mathematics
• Mathematical Education
• Mathematical Finance
• Mathematical Analysis
• Numerical and Computational Mathematics
• Probability and Statistics
• Pure Mathematics
• Browse content in Neuroscience
• Cognition and Behavioural Neuroscience
• Development of the Nervous System
• Disorders of the Nervous System
• History of Neuroscience
• Invertebrate Neurobiology
• Molecular and Cellular Systems
• Neuroendocrinology and Autonomic Nervous System
• Neuroscientific Techniques
• Sensory and Motor Systems
• Browse content in Physics
• Astronomy and Astrophysics
• Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics
• Biological and Medical Physics
• Classical Mechanics
• Computational Physics
• Condensed Matter Physics
• Electromagnetism, Optics, and Acoustics
• History of Physics
• Mathematical and Statistical Physics
• Measurement Science
• Nuclear Physics
• Particles and Fields
• Plasma Physics
• Quantum Physics
• Relativity and Gravitation
• Semiconductor and Mesoscopic Physics
• Browse content in Psychology
• Affective Sciences
• Clinical Psychology
• Cognitive Psychology
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Criminal and Forensic Psychology
• Developmental Psychology
• Educational Psychology
• Evolutionary Psychology
• Health Psychology
• History and Systems in Psychology
• Music Psychology
• Neuropsychology
• Organizational Psychology
• Psychological Assessment and Testing
• Psychology of Human-Technology Interaction
• Psychology Professional Development and Training
• Research Methods in Psychology
• Social Psychology
• Browse content in Social Sciences
• Browse content in Anthropology
• Anthropology of Religion
• Human Evolution
• Medical Anthropology
• Physical Anthropology
• Regional Anthropology
• Social and Cultural Anthropology
• Theory and Practice of Anthropology
• Browse content in Business and Management
• Business Ethics
• Business Strategy
• Business History
• Business and Technology
• Business and Government
• Business and the Environment
• Comparative Management
• Corporate Governance
• Corporate Social Responsibility
• Entrepreneurship
• Health Management
• Human Resource Management
• Industrial and Employment Relations
• Industry Studies
• Information and Communication Technologies
• International Business
• Knowledge Management
• Management and Management Techniques
• Operations Management
• Organizational Theory and Behaviour
• Pensions and Pension Management
• Public and Nonprofit Management
• Strategic Management
• Supply Chain Management
• Browse content in Criminology and Criminal Justice
• Criminal Justice
• Criminology
• Forms of Crime
• International and Comparative Criminology
• Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice
• Development Studies
• Browse content in Economics
• Agricultural, Environmental, and Natural Resource Economics
• Asian Economics
• Behavioural Finance
• Behavioural Economics and Neuroeconomics
• Econometrics and Mathematical Economics
• Economic History
• Economic Systems
• Economic Methodology
• Economic Development and Growth
• Financial Markets
• Financial Institutions and Services
• General Economics and Teaching
• Health, Education, and Welfare
• History of Economic Thought
• International Economics
• Labour and Demographic Economics
• Law and Economics
• Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics
• Microeconomics
• Public Economics
• Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics
• Welfare Economics
• Browse content in Education
• Adult Education and Continuous Learning
• Care and Counselling of Students
• Early Childhood and Elementary Education
• Educational Equipment and Technology
• Educational Strategies and Policy
• Higher and Further Education
• Organization and Management of Education
• Philosophy and Theory of Education
• Schools Studies
• Secondary Education
• Teaching of a Specific Subject
• Teaching of Specific Groups and Special Educational Needs
• Teaching Skills and Techniques
• Browse content in Environment
• Applied Ecology (Social Science)
• Climate Change
• Conservation of the Environment (Social Science)
• Environmentalist Thought and Ideology (Social Science)
• Natural Disasters (Environment)
• Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Social Science)
• Browse content in Human Geography
• Cultural Geography
• Economic Geography
• Political Geography
• Browse content in Interdisciplinary Studies
• Communication Studies
• Museums, Libraries, and Information Sciences
• Browse content in Politics
• African Politics
• Asian Politics
• Chinese Politics
• Comparative Politics
• Conflict Politics
• Elections and Electoral Studies
• Environmental Politics
• European Union
• Foreign Policy
• Gender and Politics
• Human Rights and Politics
• Indian Politics
• International Relations
• International Organization (Politics)
• International Political Economy
• Irish Politics
• Latin American Politics
• Middle Eastern Politics
• Political Behaviour
• Political Economy
• Political Institutions
• Political Methodology
• Political Communication
• Political Philosophy
• Political Sociology
• Political Theory
• Politics and Law
• Politics of Development
• Public Policy
• Public Administration
• Quantitative Political Methodology
• Regional Political Studies
• Russian Politics
• Security Studies
• State and Local Government
• UK Politics
• US Politics
• Browse content in Regional and Area Studies
• African Studies
• Asian Studies
• East Asian Studies
• Japanese Studies
• Latin American Studies
• Middle Eastern Studies
• Native American Studies
• Scottish Studies
• Browse content in Research and Information
• Research Methods
• Browse content in Social Work
• Addictions and Substance Misuse
• Adoption and Fostering
• Care of the Elderly
• Child and Adolescent Social Work
• Couple and Family Social Work
• Direct Practice and Clinical Social Work
• Emergency Services
• Human Behaviour and the Social Environment
• International and Global Issues in Social Work
• Mental and Behavioural Health
• Social Justice and Human Rights
• Social Policy and Advocacy
• Social Work and Crime and Justice
• Social Work Macro Practice
• Social Work Practice Settings
• Social Work Research and Evidence-based Practice
• Welfare and Benefit Systems
• Browse content in Sociology
• Childhood Studies
• Community Development
• Comparative and Historical Sociology
• Economic Sociology
• Gender and Sexuality
• Gerontology and Ageing
• Health, Illness, and Medicine
• Marriage and the Family
• Migration Studies
• Occupations, Professions, and Work
• Organizations
• Population and Demography
• Race and Ethnicity
• Social Theory
• Social Movements and Social Change
• Social Research and Statistics
• Social Stratification, Inequality, and Mobility
• Sociology of Religion
• Sociology of Education
• Sport and Leisure
• Urban and Rural Studies
• Browse content in Warfare and Defence
• Defence Strategy, Planning, and Research
• Land Forces and Warfare
• Military Administration
• Military Life and Institutions
• Naval Forces and Warfare
• Other Warfare and Defence Issues
• Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution
• Weapons and Equipment

