Thanatourism: Disaster and Dark Tourism

It is almost taken for granted nowadays that another school, workplace, mall, restaurant, movie, or related site will have a mass shooting incident or major terrorist attack again soon. 

Out of these disasters we have seen the rise of collecting disaster buildings, from elegant replicas made by Boym Designs and Mike Merwine's InFocusTech, to the less exacting ones, as I mentioned recently regarding securing a Waffle House model. 

For today, I wish to ponder a prediction that mass shootings will lead to a form of thanatourism that includes locations of mass violence. Few in the synchromystism field have examined the rather recent, and yet large movement in this direction. 

People may hesitate going to their local or distant school to visit a shooting site. But we will begin observing folks stopping at Louie's by the Lake at Lake Hefner near Oklahoma City or by Trolley Square Mall in Salt Lake City, in some fashion similar to how thanatourists have sought out the University of Texas tower or how ultrathanatourists beat a path to Pompeii. 

Dates for some thanatourism pilgrimages are important, of course, such as the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in 2018. While the building where he was killed has been torn down, the Ambassador Hotel exists in a high quality replica building by InFocusTech. 

Here's an overview of thanatourism:

Thanatourism is derived from the ancient Greek word thanatos for the personification of death. (Not to be confused, directly, with the Marvel character Thanos, but you can imagine how creators Mike Friedrich and Jim Starlin came up with that name.)

Disaster tourism is the act of traveling to a disaster area for pleasure, usually out of curiosity.

Disaster Tourism is used for leisure travels to zones whipped by natural disasters or traumatic events known as "traumascapes." 

Dark tourism (also black tourism or grief tourism) has been defined as tourism involving travel to places historically associated with death and tragedy.

Example destinations in the specific form of thanatourism more generally known as "dark tourism" include:

Destinations of dark tourism include castles and battlefields such as Culloden in Scotland and Bran Castle and Poienari Castle in Romania, former prisons such as Beaumaris Prison in Anglesey, Wales, the Jack the Ripper exhibition in the London Dungeon, sites of natural disasters or man made disasters, such as Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park in Japan, Chernobyl in Ukraine and the commercial activity at Ground Zero in New York one year after September 11, 2001. It also includes sites of human atrocities and genocide, such as the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall in China, the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia, the sites of the Jeju Uprising in South Korea and the Spirit Lake Internment Camp Centre near La Ferme, Quebec as an example of Canada's internment operations of 1914–1920.
On Bali "death and funeral rites have become commodified for tourism ..., where enterprising businesses begin arranging tourist vans and sell tickets as soon as they hear someone is dying." In the US, visitors can tour the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC "with an identity card which matches their age and gender with that of a name and photo of a real holocaust victim. Against a backdrop of video interpretation portraying killing squads in action, the pseudo holocaust victim enters a personal ID into monitors as they wander around the attraction to discover how their real-life counterpart is faring." 

In late 2017, the online journal Current Issues in Dark Tourism Research was launched. The aim of the online journal is to bring affordable 'dark tourism' scholarship direct to students, researchers, and the media. The journal is unique in that it pays royalty fees to authors and, as a result, is a new model for contemporary academic publishing. Authors and scholars may submit their own related research for publication in the journal. A broad range of 'dark tourism and difficult heritage' research will be available in the journal, in the form of articles, case studies, and commentaries. The editor of the journal is Dr Philip Stone.

Popular Mechanics published a list of "8 Disaster Tourism Sites," by Laura Kiniry, August 30, 2013, "for your next family vacation." They include:

1. Chernobyl Power Plant (site of the radioactive accident, April 26, 1986), in the restricted Chernobyl Exclusion Zone situated in the Ivankiv Raion of northern Kiev Oblast, near Ukraine's border with Belarus.
2. Naval Air Engineering Station Lakehurst (where the Hindenburg caught fire, May 6, 1937) Lakehurst, New Jersey.
3. Exxon Valdez Oil Spill (where 30 million gallons of oil leaked, March 24, 1989) Bligh Reef, Prince William Sound, Alaska.
4. Chelyabinsk Meteor (where it struck on February 15, 2014), Chelyabinsk, southern Urals; Lake Chebarkul; and Ilmen Reserve, Russia.
5. Bikini Atoll Nuclear Test Site (site of the tests in 1946-1958), Marshall Islands, Pacific Ocean.
6. Hanford Site (built in 1943, decommissioned 1964-1971), Benton County, along the Columbia River, Washington State.
7. Hurricane Katrina (hit the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005), especially the Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans, Louisiana.
8. Pompeii (due to the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD), at the base of the volcano, Italy. Popular Mechanics calls it the "mother of all disaster tourism sites."

A couple other examinations of this phenomena include:

"The Disaster Tourist," by Kent Russell, Highline/HuffPost, January 25, 2018, about Otto Warmbier's terrible adventure that ended in his death via North Korea.
"JFK and dark tourism: A fascination with assassination" by Malcolm Foley and J. John Lennon, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2007, about three JFK assassination sites. 

London Disaster?

