Abstract
Dark tourism involves visits to places where death and human suffering represent the tourism product, which has become more and more popular in today's tourism industry. Thus,the aim of this paperis to study the Dark tourism-phenomenon and the underlying motives that makespeople choose to visit this type of attractions.
The main objects in this study is the Swedish Prison Museum in Gävle among with the Mental Health Museum in Dalarna, where both qualitative and quantitative research have been conducted. The results from this research, showsthat visitor’smotives vary by location and attraction. However, some motives wasoutstandingamong visitors regarding each attraction. These are "exciting" and "acquire knowledge", which appeared most oftenand was in commonfor both attractions.
Further highlighting in the following study is to explain in what way dark tourism-attractions can affect visitorsand which methods this can be done by.Apart from the Swedish Prison museum and the mental museum, the Holocaust museum Yad Vashem representa large part of this work. The reasonisto study if there is anysimilarities between these three attractions, regarding the impact on visitors. The result informs us that the two Swedish attractionshas many equal methods in commonwith Yad Vashem. Clearly, thisimpacts can be done bymethods such as storytelling, use of technology and education & knowledge. Based on a quantitative survey at the Swedish Prison Museum, education & knowledge was the most prominent experience among the museums visitors.