• < Previous chapter
• Next chapter >

Dark Tourism as History: Dark Tourism in History

Tony Seaton is Emeritus Professor of Travel and Tourism Behaviour and History at The University of Bedfordshire, UK.

• Published: 19 December 2022
• Cite Icon Cite
• Permissions Icon Permissions

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 .

Google Scholar

Google Preview

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.

• About Oxford Academic
• Publish journals with us
• University press partners
• What we publish
• New features  
• Open access
• Institutional account management
• Rights and permissions
• Get help with access
• Accessibility
• Advertising
• Media enquiries
• Oxford University Press
• Oxford Languages
• University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• Cookie settings
• Cookie policy
• Privacy policy
• Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• We're Hiring!
• Help Center

Dissertation: Dark Tourism, does what it says on the tin? An investigation in to the marketing and packaging of the collective label ‘Dark Tourism’

The main objectives were to analyse current dark tourism and pose whether ‘dark tourism’ would be an acceptable newcomer as a retail-ready marketing collective.

Related Papers

James Pardoe

Leanne White

Journal of APF Command and Staff College

Neeru Karki

Dark tourism is a youngest subset of tourism, introduced only in 1990s. It is a multifaceted and diverse phenomenon. Dark tourism studies carried out in the Western countries succinctly portrays dark tourism as a study of history and heritage, tourism and tragedies. Dark tourism has been identified as niche or special interest tourism. This paper highlights how dark tourism has been theoretically conceptualized in previous studies. As an umbrella concept dark tourism includes than tourism, blackspot tourism, morbid tourism, disaster tourism, conflict tourism, dissonant heritage tourism and others. This paper examines how dark tourism as a distinct form of tourism came into existence in the tourism academia and how it could be understood as a separate subset of tourism in better way. Basically, this study focuses on deathscapes, repressed sadism, commercialization of grief, commoditization of death, dartainment, blackpackers, darsumers and deathseekers capitalism. This study generate...

Alex Grebenar

The study of ‘dark tourism’ has gained increasing traction over the past two decades or so. Visits to sites of, or associated with death, disaster, atrocity, or suffering are a pervasive feature within the contemporary tourism landscape. This thesis, therefore, critically examines dark tourism within the modern tourism industry in which ‘dark’ experiences are packaged-up and sold to consumers – a process known as ‘commodification’. As a result, the study appraises the effects commodification has on the visitor experience at sites of dark tourism. Drawing upon a multidisciplinary approach, this thesis examines key relationships between dark tourism supplier and consumer in order to evaluate the visitor experience. This includes the notion of mortality and, in so doing, the research considers how the process of commodification affects encounters with the fragile state and inevitable demise of the human being. Moreover, this relates to the so-called ‘sequestration of death’ whereby dea...

Journal of the Geographical Institute Jovan Cvijic, SASA

Nar Aditya Rai

eReview of Tourism Research

Dr. Philip Stone

ATITHYA: A Journal of Hospitality

Publishing India Group

Tourism is a multifaceted sector, which is manifested in various forms, including dark tourism. Of late there seem to be an increase in the number of tourist opting for Dark Tourism. This paper studies the motivating factors that influence tourists to visit places that have a past which may be haunted, have a sinister past or is related to death.

Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change

Maximiliano E. Korstanje

Journal of Vacation Marketing

A Craig Wight

RELATED PAPERS

Brickey LeQuire

JAVAR Editor

TEOLOGI PERJANJIAN BARU MENGENAL YESUS DALAM KITAB INJIL (MATIUS, MARKUS, LUKAS DAN YOHANES)

Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism

Sergei Jargin

Dolmen: Revista de información sobre cómic

Marcos Rafael Cañas Pelayo

Chemical Science

Peter Adriaensens

Angewandte Chemie

fernando patolsky

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe)

Veronique Aubin

买斯威本科技大学毕业证书成绩单 澳洲文凭学位证书

IEEE Access

Proceedings of International Frequency Control Symposium

Richard Karlquist

Christian Dunker

Angie Cubillos

Frontiers in Education

Mohd Nour Al Salem

Mirja Tarnanen

Springer eBooks

New Journal of Physics

Xianfeng Hao

Yesica Herrera Alvarado

Conservation Genetics Resources

RELATED TOPICS

•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024