Dark Tourism BLOG
This page is intended to provide a more flexible and also more interactive element to dark-tourism.com, which is otherwise more static (more like an encyclopedia). The idea came about after the DT page I used to curate on Facebook was suddenly shut down by the company (full story here). So I’m continuing here – with regular blog posts, either featuring particular dark-tourism destinations or marking specific days in dark history and sometimes reacting to current affairs that are in some way relevant to this site’s topic.
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Return to Highgate
When I was in London for a few days at the beginning of the year, I finally managed to make a return visit to Highgate Cemetery – one of the world’s most celebrated dark-tourism attractions in that category (cemeteries). I had first seen it in the first half of the 1980s not long after the Friends of Highgate Cemetery Trust had made the overgrown Western section accessible to the public on guided tours (while the Eastern section remained freely accessible then). The tour I went on left a lasting visual impression on me. So I had long wanted to go back,
A Day in Stockholm
Last weekend I was in Sweden’s capital city, tagging on to a group of friends and colleagues of my wife’s, most of whom were primarily interested in sauna-ing and cold-water swimming as well as some mainstream sightseeing. I instead used the Saturday for doing my own thing – and filling a few DT-related gaps. I had been to Stockholm once before, but that was nearly 20 years ago, long before I started
Dark Tourism & Beds
This is the theme that in the latest theme poll came second in the vote, and, as indicated in the winning theme’s post, I’ll now bring you the runner-up without a new poll.
Here’s a photo of one of the most gruesome places involving beds, namely a bed frame in a torture room of the infamous Tuol Sleng (aka S-21) prison in Phnom Penh in Cambodia. It was on beds like this that the decaying and ghastly mutilated bodies of the final victims of the Khmer Rouge were found by the liberators (the
Back from Portugal
On Tuesday I returned from my 11-day trip back to Portugal. It had been 12 years since I was last in Lisbon, and I had never before ventured beyond that city. This time I did also travel to other places, but Lisbon was still my first destination. I then moved on to the country’s second city, Porto, before visiting some smaller places – and managed to fill a few significant gaps in terms of dark tourism!
As already indicated I first travelled back to lovely Lisbon – and it was a happy reunion. What a great city it is indeed …
Dark Tourism & Books
The title of this post is the theme that in the recent theme poll of the previous post (and DT Newsletter) was the winner, leaving the theme DT & Beds in second place. But I may turn the latter into a post at some point too.
So, for now let’s kick off with DT & Books:
And let’s get the most obvious book to feature here out of the way right at the start. It’s possibly the historically darkest book ever,
Dark Tourism & Trains
With this Blog Post I’m reviving the tradition of having “themed” posts (the latest previous one was this) as well as reader polls about future themes (the last poll was at the bottom of this post). If you already want to know now what the new poll’s four choices are, scroll down to the bottom of this post, cast your vote, and then come back here.
For this post I randomly picked “trains” at the theme. Once again it will be mostly a photo essay with only the most essential background explanations.
The first thing about trains with a dark connection to spring to most people’s minds will be