Dark tourism and spectral geographies: ghosts, memories, and the rupturing of absence and presence

This paper explores the intersection of dark tourism and spectral geographies, offering a critical examination of how spaces of death, disaster, trauma, and painful memories are shaped by hauntings and spectral presence. Drawing on hauntology and the work of Derrida, as well as on work in spectral geographies, it proposes spectrality not as a metaphor to analyse places connected with literal ghosts and supernatural presence, but as an analytical framework that reconfigures our understanding of temporality, spatiality, and presence within dark tourism sites. This article, as introduction to a collection of works on the nexus between dark tourism and spectral geographies, argues that spectrality offers a qualitative and transformative rethinking of dark tourism, revealing how disruptions in linear understandings of absence and presence, and past-present-future temporalities can produce sites that are emotionally and politically charged, and ethically complex. The collection interrogates how ghostly traces—whether of colonialism, disaster, or ecological loss—complicate linear historical narratives. It positions spectrality as a transformative and generative lens through which to engage with dark tourism’s critical potential in negotiating memory, justice, and intergenerational trauma.