LATEST Dark Tourism DESTINATIONS
Arlington National Cemetery: One Name I Actually Knew
Arlington National Cemetery is more than famous graves and perfectly aligned white headstones. It’s hundreds of thousands of individual stories, including one belonging to a girl I grew up with who made the ultimate sacrifice. Add the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and an absolutely fucking gorgeous autumn backdrop, and this is one place where eventually you just put the camera down and remember.
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Cagsawa Ruins: Come for the Bell Tower, Pay the Foreigner Tax
Cagsawa Ruins is beautiful, historic and surprisingly quick to explore. Wander the remains of a church destroyed in 1814, photograph its iconic bell tower, question some historical site-planning decisions, and discover that apparently foreign cars require twice as much parking lot.
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Chernobyl: Humanity Fucked Around. Reactor 4 Found Out.
I spent years obsessing over the Chernobyl disaster, so naturally my equally questionable friends and I decided to visit. In September 2017, I finally stood outside Chernobyl Reactor 4, photographed the newly covered nuclear disaster, met some radioactive-adjacent wildlife, explored the Exclusion Zone and somehow returned home without glowing. Then HBO made Chernobyl famous and suddenly everyone understood why the hell I went.
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Pripyat: The City That Never Got to Come Home
49,000 people evacuated the town of Pripyat overnight. Visit the abandoned, radioactive ghost town of Pripyat located next to the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.
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Duga Radar: The Secret Soviet Antenna Everyone Could Hear
Hidden in the forests near Chernobyl is Duga Radar, a supposedly top-secret Soviet antenna nearly 50 stories tall whose infamous “Russian Woodpecker” signal could be heard around the fucking world. I arrived completely unprepared for the sheer scale of this Cold War monstrosity and immediately fell in love with it.
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Lima Catacombs: God Upstairs, 25,000 Bodies Downstairs
I wandered into a beautiful old church in Lima expecting some history and religious architecture. Then I discovered roughly 25,000 dead people downstairs. Apparently salvation came with basement storage.
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Centralia: The Town Where Hell Is Technically Downstairs
Beneath the quiet forests of eastern Pennsylvania, an underground mine fire has been burning continuously since 1962, and it destroyed an entire town in the process. Centralia wasn’t abandoned because the mines closed. It was erased because the ground itself became uninhabitable. Today, only empty streets, forgotten cemeteries, and an invisible inferno remain, creating one of America’s most infamous dark tourism destinations. Once home to the legendary Graffiti Highway and widely associated with the eerie world of Silent Hill, Centralia is a haunting reminder that sometimes the scariest places aren’t fiction at all.
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Arecibo: 900 Tons of Fuck Around and Find Out
A cheap’ish flight, two useful Spanish words, and an unhealthy enthusiasm for giant science shit somehow led me to Arecibo Observatory in 2012. Eight years later, I woke up and watched one of humanity’s coolest scientific achievements spectacularly collapse into the Puerto Rican jungle.
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