Why They Sleep Where Murders Happened: The Psychology Behind Dark Tourism

If you have watched Netflix’s “Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story,” you know you can stay at the Borden house. In the sixth episode, Sarah Paulson’s Aileen Carol Wuornos, the Florida serial killer, checks into the Fall River bed and breakfast with her girlfriend. She walks its rooms late at night and comes face to face with Lizzie’s ghost.

The story that grips her is real. Abby Borden was killed first, in an upstairs guest room she was cleaning. About 90 minutes later, Andrew Borden was murdered in the parlour, where he seemed to be napping on a couch. Both were struck with a hatchet. Andrew’s 32-year-old daughter, Lizzie, was charged with both murders. She and the housemaid Bridget were the only people known to be at home. After a 13-day trial, a jury took just 90 minutes to acquit her in June 1893, and no one else was ever charged. The playground rhyme gives her mother 40 whacks and her father 41. In reality, Abby was struck 19 times and Andrew 11. 

Wuornos never made the trip. The house did not become a bed and breakfast until 1996, by which time she had been convicted and imprisoned in Florida. She was arrested in 1991. But real travellers do make the trip. Guests can stay overnight in the room where Lizzie’s stepmother was killed, and stays start at around USD 200 a night. Why would anyone pay for that?

The Lure Of The Unfamiliar

To understand why this has become a trend, Outlook Traveller spoke to a psychiatrist and a counsellor psychologist.

For Pragya Priya Mandal, a counsellor psychologist at Monoshij, a mental health unit of Techno India Group in Kolkata, the answer starts with a long list of motives. “For some, it might be the desire to learn and understand the events of the past, an interest in places of historical importance but from close quarters, a thirst for knowledge, nostalgia, or a ‘profound heritage experience’ as put by Peter Slade,” she said. For others, it is “the sole thrill of it, their curiosity about the unusual, empathy for or identification with the victim of such violence.”

Curiosity does much of the work. “There is a feeling of ‘other’-ness that comes with the concept of crime and death,” Mandal said. Unless we experience them intimately, both remain abstract, “giving rise to the hunger for a clearer understanding of what it really feels like.” She added an evolutionary layer: “Learning more about death and crime closely is interpreted by the brain as preparation.”

Dr Sarthak Dave, a psychiatrist with Vibha Healing Centre in Ahmedabad, framed it as ordinary novelty-seeking. “It’s a normal human thing that is what we call novelty-seeking,” he said. “Anything that is new is attractive to us, including something that’s dark, something that is gross. So as long as they are safe, they will love to explore that.” A holiday, he explained, is a break from routine, and a murder house is one more item on the menu, alongside adventure sports. He believes a smaller group is drawn only to such material and finds little else stimulating.

Mandal pointed to culture as well. Indian aesthetics, she noted, has a name for the emotion: Bibhatsa Rasa, “the feeling of revulsion and horror,” which some people “actively seek.” Her blunter summary: “Violence sells.”

The business model bears her out. In Villisca, Iowa, eight people, six of them children, were bludgeoned to death in their sleep in June 1912, and the crime remains unsolved. The house opened to the public in 1998 after a restoration that removed its plumbing and electricity. Rooms now go for USD 199 a night. Its own booking page is candid that the stay is “not meant as accommodation” but as an experience. Villisca and the Borden house even share an owner. Lance Zaal’s US Ghost Adventures bought Villisca in 2024, and its portfolio already included Borden’s house.

A Safe Scare

Why does the fear feel good? Mandal said such places offer “a safe space to express extreme fear in a socially acceptable and controllable context.” That is, she said, “a relief from the exhausting drudgery of compulsion to maintain decorum in our everyday lives.” The payoff, in her words: “The cherry on the cake is the sense of accomplishment achieved from having successfully faced one’s fears and surviving unharmed.”

She argued that the brain cannot fully tell rehearsal from reality. The threat-detecting part of the brain, she said, “does not make the distinction between real threat and simulated threat.” So a horror film or a haunted bedroom delivers “a safe rush of adrenaline,” a jolt that “can often feel pleasurable.” Visitors get “the danger by choice and without any consequence.” She also described a darker version: learning about a crime can lead people to “visualise themselves as both the victim and the perpetrator, a hollow catharsis that still offers a sense of control while experiencing heightened fear in a comparatively secure space.”

Dave had a varied point. “It’s not about control of fear,” he said. “It’s about experiencing something that they have not.” A tourist on an adventure ride is confronting a real fear of heights or deep water, he argued. A tourist in a murder house is “absolutely sure that they and the family are going to be safe,” and simply wants to imagine what the culprit or victim went through: “I will get to know something new. I will get to feel something new.” If visitors were truly frightened, he said, they would not go.

The two views may describe different visitors, and the numbers suggest most people come with less lurid motives. Alcatraz, once home to gangsters like Al Capone, receives about 1.6 million visitors a year, according to the US National Park Service. The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum reported more than 1.83 million visitors in 2024, almost 10 per cent up on 2023. That is still well below the pre-pandemic record of 2.32 million in 2019, according to the European Jewish Congress. A 2022 study by Passport Photo Online found that 82 per cent of the Americans it surveyed had visited at least one dark tourism destination, with education (52 per cent) and paying tribute (47 per cent) the leading motivations. Market estimates vary widely, too. Market.us values the global dark tourism market at USD 35.1 billion in 2025, while Fact.MR puts it at USD 32 billion. There is no agreed count of dark tourists, and the Borden-style overnight stay is a small corner of a much larger field of memorial and heritage travel.

Where Curiosity Ends

The harder question is when interest becomes voyeurism. Medellín offers a live example. Pablo Escobar tours began in 2011 and take foreigners to his grave and the rooftop where he was shot. The city’s then-mayor said the tours are legal but that he dislikes them because he believes they promote “mafia culture.”

Mandal said the debate is unresolved. “Morbid fascination is a core part of the human experience, especially when it comes to the mystery of death,” she said, and society is “still wrestling with this question: where does innocent curiosity end and voyeurism begin?” Critics argue that profiting from violent crime “further exploits the original victims and inflicts additional trauma on their families,” while supporters point to education and awareness. Her conclusion: “The line between what is okay and what is not cannot be drawn from the outside.” Each traveller, she said, “must look inside themselves” and reach an approach that maintains “the overall homeostasis.”

Dave offered a practical yardstick. Travellers, he said, must make sure “they don’t end up harming anyone else or themselves,” and avoid slipping into a loop of only dark stimulation. Someone stimulated only by dark material, he said, is “definitely unhealthy.”

He also raised a clinical caution, framed as a hypothetical. In someone who already harbours violent thoughts they have never acted on, he said, seeing that such acts exist and were committed could activate them. And if a trip leaves a traveller badly distressed, Dave said, therapy before returning to routine is advisable.

Aileen Wuornos never spent a night in the Borden house, but the show got something right about those who do. They are rarely there for the murders themselves. They want a way into the story, whether that is a history lesson, a thrill, a rehearsal for fear or simply a feeling their ordinary lives don’t offer. The guests in Fall River and Villisca know how their night will end: they will wake up, check out, and go home. That certainty is what makes the fear enjoyable, and it is also what separates the curious traveller from the one who has forgotten that real people died in these rooms.

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