Monetizing The Morbid: A History Of Ghost Tourism (NYC Online)

Since 18th century visitors to Tintern Abbey gawked at gothic ruins, and Thomas Cook referenced the supernatural writings of Sir Walter Scott in his 19th century marketing of Scottish tours, ghosts have been part of popular tourism. Modern ghost tours continue to exploit supernatural appeal in a mass market format, delivering moderate thrills three times a night to paying audiences in historic city centers throughout the world. This illustrated lecture draws a line from these proto-ghost tours to contemporary (and often problematic) ghost tours of present-day America, focusing on the ways people interact with these haunting and supposedly haunted spaces.

A subcategory of the broader term “dark tourism”, ghost tourism is defined as any form of leisure travel that involves encounters with or learning about ghosts or hauntings; this lecture focuses on the ghost walk, the most accessible and affordable ghost tourism experience. Ghost walks offer many potentially positive aspects: they can provide a welcome space to begin to address troubling histories, and have, since their beginnings, provided a cathartic emotional release for participants. The Victorian-era practices of visiting and picnicking in cemeteries, or visiting the Paris catacombs, similarly provided tourists with a way to safely enjoy death-adjacent surroundings, and process their own complex feelings about mortality, grief, and the afterlife.

The commercial aspect of contemporary ghost tourism, however, is inherently problematic, and questions of taste, morality, and exploitation continue to plague what has been called the “worst form of tourist trappery around.” So how can ghost tours approach the delicate line between one person’s good time, and another’s spiritual taboo? And how are a new group of emerging ghost tour operators attempting to change the kitschy and exploitative nature of the industry?

Case studies of various American ghost tours will illustrate this complicated interplay between exploitation, education, and emotion. We will look at traditional and “new age” spirit walks in Salem; parse the complex racial dynamics at play in ghost tours of New Orleans and Savannah; explore the tensions between history and sensationalization in commercial ghost walks of New York City; and look at new perspectives on supernatural storytelling in Maine.

Presented by Andrea Janes, owner and founder of Boroughs of the Dead: Macabre New York City History Tours, this lecture acknowledges the difficult aspects of ghost tourism while also positing that, as our death-positive Victorian forbears knew, ghost tours may offer a healthy way to process grief and address the difficult histories that must be acknowledged lest they continue to haunt us forever.

Please note these are live events – they cannot be downloaded and watched later, so please be sure you are available at the time and timezone the classes are being offered in before registering.