Fourth International Conference on Tourism and Leisure Studies

Abstract

Humans travel to break from their day-to-day lives and find meaningful experiences in places significantly different from those from which they hail. One particularly out-of-the-ordinary experience on offer in today’s United States tourism industry is that of the uncanny. Many tourists seek out haunted destinations or places with connections to the supernatural, particularly those featured in media works that deal with similar themes. In focusing on two such destinations on opposite coasts, this project combines rhetorical, phenomenological, and ethnographic approaches to analyze the uncanny media-induced and literary tourism of Sleepy Hollow, NY, and Snoqualmie, WA, in conjunction with their associated media works: Washington Irving’s short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and David Lynch and Mark Frost’s television show Twin Peaks. The towns of Sleepy Hollow and Snoqualmie utilize the intangible cultural heritage afforded to them by these source texts to encourage a flow of resources and revenue to their communities. By offering affective and embodied experiences with the settings of media texts significant to American popular culture, these towns are able to influence visitors’ values, beliefs, and purchases. The tourist experience in these settings is most often charged with a sense of the uncanny fueled both by the nature of the associated texts and the design of the immersive spaces that appeal to tourists to each town. This project examines both the nature of tourist experiences in each place and the role of supernatural theming in drawing tourism and defining tourist experiences.