Lizzie Borden House

Origin Story

On the morning of August 4, 1892, Andrew and Abby Borden were found hacked to death in their Second Street home in Fall River, roughly ninety minutes apart by the state's own timeline. Andrew's daughter Lizzie, 32 and living in the house, was the only person placed at the scene; she was charged with both murders and acquitted after the jury's five-day deliberation the following year. No one else was ever charged, and the case entered American folklore almost immediately, cemented by a schoolyard rhyme claiming Lizzie gave her mother "forty whacks" and her father "forty-one," though the actual autopsies counted roughly nineteen wounds on Abby and eleven on Andrew.

Evidence & Claims

Police failed to rope off the crime scene in the hours after the bodies were found, letting family, neighbors, and reporters move freely through rooms that would today be treated as a sealed forensic environment, contamination historians say makes the case functionally unsolvable by modern standards. A blood-stained hatchet head found in the basement, missing its handle, was the closest thing to a murder weapon ever produced, but it was never conclusively tied to either killing. Overnight guests at the house, now a bed-and-breakfast and museum, have reported unexplained sounds, cold spots, and apparitions for decades, concentrated in the rooms where the bodies were found.

Skeptical Explanations

Historians note the property's haunted reputation grew almost entirely after it opened as a commercial tourist attraction in 1996; no account from 1892 describes the house as unsettled, only as the scene of an unsolved and sensational crime. Forensic researchers, including George Washington University's James Starrs, have periodically floated testing preserved evidence for DNA, but no such analysis has resolved the case, and likely never will given how thoroughly the original scene was compromised.

Operates as the Lizzie Borden House Bed & Breakfast and Museum, offering both overnight stays and daytime guided tours of the crime scene rooms.