It's an intriguing question in our enlightened age, when our taste for tales of the sick and macabre is surpassed only by our need to travel to exotic or curious destinations.

The six-bedroom Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast in Fall River, Mass., is a prime and popular example of "thanatourism" or death tourism - one of the hottest trends in today's specialty tourism.

The guest house is restored to resemble the Victorian home where Borden was accused of giving her parents "40 whacks" with an ax in 1892. Guests awake to a hot breakfast similar to what the Bordens ate on their last morning.

And then ... I suppose everyone casts a wary eye at their youngest daughter.

The B&B opened in 1992, a century after the murder. One hundred years is apparently long enough to turn news into fairy tales.

Fifty years? Still not quite enough time in Plainfield, Wis. - appropriately named since it is a rather plain field.

Thanatourist marketers there ran into opposition when it came to Edward Gein, the farmer whose story inspired "Psycho," "The Silence of the Lambs" and "Texas Chainsaw Massacre."

In late 1957, police arrested Gein, then discovered his home and wardrobe were constructed from bits or whole sections of corpses. He had an entire woman suit made of human skin.

Tourists flocked to the farm until horrified Plainfield citizens burned it down in 1984. Now passersby just hang out at his gravestone.

Seven years seems far too short, especially to the citizens of Naperville, Ill. In Sept. 2006, a guide named Diane Ladley began taking tourists past the home where Marilyn Lemak suffocated her three young children in 1999.

The home's owners, the neighbors and the mayor are appalled by the tour, www.napervilleghosttours.com.

"Is it entertaining?" Ladley told the Chicago Tribune. "Yes. But it is also a lesson in evil."

I'd say all the Juneau tragedies that fell between World War II and Vietnam are in that fuzzy area.

Sure, it's absolutely mind-blowing that two black men, Austin Nelson and Eugene LaMoore, were convicted on circumstantial evidence for the murder of white shopkeeper Jim Ellen in December 1946. And it's still shocking that they were hung at the Juneau jail, the present-day site of the State Office Building, in 1948 and 1950 respectively.

But are we ready to admit that our little cosmopolitan town's judicial system was comprised of stone-cold racists just 60 years ago?

Let's go out on a limb and say all the terrible things that happened before 1930 are fair game for thanatourism.

Soapy Smith? Up here, he's practically a Disney character. The Birdman of Alcatraz? (See pg. 10-11.) He needs a namesake guest house where he killed F.K.F. von Dahmer next to the present-day Earthjustice on Fourth Street.

How about Edward Krause, the famed Boxer Rebelion deserter and Petersburg boatbuilder who was suspected of at least nine murders between 1912-1915? Krause sawed out of the Juneau courthouse two days before his scheduled 1917 execution, then was killed by a vigilante homesteader on Admiralty Island.