Tourism has taken quite a hit these past 12 months. Economists are reckoning with the fallout. But tourism won’t die. Nor will the tourism of death.
Asylums have long been locales for “dark tourism.” Dark tourism (or “Thanatourism”) is essentially the recreational visitation of sites of atrocity, death, torture, and grief. Such destinations might include concentration camps, graveyards, abandoned hospitals, assassination museums (such as the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, where you can look down on the plaza where JFK was shot), prisons, and mental hospitals.
American mental hospitals have long been magnets for curiosity-seekers. Back in the mid-1800s, asylum superintendents regularly encouraged visitors to come and tour the grounds. Patients were encouraged to interact.
Some tourists even managed to get the “real” experience, having themselves briefly locked up or put into restraining devices. Such experiences were viewed not as ghoulish voyeurism but rather as educational. Hospital superintendents pushed tourism. They had to.
Superintendents depended upon favorable reputations to attract patients. They wanted the public to know they ran safe, orderly, scientific places where loved ones could be healed (home was typically where people suffering mental illness were cared for at the time). Pastoral settings, coupled with well-placed media articles and alluring tourist materials, showcased their wares.
One famous asylum tourist, British novelist Charles Dickens, visited several American mental institutions during his American trip in the 1840s. He appreciated the calm of the Hartford Retreat, finding it to be “admiringly conducted.” He was impressed with the Boston Insane Hospital as well.
But Dickens's trip to Blackwell’s Island in New York City (he confusingly described it as being “on Long Island or Rhode Island”) left an altogether different impression. In American Notes, he writes that here, “everything had a lounging, listless, madhouse air, which was very painful. The moping idiot, cowering down with long disheveled hair; the gibbering maniac, with his hideous laugh and pointed finger; the vacant eye, the fierce wild face, the gloomy picking of the hands and lips, and munching of the nails: there they were all, without disguise, in naked ugliness and horror.”
By the end of the 19th century, mental hospitals in America had taken on all of the horrors Dickens described of Blackwell’s, magnified by extreme overcrowding and a sense of medical hopelessness. Though tourism declined, some visitors started to enter surreptitiously.
For instance, in 1872, Julius Chambers had himself committed to the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum. In his shocking A Mad World and Its Inhabitants, he describes the “instruments of torture” within, regaling his readership with accounts of the denizens of a horror house. A few decades later, reporter Nellie Bly lied her way into the Woman’s Lunatic Asylum at Blackwell’s Island to similar effect. Her book, Ten Days in a Mad-House, made her famous.
By this point, asylum tourism was as good as dead. But accounts of the experiences of patients sold well to a public voracious to peek inside the gates, and some visitors still could not be kept away. As “Inmate Ward 8,” Marion Marle Woodson reported in his 1932 memoir, Behind the Door of Delusion, curiosity seekers who “want to be shocked and are disappointed if they are not” regularly visited his institution. He sarcastically tells the reader, “taxpayers… are entitled to free admission to any of the entertainments paid for out of ‘our money.’ And chief among the legitimate amusements provided by the state through the medium of ‘our money’ is a trip through the insane asylum, with the creepy thrills incident hereto.”
About a decade after the big hospitals started shutting down late in the 20th century, a new category of tourist showed up—the “urban explorer.” These adventurers roamed the rotting hospital grounds, often illegally, to investigate the remains of an obsolete system. This class of tourism is still going strong. Some shuttered hospitals, like the Trans Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia, even invite such explorers.
THE BASICSThe urban explorer is the latest variant in our longer asylum tourism history. While “dark tourism” is a useful term, since these intrepid folks expressly seek out places most people view as “scary,” it shouldn’t obscure other connections to mainstream tourism. The hugely popular USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor, Civil War and Revolutionary War battlefields, Ground Zero in Manhattan, the Colosseum in Rome (where gladiators died and were killed), funerary monuments like the Great Pyramids, and many other popular places all imbibe the irresistible allure of tragedy.
People are naturally attracted to sites of death and grief. It is a “darkness” we crave, a melancholic lure that satisfies a natural human curiosity. It won't end any time soon.