Lizzie Borden House

On the morning of 4 August 1892, in a narrow wooden house on Second Street in Fall River, Abby Borden, 64, was killed in the upstairs guest room. About an hour and a half later her husband Andrew, 69, one of the city’s wealthiest men, was killed as he napped on the sitting-room sofa. Both had been struck repeatedly with a hatchet. The only other people known to be at home were Andrew’s younger daughter, Lizzie, 32, and the family’s Irish maid, Bridget Sullivan. Andrew had bought the house in 1872 and converted it from a two-family dwelling into a single home, close to his businesses downtown but far below what his fortune could have bought – a source, many historians think, of tension in the household.

Lizzie Borden was arrested a week later. Her trial in New Bedford in June 1893 was a national sensation, with newspapers covering every detail of the inconsistent statements, the dress she burned, and the hatchet head found in the cellar. On 20 June the jury acquitted her after brief deliberation, and no one else was ever charged. Lizzie and her sister Emma moved to a large house on the Hill that Lizzie named Maplecroft; shunned by much of Fall River society, she lived there until her death from pneumonia on 1 June 1927. Emma died nine days later. The case remains officially unsolved, and the playground rhyme about “forty whacks” has kept it alive ever since.

The house passed through private hands for most of the twentieth century. In 1996 Martha McGinn and Ronald Evans, who had inherited it from McGinn’s grandparents, opened it as a bed and breakfast and museum furnished to look as it did in 1892. Later owners kept it open for tours, and in 2021 it was sold for about $2 million to Lance Zaal of US Ghost Adventures, which runs it today with house tours, ghost tours, overnight ghost hunts and themed events. Evidence from the trial, including the hatchet head, is held by the Fall River Historical Society.

Guests and staff report footsteps, voices and a woman’s weeping, doors opening and closing, objects moving, being touched in bed at night, unexplained smells, and full-bodied apparitions – including a woman in Victorian dress said to be Abby Borden. Paranormal investigators have used EVP, table-tipping and dowsing rods in the house.

The John Morse guest room, where Abby Borden was killed; the Andrew and Abby Borden suite; Bridget Sullivan’s attic room; the sitting room where Andrew died; and the cellar, used for overnight ghost hunts.

The Borden case has inspired the rhyme “Lizzie Borden took an axe,” a ballet (Fall River Legend, 1948), an opera, the 1975 TV film The Legend of Lizzie Borden, the 2014 Lifetime film Lizzie Borden Took an Ax, the 2018 film Lizzie and many books. The house has appeared on numerous paranormal TV shows.