If you have ever been to the world war battlefields in northern France, the site of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York, a Holocaust museum or even a military cemetery, then you've participated — perhaps unknowingly — in dark tourism. The term applies to the increasingly popular pursuit of visiting sites where people have suffered or died in tragic or spectacular circumstances. The killing fields of Cambodia, the gulags of the former Soviet Union and the ruins of New Orleans have all become tourist hotspots, while more than half a million people visit the extermination camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau each year. ...
Why do people do it? [Philip Stone] argues that death has been almost completely hidden from everyday public life in most western societies. In a paper awaiting publication, he suggests people might engage in dark tourism to redress this balance — to explore the meaning of their own mortality and to indulge their curiosity about death in a socially acceptable public context, in a way they could not in private, when such contemplation is more likely to lead to dread or terror. [via WordSpy.com]
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