Shedding Light on Dark Tourism: An Introduction

RICHARD SHARPLEY

Introduction

On 23 August 1930, the SS Morro Castle, named after the fortress that guards the entrance to Havana Bay, set out on her maiden voyage from New York City to Cuba. Offering luxurious, though affordable, travel as well as a Prohibition-era opportunity for the legal consumption of alcohol, the ship immediately became popular among tourists and business travellers alike and over the next four years successfully plied the route between the New York and Havana.

In the early hours of 8 September 1934, however, disaster struck. During the previous evening, as the ship was approaching the eastern seaboard of the USA on the return journey from Havana, Captain Robert Wilmott apparently suffered a heart attack and died in his bathtub and, as a consequence, command passed to the First Officer, William Warms. At 2.45 am, fire broke out in the First Class Writing Room and quickly spread, with design faults and questionable crew practices contributing to the conflagration. For a variety of reasons, including alleged indecision on the part of the captain, the SOS was not sent out until 3.25 am, by which time the ship had lost all power and was fully ablaze. Despite the ship's position close to the shore, rescue operations were slow and ineffective and the eventual death toll amounted to 137 passengers and crew out of a total of 549 people on board (Gallagher, 2003; Hicks, 2006).

The devastating fire on the SS Morro Castle remains one of America's worst and most controversial peacetime maritime disasters and at the time led to significant fire safety improvements in ship design. However, it was also notable for the fact that large numbers of people arrived to witness the aftermath of the event. Attempts to salvage the ship were unsuccessful and, driven by the wind, the smouldering wreck, with numerous victims still aboard, drifted onto the shore of New Jersey at Asbury Park (Figure 1.1). Almost immediately it became a tourist attraction. Spurred on by newspaper and radio reports and special excursion train fares from New York and Philadelphia (Hegeman, 2000), up to a quarter of a million people travelled to view the wreck and, according to press reports at the time, almost a carnival atmosphere prevailed. As Hegeman (2000) observes, 'the scene at the wreck of the Morro Castle was both a spontaneous public festival and a media event. Postcards were printed, souvenirs were sold, and radio broadcasts offered ... firsthand accounts of the scene on board the wreck complete with lurid descriptions of charred corpses.' It was even proposed that the wreck should be permanently moored at Asbury Park as a tourist attraction, although it was eventually towed away to be sold for scrap some six months later.

In short, the SS Morro Castle disaster was an early, while by no means the first, example of a phenomenon that has more recently come to be referred to as 'dark tourism'. Indeed, for as long as people have been able to travel, they have been drawn – purposefully or otherwise – towards sites, attractions or events that are linked in one way or another with death, suffering, violence or disaster (Stone, 2005a; Seaton, forthcoming). For example, the gladiatorial games of the Roman era, pilgrimages, and attendance at medieval public executions were early forms of such death-related tourism. Boorstin (1964) alleges that the first guided tour in England in 1838 was a trip by train to witness the hanging of two murderers. In the specific context of warfare, Seaton (1999) observes that death, suffering and tourism have been related for centuries (see also Smith, 1998; Knox, 2006), citing visits to the battlefield of Waterloo from 1816 onwards as a notable 19th-century example of what he terms 'thanatourism'. Also in the 19th century, visits to the morgue were, as MacCannell (1989) notes, a regular feature of tours of Paris – perhaps a forerunner of the 'Body Worlds' exhibitions in London, Tokyo and elsewhere that have attracted visitors in their tens of thousands since the late 1990s (www.bodyworlds.com/en.html).

As will be considered shortly, the extent to which dark tourism may be considered a historical phenomenon – that is, visiting sites or attractions that predate living memory – remains a subject of debate (Wight, 2006). It is clear, however, that visitors have long been attracted to places or events associated in one way or another with death, disaster and suffering. Equally, there can be little doubt that, over the last half century and commensurate with the remarkable growth in general tourism, dark tourism has become both widespread and diverse. In terms of supply, there has been a rapid growth in the provision of such attractions or experiences; indeed, there appears to be an increasing number of people keen to promote or profit from 'dark' events as tourist attractions, such as the Pennsylvania farmer who offered a $65 per person 'Flight 93 Tour' to the crash site of the United Airlines Flight 93 – one of the 9/11 aircraft (Bly, 2003). Moreover, dark tourism has become more widely recognised both as a form of tourism and as a promotional tool, with websites such aswww.thecabinet.com listing numerous dark tourism sites around the world (Dark Destinations, 2007).

At the same time, there is evidence of a greater willingness or desire on the part of tourists to visit dark attractions and, in particular, the sites of dark events. For example, in August 2002 local residents in the small town of Soham in Cambridgeshire, UK appealed for an end to the so-called 'grief tourism' that was bringing tens of thousands of visitors to their town. Many of these visitors, travelling from all over Britain, had come to lay flowers, light candles in the local church or sign books of condolence. Others had simply come to gaze at the town –...