Ghost tourism profits on death while dancing on the graves of those who died

“Can ghosts make you rich?”

On 2023’s Halloween-themed episode of “Shark Tank,” two siblings were winding up to pitch their business, American Ghost Tours, to the Sharks. That opening line, delivered by the tiredly perky sister, a kind of Great Value Kimmy Schmidt, sounded forced and uncertain; as the pitch continued, her brother’s vaguely oily confidence disappeared each time a Shark shot out a question. You would not have known that the pair had been running ghost walks in Midwestern cities for more than a decade and had been fascinated with the supernatural since childhood. You would not have known that they cared about anything but money. None of the things mentioned on their website — community, memory, connection — was of interest to the Sharks. They had tucked away their real selves to cosplay in the hope of becoming what everyone wants to be: rich.

And at the center of it all was the inescapable thing no one could mention lest they bring the whole room down. The immovable fact that would eventually render all their collective ambition, hustle, success, and money useless. Death.

Americans have never wanted to talk about death. It’s uncomfortable. It’s morbid. It’s a bummer. But it’s also never been closer to us, quite literally, and all the time. It’s on the news when we wake up, on social-media push notifications when we’re at work. We can watch death happen on any number of platforms, thanks to autoplay, even if we would never choose to. The nation’s leadership and much of its media have tacitly agreed not to reckon with the million-plus Americans who died of COVID, much less about the Americans who continue to.

Ghosts, though, we can talk about. Historically, interest in ghosts rises in the wake of mass-casualty phenomena: In the 19th century, Spiritualism riveted Americans needing psychic relief from the Civil War; at the start of the 21st century, 9/11 catalyzed a new wave of ghost stories and paranormal investigations broadcast on TV. With COVID barely in the rearview, ghost tourism has thrived, urging Americans to embrace the spirit world as a welcome distraction — close enough to death to acknowledge it, far enough away to see ghosts as a present-day entertainment sourced from the past that lets us forget, at least temporarily, the inevitable future.

Ghost tours still exist in their original incarnation, spooky season walking tours generally conducted by local experts who introduce city residents and visitors to a wealth of hidden history. These days, though, well-oiled corporate tours run year-round in cities and towns, with standardized scripts that include space for jokes and lists of verboten questions. In famously haunted places like Savannah, Ga. and New Orleans, La., ghost tours account for a significant chunk of tourist revenue and often subsidize the preservation of historic buildings and sites.

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Ghost-hunting and paranormal-research communities abound on social-media platforms, convene at real-life meetups at bars, and often set out on investigations that — who knows — might get them on one of the more than 65 ghost-hunting reality shows available to stream on various platforms. The larger industry of “dark tourism,” currently valued at $32 billion and projected to keep rising, encompasses visits to any notable site of historically significant suffering — a range that includes Auschwitz and Chernobyl as well as New York City’s Hotel Chelsea, Detroit’s Masonic Temple, and The Myrtles Plantation in St Francisville.

Humans need ghosts in a different way than they need, say, monsters or vampires. “One of the main things ghost stories do is allow us to approach historical trauma obliquely, in a way that recognizes trauma without asking the audience to admit fault or guilt,” says author Colin Dickey, whose books center on the inextricable connections between history, culture, and the paranormal. “You get to face the horrible thing without letting it affect you.”

This has been particularly true of reality-TV paranormal programming that Dickey sees as the spiritual offspring of 1984’s “Ghostbuters” — masculinized spaces of homosocial bonding that marry the adrenaline rush of extreme sports and the gadget-obsessed nerdery of online forums, but that also catalyze expressions of feeling and emotion. The casts of ghost-hunting shows aren’t uniformly male, of course, but amid the terminology of hunting and trapping and proving paranormal existence, there is almost always one burly dude hoping to fight a spirit.

