Halloween meets history in many ghostly tourism attractions. Is this a problem? |
Halloween, the fall holiday and $13.5 billion industry, lurks around the corner.
But what’s behind the more than 11,000 acres of pumpkin patches across Canada and $3.9 billion in consumer spending on candy alone?
Halloween has ancient origins in the pre-Christian religion and practices of the Celts. It was custom to honour the transitions between the seasons and harvest, acknowledge the thin veil between different planes of existence and also to commemorate the dead.
Modern-day commercialization has shifted how people experience Halloween, but the spirits of the dead continue to play a significant role in the occasion and the time of year.
The day’s appeal and its marketability extends beyond a one-day “holiday.” Many people are drawn to carefully curated encounters, seeking thrilling yet sanitized experiences that allow them to engage with the macabre and mortality from a safe distance.
Consequently, Halloween’s commercial success in commodifying dread and the monstrous can be analyzed alongside broader “dark tourism” — an umbrella term that explores tourism involvement with sites of death, disaster and a difficult heritage.
Anthropologist Philip Stone notes that a range of motivations exist for promoting engagement with death, disaster and the macabre: for example, political reasons or remembrance, education, entertainment or economic gain.
So how should we think about worldwide Halloween-related attractions that not only seek to entertain but also promote interpretation and engagement with sites marketed as scary, which often have genuinely dark pasts?
For example, a tourism attraction at Eastern........