ABSTRACT

This chapter addresses mobilities less as an analysis of the movement of people - although it is myths and legends about a place that impel people to visit it - than as the traffic of ideas, behaviours, feelings and experience, their association with place, and their cultural circulation and informational mediation as narrative performance. It examines how dual senses of expectancy and receptivity combine to influence and even drive Herbermann's pithy epigraph process. 'Myth' and 'legend' are often treated as synonymous, but folklorists recognise a crucial distinction between them. Myths are accumulations of stories, whose meanings are not expressed either abstractly or as fact but are latent, and cannot be told in any way other than by story. Ellis defines the legend trip as a journey to a site where something extraordinary is said to have occurred; it can be located on the continuum of places, events and experiences identified as 'Dark Tourism'.