The Fall River History Club will be holding its regular every third Wednesday of the month meeting on November 19, 6:30PM at the Fall River Public Library. The meetings/lectures are free and open to the public!
Ken Champlin will speak on the development of the granite quarrying industry in Fall River.
See you there!
Paranormal research expert Al Rauber, who recently took part in the Monsterquest investigation of the Lizzie Borden B&B/Museum, will be presenting a live talk on his discoveries there.
The talk, titled The Lizzie Tapes: A Paranormal Case Study.
Presented at 7 pm, Thursday, November 20, at the Mt. Lebanon Public Library in Pittsburgh, PA.
The Lizzie Tapes: A Paranormal Case Study
7:00 PM ,Thursday, November 20
Lizzie Borden took an ax…or did she? On the morning of August 4, 1892, the populace of Fall River, Massachusetts was shocked and horrified by a vicious and gruesome double homicide. The bodies of Andrew and Abby Borden were found in their home at 92 Second Street. They had been bludgeoned to death with what appeared to be a hatchet.World renown Paranormal Investigator Al Rauber was commissioned by two different production companies for two different TV shows to come up with evidence of reported haunting phenomena at 92 Second Street. Hear the detailed story about the two investigations presented in his lecture: The Lizzie Tapes: A Paranormal Case Study.
Known for his use of Electronic Voice Phenomena in gathering evidence of hauntings, Rauber offers many of the voices collected over two separate weekends of filming from this location…voices of the spirits of the Lizzie Borden House which may shed new light on the infamous case of murder.
Al Rauber’s stellar reputation in the field of Paranormal Studies is well deserved. He has spent the past 40 years investigating claims of haunting phenomena all over the U. S. and Europe. He has appeared on a number of worldwide TV productions and has consulted for practically every major TV show on the paranormal.
For those of you interested in a little preview, please visit my site at LizzieAndrewBorden.com where I have added a paranormal tab, taking you to the very EVPs Al will be talking about.
And if you would like to read more of Al’s investigating, please read the August issue of The Hatchet, where Al tells us first hand all about his work and experiences at Lizzie’s house.
This weekend in Providence, at the Columbus Theatre, November 15 and 16, will appear a unique play about Lizzie Borden. I have not seen the show yet. But I will this weekend. I highly suggest you go too!
You can buy tickets through LizzieBordenLive.com
A lengthy write-up of the show appeared online today in the Providence Journal.
Play offers a different look at Lizzie Borden
Thursday, November 13, 2008
By Channing GrayMost people think of Fall River’s Lizzie Borden as the woman who hacked her parents to death with an ax, one of the most notorious figures in the annals of crime. But there is more to the story than that, and Jill Dalton would like to tell you about it.
Dalton, an award-winning New York actor with a long list of television and theater credits, has put together a one-woman show about the life of Borden, who was acquitted for the murders of her father and stepmother more than a century ago. Dalton wrote the 80-minute script and will be starring in the production tomorrow night and Saturday at the Columbus Theatre on Broadway.
“All I knew was that she was an ax murderer,” said Dalton, who spent about nine months researching the show.
“I told the woman who asked me to write it that I didn’t know if I wanted a homicidal ax murder living inside my head. But then I started reading certain things and didn’t get any negative energy.
“The real arc of her life is much more interesting than all the gossip they write about.”
The show, which just played Arizona, takes place 13 years after the murders. It opens with Lizzie feeding her beloved birds in the backyard of Maplecroft, the hilltop mansion in Fall River that she bought after the murders and where she lived for more than three decades.
She has just had a falling out with her older sister, Emma, over opening the house to theater types. The two never spoke again.
Now memories begin to flood in and we are taken back to the murders, the trial and Lizzie’s early life.
At this point, Dalton becomes Lizzie’s parents, the police and other important figures in her life, as she recites lines from the transcript of the trial.
“It’s really Lizzie telling her side of the story,” said director Jack McCullough, who lives in East Providence and helped Dalton develop the show.
The split between the two sisters was a momentous event in Lizzie’s life, more important than the murders, said Dalton. At that point Lizzie, who is something of an outcast taunted by children, is abandoned by everyone save her friend Nance O’Neil, the famed Shakespearean actress who is purported to have been Lizzie’s lesbian lover.
The show has its grisly moments, as a hatchet-wielding Dalton enacts the murders. But there is also humor in it, said Dalton. Lizzie used to make light of her parents’ death as a way of coping with the tragedy, said Dalton.
