Lizzie Borden House — GIRLVETICA

For Memorial Day Weekend, Mike and I went on a road trip to Fall River, Massachusetts. He'd always wanted to see Battleship Cove and I had always wanted to tour the infamous Lizzie Borden house where the aforementioned lady took an axe and gave her parents several fatal whacks. So we decided to make a day out of it. Also it was a good excuse to take Mike's new GTI out for a long drive.

Content Warning: I've included a few (albeit small) historical crime scene photos in this post.

The Borden family home built in 1845, sits quietly at 92 Second Street in Fall River, pretty much the same as it was back in 1892. We parked out front and headed around back to grab tickets for the noon tour. Behind the house sits a barn, original to the property and now operating as a boutique for tour tickets and gift shop merchandise. I'll come back to the gift shop in a bit. But first, a bit of history.

Heading up the household back then was Andrew Jackson Borden, one of the wealthiest but shrewdest businessmen in town. Historical accounts show that nearly everyone in the city did business with him (from banking and rental properties to casket sales), but there are exactly zero reports of anyone actually liking him. His own family even detested him because he refused to install toilets in their home even though he was a multi-millionaire by today's standards. They also didn't have electricity which was also pretty common at that time. Look if I had to piss in a pot under my bed by candle light I would have axe murdered someone too.

Speaking of family and murder, Andrew's two adult daughters, Emma (41) and Lizzie (32) resided at home alongside him. Back then they would have been considered spinsters but now we'd just call them millennials or something. Their mother (Sarah Borden) passed away in childbirth shortly after Lizzie was born, and in her place arrived Abby Durfee Gray Borden, Andrew's second wife. Like her husband, she was not beloved of her step daughters.

Our tour began at the front door where our guide welcomed us and explained how the interior of the house has been meticulously reconstructed with period furnishings. Everything is accurate, from the couch placement, right down to the wallpaper motif. All thanks to highly detailed crime scene photographs which were used for reference. The interior decorator must have had a strong stomach.

Pictured above is the sitting room where the Borden family would have sat together for tea or a piano recital if they'd all gotten along with one another. But they didn't. Emma and Lizzie avoided their parents as much as possible. They took extended vacations out of town and even stayed in boarding houses to get away from Mr. and Mrs. Borden.

After the sitting room, we entered the dining room and gathered around the table. Our tour guide continued with her fantastic non-linear presentation, alternating between day-to-day Victorian life of the Borden's and the extensive details of their murder trial. In this room we learned about what a typical family meal consisted of, a mutton-related food poisoning scare the week of the murders, Lizzie's failed / questionable attempt to purchase cyanide the morning of, and the coroner's autopsy reports. Our guide had photographs of the latter, which she passed around after getting enthusiastic permission from our group, including that of a 12-year old girl.

In the curio cabinet at the far end were plaster casts of the skulls of Andrew and Abby. During the trial, the coroner removed the heads from their bodies, took them home, boiled the flesh off (presumably in his kitchen), and presented their cracked craniums to the court. Lizzie Borden fainted on sight. Guilty or not, that's a pretty horrible surprise. To the left of the cabinet was an antique, travel-friendly wicker gurney similar to the one brought in to examine and transport the bodies. I made Mike stand against it "for scale."

Mike is an exceptionally good sport when touring haunted axe murder houses.

The tour group moved into the adjacent living room where our guide laid out the timeline for the morning of Thursday, August 4, 1892. Around 9am, Mr. Borden chatted with Lizzie's uncle here for a bit before leaving for his morning walk. When Mr. Borden came back home around 10:30am, he was locked out and the maid had to let him in. Forty minutes later he was dead on the sofa.

Within those 40 minutes Lizzie claims to have been in the kitchen reading a magazine when her father arrived home. Or in the dining room ironing handkerchiefs. Or she was upstairs in her room. One of those places. She also claims to have helped her dad kick back on the sofa and put his slippers on.

At this point we all took a turn with a magnifying glass to peer at a crime scene photo and verify that Mr. Borden's boots were still firmly on his feet as his body lay slack on the couch. Our guide also discussed the directional angle of the blood spray visible on the top of the door frame and how that suggests he was perhaps standing when his attacker dealt eleven blows to his face, hacking his nose off and cleaving his right eye in half. Then she invited us all to take our time with photos and that she'd wait for us in the next room if we wanted to lie down on the sofa and pose with a faux-bloodied hatchet.

