The Lizzie Borden House: Forty Whacks, an Acquittal, and the Bed and Breakfast Where You Can Sleep in the Murder Room

Every American child knows the rhyme, and almost none of them know they are reciting a libel.

Lizzie Borden took an axe / and gave her mother forty whacks. / When she saw what she had done / she gave her father forty-one.

It is not true in a single particular. It was not forty whacks; it was nineteen. It was not forty-one; it was ten or eleven. Abby Borden was not her mother but her stepmother. And Lizzie Borden was tried for those murders in 1893 and acquitted by a jury of twelve men in a little over an hour, and never charged again, and lived in Fall River for another thirty-four years as a free woman.

The rhyme was made up by schoolchildren while the trial was still going on. It is one of the most successful pieces of character assassination in American history, and it worked so completely that the verdict of the court has never once, in a hundred and thirty years, been the verdict of the public.

The house where it happened stands at 230 Second Street in Fall River, Massachusetts. It is a plain, narrow, greenish clapboard house on a plain street. You can book a room in it tonight. You can sleep in the room where Abby Borden was killed. They will give you breakfast in the morning — johnnycakes, bananas, sugar cookies, the same menu the Bordens ate on the last day of their lives — and if you like, you may be photographed lying on the sofa in the exact posture in which Andrew Borden was found.

The Fourth of August, 1892

It was one of the hottest days of a brutal summer.

Andrew Borden was seventy and rich and famously, pathologically cheap. He was worth perhaps three hundred thousand dollars, which was an immense fortune then, and he lived in a house with no bathtub, no electricity, and no gas lighting, on a street beneath the station of a man of his means, because the Hill was where the money lived and Andrew would not spend it. His two grown daughters, Emma and Lizzie, in their thirties and unmarried, lived at home in that house with him and their stepmother Abby, whom neither of them liked and whom Lizzie called Mrs. Borden.

The household had been sick for days, vomiting; Abby had told a doctor she thought they were being poisoned. The doors inside that house were kept locked — every one of them, room from room, a fortress of small suspicions.

On the morning of August 4, Andrew went out on his errands. Abby went upstairs to make up the guest room. Sometime between nine and half past ten, someone came into that room behind her and struck her in the back of the head with a hatchet, and she fell face-down, and the blows continued after she was dead. Nineteen of them.

Andrew came home. He lay down on the sofa in the sitting room for a nap, in his coat, with his boots on. Sometime around eleven, someone stood over him and struck him ten or eleven times in the face while he slept, so violently that one eye was cut in half.

Lizzie called the maid. The neighbors came. The police came. And the story that came apart under them was Lizzie's.

The Case, and Why It Failed

The circumstantial case against her was extremely strong and every American who has heard the rhyme has already convicted her, so let us be fair and lay out both halves.

Against her: she was in the house. She had tried to buy prussic acid at a druggist's the day before, which the judge excluded from the trial. Her account of where she had been kept shifting — the barn, the loft, looking for sinkers to go fishing, in the hottest hour of the hottest day, in a dust-covered loft where police found no footprints. She had motive: Andrew had been transferring property to Abby's relatives, and the daughters had watched their inheritance being quietly moved. And three days after the murders, with the police still coming and going, she burned a dress in the kitchen stove, saying it was stained with paint.

For her: there was no blood. This is the fact that acquitted her and it is not a small one. Two people were butchered with a hatchet in an enclosed room, and the killer would have been drenched. Lizzie was seen minutes afterward, calm, in a clean dress, with her hair in order. There was no time to bathe in a house with no bathtub. No bloody clothing was ever found. The hatchet head presented at trial had no blood on it. And the prosecution never explained how a woman could have killed Abby at half past nine and then sat quietly in a small house for ninety minutes with her stepmother's body cooling on the floor above, waiting for her father to come home so she could kill him too.

The jury acquitted in sixty-eight minutes. Some of them are said to have made up their minds long before: a woman of that class, in that decade, in New England, simply did not do such a thing, and the whole edifice of the age said so.

Lizzie took her money, and she and Emma bought a fine house up on the Hill — the address Andrew had refused them all his life — and she named it Maplecroft, and she lived there until 1927. The town never spoke to her again. Emma eventually moved out and the sisters never reconciled. Lizzie died alone and left much of her money to an animal welfare league.

Nobody else has ever been charged. It is an unsolved murder.

The House Now

It has been a bed and breakfast since 1996, and it does not pretend otherwise. It is a genuine business built on a genuine atrocity, and it is booked out months ahead.

The reports from guests are the standard grammar of American haunting: footsteps on the stairs when the house is empty, doors, an impression of a woman in Victorian dress tidying the guest room where Abby died, weeping heard through walls. Guests wake at night to find someone standing at the foot of the bed. Objects move.

I have no way to weigh any of it. Neither does anyone else. The guests paid to be frightened in the murder house and were duly frightened, which proves precisely nothing.

An Esoteric Reading

But look at what the house actually is, because that is where the old traditions have something exact to say.

The rite of a funeral, in every tradition on earth, has two functions, and we usually only remember one. The first is to dispatch the dead — to say the words, close the eyes, carry the body out, and send the soul on. The second, and the one we forget, is to settle the account among the living: to name what happened, to fix responsibility, to declare the matter finished, so that the community can put it down and walk away.

A trial is that second rite. That is what a court is: the machinery by which a society formally decides what occurred and who owes what, so the thing can be closed. And Fall River performed that rite, correctly and completely, in the summer of 1893 — and then refused the result. The court said not guilty. The town said guilty and stopped speaking to her for thirty-four years. The children in the street sang a rhyme that convicted her, and the rhyme is still being sung by American children who have never heard the name of Fall River.

This is the condition the old law calls a debt undischarged, and it is worth being precise about why. It is not that a murderer went free — perhaps one did, perhaps one did not, and honestly nobody knows. It is that the community never accepted any answer at all. Two people were hacked apart in their own house on an August morning and the question who did this was formally asked, formally answered, and then formally rejected, and it has stayed open ever since, for a hundred and thirty years, like a door that will not latch.

And consider what was violated in that house, in the old language. Abby Borden was killed while making a bed — performing the small domestic office of preparing a room for a guest. Andrew Borden was killed asleep on his own sofa in his own parlor, in the middle of the day, with his boots on. Both of them were struck from behind or while unconscious, in the one place where a person is entitled to put down their guard. The alchemists said the vessel must be closed for the work to proceed; the older, simpler teaching about houses says the same thing in reverse — the roof is the covenant, and everything under it is supposed to be safe from what is outside. To kill under a roof is one crime. To be killed by what was already inside the roof, which is what everyone in Fall River believed, is something else: it means the covenant was never real, that the thing was in the house the whole time, sitting at the breakfast table eating johnnycakes.

So the house sits there on Second Street with the sofa in the parlor, and the account has never been settled, and now — and here is the part the old traditions would find genuinely obscene, more than any ghost — we have made it a hotel. We rebuilt the rooms to look exactly as they looked on the morning of the murders. We serve the last meal the victims ate. We photograph the guests lying where the dead man lay, in the pose, laughing, and they post the pictures.

There is a word for a rite performed over and over with no intention of ever concluding it, and the word is not exorcism. It is the opposite. Every night in that house, a group of strangers pays money to re-enact an unavenged murder as an amusement, and then goes upstairs to sleep in the room where the woman died, and is surprised to hear footsteps.

Lizzie Borden took an axe, sing the children, and they have been singing it for a hundred and thirty years, and a jury said she did not, and nobody has ever listened to the jury.

Lux Esoterica.
2026.