If you’re taking a Halloween holiday or other trip somewhere with a sombre history, behaviour matters

When autumn weather creeps in, so, too, does an urge to seek out ways to terrify ourselves. No doubt we are influenced, too, by Halloween, and the whole spooky season leading up to and following October 31. While some autumn activities can be casual and festive – haunted houses, or horror movie marathons – others are more serious, dipping into the realm of what has become known as dark tourism.

Although the term hasn’t yet made it into the dictionary, it’s largely defined as travel associated with sombre events.

“It is sometimes claimed that the one element that unites all dark tourism is that it has, in some way, to do with death,” Dark-Tourism.com founder Peter Hohenhaus said in an email.

“But that’s quite abstract, and I do not think this is the main motivation with regard to those individual places (it certainly isn’t for me). Also: not all dark-tourism sites are necessarily linked with death.”

Some of the most popular dark-tourism sites in the world are Alcatraz, the famous offshore former prison in San Francisco; Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp in Poland; Checkpoint Charlie, the crossing between East and West Berlin during the cold war; and Chernobyl, a nuclear disaster site in Ukraine where tourism had been exponentially increasing since 2010, and then took off after US television network HBO released a TV series on the disaster.

Here’s how to navigate the etiquette – no matter how dark.