Speaker 1: Imagine for just a second, stepping into a physical space
where the very air around you feels well inexplicably heavy.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, like there's a weight to it.
Speaker 1: Exactly. You're standing on dirt or maybe these worn cobblestones,
looking down at the ground beneath your feet, and you
realize with the sudden chilling clarity that these exact spones
have witnessed the absolute extremes of human existence.
Speaker 2: The best and the worst, usually the worst.
Speaker 1: Right, They've absorbed the echoes of unimaginable cruelty, profound tragedy,
and desperate resilience. And you look around and there are
hundreds of other people standing there right alongside you.
Speaker 2: Taking pictures, holding water bottles.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they've got cameras in hand, maybe a snack, and
they've all paid an admission fee to walk through a
site of historical horror, which begs a deeply unsettling.
Speaker 2: Question, Why do we do it?
Speaker 1: Exactly? Why are away as a species so irresistibly drawn
to the darkest, most macabre chapters of our own history?
What is it about death, disaster and suffering that make
this want to buy a ticket, stand in line and
just take a.
Speaker 2: Tour This huge industry too.
Speaker 1: It really is welcome to thrilling threads. I am so
incredibly glad you could join us today because the journey
we're embarking on forces us to look really closely at
the shadows of human nature. Our mission for today's discussion
is to pull at the complex, deeply tangled threads of
this fascinating global phenomenon.
Speaker 2: It truly is global.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's an industry built entirely on tragedy. Today we
are unraveling the intricacies of dark tourism.
Speaker 2: It's a profound topic. Yeah, And looking through the comprehensive
dossi and all the transcripts we pulled together for today,
it's pretty clear we're in for a heavy but vital conversation.
Speaker 1: Oh absolutely.
Speaker 2: We're going to be traveling all over the map exploring
ten distinct global tourist attractions. And I want to be clear.
These aren't your typical sunny vacation spots where you lounge
by a pool.
Speaker 1: Definitely not.
Speaker 2: No, these are destinations built on incredibly dark, bloody and
thoroughly Macaw's histories. We'll be sweeping across multiple continents and
centuries at everything from ancient monumental arenas to modern day
and nuclear exclusion zones.
Speaker 1: And I think it's important to set the tone right
up front for you listening. Our goal today isn't to
sit on a high horse and pass judgment on the
tourists to visit these.
Speaker 2: Sites right, or to take sides on the politically charged
atrocities that happen there. We have to be completely impartial.
Speaker 1: We are just acting as your guides to the facts
and the profound psychological puzzles these places present. We're taking
no sides. We're just exploring the human condition through the
sources we've.
Speaker 2: Gathered, which is the best way to approach it.
Speaker 1: So I think the best place to start is with
a location that is universally beloved. I mean, it's on
almost everyone's travel bucket list.
Speaker 2: I think you know where you're going.
Speaker 1: We're heading back to antiquity, specifically to Rome and the
iconic Colisseum a classic.
Speaker 2: Millions of tourists visit that Amphitheater every single year.
Speaker 1: Right it's recognized as one of the new Seven Wonders
of the World. Stands as this triumphant monument of ancient engineering.
But here is where the disconnect happens and where the
concept of dark tourism really begins to take shape.
Speaker 2: Because of what actually happened inside.
Speaker 1: Yes, this was a place where an incredibly advanced civilized
culture poured staggering amounts of wealth into engineering spectacles of
death purely for entertainment.
Speaker 2: The sheer scale of it, the meticulous organization of that brutality,
is what always catches me off guard when reading the.
Speaker 1: Historical acaut gests so systematic.
Speaker 2: It is when you look at the daily schedule of
the coliseum I mentioned in our sources, it reads almost
like a modern festival lineup, but with this horrific twist, like.
Speaker 1: A schedule of events for a concert.
Speaker 2: Exactly so, in the morning the crowds were treated to
the wild beast shows. They would import exotic animals from
cross the entire empire, lions, bears, elephants.
Speaker 1: Just massive logistical efforts to get them there just.
Speaker 2: To be slaughtered or slaughter prisoners. And then right around
lunchtime the schedule.
Speaker 1: Shifted lunchtime execution right off.