With the first floor finished, we journeyed upstairs to see the second crime scene, that of Mrs. Borden. A clever sign above the staircase warns visitors, "Caution! Watch your head! Low ceiling. There have already been two fatal head injuries in this house."

While Mr. Borden was out for his routine morning stroll, Mrs. Borden was getting an axe to the face. She had been upstairs in the guest room where Lizzie’s uncle stayed the night. She was making the bed up and replacing pillowcases when the assault occurred. The autopsy report declares that Mrs. Borden was struck in the head, from behind, nineteen times and discovered face down in a pool of congealed blood. From this we know two things: that she was murdered hours before her husband and that she got the lion's share of the whacks.

While all this was going on, the maid was conveniently outside washing the windows. When she came back in later, Lizzie was hanging out upstairs, calm as a cucumber. First Lizzie told the maid her mother had gone out to visit a sick friend. Then she tried to get the maid out of the house again by telling her about a dress sale in town. But the maid was tired and not taking the bait. Then she begged the maid to come downstairs and call a doctor because her father had been attacked in the living room. Right. Sure. Okay.

So the doctor arrives and finds Mr. Borden oozing onto the sofa and asks Lizzie where she was during the last 40 minutes. She was in the backyard. Or in the barn. Maybe both. And her stepmother? She went out to visit a friend. But maybe she came back home and has just been chilling upstairs this whole time while we pontificate on dad's murder. Yeah she's probably around. Send the maid up to bring her downstairs. GIRL WHAT?

Despite all the damning evidence, inconsistent alibis, no other suspects, FOUR individual hatchets found around the house, and Lizzie throwing a dress "stained with paint" into the fire the day after the murder, she was somehow acquitted and set free. Townspeople couldn't imagine a petite Sunday school teacher capable of such grisly murders. The case technically remains unsolved until this day.

Because everyone loves a murder mystery, especially a femme fatale, Lizzie's tale has been developed into countless stories, novels, plays, songs, nursery rhymes, tv shows, documentaries, and films. In 1975, Elizabeth Montgomery (of Bewitched fame) starred in the made-for-tv feature The Legend of Lizzie Borden. In preparation for her role, she spent time in the house getting a feel for the setting and after filming, donated her screen costume (which earned the designer a costume design Emmy) to the estate.

Our tour moved into the largest of the bedrooms, Lizzie's room. Most of the decor is period-accurate but not owned by Lizzie herself, except for a few rare books which are preserved on her bookshelf. The bedroom to the left was Emma's room, and the bedroom directly behind Lizzie was her parent's bedroom. There was no hallway upstairs, each person had to walk through the other's bedroom to get to their own. Or in the case of their parents, resort to latching the inner door and using the back stair case off the kitchen.

And speaking of the kitchen, I heard Mike audibly gasp when we came down and found the giant cast iron cooking stove. It's glorious and fully functional! Breakfast is prepared here every morning for the morbidly curious guests who opt to stay the night. Which you can do, because the entire Borden house also operates as a bed and breakfast.

Each individual room rents for about $275 a night ($219 for the maid's attic rooms). Alternatively, you can rent an entire floor for you and a group of friends. Or for the ultimate macabre party: the entire Borden house can be yours for roughly $1,500 a night. They even throw in a free ouija board in the living room if you want to hold a seance after dinner and ask Mrs. Borden to the table. The whole place is reputed to be haunted by the former occupants.

After tipping our fabulous tour guide (which, having worked as a tour guide before, you should always do if you had a good time!), we made our way back to the infamous barn to raid the gift shop like the morbid tourists we are.

There is a vast array of merchandise all along the taste spectrum, from literary to ludicrous. There are books (non-fiction and fictitious), DVDs, bobble heads, bumper stickers, black coffee mugs that reveal fractured skulls when heated, at least two dozen varieties of fridge magnets, t-shirts that bear the phrase “I (heart) my daddy/mommy to death!”, axe-shaped cookie cutters, postcards, miniature models of the house (like those ceramic Christmas villages), blood-stained bow ties, axe-shaped jewelry, golf balls with Lizzie’s face and the tagline, “Keep Hacking Away”, pancake mix(?), and moisturizing hypo-allergenic murder soap. Oh, and there are actual hatchets for sale too. Because of course there are.