The House That Andrew Built: Inside the Lizzie Borden Murder House

In Episode 8, Amanda walks through 92 2nd Street in Fall River, Massachusetts, the most famous murder house in America. On August 4th, 1892, Andrew and Abby Borden were killed with a hatchet inside a locked up house, and Andrew's daughter Lizzie was tried and acquitted in a case that remains officially unsolved. Amanda breaks down the ninety minute timeline that reframes the whole crime, why a Victorian jury could not convict, and how the property was transformed into a two million dollar business. She unpacks the 2021 sale to U.S. Ghost Adventures, the dozen revenue streams now stacked onto one Victorian, and the Massachusetts disclosure law that would let the most famous murder house in the country stay legally invisible, even as the market prices its history at a premium.

LINKS

https://lizzie-borden.com/

https://www.countryliving.com/life/travel/a45140/what-its-like-to-stay-lizzie-borden-house/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lizzie_Borden_House

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

It is a little after seven in the morning on the 4th of August 1892. It is already hot. The kind of thick New England August heat that settles onto a house in the morning and does not lift all day. And inside one particular house on a narrow lot, on one ordinary street, a family sits down to breakfast. The man at the head of the table is one of the richest men in the city. He owns mills. He owns commercial buildings downtown. He sits on the board of a bank. And today's money he is worth somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 million dollars. And in his house does not have a full bathroom. No hot running water upstairs, no gas lighting in every room. Because the man at the head of the table, one of the richest men in town, is also one of the cheapest men who ever lived. He would rather serve his family the same mutton four days running in August with no refrigeration than spend one dollar he did not absolutely have to spend. By the time the noon bell rings, that man will be dead on the sofa in the next room. His wife will be dead on the floor of the guest room upstairs. And the person the entire country decides did it will walk out of a courthouse, a free woman, and spend the rest of her life in the finest house money could ever buy, two miles up the hill, with every modern convenience her father never let her have. Welcome to 92 2nd Street. Welcome to the Lizzie Borden House. Welcome back to Really Scary Real Estate, the only show where the property history matters more than the property line. I'm your host, Amanda, and today we are in front and we are talking of the single most famous murder house in the United States of America. If you have been with me since the start, you know how we roll. We kind of do our open, we're gonna walk through the history, we're gonna get to the haunting, and then we do make a little part that makes the show a little different from any other ghost podcast out here. We talk about the real estate, the money, the disclosure law, the value, the deal, and then at the very end, you get my verdict, haunted or hype. And I will tell you right now, this one is special because the Lizzie Borden house might be the most perfect case study this show will ever get. A double murder that was never solved, an acquittal that almost nobody believed, and a small Victorian on a small lot that took the worst thing that can happen inside four walls and turned it into one of the most profitable little addresses in New England. So pour something, lock the door behind you. Let me tell you about the Bordens. Before there is a murder, there is a house. And to understand this house, you have to understand the man who ran it, because the house is basically a monument to his personality. His name was Andrew Jackson Borden, seven years old in the summer of 1892. Self-made, he started out building and selling caskets, which is a detail you cannot make up. And he climbed from there into real estate, textile mills, and banking until he was one of the wealthiest men in Fall River, Massachusetts. Now, Fall River at the time was a booming mill city. New money, old money, and a very clear map of where each kind lived. The wealthy families lived up on the hill in big houses on wide streets with the plumbing and the lighting and the address that told everyone exactly how well you were doing. Andrew Borden could have bought any house up there in cash. He chose not to. He kept his family down in the flats near the business district in a tall, narrow, dark house that was frankly beneath his fortune. And for his two grown daughters, that decision was a daily social humiliation. They had the family name, they had the family money, and they lived in the wrong house on the wrong street because their father would not part with the cash to move. And it was not just the address. Andrew Borden ran that house like a man who resented every penny it cost him. There was no proper bathroom. The family used chamber pots and a water closet down in the cellar. The upstairs had no running hot water. Parts of the house still ran on oil lamps when gas was available and affordable. This was not a poor family choosing to go without. This was a millionaire choosing to make his family live like they had nothing because spending money physically pained him. Here is the part that matters for what is coming. The boarding house had a very strange layout. It was full of locked doors. The rooms were arranged in a chain, one opening into the next, and the family had gotten into the habit of locking the doors between them. Bedroom doors locked from both sides, keys sitting out on shelves and mantles a year or so before the house had been burglarized in