Chapter 20: Storytelling in Dark Tourism Destination Promotion: A Struggle to Build a Unique Image out of Varied and Contradictory Narratives

Dark tourism is a contemporary niche phenomenon. It originates in the understanding of traveling or involving in tourism activities at a destination connected to various shades of the darker phenomena of human life and civilization. Translating a destination into a dark tourism destination requires promotion pursuits. Destination promotion agents come from varied backgrounds. The role of the locals among those agents is crucial in primary image formation and corresponding narrative creation by storytelling.

Stories make the tourists experience, engage, and be emotionally attached to the morbid attractions, the main draw of a visit to a dark tourism destination. The storytelling becomes diverse according to the storyteller’s cultural upbringing, knowledge, attachment to the morbid draw, and narration skill or aptitude. The confusion in signifier-referent-signified corroboration and frames of interpretation is quite logical. Accordingly, a contradiction appears among diverse stories. However, the destination struggles to build a unique but fully reconciled image instead of swapping between varied morbid stories.

The present chapter will try to locate the challenges of storytelling encountered by local stakeholders to build a unique image from varied and contradictory narratives for dark tourism destination promotion and portrayal.