“There is a lot of tragedy in this play,” said Dalton, “but a lot of humor, too. I have to let the audience know that they are allowed to laugh. People are sometimes a little apprehensive.”
Theories about the murders, which took place in 1892, abound. Some have said the maid did it out of anger over being asked to wash windows on a sultry August morning. Another possible culprit is the illegitimate son of Lizzie’s father Andrew, who it is speculated to have carried out a revenge killing in his failed attempts to extort money from Andrew, a wealthy bank president.
McCullough said the boy, William Borden, hanged himself three years after the slayings, and that a hatchet was found in his possession.
Yet another theory is that Lizzie, whom Dalton called the “OJ of her time,” suffered an epileptic seizure during her menstrual cycle and killed her parents in a dream-like state.
But Dalton, who read the entire 1,700-page trial transcript, pretty much lets the audience come to their own conclusions.
She and McCullough found in their researchthat Lizzie suffered from kleptomania, a condition that can be brought about by sexual abuse. Could it be that her father had abused her and the murders were somehow in response to that?
“I don’t say whether she was molested or whether she had an affair with Nance O’Neil,” said Dalton. “I present things and let the audience figure it out.”
McCullough thinks it might have been Lizzie’s uncle, John Morse, who committed the slayings. He was visiting the Borden home at the time and had been known to argue with Andrew, his brother-in-law, over property that Andrew owned.
Dalton, on the other hand, is not so sure.
“Some nights I do the show and say, ‘I’m so innocent. How could this happen to me?’ Other nights I say, ‘I’m so guilty. I really did this.’ ”
Those who have seen the show more than once, said Dalton, often have conflicting opinions about Lizzie’s guilt, too.
But McCullough, a Trinity Rep conservatory graduate, doesn’t think Lizzie capable of delivering such a series of precise hatchet blows. Andrew Borden was killed by 11 strikes to the face, and his wife, by 19 blows to the back of the head, all in a compact area.
McCullough thinks that had Lizzie wielded the murder weapon the wounds might have been more haphazard and scattered about the body.
Her uncle, after all, was a butcher, said McCullough.
Dalton and McCullough met in 2000 while playing detectives on the Law & Order: Criminal Intent television series. He worked with her on another solo show about growing up as an Army brat.
In 2005 Dalton was asked to write the show about Borden. She said she spent nine months researching it, visiting Fall River and the places where Lizzie lived.
But she hated her first draft because it was “too linear.” So she holed up for a few days by herself and re-thought the script.
“I asked for guidance,” said Dalton, “and at the end of the third day, it was like something went off. I just moved stuff and edited it and it began to flow.
“But the audience really has to pay attention, there’s so much stuff going on.”
The show ran for five weeks at a theater in Cape May, N.J., and it has played New York. This weekend’s performance, the New England premiere, will be accompanied by a CD of original music by the Tony-nominated composer Larry Hochman, who was the orchestrator for Spamalot.
If nothing else, said McCullough, the show puts a human face on Lizzie.
“We never see her as a human being,” said McCullough.
“And what we’ve done here is given her a human side, a side most people have never seen.”
Performances of Lizzie Borden Live with Jill Dalton take place tomorrow night and Saturday night at 8 at the Columbus Theatre, 270 Broadway, Providence. Tickets are $25 and can be purchased on line at www.lizziebordenlive.com or at the door.
A lengthy piece appeared today in the Providence Journal online.
Lizzie Borden: The intrigue remains
Thursday, November 13, 2008
By C. Eugene Emery Jr.
FALL RIVER — There’s something about Lizzie that makes it tough, once you know her story, to get her out of your head. . . . READ THE REST HERE
They get a few facts wrong (let us all repeat: 19 and 10, 19 and 10, 19 and 10), but offer up some interesting quotes by Michael Martins, curator of the Fall River Historical Society, and Bernard Sullivan, former newspaper reporter, who was involved in the 1992 Centennial Conference on the crimes.
Check it out!
Students look over a replica of the Lizzie Borden house unveiled at Point Park University yesterday. It will be used by forensic science classes to give a hands-on learning experience and perhaps help to solve the murder mystery. James Hudak, far right, of the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, along with fellow institute student David Presnell, made the house for Point Park.
Cold case re-opened
Point Park forensics students take another look at Lizzie Borden mystery
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
By Daniel Malloy, Pittsburgh Post-GazetteThough she was the only suspect and was in the house at the time, Lizzie Borden was acquitted of the 1892 ax murders of her father and stepmother in their Fall River, Mass., home because of a lack of evidence.
