The house where Lizzie Borden may have killed her family is now a Bed and Breakfast lodge. This sturdy wood frame house in sturdy Fall River, Massachusetts hardly looks like a celebrated murder scene, but then so few really do. That is, until you look at them with the knowing eye. Otherwise would you know the difference? Would the people lodged in creepy, haunted houses really see and feel the ghosts if they didn’t know they were inside a creepy, haunted house?
Maybe. I remember visiting one small town and finding one house particularly, in fact, unmistakeably creepy. Nobody seemed to know anything about what may have happened there, neither my family nor the neighbors. Okay. False hunches. I was just getting ready to leave.
As luck would have it the current owner of the house pulled up in the driveway. Without much prodding her confirmed my suspicions that foul play did indeed occur in that house. A minister of some religious persuasion, deeply in debt, killed his wife for the insurance money. He had pushed her down the stairs. The house over the years was occupied by other people with new and different tragedies, from riches to rags to sagas of drugs and degradation.
But Lizzie Borden was another story. She was the O.J. Simpson of her time, among the dozens of other celebrity killers. Ironically, perhaps, Lizzie was not tried for the murder of her parents in California. Nevertheless, she was still acquitted. She then became part of mythical American macabre. There is a rhyme about her. “Lizzie Borden took an ax and gave her mother forty whacks. And when she saw what she had done, she gave her father 41.”
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As to who actually committed, the murders, as with most of these high profile murder cases, theories abound. It was everyone from the housekeeper to the towns people who didn’t at all like Andrew Borden. Some think Lizzie killed him because financial disputes and property divisions. That would be a motive. It has certainly been one before. Others believe Lizzie, the spinster, may have been a little too constrained and embroiled in family dissension. She may have lashed out to save her sanity and her inheritance.
Today we would find a drug ridden and repressed Lizzie seeking to right the wrongs of an inhospitable environment, an oppressive father and abusive step-mother. Who knows? But today what remains of the story, aside fromthe legend itself, is the bed and breakfast and the ghosts who inhabit it along with the 10,000 people who pass through its doors each year. Ghosts are reported to do what ghosts are best know for. They poke and prod, open and close the draws, turn the lights on and off, move things around. In short, they scare the hell out of most of us. For a population that thinks of Pearl Harbor as ancient history, it is amazing how sex and murder can long endure.
Lizzie Borden died and left $30,000 to the animal shelter. She left another $500 so that the cemetery could tend to her father’s grave in perpetuity. Guilt or true love? It’s hard to say. Maybe a little of both. The thing is, given the times, most people were perplexed and a legend was born. Today, we know the story all too well. The difference a hundred odd years can make.
