You can find more on ghost hunting vacations here and here.

Bill Morse is someone who is very involved in Cambodian tourism and organizes visits to the Aki Ra Landmine Museum as part of his Mekong River Cruise. He has also been involved in removing landmines in Cambodia (some vacation).

Hundreds got a rare glimpse of the 126-year-old concrete fortress Saturday. It was one of 52 buildings involved in the annual Doors Open Winnipeg weekend to show off the insides of historic structures normally closed to the public.

Tourists got to speak with a former hangman and hear stories about botched executions with heads ripped off and how 5-year-old children were incarcerated. Sounds pretty dark to me.

It seems like Vaughan Street Jail is only open for tourism during Doors Open Winnipeg, an annual event celebrating Winnipeg’s history.

I’d like to share a few posts from a football message board regarding Memorial Day (these posts were made on an around the US Memorial Day Holiday in 2007) and burials in Arlington National Cemetery:

1. I  recently layed my father to rest in Arlinton. I have to say It was the first and I can only hope the last military funeral I have ever been to. But what a true honor it was to be there and experience such a thing. They truly do not forget a man’s service for his country and make every effort to make the families comfortable.

It was quit sobering to hear taps and the 21 gun salute as many times as we did during our service throughout the grounds.

I have to admit prior to this weekend memorial day was a day for remembrance for me but it was also a extra day off from work and grill out and what not. But now its a lot more than that not just becauce of my dad but all of the men and women who we have all lost.

2. Arlington is a very special place, and your Dad now rests in his rightful place among the other heroes.

3. Military burials are extremely emotional. Never experienced a burial at Arlington but my father & Grandfather were both buried at Calverton National Cemetery (as I will be eventually) and the playing of Taps & the presentation of the Flag to the family (my mother in both cases) were the toughest things to handle. Besides being present when both of them passed away those were by far the most emotional situations I ever had to deal with.

4. As a former soldier and member of the 3rd U.S. Infantry “The Old Guard” based at Ft. Myer, Arlington, VA … some of my duties included marching as part of a military escort/marching platoon (dress blues with almost razor-sharp creases, highly polished brass, etc.) for military burials “with honors” at Arlington National Cemetary.

After going through several burials it became pretty routine (almost as if it were like you had iced water running through your veins … basically you were totally focused on performing all of your rifle drill and ceremonial movements with near perfection). Besides, as part of the honor guard you cannot move, glance around, or hardly breathe let alone show/display any emotions.

It was an interesting, honorable, and memorable experience for me to have been a member of the Army’s most prestigious and elite ceremonial unit.

I wish all of the other veterans and active service members alike a very happy and safe Memorial Day!!! May those who served and paid with their lives while protecting the sovereignty and national interests of this great, great country … never be forgotten!!!

5. My grandfather was a SGT in the Air Force during WWII and wow what a service they put on for him in Aug of 2004. I honestly felt like my grandfather was an ex president of the US the way my grandfather and our family were treated during the ceremony. The gun salute and all. It was truly breath taking. Glad to hear your father received the same treatment.

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 from the late 50’s and the cold war. These missiles were supposed to shoot Soviet ICBMs out of the sky before they landed in New York City.

But it’s not the abandoned military base that really qualifies Hart Island as a grief tourist destination. That distinction belongs to Potter’s Field.

Potter’s Field on Hart Island has been the burial place for New York’s unclaimed dead bodies since 1869. There are now over 700,000 bodies on Hart Island. This cemetery is unlike more famous and touristy cemeteries:

There are no ceremonies for the dead here on Hart Island.  Inmates from Riker’s Island are assigned burial detail and are ferried over to do the work.  Coffins are stacked beneath the ground–3 high, 10 across, 5 rows deep, between each of the white grave markers–crowding 150 adult bodies into each marked square.  Infant’s coffins are stacked in trenches and buried.

Then again, we see grief tourism so often. For example, The Freedom Museum in Chicago, a very mainstream tourism spot “contains stone pieces of historical significance from the Great Wall of China, the Alamo, the White House, the World Trade Center, and the Berlin Wall.”

Chicago also has the Abraham Lincoln Civil War tour which includes Stephen Douglas’ tomb and memorial along with other significant sites.

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 thanatourist is “motivated by the desire for actual or symbolic encounters with death.”

