Hi, I’m Louise – the dark tourism blogger behind The Morbid Tourist.
I love travelling and exploring, writing about my experiences and jumping in my car for random adventures nearby. When I’m not travelling, I work on my blogs and spend time at home watching TV, doing sweary cross-stitch and reading.
I live in a little ways outside of London, dreaming of travelling the UK in a campervan.
My Love for All Things Morbid & Paranormal
I have always been curious about the darker side of life and have been fascinated with the paranormal since a young age.
I can’t tell you the exact moment I became obsessed with the supernatural, because there are a few different instances that stand out to me from my childhood! It could be when I got my hands on one of my siblings’ books that explored the mysteries of the universe and featured mermaids, ghost pictures and the Bermuda Triangle. It might be when my mum and I used to always watch Most Haunted and hope that one day we could attend a live show together. Or perhaps it was when I found a book all about the Enfield haunting in my high school library and rented it out numerous times when I was a student.
I do know that I kind of forgot all about my weird and nerdy obsessions when I became a teenager and started trying to fit in. Luckily this didn’t last forever and I soon found myself becoming the person I wanted to be, listening to rock music and finding my own hobbies again. (I’m definitely an elder emo at heart!). I realised it was so much better to be different from following the crowd.
It wasn’t until my 30s really that I began to invest time back into all those projects and things I enjoyed when I was younger, like sweary cross stitch or spending hours reading about bizarre conspiracy theories on the internet. After that, I never looked back!
Then I decided to share my obsession with the world…
Why I Launched the Morbid Tourist
I’ve tried to launch something like The Morbid Tourist a few times over the years. There are a couple of old Instagram accounts that featured haunted locations around the world and were kept on private, and there’s even a very, very old Xanga blog somewhere with one singular entry about America’s Eastern State Penitentiary. Neither of these projects went far.
Then, in the summer of 2022, I started scrolling through Instagram and realised a lot of people are fascinated with the idea of dark tourism, but not many people write about it. Most people focus solely on haunted locations or hidden gems. I knew I had a lot of great experiences to share, so on a whim I decided to launch another Instagram account. It took me about an hour to decide on a name and I then spent the rest of my afternoon scheduling content for the next couple of months.
At first, The Morbid Tourist was always going to be just an Instagram account – a fun little way of sharing my experiences and highlighting spooky places to travel to in the UK.
Then in September 2022, I flew to the Czech Republic to attend a travel conference. I went because I also run another travel blog called Formidable Joy and I wanted to learn more about travel blogging overall. At the time, Formidable Joy was just moving into the travel niche, after being focused on lifestyle content in the past. I’ve been running Formidable Joy since 2011 and it’s taken me a while to find my angle with it!
At the conference, I learned so much and met so many great people. One presentation that really stood out to me, however, was about how even in the age of TikTok and short-form content, blogging still has a big place in the market. I also learned that niche travel blogs are a thing.
It was like a lightbulb went off in my head. I’d wanted to write and share content about this type of travel for a while now, but it simply didn’t have a place on my main blog. I was also starting to take blogging really seriously too and was making a lot of changes behind the scenes, like SEO research, getting rid of old posts and optimising my blog to hopefully one day earn some money.
So what if I took all that experience I’d learned from 10+ years of blogging and put it towards a brand new niche site – all about the darker side of travel? I was already getting lots of great feedback from my Instagram account and all my friends loved that I was doing something a bit different.
I didn’t exactly have the time to launch another travel blog, but I knew in my heart it was something I wanted to do. I knew there was a place for it in the travel space, which is oversaturated with a lot of other niches like solo travel for example.
So, after I flew home, I bought my domain, I started writing and the rest is history!