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Introduction
It is innocuous to suggest that one of the most widely discussed topics in tourism studies in recent years is dark tourism. Defined as "the act of travel to sites associated with death, suffering and the seemingly macabre" (Stone, 2006, p. 146), the concept of dark tourism has been widely popularised in the academic research landscape. A foray into pertinent literature reveals that dark tourism has generated extensive academic interest, with initial efforts being centred on conceptualising and operationalising the ambiguous term. Consequently, a plethora of terms have arisen to describe visitation to places where death and disaster have occurred. For instance, Seaton (1996) used the term "thanatourism" to designate travel partially or wholly motivated by a desire for actual or symbolic encounters with death. Similarly, Rojek's (1993) "black spot tourism" concept introduced dark attractions by referring to sites and graves where celebrities or large numbers of people experienced death, whereas Bloom (2000) used the term "morbid tourism" to delineate death-oriented attractions. As researchers attempted to advance understanding on the concept, valuable studies investigating dark tourist motives emerged. Specifically, relevant studies allude to a diverse pool of visitation motives. Dann (1998) identified fear of phantoms, search for novelty, nostalgia, the celebration of crime, basic bloodlust and encounter with death as primary motives of visitors to dark sites. Similarly, curiosity, entertainment, empathetic identification, compassion, nationalistic motives, pilgrimage, education and identity search were included in the list by subsequent studies (Ashworth, 2002; Biran et al. , 2011; Dunkley et al. , 2011; Iles, 2008; Tarlow, 2005). What extant literature indicates is that a wide spectrum of dark tourism categories exists, with Stone (2006) concluding that "varying degrees of darkness" subsists.
The variety of case studies used in dark tourism research highlight the close relation of the concept with heritage, verified by the increasing popularity dark tourism is gaining in heritage studies (Hyde and Harman, 2011). Indeed, dark tourism is used as an umbrella term under which several heritage sites associated with death, conflict and tragedy have been placed. A wide range of heritage sites have been explored from the dark tourism perspective, with academic attention being directed to issues of visitor motivation, site interpretation and classification of attractions (Biran et al. , 2011; Cohen, 2011; Kang