The sensational trial of Ms. Borden, who was widely considered guilty and even implicated in a nursery rhyme, could have turned out differently, according to some historians, if prosecutors had access to modern investigation techniques. For example, no fingerprints or DNA were taken from an ax found in the basement.
This year, students in the forensics and criminal justice departments at Point Park University will reopen the cold case.
A 1/12-scale model of the Borden house was unveiled yesterday at the school. The model house, about five feet high, was built by students at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and funded in part by a grant from the PNC Foundation.
“It’s a big, glorified dollhouse,” said James Hudak, a senior at the Art Institute who worked on the project, “where they found dead people, unfortunately.”
The project is part of an effort by the criminal justice and forensics faculty to give a more hands-on learning experience to students, who will use the model house to study the steps investigators take in a murder case.
“You can’t show all that on a PowerPoint — the proportions, the size of the rooms,” said Dr. Steven Koehler, an associate professor in the forensic science program.
“You need a big area to swing an ax.”
Dr. Koehler dreamed up the idea a couple years ago when he came across the Borden case in a book about unsolved murders. He said the level of detail in diagrams and photographs of the house — which has since been converted into a bed and breakfast — made it possible to do a re-creation.
Mr. Hudak said he and a few other students spent a couple months designing and building the house as a project for a class on building miniature movie set pieces. Each floor of the house can be removed and examined, so you can see the second-floor bedroom where Abby Borden was found, the first-floor living room with Andrew Borden’s miniature corpse, and the cellar where the ax was found.
Classes will begin using the model in the spring semester, and Point Park and the Art Institute already are planning another scale model for next year: The assassination of John F. Kennedy — complete with grassy knoll — which will be used to study ballistics.
The Associated Press has picked up the story too:
Pittsburgh-area forensic students re-open Lizzie Borden case
by The Associated Press
Wednesday November 12, 2008, 7:13 AMPITTSBURGH — A group of forensics students at a downtown Pittsburgh university are reopening the murder case of Lizzie Borden.
Borden was acquitted of the 1892 ax murders of her father and stepmother in Massachusetts, though she was widely believed to be guilty.
The Point Park University students have built a scale model of the Borden household to re-examine the infamous cases. The actual house is still standing, though it has been converted into a bed and breakfast.
Students are using the model to learn the steps investigators take in studying a murder scene.
Their next project is a study of the John F. Kennedy assassination, complete with a scale model of Dealey Plaza where the president was shot in 1963.
Lizzie Borden still excites the press. She always did and always will. Thanks to Leonard Pickel for a heads up on this story.
On November 4, Colleen Johnson, a tour guide at the Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast/Museum, took part in a lengthy talk about the Lizzie Borden case and its paranormal connections on Spiritfinders Radio.
You can listen to the whole thing here.
This video appeared as an on-demand movie on Comcast New England this weekend. It is a brief overview of the case and the scary happenings that have occurred of late.
Alice Russell’s house at 18 Hillside Street in Fall River was recently purchased by SouthCoast Hospital Group, a consortium between Charlton Memorial Hospital in Fall River, St. Luke’s Hospital in New Bedford, and Tobey Hospital in Wareham.
That means it will probably soon be torn down and the land used for either a parking lot or a new medical building.
The same group purchased 38 Hillside Street, an old rope 3 story mill building, and tore it down rather quickly afterwards.
By purchasing 18, a two and a half family home, three decker, there is now only one house in between the torn down mill and Alice’s home. When they buy the house next door, they will own all the property on this side of Hillside, a street that borders their Prospect and Hanover parking lot.
From the Knowlton Papers: RUSSELL, MISS ALICE MANLEY 1852 - 1941: born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, daughter of Frederick W. and Judith (Manley) Russell. She was a niece by marriage of Mrs. Delia S. Manley. Employed as a clerk for several years in Fall River, Massachusetts, she later taught sewing in the public schools of that city. In 1908, she was promoted to supervisor of sewing, retiring from that position in 1913. She resided in Fall River for the rest of her life. She was a witness at both the inquest and the prelimnary trial but it was not until the grand jury hearing that she revealed her “burning of the dress” testimony. She was also a witness at the trial of Miss Lizzie A. Borden in June of 1893.
Thanks to Michael Brimbau for the news and photos.
October 29, Wednesday, 8PM, at The True Story of Lizzie Borden Museum, 203 Essex Street, Salem, MA.
Talk entitled: “Lizzie Borden: Heroine to Halloween Horror”
Presented by me, Stefani Koorey, Ph.D.
Cost is $20, which includes entrance into the museum. Snacks and libation will be provided. For information, please telephone 978-666-4416.