Speaker 2: In crucifixions, and finally in the afternoon they presented the
main event, the peace to resistance flattiatorial combat two men
fighting to the absolute death. It forces us to ask
what it actually says about a society when they structure
public executions with the same logistical care that we might
apply to like a Super Bowl halftime show.
Speaker 1: It's hard to even wrap your head around that level
of normalized violence.
Speaker 2: It wasn't hidden away in some dark dungeon either. It
was the bright, beating heart of Roman life.
Speaker 1: You have to picture the magnitude of it. Fifty thousand
Romans packed into those seats, watching every single movement of
a sword, collectively willing a fighter to deliver a killing blow.
Speaker 2: The noise must have been deafening.
Speaker 1: And imagine standing in the center of that arena today
as a tourist. You're standing where men literally bled into
the sand while tens of thousands of people cheered for
their demise.
Speaker 2: It's surreal.
Speaker 1: And what's wild is that this arena was just a
normal part of their urban infrastructure. There were open air
markets right alongside these brutal contests.
Speaker 2: You can grab lunch and then go watch someone die.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and today you have modern tourists wandering around in
the sunshine, snapping selfies with a gelato in hand, standing
on the exact same ground that was explicitly designed as
an execution chamber.
Speaker 2: It feels like the grim reality is totally lost on
people today. It's completely sanitized by time.
Speaker 1: Sanitized by time. That's a great way to put it.
Speaker 2: Well. I actually think that sanitization is the fundamental engine
of this specific brand of dark tourism. When an event
is separated from us by two millennia, the visceral horror
naturally fades.
Speaker 1: You don't feel connected to it anymore.
Speaker 2: Right, we aren't confronted with the smell and the blood
or the screams. We're left with architectural awe and abstract history.
We admire the arches, the underground area.
Speaker 1: Is Tepageum, right where they kept the animals exactly.
Speaker 2: We admire the engineering, but we distance ourselves from the
human agony. But that dynamic shifts dramatically when we look
at sites where the history is a bit more recent,
even if it's still shrouded in the past.
Speaker 1: Oh, like the Tower of London.
Speaker 2: Yes, if you look at London and His Majesty's royal
palace and fortress, you see a completely different kind of
psychological engagement.
Speaker 1: It sits right there along the River Thames, and while
it's been a royal residence and a treasury. I mean
it holds the crown jewels. Its massive appeal today doesn't
come from the gold.
Speaker 2: Not all the.
Speaker 1: Dark tourism appeal comes directly from its shadowy reputation as
a near inescapable prison and a fearful place of execution.
Speaker 2: And the details of those executions from our sources are
incredibly grim.
Speaker 1: They really are. The sentence most closely associated with the
Tower is beheading by acts carried out by a mass executioner.
But here's the historical tidbit from the dossier that really threw.
Speaker 2: Me, the part about the executioners.
Speaker 1: Yes, there weren't actually enough executions happening for anyone to
become a true polished expert at it. Being an executioner
wasn't a high status for spected trade.
Speaker 2: It was a miserable, low status.
Speaker 1: Job, right And because of that, the guys wielding the
axes were quite often very very drunk when they were
asked to perform their duties.
Speaker 2: Which, as you could imagine, led to absolutely horrific outcomes.
Speaker 1: I can't even imagine.
Speaker 2: There are documented accounts where it took several strikes of
the acts to actually sever the head from the body.
It wasn't the clean cinematic drop we tend to picture.
Speaker 1: It was a messy, agonizing, unpolished reality exactly.
Speaker 2: Yet if you look at how the tower is marketed
to tourists today, it's largely wrapped in this palatable supernatural lore.
The ghosts, the mystery, and the ghost stories are the
primary draw. The guides lean heavily into the tales of
ghosts living within.
Speaker 1: The walls like Anne Boleyn, Yes.
Speaker 2: The stories of Amboleyn walking with her head tucked under
her arm, or the spirits of the two young princes
who were confined there by Rich of the Third and
are assumed to have been murdered in the dead of night.
Speaker 1: Right. Those tales of death and dismay are actively used
to enhance the tours, grim legend, and commercial appeal.
