Visiting Unhappy Places: What Is Dark Tourism?
Many people travel to places with beautiful scenery, nice weather or great food — places that make them happy.
But others travel to unhappy places — sites where horrible things took place, such as wars or disasters.
For example, Auschwitz in Poland — a concentration camp where around 1 million Jews died during the Holocaust — receives nearly 2 million visitors every year.
And every day, hundreds of people visit the Choeung Ek Genocidal Center. It's one of many sites across Cambodia known as the Killing Fields, where nearly 1.4 million people killed by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s are buried.
This is known as "dark tourism."
The term was coined by Malcolm Foley and J. John Lennon — no, not that John Lennon, although the Dakota building in New York, where the Beatles singer was killed in 1980, also receives dark tourists.
Foley and Lennon wrote the book Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster. Speaking with The Washington Post, Lennon said dark tourism isn't new.
"There's evidence that dark tourism goes back to the Battle of Waterloo, where people watched from their carriages the battle taking place," he said, referring to Napoleon's final battle in 1815.
Why do people visit these sites? Experts say it's human nature.
"These are important sites that tell us a lot about what it is to be human," Lennon said. "I think they're important places for us to reflect on and try to better understand the evil that we're capable of."
Philip Stone, founder of the Institute for Dark Tourism Research at the University of Central Lancashire, told The Washington Post that dark tourism is growing in popularity.
Popular culture may be partly responsible. Reuters reported in 2019 that at least one tour agency at Chernobyl in Ukraine — where history's worst nuclear accident happened in 1986 — reported a 40% increase in bookings after the HBO series Chernobyl was released.
