In Brief
At the Lizzie Borden House in Fall River, Massachusetts, you can sleep in the guest room where Abby Borden was found murdered in 1892. People who book it report the weight of someone sitting down on the edge of the bed beside them in the dark.
The Full Story
At the Lizzie Borden House in Fall River, Massachusetts, the most-requested room is the one where a woman was found hacked to death. Book it, and guests say you may feel the mattress dip in the night, as a weight settles onto the edge of the bed beside you.
The murders happened here on the morning of August 4, 1892. Abby Borden, 64, was upstairs making up the bed in the second-floor guest room when someone struck her down from behind with a hatchet. Her husband Andrew, 69, came home, lay down for a nap on the sitting-room sofa downstairs, and was killed the same way about ninety minutes later, his face split nearly in two. At the autopsy the medical examiner counted 18 wounds on Abby's head and 10 on Andrew's. Police found two hatchets, two axes, and a broken-handled hatchet-head in the basement, and never tested any of it for fingerprints.
Andrew's daughter Lizzie, 32, was in the house. So was the maid, Bridget Sullivan, whom Lizzie called Maggie. "Maggie, come quick! Father's dead," Lizzie called out, by the trial testimony. She was arrested a week later, tried the following summer, and acquitted in June 1893. The case was never solved. Lizzie moved across town to a house she named Maplecroft and lived there until she died in 1927.
The house at 230 Second Street became a bed and breakfast in 1996, and the room where Abby died became the booking people fight over. The guest rooms are all named for figures in the case — the maid, the prosecutor, the defense attorney, the uncle who'd slept over the night before the killings. The dining room where guests now eat breakfast is where Andrew's body was laid out for examination the day he died.
People who stay overnight report chairs that rock with no one in them, footsteps in empty rooms, the closet's coat hangers jostling on the third floor, where some say children's laughter comes from the attic. In 2017, the Travel Channel's Kindred Spirits spent an episode investigating the place.
In 2021 the house sold for $2 million to a man who runs ghost tours, and it still serves the breakfast and rents out every room. So the place where two people were hacked to death is now a place you can pay to spend the night. You can sleep in the room where Abby was found, ask for it by name, and wait in the dark to feel the mattress take on a little more weight than your own.
