Haunted Crime Scenes
Lizzie Borden Took an Axe
On August 4, 1892, the bodies of Andrew Borden, 70, and Abby Borden, 65, were found in their home in Fall River, Massachusetts. Andrew's corpse lay on the living room couch, his face cut by eleven blows. It was his daughter, Lizzie, who found him. She was thirty-two and living at home. The only other person in the house was the maid, Bridget Sullivan.
Lizzie sent Bridget for the doctor, claiming that she had gone into the barn, leaving the back door unlocked. Whoever had murdered her father, she said, must have come in that way. It wasn't long before a neighbor offering to help found Lizzie's stepmother dead upstairs, also from some eighteen to twenty blows with an ax.
The home at 92 Second Street opened in 1996 as a Bed & Breakfast. It has since changed hands, but still offers lodgings, tours, a gift shop...and then some. With help from crime scene photos, the house was made to resemble its condition on that August morning.
Lizzie, the prime suspect, went through a trial and was actually acquitted. Fall River folks like to say she got a fair trial, but crime buffs know that the most damning evidence, such as her attempt to purchase prussic acid the day before and her inconsistent statements under interrogation, was never admitted. It's common to find people who believe that Lizzie's defense attorneys outmaneuvered the prosecution and freed a killer.
- Property Crimes
- Capone's Ghost Returned?
- Ghost Hunting in Cell Block 12
- Appeasing the Spirits
- The House with 160 Rooms
- The City that Loves the Dead
- Tombstone Tales
- Haunted Grave
- Lizzie Borden Took an Axe
- Ghost-Hunting at the Borden House
- Massacre
- Amityville Controversy
- Where Grass Refused to Grow
- Benders
- "Recomposer" of the Decomposed
- Ghost Hunting
- Crime against Innocence
- Hamilton's Revenge
- Jumel-Morris Mansion
- Bibliography