the middle of the day, and Andrew had responded the way Andrew responded to everything by tightening down and trusting no one, including it seems, the people he even lived with. So picture the household in the summer, Andrew, 70, his second wife, Abby, 64, his two unmarried daughters, Emma, who was 41, and Lizzie, who was 32, a live-in maid named Bridget Sullivan, who the family called Maggie, which was the name of the previous maid, because Andrew apparently could not be bothered to learn a new one. He's such a winner, you guys. And that week, a visiting uncle, John Morse, staying in the guest room. And underneath all of it, tension, real tension. Abby was the girl's stepmother, and Lizzie had stopped calling her mother years earlier. She had called her Mrs. Borden, cold and deliberate. Not long before the murders, Andrew had quietly transferred some property to Abby's side of the family, and the daughter saw it for exactly what it was their inheritance, walking out that door. This was a house where nobody fully trusted anybody, where the doors locked from the inside, and where in the days right before the murders, the entire household had been violently, mysteriously sick to their stomachs. Abby was so frightened she went to the family doctor and said out loud that she thought they were being poisoned the morning. The morning of August 4th starts like any other tense morning in that house. Uncle John Morris eats breakfast and leaves to run errands. Andrew heads downtown to check on his properties and his bank the way he did every day. Abby goes upstairs to tidy the guest room, the very room John Morris had slept in the night before. And this is where the timeline becomes the whole case. Sometime around 9 30 in the morning, up in that guest room, Abby Borden is attacked from behind. She is struck in the head. She falls face down, and then she is hit again and again and again. The final count is where somewhere around 18 or 19 blows from a hatchet, she would have died almost instantly. And then the blows kept coming. Her body drops in the narrow space between the bed and the dresser, where it will lie undiscovered for the next hour and a half while the rest of the morning goes on beneath it. Because here is the detail that reframes everything. Nobody finds Abby. Andrew comes home late morning, around a quarter to 11, and has trouble with the locks at his own front door. He comes inside, and by some accounts, Lizzie tells him that Abby got a note and went out to visit a sick friend. A note that was never found from a friend who never came forward, delivered by a boy nobody could ever locate. Andrew, tired and warm, lies down on the sofa in the sitting room for a nap. And while he sleeps, someone wakes him up and swings a hatchet into his face 10, 11 times. He never wakes up. One of the blows splits his eye. The crime scene photograph of Andrew Borden on that sofa is one of the most reproduced images in American true crime. And I am not going to describe it any further than that because you can look at it yourself and it is displayed right now on the wall of the room where it happened in a house you can book tonight. The alarm goes up around eleven. Lizzie calls out to the maid who is resting up on the third floor. Maggie, come quick, she says. Father's dead. Somebody came in and killed him. Bridget comes down, a neighbor is called, then a doctor, and in the middle of all of this, somebody finally thinks to ask a very reasonable question. Where is Mrs. Borden? They go upstairs and they find Abby in the guest room exactly where she had been the entire time. Now here is why the 90 minutes matters so much. When the medical examiners look at the two bodies, Abby's blood is dark and thickened and already congealing. Andrew's is still bright and fresh. Her stomach contents are further along than his. Everything points to the same conclusion. Abby was killed roughly 90 minutes before Andrew, which means that for an hour and a half, someone was in that house with a fresh corpse upstairs, calmly waiting for Mr. Andrew Morton to come home, lie down, and fall asleep. This was not a robbery gone wrong. Nothing was taken. There was no forced entry that anyone could establish in a house that, remember, was locked up like a vault. Whoever did this was inside. Whoever did this waited. And the only two people known to be in that house across that entire window were the maid, Bridget Sullivan, and Andrew Borden's 32-year-old daughter, Lizzie. Lizzie's account of where she was during her father's murder changed more than just once. But the version that stuck was this. She was out in the barn loft looking for lead sinkers for a fishing trip in August in a stifling hot loft that investigators said was covered in undisturbed dust, looking for sinkers for a fishing trip. That was not even planned. And there was no blood on her. No blood on her dress, no blood in her hair, nothing. Which the defense would use as proof of innocence, and the prosecution would try and fail to explain. The county could not believe it. Lizzie Border was arrested a week after the murders, and what follows was one of the first true media circus trials in American history. Reporters came from all over the country. The story had everything money, an unsolved double murder, a respectable family, and at the center of it, a church-going, Sunday school teaching, upper middle class white woman accused of taking a hatchet to her own father and stepmother. And last part, more than any piece of physical evidence, is what decided the case. Because the Victorian world simply could not hold the idea in its head. Women of Lizzie's class was supposed to be delicate, moral, and capable of that kind of violence. The all-male jury looked at her, sitting quietly in nice clothes, sometimes