Speaker 2: Today they're selling the spooky factor.
Speaker 1: People are flocking there hoping to feel a chill in
the air or see a shadow move in a dark corridor.
We take the genuine brutal suffering of historical figures like
those poor young princes or the victims of a drunken executioner,
and we turn it into a thrill.
Speaker 2: Ride, a Halloween attraction.
Speaker 1: Basically, Yeah, but isn't there something a little strange about
preferring the ghost story over the historical reality. It's like
we'd rather be scared by a phantom than confront the
fact that a state government actively sanctioned chopping people's heads off.
Speaker 2: That's a really sharp observation. The ghost story provides a buffer.
Speaker 1: It softens the blow.
Speaker 2: It turns real world tragedy into folklore, which is much
easier to digest on a Tuesday afternoon vacation. And this
actually transitions perfectly into our second theme, how we interact
with the architecture of the.
Speaker 1: Macabre, moving from the ghosts of the elite in London
to the physical remains of the masses in Paris.
Speaker 2: Exactly, if you descend into the catacombs of Paris, you
are looking at the ultimate macabre pilgrimage.
Speaker 1: It's a subterranean secret.
Speaker 2: We're talking about an underground ostuary where the number of
interred individuals is estimated to be over six million.
Speaker 1: Six million people just stacked beneath the streets of one
of the most romanticized beautiful cities on Earth.
Speaker 2: It's a staggering contrast.
Speaker 1: And what I found so striking was the historical utility
behind it all. It wasn't initially designed to be some
creepy tourist track.
Speaker 2: No, it was a practical necessity.
Speaker 1: It was a purely practical, almost bureaucratic decision to stem
the overflow from the city's rapidly filling cemeteries. They literally
just ran out of room for the dead above ground.
Speaker 2: There was a massive public health crisis, so they moved
them into the old limestone quarries below the city. It
was a civic engineering solution.
Speaker 1: Yet today people descend into these burial sites seeking supernatural thrills,
and the visual impact of the catacombs is so staggering
the it almost defies human comprehension.
Speaker 2: The walls of bones.
Speaker 1: Yeah, when tourists visit, some of them simply refuse to
believe that the bones are real. They look at these massive,
meticulously arranged piles of femurs and skulls spanning miles of punnels,
and their brains just rejected.
Speaker 2: It's too overwhelming to process that each one of those
skulls belong to a living, breathing Parisian I.
Speaker 1: Can completely see why the mind would reject that reality.
When you see bones arranged in decorative patterns, hearts and
crosses made of skulls. It looks like a movie set.
Speaker 2: And speaking of movies, this specific location has massively fueled
modern pop culture horror.
Speaker 1: Oh absolutely, you've got the two thousand and seven film
literally titled Catacombs, and then the twenty fourteen found footage
horror movie as above, so below.
Speaker 2: Both of those films centered their frights entirely on the
infamously creepy reputation of this underground.
Speaker 1: The real life Catacombs have proven incredibly popular for tourists
who watch those movies and want to experience that cinematic
dread in real.
Speaker 2: Life that they want to be in the horror movie right.
Speaker 1: And local lore is always more than happy to provide
that dread.
Speaker 2: There is a fascinating local legend regarding the creation of
the catacombs. The story goes that the very act of
moving the bones of so many deceased people, disturbing their
final resting places to pile them into these tunnels, unleashed
a dark and malevolent force that still haunts the Catacombs today.
Speaker 1: A curse.
Speaker 2: Essentially sociologically speaking, it's a classic projection of collective guilt
and existential fear. We disturb the dead. Therefore the dead
must be angry with us.
Speaker 1: So I have to ask you, listening right now, would
you feel that heavy energy walking through those tunnels knowing
that six million skeletons are surrounding you.
Speaker 2: It's a heavy thought.
Speaker 1: Are these intrepid adventurers waiting in line for hours truly
seeking public health history or are they just looking for
that supernatural adrenaline rush.
Speaker 2: It's an incredibly thin line between historical curiosity and treating
a mass grave like a haunted house attraction. It really is,
and that boundary gets even lurier when we shift to
our third theme, incarceration, isolation, and infamy. Let's look at
how modern society treats its outcasts.
