An Axe to Grind
True crime meets travel tourism in an infamous century-old murder scene turned charming B&B
Lizzie Borden’s house has no hallways. This is pertinent information in 1892, if you’re investigating a double homicide, and in 2024, if you’re about to sleep in said murder house. Few remaining historical homes dot the industrial downtown block, and this one’s boring, boxy olive-green exterior is a red herring. Inside, rooms lead into and through each other; staircases wind at both front and back; bedrooms connect (at best) and overlap (much worse). Luckily, we’re getting friendly fast.
“We could help you move the body?” I ask our new neighbour, Jill, who politely declines. The (faux) corpse won’t bother her at all, she says, and it’s actually kind of the reason we’ve all travelled to the Lizzie Borden B&B in Fall River, Mass. Tucked along the way from bustling Boston to swanky Newport, Fall River is America’s formerly leading textile town turned blink-and-you’ll-miss-it tourist spot known almost entirely for its true-crime clout. For the tens of thousands of visitors per year who flock to 230 Second Street in Fall River to see the exact place the unthinkable happened, a vintage macabre crime – and even more so when committed by a woman – remains an irresistible lure.
Not unlike Canada’s Grace Marks, who inspired Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, the allure is the seeming impossibility of a young, powerless woman possibly committing the dirty deed. Or did she? While Grace Marks was certainly involved in the crime of murdering her employer Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper/mistress Nancy Montgomery, at the very least, Lizzie Borden’s guilt or innocence is as debated today as it always was. All evidence either way is circumstantial, and this citizen detective has swung wildly back and forth many times over.
By complete fluke or divine intervention, depending on whether you believe in omens, our visit to America’s most famous unsolved murders falls directly atop the solar eclipse to the minute almost, as the much-hyped solar event peaks just as we arrive. “A coincidence,” I reassure Tamara – my oldest and most easily terrified friend – though admittedly foreboding when you’re entering one of the most haunted houses on the globe for a ghost tour, overnight bags in hand.
Braver-than-us Jill’s in the so-called Murder Room, complete with gory splattered Halloween blood, while we’re in the conjoining “Lizzie & Emma” suite. (I’m Lizzie, naturally.) Jill, we learn, is here having discovered Lizzie Borden hiding ominously in her family tree, making me as jealous as I’ve ever been of another living human. In lieu of pleasant small talk, we discuss the detailed intricacies of the murders – did she do it? If not, who did? – as muffled voices come from the hallway. “I booked the Murder Room,” says a disgruntled deep voice. Since it regularly comes with a weeks-long waiting list, he reluctantly relocates to another bedroom; a mere latch hook separating us from the furious stranger next door.
If you haven’t devoured 30 thick books in anticipation of this bucket-list evening, a quick case file: On a sweltering August morning in 1892, the bodies of Andrew and Abby Borden – him, one of the richest but cheapest men in town and her, his second wife set to inherit it all – were discovered by his 32-year-old daughter, Lizzie, spinster, Sunday school teacher and now new heir to the aforementioned fortune. Lizzie had neither a hair out of place nor a drop of blood on her person, having been, she told police, leisurely eating pears in the barn the whole time.
Since her sister, Emma, was away (convenient?) and her visiting Uncle John had an iron-clad alibi (even more convenient?), Lizzie was alone but for their Irish maid in the hallway-less home when Abby was struck with a hatchet 18 times then, an hour and a half later (timeline courtesy of the autopsy examining their digested stomach contents), Andrew received 11. (What kind of axe murderer loiters that long at the crime scene? Something to think about.) When the Bordens’ doting daughter was charged with murder seven days later, a century-long sensational media circus began. It even got a catchy little ditty: Lizzie Borden took an axe, gave her mother 40 whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave her father 41.