fainting at the right moment. And a lot of them decided before the evidence was even in that a woman like that could not have done a thing like this. And it did not help the prosecution that some of the most damaging evidence never made it to the front of the jury. Lizzie's own inquest testimony, which was rambling and contradictory and possibly given while she was medicated on morphine, was ruled inadmissible. And there was the matter of the prussic acid. The day before the murders, a young woman matching Lizzie's description tried to buy prussic acid, which is a cyanide from a local drugist, and was refused. The judge kept that out too. Add to that a dress that Lizzie burned in the kitchen stove a few days after the murders, which she said was stained with paint. And you have a case that on paper looks damning, and in the courtroom kept getting quieter and quieter. The jury deliberated for about an hour and a half and came back not guilty. Lizzie Borden walked out of that courthouse and New Bedford, a free and very wealthy woman. And no one else was ever arrested. No one else was ever seriously charged. The case is to this day officially unsolved, which is a strange thing to sit with because in the court of the public opinion, it was never unsolved at all. Everybody had already decided. You know the rhyme. Lizzie Borden took an axe, gave her mother 40 whacks, and so on. Uh it's a schoolyard chant that was outlived almost everyone who was alive when it happened. And it is wrong in almost every detail. It was a hatchet, not an axe. It was her stepmother, not her mother. It was around 19 blows, not 40, and around 11 for Andrew, not the number in that rhyme. And of course, legally, she didn't do it all. So she was acquitted. But the rhyme is what survived because the rhyme is catchy and the truth is complicated. And this is a lesson the show comes back to time again and again. The story of Property Carries is almost never the accurate one, it is the memorable one. And here is the ending that I think is the most quietly damning part of the whole story. After the acquittal, Lizzie and her sister Emma inherited their father's fortune. And the very first thing Lizzie did with their money her father would not spend was buy a big, beautiful house up on the hill. The exact neighborhood he refused to move to. She named it Maplecroft. She had it carved into the front step. She put in the modern conveniences, the plumbing, the comfort, everything old Andrew denied his family down in the flats. She started calling herself Lizbeth, and she lived there largely shunned by respectable Fall River society for the rest of her life until she died in 1927. Her sister Emma died nine days later. They're buried in the family plot a few feet from the father and stepmother. Nobody was ever convicted of killing the haunting, the most active room in the house. So that is the history. Guests reported footsteps when the house is quiet. They report the sensation of a weight sitting down on the edge of the bed. Some describe the feeling of being tucked in, a hand smoothing the blankets of the dark, which is either comforting or the single most upsetting thing I can imagine, depending on your nerves. There are reports of a woman in Victorian dress seen out of the corner of the eye and cold spots that move through rooms on warm nights. Up on the third floor, where the maid has slept, and where you can now book a room, guests describe the sound of children laughing and playing, which is strange because no children died in that house. The lore around the third floor is pretty thin and the explanations vary. And I'm going to be straight with you. Some of this feels kind of like a story a house grows, like the way a garden grows weeds, once it has a reputation to live up to. Because here is where I always level with you. I went and read the accounts, including from people who paid to stay the night, specifically hoping to be terrified. And a fair number of them came home having experienced essentially an old creaky house on a hot night with a lot of atmosphere in a gift shop. One reviewer who does this for a living stayed the night and walked away convinced the scariest thing in the building was the price of the add-ons. So that does not mean nothing happens here. A house where two people were murdered with a hatchet, a house that has marinated in 130 years of national fascination, is going to do something to the people who sleep in it. So, but most of what it does, I think, happens in the mind of the guest who walks in, already primed to feel it. You hear the house settle, you know what happens in that room. Your brain does the rest. That is not weakness, that is being a human, being in a very loud story. The real estate. Now we do the part that is mine. Let us talk about the real estate because the Lizzie Bourne house is, without exaggeration, one of the cleanest examples of stigma as an asset that I have ever put in front of you guys. Start with the basic property, a six-bedroom Victorian built in 1845 on a small lot in Fall River, Massachusetts. Fall River is a post-industrial mill city that spent a century working through the loss of the industry that built it. It is not a hot luxury market. Um, it's a regular, unremarkable six-bedroom Victorian in that part of that city. One where nothing famous has ever happened. In a modest property, it's nice bones, real repairs needed, a price that reflects a working-class New England city and not a booming one. Now, here is what the same house actually did. In January of 2021, the owners who had it as a bed and breakfast for about 15 years listed it for $2 million and announced they were retiring. And within weeks, it went under agreement and it sold at that $2 million number to a company called US Ghost