Feeding the Fascination: Crime-related tourism and the True Crime Museum

Often understood as a form of ‘dark’ tourism these Crime Museums as storied spaces are significant sites in which meanings are made and opinions are formed. When we visit a museum associated with prison or policing, when we seek out sites linked to infamous killings and killers, or when we tour a defunct jail cell, we are - in effect - consuming true crime narratives. Much like other mediated crime narratives they are no doubt partial and limited, forgetting as much as they remember, but this is unlikely to diminish their power or potency. This chapter then, will introduce the reader to some of the issues involved in crime related tourism. It will begin by offering a typography of crime related sites to expose the diversity within and between these tourist experiences. It will then move on to consider one such site in more detail: the True Crime Museum in Hastings, England. I have written about the methodology I use in museum spaces elsewhere (please see Thurston 2017) so this second part of the chapter will instead focus on the exhibits themselves.