Speaker 1: We're heading to California to Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary.
Speaker 2: The Rock located on an isolated island in the San
Francisco Bay. It was famously designed to house America's absolute worst.
Speaker 1: Criminals, and today it operates as a highly popular museum.
Tourists routinely pay money bord a ferry and take guided
tours of the.
Speaker 2: Cell blocks and the roster of inmates they house there
is infamous.
Speaker 1: It reads like a who's who of American crime lore.
You have al Capone machine gun, Kelly James, Whitey Bulger
and Robert Franklin Stroud, the Birdman.
Speaker 2: Of Alcatraz, The Worst, the Worst.
Speaker 1: There's a chilling quote from the source material regarding Stroud.
It's from an evaluation where the interviewer says, what's eating
you up inside?
Speaker 2: Bob?
Speaker 1: You act as though you hate everyone in the world.
Speaker 2: That paints a picture of intense psychological misery.
Speaker 1: It does. The isolation was meant to break them, and
now we buy tickets, put on audio headsets and go
look at their tiny, miserable cages.
Speaker 2: It's a profound commodification of human isolation. The current tourism
industry around Alcatraz is fascinatingly complex. How so well. Its
initial mythos was built entirely on its reputation of being escapeproof,
but today a significant part of its dark tourism appeal
is driven by rumors of ghosts. Ghosts again, Yes, the
ghosts of those who died in the skate attempts were
the spears of men who went mad in solitary confinement.
It brings us right back to that recurring pattern we
saw at the Tower of London.
Speaker 1: The supernatural wrapper.
Speaker 2: Exactly why do we elevate these criminals who caused immense
suffering in the real world to a legendary, almost mythical
status by touring their cells.
Speaker 1: Well, I actually want to analyze that mythos a bit.
Are we really elevating them or are we just treating
them like zoo animals?
Speaker 2: That's a fair question.
Speaker 1: We take a mobster like al Capone, a man responsible
for incredible violence, and turn his prisons into a vacation stop.
We want to be close to the danger, but only
when it's.
Speaker 2: Neutralized, a safe brush with danger, right.
Speaker 1: We want to look at the cage to prove to
ourselves that the monsters are safely locked away in the past.
Speaker 2: The neutralization of the threat is key there. But what
happens when that desire to brush up against danger involves
a wound that is still incredibly fresh.
Speaker 1: Oh this leads us into theme four, Modern outlaws and
the commodification of crime.
Speaker 2: If Alcatraz represents criminals safely relegated to the past, our
next location is deeply uncomfortable because the scars are still
highly visible.
Speaker 1: I know exactly what you're talking about. Narcotourism in Medellin, Colombia.
Speaker 2: Yes, specifically centered around the former properties and the legacy
of the infamous international criminal Pablo Escobar.
Speaker 1: This one genuinely threw me in the research. It is bizarre.
Speaker 2: It's wildly controversial.
Speaker 1: There is a subset of tourism where guests actually visit
Escobar's former complex and engage in paintball contests.
Speaker 2: It's hard to believe.
Speaker 1: And they aren't just playing a standard game of paintball.
They are actively recreating bloody shootouts between Medellin cartel members
and armed DEA agents.
Speaker 2: It's the starkest example of cognitive dissonance in the entire
tourism industry.
Speaker 1: It's just sheer disbelief. I mean, real people, innocent civilians,
police officers, died in those exact conflicts, and tourists are
flying in, putting on goggles and using it as a
theme for a weekend paintball game. It sounds so morbid
and disrespectful.
Speaker 2: It does. But to understand how something this surreal happens,
we have to provide a grounded, impartial analysis of the
conflicting narratives surrounding Escobar within Colombia itself.
Speaker 1: Right, because it's not viewed the same way locally.
Speaker 2: It's exactly despite the immense violence of his drug empire,
Escobar holds a lingering reputation among the specific subset of
the population as a mythical Robinhood.
Speaker 1: A robin Hood figure.
Speaker 2: Yes, during the height of his power, he used a
fraction of his illicit wealth to assist some of the
poorest Colombians. He built housing developments in infrastructure that the
government had and provided.
