Dossier 0526Historic HouseHigh confidence 78

Lizzie Borden House

Fall River, Massachusetts230 Second Streetest. 18453 min readFile amended October 2, 2026Official site Directions

Also filed as:

On August 4, 1892, Andrew and Abby Borden were killed with a hatchet inside this 1845 Greek Revival house on Second Street. Daughter Lizzie was tried and acquitted in 1893; the case was never solved. The property now operates as a bed and breakfast and museum where guests can stay in the rooms where the bodies were found.

Archive note: 5 conflicting records

Multiple Phenomena Reported Anomalies Named Ghost Legend

Built

1845

Status

Operating

Access

Open to public

Coordinates

41.699, -71.157 · Sourced coordinates

Signal: strong

Is Lizzie Borden House haunted?

The record holds 3 claims, 1 legend, 1 named entity — filed as reported, not verified. The heaviest filing is classed local folklore. The archive documents the claim; it takes no position on the ghost.

Dark History Hauntings & Apparitions Historic Sites

The record — long form

On the morning of August 4, 1892, someone took a hatchet to Andrew and Abby Borden in their house on Second Street in Fall River. Abby was killed first — nineteen blows in the upstairs guest room, the first strike above her ear, while she made the bed. Andrew came home around eleven, lay down on the sitting-room sofa, and died there under ten or eleven more. The famous rhyme gets the arithmetic wrong twice: it was a hatchet, not an axe, and about thirty whacks total, not eighty-one.

It was the Irish maid, Bridget Sullivan, whom Lizzie sent for the doctor, and Bridget who had been washing windows that morning — which is why she was outside, and why the house's small geography matters: an intruder would have had to move through rooms occupied by a daughter and a servant, in daylight, one block from the business district. No one ever produced the murder weapon.

The documented record

Andrew Borden was rich and chose not to live like it — mills, banks and real estate, but a modest house on the unfashionable side of town when he could have afforded the Hill. The household had its documented fractures: a July argument over property sent Lizzie and Emma to New Bedford; Andrew had killed Lizzie's pigeons with a hatchet that spring; a drugstore clerk claimed Lizzie tried to buy prussic acid the day before the murders; the family's friend Alice Russell watched Lizzie burn a blue dress three days after, told it was paint.

The night before the murders the house held one more occupant than usual: John Morse, brother of Andrew's first wife, had slept in the guest room where Abby would die. Bridget Sullivan went up to her attic room that morning and heard nothing below. And in the barn where Lizzie said she spent the hour eating pears and looking for fishing sinkers, and in the cellar afterward, police found a hatchet head with a freshly broken handle and no blood on it — the nearest thing to a weapon ever produced, which was not near enough.

Lizzie was arrested a week after the killings, indicted in November, and tried at New Bedford in June 1893. The case was circumstantial; the jury deliberated about ninety minutes and acquitted her on June 20. No one else was ever charged. She lived in Fall River until 1927 — in a house on the Hill called Maplecroft — and the Second Street house kept its floor plan.

What witnesses file

The house is now a bed-and-breakfast, and the reports concentrate on the guest room where Abby fell, an apparition associated with her, and less often a figure near Andrew's sofa. Guests log voices, odors, moved objects and doors that operate themselves; the operators, US Ghost Adventures, log them with a FAQ's worth of disclosure that no paranormal verification exists.

The claims are anecdotal but unnervingly site-specific: a haunting with a floor plan. Visitors pay to sleep in the murder room, and the house obliges — the preserved-crime-scene quality is the product, and Fall River's unresolved verdict is the atmosphere.

What remains

What the record leaves is an acquittal and a house. The crime was never solved to the law's satisfaction — which is precisely why the file stays open, why the rhyme persists despite being wrong in both its facts, and why the guest room at what is now 230 Second Street remains the most booked bedroom in the catalog of American unpleasantness.

The long record

1845Built
Historic House constructed
1892History
Andrew and Abby Borden were killed on the morning of August 4, 1892; both were struck repeatedly with a hatchet. The record dates it to 1892-08-04. A house in Fall River, Massachusetts with this much documented history gives the dossier substance underneath the lore. The fact is historically verified — the part of the file that doesn't need hedging. Sources including 'Lizzie Borden' carry the record. The date is part of the site's documented spine.
1892Crime
Borden murders

The record of claims

Reported experienceMultiple Phenomena

The Lizzie Borden House operator reports guest accounts of voices, footsteps, odors, moving objects and apparitions — the full sensory repertoire from a building that now sells overnight stays in the murder rooms. The claims are guest reports; the rooms they describe are documented crime-scene geography.

Lizzie Borden House / US Ghost Adventures

AnecdotalReported Anomalies

Overnight guests at the Borden house report footsteps, doors opening and closing, and a sense of presence in the rooms where the bodies were found — Abby's guest room upstairs and Andrew's sitting-room sofa. The reports concentrate on the exact spots where each victim fell, which is what makes them unnerving.

Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast

Local folkloreNamed Ghost Legend “Abby Borden”

Tour accounts at the Borden house describe apparitions attributed to Abby Borden — killed in the guest room where visitors now pay to sleep — and, less often, to Andrew on the sofa. The house's preserved-crime-scene quality makes the lore unusually site-specific: a haunting with a floor plan. The floor plan is the lore's map.

Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast

Local folklore

Tour accounts at the Lizzie Borden House describe apparitions attributed to Abby Borden — killed in the guest room where visitors now pay to sleep — and, less often, to Andrew on the sitting-room sofa. The house's preserved-crime-scene quality makes the lore unusually site-specific: guests report phenomena in the exact rooms where each victim fell.

Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast

Two accounts on file

Place Type

On file

HISTORIC_HOUSE

Also reported

HOUSE