On October 30, 2008 at 7PM at the Brighton Branch of the Boston Public Library, I will be presenting yet another brand new talk titled “Looking For Lizzie: The Mystery and the Myth.”
I invite you all to attend!
This talk is free for all and is appropriate for persons of all ages.
Lizzie Borden still fascinates. She still intrigues us mostly because we know very little about her! After her acquittal for the murder of her father and stepmother, she remained in Fall River, Massachusetts, and spoke to no one publicly about the case ever again. A look at the Lizzie Borden story will reveal just how ubiquitous this enigmatic woman has become, over 116 years after she first made headlines.
Brighton Branch
Boston Public Library
40 Academy Hill Road
Brighton, MA 02132
The event is co-sponsored by the Brighton-Allston Historical Society.
See you in Brighton!
A very interesting lengthy article on the Lizzie Borden murder case appeared October 20th on the NorthIslandMidWeek.com site. What makes this extra fascinating is that this online newspaper is from British Columbia. Even people way up yonder care about this case!
The author, one Max Haines, promises to offer his solution next week. I am looking forward to it!
There are a few mistakes in the retelling but so far the most egregious error is in the repeating of the “hot day” myth.
TEXT OF THE VIDEO: “High society members Andrew and Abby Borden were found murdered in their home in Fall River, Massachusetts in August of 1892. Both of their skulls had been crushed in, and police thought the hatchet they discovered in the basement was the murder weopon. Their 32 year old daughter, Lizzy Borden, who lived in the house with her parents, was the prime suspect, but she was aqquited and the murders were never solved. Over 100 years after the murders, the scene of the grisly crime has been converted into a quaint, yet macabre, bed and breakfast. When guests arrive, they are greeted by a hatchet with Welcome pained on it in blood red. And a darkly funny sign inside cautions please be careful; we’ve already had two fatal head injuries in the house. Photos of the horrifying murder scene are hung in the rooms where they were taken, showing how carefully restored the house has been, and guests love to pose and recreate the gruesome scene. Creepy close encounters like phantom footfall sounds and strangely unnatural wind guts are commonly reported, especially when guests use the Ouija Board in the sitting room. Abby Borden’s death room, where her body was discovered, in the most popular room in the B and B. It was auctioned off for over 400 dollars on the night of the murder’s anniversary this year. And the adjacent Borden Carriage house has been converted into a gift shop which sells hatchet shaped soaps, key chains, and earrings, while grusome Lizzie Borden bobbleheads sell like hot cakes. Check in to this gloriously tasteless and creepy B and B if you dare, but good luck getting a good night’s sleep there. Though, if you do survive, I heard the eggs they serve in the morning are to die for. Im Liesel Hlista for TravelWishTV.com. Keep watching for more quirky, odd, and outrageous American travel destinations.”
THE VIDEO:
A recent story in the travel section of the LA Times has been circulating around the Internet. It tells the tale of ghostly happenings at the house on Second Street and the guest who dare not stay the night, or the entire night, while things go bump in the night.
It is a scary idea, really, to think of the murder house has permanently “occupied” by spirits and spectral beings. Since Halloween is nearly nigh, I thought you might enjoy the details of some of the more recent “happenings.”
Ghostly goings-on at the Lizzie Borden B&B
The family home in Fall River, Mass., is a museum by day, a lodge by night. Which is when things can get creepy.
By Jay Jones
REPORTING FROM FALL RIVER, MASS.
October 21, 2008Karen Zorn and her boyfriend fled their cozy bed-and-breakfast earlier this year. It wasn’t that the place was dirty or the neighbors noisy. Zorn says they grabbed their bags and left for a nearby motel after discovering that, apparently, some of the other guests were ghosts.
The couple had just finished checking in to the B&B in Fall River, Mass., when things started to go awry.
“We went up to the room and it was freezing cold. It was the coldest room in the house by far. And that kind of spooked us out,” she recalls.
Planning the trip
The Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast is open year-round for daily tours and overnight stays.
COST AND LOCATION
Rates: Rooms in the off season (November to April) start at $150 per night. There’s no need to book well in advance. Despite the interest in the house, Fall River is off the beaten tourist path.
City life: The closest town with any sizable tourist trade is Newport, R.I. (25 minutes), and then Boston (one hour.)
Info: (508) 675-7333, www.lizzie-borden.com.
