There are ghosts in the walls of old houses. They roam abandoned plantations. They float down the side streets of southern cities on sticky, sultry summer nights.

That is what the dark tourism industry would have us believe at any rate. Dark tourism is travel that is steeped in suffering of one sort or another. In the American South, this industry overlaps with the ghost tourism industry in which people investigate potential hauntings. Historian Tiya Miles explores these ideas along with the historical memory of slavery in Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era.

In the book, Miles focuses on ghost tours to help understand how people reinterpret the Civil War era. The narrative follows her as she travels to places like Charleston, New Orleans, and Savannah as well as more rural plantations. Histories can often be dry texts, but Tales…