America’s Horror Stories

America’s Horror Stories: U.S. History through Dark Tourism conducts a ghost tour(ist) methodology to explore how slavery and racism are represented in dark tourism via ghost tours.

The authors travel to key sites of racist U.S. history, including Salem, Massachusetts, where a witch panic was sparked by accusations of witchcraft by Tituba, an enslaved woman practicing Voodoo; New Orleans, Louisiana, which hosts the largest slave trade market; the Myrtles Plantation in Francisville, Louisiana; and to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where the bloodiest battle of the Civil War took place, marking a pivotal moment to end slavery in the nation—but where Confederate ghosts are said to continue roaming the town and battlefield. Acting as research ghost hunters/tourists, the authors go on walking and bus tours, visit historical monuments, stay at haunted hotels, ponder objects in haunted museums, and do some ghost hunting of their own. They find that the ghosts conjured by tour guides—ghosts of confederate soldiers, American citizens, and enslaved people—tend to whitewash, sensationalize, and commercialize the horrors of U.S. history, including slavery, racism, and colonialism. They do not discount dark tourism entirely; but recommend a ghost tour(ist) pedagogy that critically considers social issues—and structural forms of inequality—that haunt us today.

America’s Horror Stories will be of great interest to students and scholars researching and taking part in critical criminology and cultural criminology courses, specifically on crime, media, and culture.