The business of capitalizing on ghosts can get shameless. The home-security company Vivint, for instance, recently ranked Estes Park, Colo.; Gettysburg, Pa.; and Stowe, Vt. as the nation’s top-3 “spookiest cities.” All three do have famed spirits, but it’s also no accident that each is a thriving non-paranormal tourist destination as well  — places where hotels, outbuildings and second homes are likely to need security systems. In the Southern cities most associated with ghost tourism, both tour companies and tourists are regularly confronted with questionable ethical decisions made in the interest of balancing accurate history with scripted thrill-seeking.

And just as these were scrubbed from America’s corpus of official history — land of the free, home of the brave, nothing else to see here — they underwent a much more insidious transformation as part of these. In her 2015 book “Tales From the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era,” historian Tiya Miles considers the collateral costs of ghost tours that in many cases smooth over the horrifying realities of slavery with invented narratives in which plantation owners and enslaved women are presented as doomed lovers rather than owner and owned in order to maximize entertainment value for tourists.

Likewise, in a 2023 episode of “This American Life,” Chenjerai Kumanyika recounts ghost tours on which, he says, “guides would breeze through these violent tales of enslaved people being killed for pure shock value or laughs.” Ghost tourism as an industry is inescapably ghoulish because it can’t be meaningfully separated from the sites and stories of exploitation and violence that produced its moneymaking spirits. But the half-serious theory Kumanyika floats in the episode (“If you turned critical race theory into a book of ghost stories, all the white people who hate it would love it”) is disproved by instances of white tourists who can’t stomach even these soft-focus narratives.

The author of a 2023 TimeOut article titled “This ghost tour in America’s most haunted city is not for the faint of heart” abandons a tour that foregrounds the experiences of enslaved people. Her explanation (“My spectral preference is for something filmy you might see in an attic, a forlorn soul stuck between two worlds — but these ghosts were victims of serial killers, of racial brutality”) underscores an inability to see enslaved people’s lives and deaths as meaningful. (The article’s metadata reads “A Walking Ghost Tour of New Orleans Proves to Be Scary and Upsetting.”)

At a time when American history is being contested in unprecedented ways, ghost tourism has no responsibility to step into spaces where school boards and state legislatures cut out inconvenient portrayals of the United States as anything other than the land of the free and home of the brave. But it also seems like an opportunity to rethink what ghost tours are for: Pennsylvania’s extravagantly gothic, legendarily feared Eastern State Penitentiary, for instance, is these days known as the Eastern State Penitentiary Historical site and is operated as a nonprofit museum and justice-education center. Daytime audio tours are guided by the voice of Steve Buscemi, and a $150 family-and-friends membership also grants admission to monthly talks like the upcoming “Justice 101: State of the Union: Excessive Punishment, the 8th Amendment and the Justice System,” and none of it makes the place any less haunted. Ghosts as a source of entertainment don’t preclude ghosts as more than that.

This is especially true with ghost tours that close the wide gap between past and present hauntings. In his 2016 book “Ghostland: An American History In Haunted Places,” Dickey writes about a New Orleans burger joint that honored its resident ghost, an elderly woman named Vera Smith who died in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and rubble transferred from the site of the former World Trade Center after 9/11 that reportedly hosts at least one restless spirit. It’s hard to imagine a ghost tour of the New York City hospitals that were so inundated with COVID deaths in the early months of 2020 that they had to turn refrigerated trucks into makeshift morgues; then again, it was hard to imagine such a tragedy even as it happened. In New Orleans, Dickey notes, “the story of Katrina [was] folded into the narrative of New Orleans as a city that persevered and survived and that’s a really powerful, stirring message to hear filtered through ghost stories.”

This seems important to remember in a moment when the richest man in the world seems to believe that anyone who doesn’t agree with him is an NPC — in videogame parlance, a nonplayable character — and the Secretary of Health and Human Services is so intent on reviving previously eradicated diseases that a rational person might wonder about his connections to the funeral industry. There’s no honoring the dead without first respecting the living, and some of the nation’s most  powerful lobbies have already answered the question “Can ghosts make you rich?” with a resounding yes.