In a widely publicized trial, a jury found Borden innocent of the crimes, but no matter – her name’s gone down in infamy; her home a hotspot for crime buffs and ghost hunters alike. But first, atop rock-hard floral settees in the floral parlour, we meet our guide, Jack, donned in full late-19th-century garb. The organ hums when the floors creak from upstairs. If you’re the kind of strange person who feels spooky energy, as I certainly am, this room – the whole house really – is dripping with bad vintage vibes.
“This home was definitely toxic,” explains Jack. The extent of the toxicity has foddered speculation for a century, but this much is true: “Andrew Borden’s 70 in a world where life expectancy is 50, and he doesn’t have a will. Everything will go to his wife, who will surely kick her middle-aged spinster stepdaughters who hate her to the street.”
Ornate furniture and lace-heavy decor are historically accurate replacements, but the house’s bones remain: Doors, mouldings, arched windows and fireplaces are all original. The cellar, as you might imagine, is particularly terrifying, though guests often play the house’s Borden-theme Clue game down there just the same. But Ouija boards are strictly forbidden, warns Jack, as “the house is haunted enough as it is.”
Ghost sightings and experiences around here are commonplace – I asked each and every person on the property, and each and everyone had a story to tell. “One time I was walking out of John’s room, the murder room, and someone shoved me – hard – from behind,” recalls Paige, a new guide. When she turned around, the room was empty.
A cleaner, Luisa, recalls an otherwise uneventful morning. “I was just vacuuming, minding my own business, when suddenly the smell of putrid eggs just engulfed the whole room,” she says. By the time she returned with air freshener, the stench was gone, recalls Luisa. She’s heard stories of rattling chains in the basement, scratches along the walls and a woman’s voice calling “Andrew! Andrew!” While not totally convinced of the supernatural, she says, “I wouldn’t sleep where you’re sleeping.”
Lizzie’s room, where I’m sleeping, is a gorgeous Victorian bedroom with cream floral wallpaper, royal blue accents and dark oak. On the walls, framed photos of the alleged murderess as a child, as a young and eligible woman (if only her father would allow her to be courted), and as older and infamous – all with the same piercing light blue eyes watching us from every shadowy corner.
As night falls, the museum closes to visitors and the staff pack up and go home. Now we’re left alone in the house, on what Jack calls “the honour system,” to play nice and explore the crime scene. There are books Lizzie read, plates Lizzie ate off, hatchets Lizzie murdered her family with (kidding on that last one). But of these many scary thoughts, the scariest is that there’s somebody else lurking in the house.
With Andrew’s reclining dead “body” beside us beneath a sheet, we sit around the parlour drinking contraband white wine, (there’s no booze allowed), while discussing each and every theory, reenacting with the plastic hatchet from the onsite gift-shop as necessary: Did Lizzie snap and kill the stepmother she hated – leaving her no choice but to kill her father next? Did her stepmother catch her in flagrante with the Irish maid? Did Uncle John come to town that day with an orchestrated plan to avenge his dead sister? Did an axe murderer strike and unknowingly leave seeds for the unsolved mystery of the century? And, most importantly, are we about to suffer the same bloody fate?
As midnight nears, we’re startled by a loud knock at our separating door. Tamara yells. “Would you ladies please keep it down? I’m sleeping,” says the politest would-be killer around. We apologize sheepishly and tuck into bed. I sleep like a baby, oddly comfortable, awakened only once by Tamara’s claim she heard a cat’s meow. “That’s Max,” says Luisa in the morning of the ghost cat, and according to the guest book of paranormal experiences, he’s not an uncommon nighttime visitor. “Creaks, squeaks, and some carpet scratching from a fuzzy visitor,” reads one entry. “My father felt Max curl up at his feet.”
We discuss in the morning, over the breakfast portion of this bed-and-breakfast adventure: a modern take on the Bordens’ last breakfast, johnny cakes dipped into days-old mutton stew. Thankfully, we have sausages and scrambled eggs instead, and everyone’s feeling healthy and well. Fabulous, actually, having now slept in Lizzie Borden’s bed and lived to tell about it.