Speaker 1: So that context perfectly encapsulates the complicated feelings a local
might have. If a man built the roof over your
family's head, your view of him is going to be incredibly.
Speaker 2: Complex, regardless of his immense crimes.
Speaker 1: But for a tourist flying in from overseas just to
play cartel paintball, that is a massive ethical gray area.
It's an objectively fascinating twentieth century crime story, but you
have to ponder the ethics.
Speaker 2: Where is the line.
Speaker 1: Exactly, where is the line between a fascinating history lesson
and a morbid, disrespectful reenactment. You're gamifying real world violence
for vacationers who just take off their gear and go
back to their safe lives.
Speaker 2: It's the privilege of distance. The tourist doesn't have to
live with the generational trauma.
Speaker 1: No they don't.
Speaker 2: But that question of respect becomes even more urgent when
we shift from intentional criminal violence to our fifth theme,
catastrophic systemic failures.
Speaker 1: The invisible threats atomic tours.
Speaker 2: We're talking about two of the most significant nuclear disasters
in human history, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in Pripiat, Ukraine.
Speaker 1: And the Fukushima Daichi site in Okuma, Japan.
Speaker 2: Let's start with Chernobyl because the cultural footprint of this
site is massive.
Speaker 1: Obviously, we need to note that currently the site is
closed due to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.
Speaker 2: Right, But previously it was a massive tourist draw, heavily
restricted due to lingering radiation.
Speaker 1: And the reason it's so controlled is that invisible threat
high levels of radiation remain in the soil.
Speaker 2: What is particularly revealing about Chernobyl's tourism is the profound
impact of media influence.
Speaker 1: The power of television.
Speaker 2: Yes, a widely acclaimed television mini series from twenty nineteen
contributed to a massive sudden uptick and travelers. Tour operators
reported close to one hundred and fifty thousand visitors in
that year alone.
Speaker 1: That is a staggering spike just because of a TV show.
Speaker 2: It demonstrates how popular culture can rapidly transform a site
of profound tragedy into a trendy destination.
Speaker 1: I was looking at the transcript from a documentary about
these tours, and there's a haunting quote. A tourist just
casually asks the guide, are you here because of the fire?
Speaker 2: Wow?
Speaker 1: It really makes you extrapolate on the psychology of the visitor.
What draws someone to a place where the danger isn't
in the past, but invisibly present right now in the
soil and air.
Speaker 2: You're walking through an active, hazardous.
Speaker 1: Environment, right And we see very similar dynamics operating in
Japan at the Fukushima Daichi site stemming from the twenty
eleven Chuku earthquake and tsunami.
Speaker 2: Yes, the tsunami directly caused the reactor meltdowns. Visiting this
site requires highly specialized criteria for these tours.
Speaker 1: The sensory details of those Fukushima tours from the sources
are incredibly chilling.
Speaker 2: Tell us about that.
Speaker 1: Imagine sitting in a tour vehicle, driving down a quiet road.
You enter the no go zone. The instruction given to
the tourists is strict. You absolutely cannot open your windows.
Speaker 2: Because of the airborne radiation.
Speaker 1: Exactly if you roll down the window, the radiation will
reach dangerous levels inside the vehicle. Can you imagine that
feeling looking through a pane of glass at a toxic town.
Speaker 2: It's a very modern type of dread. If we synthesize
these two sites, Chernobyl and Fukushima, we see tour companies
operating to show guests the aftermath and the clean up efforts.
Speaker 1: They are essentially exploring abandoned towns left frozen in time.
Speaker 2: It's a profound meditation on the uncontrollable power of the
atomic forces we try to harness.
Speaker 1: It's deeply sobering, but as sobering as atomic disasters are.
The final area we're exploring today forces us to look
at the absolute darkest thread of human.
Speaker 2: Behavior, the intentional destruction of human life.
Speaker 1: Theme six memorializing the unimaginable. We have to discuss genocides
and massacres, and I want to start in Budapest, Hungary,
with a monument called the Shoes on the Danube Bank.
Speaker 2: This is a site that requires deep historical context. It
serves as a tribute to the victims of the Aerocross
Party massacres during the World War II era.