Seaton claims that there are various degrees of thanatourism:

1. Travel to watch death (public hangings or executions)

2. Travel to sites after death has occurred (Auschwitz)

3. Travel to internment sites and memorials (graves and monuments)

4. Travel to re–enactments (Civil War re–enactors) 

5. Travel to synthetic sites at which evidence of the dead has been assembled (museums)

This leaves quite a bit of overlap and makes thanatourism seem like a common word that could encompass holocaust tourism, cemetery tourism, a visit to Strawberry Fields, or just about any type of grief tourism.

However, on the rare occasions when the word thanatourism is used, it often refers to very specific types of tourism (primarily type 1 - watching death - when the traveller most clearly wants to encounter actual death). This must include burials, such as Tibet’s famous sky burials. I have not heard thanatourism used to refer to celebrity burials, but I suppose it could be used for tourists who visited Reagan’s wake / funeral in Washington D.C.

The fact is we can not rely on scholars to define words for us. We have to see how the words are used in real life by normal people. This is difficult with uncommon words, but I think we can see that dark tourism and grief tourism are the more general terms that refer to many sites associated with death and disaster. Thanatourism is sometimes used for sites associated with violent death, particularly when travellers actually want to see a death or burial.

We get a quote from Professor John Lennon, of Glasgow Caledonian University:

“People want to go and be tourists in war zones while wars are happening. They seem to have an appetite to get very close while the blood is still dripping. There is no limit to the appetite for this stuff and demand is driving it faster and faster.

“We are always fascinated by the dark side of human nature and the most evil things people can do.”

I find this quote interesting for several reasons. First I think Lennon is exaggerating when he says there’s no limit to our appetite for visiting war zones. Ask yourself how many of your friends would like to visit a war zone and get close enough to see dripping blood. I know that experiencing a war is not on my shortlist of vacation ideas.

So I’m going to disagree with Lennon on his first point. There most certainly is a limit to our appetite for visiting war zones.

The Lennon says something about being fascinated by the dark side of human nature etc. I don’t think you have to be a scholar or a professor to know that. The reason I find this obvious comment interesting is because of what it implies about the definition of dark tourism. It implies that dark tourism is centered around the evil things that people do. This might not include acts of nature such as Hurricane Katrina or the Tsunami. As I’ve said before, the definitions of words like grief tourism and dark tourism are still being written so this interpretation will only be meaningful if other people also refer to things people do when they refer to dark tourism. We shall see.

You’ve got Rome, where Caesar was assassinated. You’ve got Dallas where there’s a famous grassy knoll on the north side of Elm Street and John F. Kennedy Memorial Plaza. Then there’s Washington D.C. where you can see a play at Ford’s Theatre, the Lincoln Memorial, and the National Museum of Health and Medicine (to see the .44 caliber bullet which was removed from Lincoln’s head, plus a skull fragments from Honest Abe). And there’s New York City’s Strawberry Fields memorial in Central Park in memory of John Lennon who was shot nearby outside the Dakota building.

The KZ Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp was home to a rock quarry that the prisoners were forced to work in.  The effects of malnutrition left the prisoners underweight and weakened.  These prisoners were forced to carry rocks weighing up to 100 lbs up 186 stairs, known as the “stairs of death.”  They were forced to climb one directly behind the other so that when one would collapse, they would fall back onto those behind them and cause a domino effect.  If they were unable to work or to complete their tasks they were either shot, beaten to death, or taken to the gas chamber. 

The number of people who where killed at KZ cannot be proven definitively because the Nazi’s attempted to destroy all records when they left the camp in 1945.  However, through eyewitness accounts and records kept by those who worked at the camp it has been determined that somewhere between 180,000 to 300,000 people lost their lives. 

The KZ camp was the last to be liberated at the end of World War II.  When the U.S. Army arrived to liberate the prisoners, the prisoners affected a small amount of revenge upon their tormenters when they turned on the approximately 30 guards who remained and hung them. 

The torture and murder of hundreds of thousands of prisoners led to the installation of a museum at the camp.  Today, people from all over the world go through the museum to learn more about the people who lost their lives there.  The hours of operation are Tuesday - Saturday from 10 am to 2 pm.  They offer explanations in German and English and have descriptive flyers in Polish, French and Italian.  The point of the museum is to remind us all what happened there and why we can never allow it to happen again.  For more information about the museum you can contact the KZ Gusen Visitors Center by telephone at ++43 7238 2269 or online at http://www.gusen.org/ - The site provides detailed information about the history of the camp, the current museum tours and much more.