This episode was suggested by patrons on both the Patreon site and on Discord.

Humans are fascinated by gore and violence, but even more so the mysterious and unsolved.

Interest in these disturbing and unpleasant subjects is called morbid curiosity, and it has gripped millions of people throughout the ages.

I am one of those people.

My name is Halley, and this is the Morbid Curiosity Podcast.

Have you ever visited a historic prison, a cemetery, a battlefield, a supposedly haunted house?

If so, you've participated in dark tourism.

Other names for this practice are grief tourism, the heritage of atrocity, and morbid tourism. There are subtle differences

in the definitions of all these terms, but they all encompass the act of visiting places

associated with death and suffering. Many cultures and religions throughout history participate

in pilgrimages to locations where religious figures have died or places

that house relics body parts of religious figures this most ancient dark tourism practice is called

thanatourism the word thanatourism has roots in ancient greek thanatos means dead or, therefore thanatourism means death tourism.

Today, this specific term denotes traveling to sacred sites where death has occurred.

Pilgrims visited Jerusalem for centuries to see the place where Jesus of Nazareth was crucified.

The ancient Greeks ritualized travel to the site of the Battle of Marathon in 140 BCE,

but it was visited by tourists long before that to honor the fallen heroes of the battle.

People traveled from all over the Roman Empire between the 1st century BCE and the 2nd century CE to witness gladitorial

spectacles, which involved violence and death. The public executions of the medieval period

in Europe were always well attended wherever they occurred, as were open morgues. The battlefields

of Waterloo in 1815, Gettysburg in 1863, as well as the Western Front during World War I, all had visitors as the battles were still raging and immediately after.

Tourists flocked to the site of the Hindenburg explosion in 1937 before all the flames had died down.

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