Speaker 1: Right, the Aarocross was a fascist Hungarian militia.
Speaker 2: Yes, they would round up civilians, bring them to the
banks of the freezing Danube River and order them to
step out of their shoes before being shot.
Speaker 1: And the reasoning behind the shoes is horrific. They wanted
the victims to discard their footwear purely so the militia
could sell them on the black market.
Speaker 2: Today, sculptured iron replicas of these nineteen forty style shoes
lie scattered along the river bank, honoring the victims.
Speaker 1: But here is where the absolute disrespect of some modern
tourists becomes infuriating.
Speaker 2: The defacement.
Speaker 1: Yes, there are details in the source about clueless tourists
defacing this powerful monument in twenty twenty three, and in
twenty fourteen thieves actually brought tools and tore away some
of the iron shoes to steal them.
Speaker 2: It shows a profound disconnect some tourists has zero connection
with the gravity of the sites they're visiting.
Speaker 1: They treat a mass grave like a photo op and.
Speaker 2: That expectation of reverence is absolutely vital in discussing our
next location. The killing fields in phenom Pen, Cambodia.
Speaker 1: This encompasses the chong Ek Genocidal Center and the Tools
Genocide Museum.
Speaker 2: These are the physical remnants of Polepot's brutal totalitarian regime
and the Khmer Rouge, resulting in nearly two million Cambodian.
Speaker 1: Deaths two million people. The psychological horror of what the
Kimer Rouge implemented is almost too much to bear.
Speaker 2: When you analyze the dystopian quotes from the sources, it's chilling.
One central tenant stated, we must be like the ox
and have no thought except for the.
Speaker 1: Party to have your humanity stripped away completely.
Speaker 2: They even delved into this terrifying concept of a new
disease they called memory sickness.
Speaker 1: Memory sickness.
Speaker 2: Yes, it was a bad new disease diagnosed by the regime.
The symptoms were simply thinking too much about life in
pre revolutionary Cambodia.
Speaker 1: That is terrifying. Missing your past life.
Speaker 2: Was a disease and punishable by death.
Speaker 1: When tourists visit the Tool Slang Genocide Museum today, reverence
is absolutely key here. This isn't entertainment, It's an intensely
powerful experience where survivor's stories are heard. It's a place
for bearing.
Speaker 2: Witness, which to our final site today, perhaps the most
universally recognized site of dark tourism on Earth, the Auschwitz
Berkanau State Museum in Oshwishim, Poland.
Speaker 1: The largest Nazi extermination camp, operating from nineteen forty to
nineteen forty five.
Speaker 2: Where at least one point one million people were murdered.
The historical preservation here details the grim presence of the
crematoriums and gas chambers.
Speaker 1: The sheer industrialization of death.
Speaker 2: It specifically notes that the massive ovens were specially developed
by a German engineering company. It was the complete corporate
industrialization of death and.
Speaker 1: The transition from Auschwitz first to the Birkenar extermination camp.
The Nazis built a vicious, sophisticated death machine.
Speaker 2: It forces us to ask about the ultimate purpose of
this specific kind of dark tourism.
Speaker 1: Exactly unlike the paintball games in Medellin, this museum exists
to confront the bleakest, cruelest course of ourselves in the
desperate hope that humanity never repeats such a gruesome event.
It's a warning so synthesizing all these threads to from
the drunken executioners of the Tower of London to the
chilling silence of the Cambodian killing fields. Dark tourism forces
us to look in the mirror.
Speaker 2: It really does. Are we seeking thrills, paying our respects?
Or are we just morbidly curious?
Speaker 1: It leaves me with a final provocative thought for you listening.
If future generations, hundreds of years from now, were to
turn our present day tragedies into tourist attractions, what would
they build a visitor center around?
Speaker 2: That's a profound thought.
Speaker 1: And how would we feel about them buying souvenirs at
the sight of our greatest heartbreaks?
Speaker 2: It strips away the comfort of history.
Speaker 1: We want to know where you stand. Have you ever
visited a site of dark tourism? Does stepping onto that
ground change you? Or do you think these spaces should
be left alone? Leave us a comment and tell us
what you think about today's thrilling dreads.