Three islands, Diable, Royale, and St. Joseph, are collectively known as the Iles du Salut, an obvious misnomer for islands that offered no salvation or rehabilitation for prisoners. Located about 6 miles off the northern coast of French Guiana in the Caribbean Sea, all three once housed infamous prison settlements. Established in 1852 [...]

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We are all familiar with the Holocaust, known as the Shoah or the Hebrew word for calamity, and the unspeakable tragedies that occurred at concentration camps. Unfortunately, there were other places filled with sorrow and grief that served as temporary deportation stations; Drancy is one.
The Jews had lived quietly and unobtrusively in [...]

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Through the years, countless ships have been lost at sea, the Titanic being the most familiar and much later the Andrea Doria.  Yet, there were other lesser known, but even greater disasters that history would like to forget – the Wilhelm Gustloff is one.
The ill-fated ship had the dubious honor of being named after the [...]

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Here’s an article describing some ghost tourism in Scotland. This is actually the 5th page of a mini-series but it talks about a haunted room in Drovers Inn (in Inverarnan). You can also download a podcast of an interview with the author from this page.
You can find more on ghost hunting vacations here and here.

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Arlington National Cemetery is a good example of a popular tourist attraction that can be called grief tourism. It’s certainly a place where people go to feel grief, from the Tomb of the Unknowns to diffrent monuments and memorials to actual funeral ceremonies.
I’d like to share a few posts from a football message board regarding Memorial Day [...]

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This is an interesting story (with photos) of a tour on June 15, 2000. The site toured was Hart Island and the tour was provided by the New York Correction History Society.
Hart Island is said to be a ghost town with an abandoned church, asylum, and military base. The military base has Nike missile silos left over [...]

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Thanatourism is a difficult word to define because it is rarely used. So when we do use it, what exactly do we mean? 
The most accepted scholar is probably A.V. Seaton. In his 1996 article, From Thanatopsis to Thanatourism: Guided by the Dark, Seaton argues that thanatourism is dependent on the traveller’s frame of mind. The [...]

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From 1940 to 1945, a concentration camp located in Mauthausen, Austria was a place of torture and murder for hundreds of thousands of people during World War II.   Prisoners consisted of men, women and children from various races and creeds.  By 1945, more than 15,000 or over 19% of the total prison population were children [...]

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Thanatourism is derived from the Ancient Greek word thanatos in mythology, for the personification of death.  Thanatourism is an extreme form of grief tourism that involves the dark contemplation of death at the time of its occurrence.  Every religion has a different approach to death and in the mountains of Tibet, there is (from the [...]

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Cemeteries have a strange and macabre attraction for the curious and the morose.  The dark symbolism of granite headstones, monuments, and crypts, viewed by some with sorrow and grief, is often no more than a part of a sightseeing itinerary for the general populace.
Pere-LaChaise in Paris, France, a burial place for such notable figures as [...]

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