Abstract
Darkness in the night brings about the feeling of fear and a sense of liberation for human. Japanese ghosts called yokai and yurei were the creation of fear of darkness, while the fear continues to exist today being manifested as urban legends and the occult. Urban legends and the occult are consumed as a result of human curiosity in the form of ghost tours. This study attempts to examine the relationship between the human feeling of fear and the feared places in Japan. Haunted places and ghost tours are thus studied, by analyzing human fear of darkness in the night and ghost tourism based on the curiosity of fear. Reflecting the local characteristics of places, haunted places vary in terms of the source of fear, and many types of ghost stories are told. Ghost tours operated by a company examined in this study are not for the purpose of profit but for the means of advertisement, thus ghost tours are ethically considered. The routes of ghost tours, visiting haunted places in the suburbs, do not reflect the overall distribution pattern of hauted places.