Is there a general sense that the London Olympics may result in a disaster? Why is that? There's nothing here but doom, gloom, and missteps, methinks. And those seem only be Romney's.

Well, according to some, it is in the cards. Or by coincidence, actually, it is shown on a card hinting at Big Ben toppling. (It's not. It's a Japanese site.) The card's art was created 17 years ago and holds some credibility due to the fact they show other images matching red dawn moments today we call simply "9/11."

Combined disasters. Shared disasters. Disasters. A bad star rising. A red dawn.

From Italian disastro, disaster; originally meaning "unfavorable to one's stars", from dis-Italian, dis-, bad (compare dys-), + astro, star, celestial body, from Latin astrum, from Greek astron.

The Advent of Deception site made the following observation:

Steve Jackson created The Illuminati Card Game in 1995 that consists of 330 cards. Two of the cards portray the Twin Towers of New York bombed and the Pentagon. Out of the 330 cards, there is one card that projects Olympic colors that are within the "Combined Disaster Card." We view Big Ben in the background and five people wearing the colors of the Olympics.

Big Ben? Apparently not: Most have identified it as the Ginza Wako clock tower from Tokyo, with 11:11 on the clock face. (See comments below.)

But the World Trade Center/Twin Towers card sure has the blogosphere talking.

The comparative imagery between the 1995 cards and
the photos of the 2001 events is haunting.

What are we to think about the wild imaginings coming from some circles being associated with these Olympics? I previously posted some of this imagery. Below is another example, via RPJ:

Credit: Boing Boing

Do you think London is a little tense right now?

On Thursday night, July 26, 2012, the following came across Twitter, via "Breaking News UK ‏@BreakingNewsUK"

London police briefly evacuate Westfield mall outside Olympic Park - @AP

and then

Update: People are being let back into Westfield mall near Olympic park; no word yet on what triggered the alarm - @AP

Media accounts later mentioned:

Police said a fire alarm forced authorities to briefly clear the sprawling mall beside the Olympic Park. The alarms sent hundreds of people into the streets amid wailing alarms a day before the opening ceremony of the Summer Games. Fears of terrorism have been at the center of preparations for the Olympics, and authorities have twice been forced to deploy troops when security arrangements fell short. Police allowed shoppers to return after a few minutes. Westfield mall authorities said the alarm was triggered in a restaurant area.

Mitt Romney remarked almost as soon as he arrived in the UK that security levels at the London Olympics were "disconcerting." Mitt Romney appeared to be raising questions about safety at the London Olympics. The newspapers reacted quickly to his comments:

A headline Thursday on the Web site of the Guardian newspaper said, “Mitt Romney’s Olympics blunder stuns No. 10 and hands gift to Obama,” while the Telegraph published an opinion column with a sub-headline that read: “Mitt Romney is perhaps the only politician who could start a trip that was supposed to be a charm offensive by being utterly devoid of charm and mildly offensive.”

Anniversaries, of course, are on the minds of British subjects:

The 7 July 2005 London bombings (often referred to as 7/7) were a series of co-ordinated suicide attacks in London which targeted civilians using thepublic transport system during the morning rush hour. On the morning of Thursday, 7 July 2005, four Islamist home-grown terroristsdetonated four bombs, three in quick succession aboard London Underground trains across the city and, later, a fourth on a double-decker bus in Tavistock Square. Fifty-two civilians and the four bombers were killed in the attacks, and over 700 more were injured. The attack happened 24 hours after the city was selected to host the 2012 Summer Olympics.

And...for tomorrow...

At 21:15 hrs on 28 July 2003 a bomb placed under a seat of a B.E.S.T. bus exploded on the busy Lal Bahadur Shastri Marg in Ghatkopar, India. The bomb was placed in the rear of the bus and killed 4 people and injured 32. A man who was riding a motorcycle behind the bus and a woman who was in a rikshaw travelling near the bus were among those killed. An eyewitness claims that the woman was thrown at least 10 feet away from the rikshaw and died on the spot.

Meanwhile, back in the States, one of our eyes is on possible Aurora copycats or some other storms coming. Rumblings are already here. It seems an Ohio man called 911 threatening a Colorado shooting for Ohio. They arrested him. Other weird incidents have happened, some seem to be bad choices of behavior related to costumes.

You have noted here my awareness of the "name game."

MAH shared an intriguing paragraph from yesterday's Los Angeles Times about the "curse invoked by Holmes' name" with regard to a call for suppressing Holmes' name as a way out of the copycat syndrome:

Names have always been the subject of magical thinking -- the ancient Romans buried lead tablets invoking the names of spirits, gods or the dead in order to curse their enemies, just as one example -- so maybe it shouldn't be too surprising that many people think uttering the name "James Holmes," like an unguarded mention of the name "Voldemort" in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, will cause bad things to happen...The curse invoked by Holmes' name, according to some, will take the form of other mass shootings. Indiscriminate killers seem to crave fame and notoriety; take those away, the theory goes, and there will be no reason for troubled loners of the future to strap on weapons and shoot up the local post office/mall/campus/movie theater.

More about other things soon, after we get through July 27th and the rest of this weekend.