Adventures, run by By a founder named Lance Zal, who had built a chain of haunted tourism attractions across dozens of cities. And critically, that $2 million did not just buy the walls, it bought the business, the name, the trademarks, the intellectual property, the whole machine, you guys. And that machine is a real story. Think about what one narrow Victorian on a small lot of Fall River now generates. Overnight stays running very roughly in the $200 to $330 a night range, depending on the room and the season. In a house where the biggest selling point is that you might sleep in the room where a woman was murdered. Whole house buyouts for groups, which runs about $1,500 and more in October, uh, daytime historical tours, evening ghost tours, overnight ghost hunts with equipment provided, a gift shop selling a hatchet-themed teddy bear and earrings and t-shirts. And on top of all that, they have added Victorian dinners, murder mystery nights, an escape room, weddings, and I'm not kidding, axe throwing on the property where the axe murders had happened. That is the whole thesis of this show in one address. This is not a house that overcame its history to have value. This is a house whose entire value is its history. So strip out the murders, and you have a modest fixer in a soft market. Add the murders back in, and you've got a $2 million business with a dozen revenue streams and a national brand. And now the part that ties it back to the law, which is my favorite kind of twist. On the show, we talked about how different states handle what is called a stigmatized property, a property where something like a death, a crime, or an alleged haunting occurred. California makes you disclose a death on the property within the last three years. Georgia, we saw, does not require it at all. Well, Massachusetts goes even further in the other direction. Under Massachusetts law, a seller and their agent are specifically not required to disclose that a home was the site of a homicide, a suicide, a felony, or an alleged haunting. The law treats those as facts that do not have to come up at all. So sit with the contradiction for a second. Legally, in Massachusetts, the most famous murder house in the entire country would not have to say a single word about it on a disclosure form. On paper, in the eyes of the statute, the thing that happened at 92 2nd Street is invisible. And in the marketplace, that exact same thing is the only reason the property is worth $2 million instead of a fraction of that. The law says it does not matter. The money says it is the only thing that matters. Same house, same country. Opposite answers. So here is my verdict. Haunted or hype. On the literal ghosts, I'm gonna stay exactly as skeptical as I always am. I cannot prove a woman in a Victorian dress is standing the corner of a John Morris room, and I cannot prove a hand smoothed anyone's blanket, anyone's blankets in the dark. What I can tell you is that a house where two people were killed with a hatchet, a house that had been the most famous crime scene in America for a hundred and thirty years, does not need a single ghost to be one of the most unsettling places you can ever choose to spend the night. The horror there is not paranormal. The horror there is that it really happened in that room, and we still do not know who done it. Because that is the true haunting of the Borden House, and it's not a ghost. It is the question. Somebody was inside that locked-up house, somebody waited 90 minutes with a body upstairs, somebody was never brought to justice for it, walked free, and bought that nice house on that hill with the inheritance. The not knowing is what keeps this story alive. The not knowing is quite literally the product they are selling you a room to come and feel. And on the real estate, this is the clearest verdict I have ever given. The Lizzie Borden house is the purest proof of this entire show that a property's darkest history is not a liability to be buried on a disclosure form. It is the single most valuable thing the property owns. A Massachusetts statute that would let you hide what happened there completely. And the market turned right around and priced it at $2 million because of it. Andrew Borden spent 70 years refusing to put a bathroom in that house to save a dollar. And now that same house rents his guest room out for $300 a night because of the one thing he could not control, which was how he died in it. If there is a lesson in this whole episode, it is that you do not get to decide what your property becomes famous for. That is episode eight of Really Scary Real Estate. I am Amanda. Every source for today, the trial records, the sale reporting, and yes, the booking page for the house itself is in the show notes. Because I know some of you are already checking the calendar to see if John Morse's room is open. Next week, we are staying with the axe because apparently that is who we are now. So we are going to do a little white farmhouse in Iowa where in 1912 an entire family and two guests were murdered in their sleep. The case was never solved. And today, just like the Bordens, you can book the whole house and spend the night in it. Two unsolved axe murder houses, two tours and businesses built on top of them, and one very uncomfortable pattern. So that is the Veliska House next Tuesday. And if today's episode made you look up the address or pull up the Redfin comps for Fall River, or seriously consider booking a room where a murder happened, then do me a favor, leave me a review, two minutes. It is the single most powerful thing you can do for independent show, and it is the reason the next person finds us. I'll see you next Tuesday. So stay curious, stay skeptical, and always, always read the full property history before you close.