From true crimes to terror: When is 'dark tourism' too dark?

The Rev. Jim Jones, pastor of the Peoples Temple, is pictured in San Francisco, January 1976. (AP Photo, File)

Fifty years ago, parishioners from Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple in San Francisco began to settle a rural commune in the South American country of Guyana. The Jonestown experiment ended four years later in one of the most tragic and bizarre murder-suicide incidents in American history. More than 900 people died on November 18, 1978, including a U.S. congressman named Leo Ryan.

Now that Guyana is considering a proposal by a government-backed tour operator to open the now-overgrown compound to visitors, it raises a fascinating debate about the appeal, ethics and sensitivities of so-called “dark tourism” — the visiting of sites associated with tragedy.

Why are the locations of past atrocities, natural disasters, infamous deaths and incarcerations so popular with visitors? What does it say about us that we want to get close to these vortexes of disaster and evil? What obligations do governments have to give or deny access? Who gets to decide how history is presented to visitors? And what impact do such events and the subsequent visitors have on those who live near these spots?

There are no simple answers, but it’s important to explore the questions anyway.

Is it not simply history?

On my first cross-country trip, in college, my girlfriend and I stopped at the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas, the site of a battle in which nearly 200 died, including a former U.S. congressman named Davy Crockett. Then a week later in Los Angeles, local relatives of mine took us on a driving tour that included the crime scene address of then-recently murdered Nicole Brown Simpson. The former visit felt like a U.S. history lesson, the latter like morbid gawking. And somewhere in between is the subjective line that dark tourism dances around.

Dark tourism (also known as memorial tourism, or thanatourism, from the Greek “Thanatos” meaning death, or more derogatorily as morbid tourism, or grief tourism) comes in various shades.

Gettysburg was the single deadliest battle in the U.S. Civil War, where 51,000 souls took their last breath, and yet where countless school field trips and, according to the National Park Service, 1.5 million visitors flock every year. Is that dark tourism? How about visiting the beaches in France where between 8,000 and 14,000 soldiers died in the D-Day invasions that turned the tide for Allies winning World War II? And what of Ground Zero and Flight 93 memorials for more than 3,000 who died on September 11, 2001?

I have toured Cambodia’s Killing Fields, with a survivor of the Khmer Rouge genocide that left between 1.5 and 3 million murdered (in the four years following the Jonestown tragedy). Isn’t it important to visit atrocities such as that one, and former Nazi concentration camps?

The point of visiting these places is to feel uncomfortable, to bear witness, to share what you’ve seen and how it made you feel. Travel changes us, and sometimes because of exposure to the worst of human nature.

You’ve heard of the Disneyfication of places. Dark tourism is the opposite of that. These are the unhappiest places on earth. Yet they are places you should never forget. To go there honors the dead, their memory, their pain.

How far is too far?

There are examples when the line seems less clear, where bearing witness to past events feels more like slowing down to see the aftermath of a fatal car accident.

The first time I visited Savannah, Georgia I took a “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” tour. This was not long after the best-selling book of that name became a Hollywood film chronicling a real double murder that took place less than 10 years earlier. On the tour I kept thinking, “The people who live next door to these places may actually remember the victims, may have even been friends with them.”

Just last month we reported on how the Los Angeles mansion where Lyle and Erik Menendez murdered their parents has become the latest 'dark tourism' hot spot. The brothers are back in the news and the subject of a recent documentary, but it’s hard to imagine what visitors are learning by simply staring at a crime scene. It reminded me of my Simpson murder scene visit, or the time I tried to find L.A.’s Cielo Drive, the site of the 1969 murders by the Manson “family.”

But how many degrees are those stops from touring Ford’s Theatre in Washington D.C. where a president was shot, or the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza in Dallas from which another was? Is it ok to see thousands of Mount Vesuvius’ victims in Pompei, Italy because they were killed 2,000 years ago? How about going on an entertaining tour of Jack the Ripper’s victims in London from the late 1800s? Or paying a lot of money to go deep underwater for a view of the Titanic – where visitors themselves died last year while exploring a shipwreck where about 1,500 died just over 100 years ago? Does time desensitize us to these crimes and tragedies?

What is your intention?

In the early 2000s, while visiting friends living in Gloucester, Massachusetts, I felt an undertow pulling me toward the Crow’s Nest, the local bar made famous in a book by Sebastian Junger and the subsequent film of the same name, “The Perfect Storm.” They document the 1991 storm and final days of six fishermen from the small, tight knit community who frequented the Crow’s Nest.

On one visit I was walking along Gloucester’s small harbor when I saw a new ice cream shop had opened called The Perfect Scoop. I thought it rather distasteful, a description I’ve never before nor since used to describe ice cream, and it left me feeling embarrassed for having wanted to visit the Crow’s Nest. I decided to leave the salty bar to the locals.

But I’ve enjoyed the murder-heavy night tour of San Francisco’s Alcatraz prison island; walked through the “Bloody Sunday” neighborhood of Derry, Northern Ireland; visited Anne Frank’s home in Amsterdam and was equally moved by The National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, inside the old Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. This summer I’m planning a family trip to Japan and added Hiroshima to the itinerary because I feel it’s important for my daughters to make a connection to the violence our country unleashed on another country, killing at least 66,000 in that city alone.

And I’ve long wanted to visit Jonestown. When I lived in San Francisco, just before seeing a show at the famous Fillmore auditorium, I popped around the corner to see the location of Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple, the last stop before Guyana. I feel drawn to follow that nightmare of a story into the real world, where it has been sitting in situ since the mass deaths. I want to talk to those who live nearby, understand the events more clearly, bear witness, go into the heart of darkness.

Perhaps the salient question to ask oneself before planning such a trip is: What is the intention? Is it to learn and understand? Or is it merely to scratch the itch of a morbid curiosity? Think about the locals, of the friends and family who are connected to the tragedy and ask whether visiting honors a legacy or exploits a tragedy. In the end, you may be the only one who can judge the ethics of visiting these places.