Lizzie Borden House:
She Was Acquitted.
The Murders Were Never Solved.
On the morning of August 4, 1892, Andrew Borden returned home from his morning errands and lay down on the sofa in the sitting room to rest. Sometime in the next hour, someone entered the room and struck him with a hatchet eleven times. His wife Abby had already been killed upstairs — struck nineteen times while making a bed in the guest room. The medical examiner estimated she had been dead for an hour to ninety minutes before Andrew was killed. Whoever did it had waited in the house between the two murders.
Lizzie Borden, Andrew's thirty-two-year-old daughter, was in the house. She said she was in the barn when her father was killed, and discovered the body when she came in. The maid, Bridget Sullivan, was upstairs cleaning windows when Abby was killed and resting in her room when Andrew died. No one else was found in the house. No murder weapon was ever definitively identified, though Lizzie was seen burning a dress in the kitchen stove three days later. She said it was stained with paint.
Lizzie Borden was tried for the murders of her father and stepmother. After a trial that gripped the nation, the all-male jury acquitted her after ninety minutes of deliberation. She lived the rest of her life in Fall River, dying in 1927 at age 66. The murders were never solved. No one else was ever charged.
The Morning
The household on Second Street was not a happy one. Andrew Borden was one of the wealthiest men in Fall River and one of the most famously tight-fisted. The house had no indoor bathroom despite the family's wealth — waste had to be carried outside. Lizzie and her older sister Emma had grown increasingly estranged from their stepmother Abby over property disputes. The tensions in the house had been building for years.
The week before the murders, the family had been ill — possibly from food poisoning, though some investigators have suggested attempted poisoning. The day before the murders, Lizzie tried to purchase prussic acid from a local pharmacy. The druggist refused to sell it to her without a prescription. She said she needed it to clean a sealskin cape.
On the morning of August 4th, the temperature in Fall River was already climbing toward ninety degrees. Abby Borden asked Bridget Sullivan, the maid, to wash the exterior windows. While Bridget worked outside, Abby was making up the guest room for an expected visitor. Andrew left for his morning rounds. Lizzie, by her own account, was in the house eating cookies and reading an old magazine.
The Trial
The circumstantial case against Lizzie was substantial. She was in the house. She had no alibi that could be corroborated. She had tried to buy poison the day before. She burned a dress days after the murders. In her inquest testimony — given before she had a lawyer — she contradicted herself repeatedly on key details. Her demeanor throughout was described by observers as unnervingly composed for someone whose parents had just been hacked to death.
"She did not weep. In the hours after the bodies were discovered, in the days of the inquest, through the months of the trial, Lizzie Borden did not weep. She fainted once, in court. But she did not weep. Whether this represents the behavior of a guilty woman who cannot perform grief she does not feel, or an innocent woman whose shock has simply closed off the ordinary channels of emotion — one hundred and thirty years later, we cannot say. We can only say that we noticed."
— Criminal historian, from a documentary on the Borden case, 2019The jury acquitted her anyway. The reasons were partly practical — no murder weapon was definitively identified, no blood was found on Lizzie — and partly social. The idea that a respectable woman from a prominent family could commit such violence was, for the jury, apparently harder to accept than the alternative: that the murders remained unsolved.
The Bed and Breakfast
The house at 92 Second Street is now the Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast Museum. Guests can book overnight stays in the rooms where the murders occurred. The John Morse Room — named for Andrew's brother who visited the night before the murders — is where Abby Borden was killed. The sitting room where Andrew died is preserved with a reproduction of the sofa he was lying on when he was struck. Guests eat breakfast in the dining room.
The paranormal accounts from the Lizzie Borden house are among the most consistently reported in American haunted location research. Guests staying in the John Morse Room — Abby's murder room — describe being awakened by the sensation of someone sitting on the bed. The weight is described as real and physical, pressing the mattress down beside them. When they look, no one is there. The sensation has been reported by guests who had no knowledge of the room's history before booking.
The sitting room produces different experiences. Guests and staff report seeing the outline of a figure reclining on the reproduction sofa — present for a moment, then gone. Security cameras have recorded what appears to be movement in the sitting room when the room is confirmed to be empty. The footage has been reviewed by the owners and by paranormal investigators who describe it as the most compelling surveillance anomaly they have encountered at any location.
One detail that recurs in accounts from the Lizzie Borden house: a woman weeping. Heard in hallways, in rooms, near the staircase. A sound of crying that has no source and stops when investigated. Lizzie Borden did not weep publicly in life. Whatever is in that house, apparently, does.