The morning of August 4, 1892, at 92 Second Street in Fall River, Massachusetts began the way most mornings did — Bridget Sullivan washing windows outside, the Borden family inside. Then Lizzie’s voice came: “Come down quick. Father’s dead. Somebody came in and killed him.” Andrew Borden had been struck eleven times; his face was disfigured beyond easy recognition. Upstairs, in the rear guest bedroom, his wife Abby had already been dead for more than an hour — nineteen blows, her body found between the bed and the dresser. She had been killed first. No one in the household had remarked on her absence.
The investigation settled on Lizzie, Andrew’s thirty-two-year-old daughter. Her account of that morning shifted slightly between tellings. A druggist confirmed she had tried to buy prussic acid the day before; he had refused. Three days after the murders, she burned a dress in the kitchen stove, telling a neighbor it was paint-stained. No murder weapon was ever definitively identified. At her trial in New Bedford in June 1893 — among the first to attract national press coverage — the jury acquitted her in ninety minutes. The case was never solved.
The house has operated as a bed-and-breakfast for decades, selling in 2021 for two million dollars to a ghost tour company owner. The guest room where Abby was found generates the most persistent reports: a figure standing at the foot of the bed, chest pressure in the early-morning hours, a woman’s weeping heard by guests staying alone on that floor. The sitting room, where Andrew died, produces its own accounts. Audio recordings have captured unexplained vocalizations during multiple separate investigations, and the room’s temperature drops without mechanical explanation. The building, by all accounts, has not finished with what it knows.
Story Source: lizzie-borden.com
Address: 230 Second Street, Fall River, Massachusetts 02721
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