When we first met, back in the soft crevices of history, my boyfriend worked in a pub that happened to be on a Jack the Ripper tour. Every evening a group of tourists would come in and order a glass of water each, and the manager would roll his eyes, and off they’d shuffle to look at another autopsy photograph in an alley. He and I lived in Whitechapel for 12 years after that, and I’d watch the serial killer tours walking slowly through our little streets with respectful bemusement.
The skyline changed behind the tour groups, sky-scrapers emerging like a sort of architectural knotweed, and the murder tours were eclipsed by street art tours, which changed the area in a different way. Yet both tours imposed an authoritative order on things that might have previously escaped it. A great episode of the This American Life podcast focused on ghost tours in Savannah, Georgia, and the stories guides told about enslaved people betraying or seducing their masters. “If you look at them as little moral fables,” noted reporter Chenjerai Kumanyika, “the message of these stories is that everything would be fine if everyone just stayed in their place.”