Tales of goblins haunting old houses are nothing new. But the former residents of the home in which Zorn and her boyfriend briefly stayed have more reason than most to be agitated: It’s where the 32-year-old Lizzie Borden allegedly hacked her mother and father to death in the late 19th century. The tale of the grisly slayings remains vivid, thanks in part to the macabre rhyme that children still recite:
Lizzie Borden took an ax and gave her mother 40 whacks. And when she saw what she had done, she gave her father 41. . . .
The rhyme may be good for skipping rope, but it’s not accurate. The historically correct version of events is shared with visitors to the Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast, a rambling, eight-bedroom manse that doubles as a museum during the daytime, before overnight guests arrive. When it was built in 1845, it was one of the finest homes in Fall River, a then-thriving community known for its textile mills.
During tours, visitors learn that Andrew Borden, a wealthy banker, was struck 10 times. His wife, Sarah, suffered 18 blows. They weren’t delivered by an ax, either; the police thought a broken hatchet found in the basement was the murder weapon. Although Lizzie’s name is infamous as a result of the shocking murders, a jury found her innocent.
Tourists are shown various crime scene photos during their walk through the antebellum house. Using those photographs as a guide, the B&B owners, Lee-Ann Wilber and Donald Woods, have painstakingly restored the home to what it looked like in 1892, when the slayings occurred. They scoured antiques shops throughout New England in search of furnishings that replicate those in the old pictures.
Intrigued by the legendary Lizzie, Zorn first stayed in the former maid’s quarters at the B&B a couple of years ago. Earlier this year, when she saw an auction on EBay for a stay in the room where Lizzie’s mother was found, Zorn couldn’t resist bidding. The stay was for the night of Aug. 4, the 116th anniversary of the murders. A séance to conjure up the spirits of Sarah and Andrew Borden was included.
When the auction closed, the Crofton, Md., woman discovered she had won, with a bid of $405. She now wishes someone else had bid just $1 more.
“As the night wore on, other weird things started happening,” Zorn explains. “At one point, my boyfriend went into the room and he claimed there was a lamp in there rocking back and forth that had turned itself on.”
There was more to come.
“We were sitting in bed talking about the creepy things that had happened. And I said, ‘What do you say if anything else really freaky happens we just get up and leave?’ And he said, ‘OK.’ And just as we said that, the bedroom door swung open.
“We began to scream,” she continues. “Everybody in the house could hear us.” Within minutes, the couple was headed to a nearby Best Western.
Zorn and her boyfriend weren’t the first people to leave prematurely, and they probably won’t be the last, given the home’s reported paranormal activity.
“On a scale of one to 10, I’d say it’s a 10-plus,” says Christopher Moon, a well-known paranormal investigator from Denver. Four weekends a year, Moon conducts “Ghost Hunter University” at the B&B.
“We have full interaction in the Lizzie Borden house,” he adds. “We have the knowledge to communicate with all the spirits there.”
Wilber says she didn’t believe in ghosts before buying the house four years ago. But after many strange occurrences, she doesn’t know what to believe.
“Things have moved on me. I’ve been touched, pushed, poked and prodded,” she says. “To this day, I try to explain some of them and there’s just no possible way.”
The attraction goes well beyond the spooky stories. Detectives, law students and others interested in the celebrated unsolved case are also among the 10,000 people who tour the home each year. Guests leave with differing opinions as to whether Lizzie, who with her younger sister inherited their father’s fortune, got away with murder. Moon says the spirits of Andrew, Lizzie and others have convinced him that although Lizzie didn’t deliver the fatal blows, she wasn’t an innocent bystander either.
“Lizzie was definitely one of the people involved, but it wasn’t just one person,” he says. “There was a group involved in the murder.”
A new talk on Lizzie Borden has been scheduled for October 29 in Salem at The True Story of Lizzie Borden Museum.
Titled “Lizzie Borden: Heroine to Halloween Horror,” the multi-media presentation will begin at 8PM.
Even though Lizzie Borden was acquitted of the double murder of her father and step-mother, her celebrity has permutated from being the innocent victim of police incompetence to a national figure of Halloween horror. How did this happen? And in what ways has Lizzie Borden the hatchet-wielding murderess become ingrained in our collective memory?
Presented by Stefani Koorey, Ph.D., Editor/Publisher
The Hatchet: Lizzie Borden’s Journal of Murder, Mystery & Victorian History
True Story of Lizzie Borden Museum, 203 Essex in Salem, MA. $20 admission fee includes snacks and admission to the Museum. Seating is limited and reservations are suggested. You can call 978-666-4416 for reservations or email leonardpickel@gmail.com
UPDATE: THE NEW WEB ADDRESS OF THE TRUE STORY OF LIZZIE BORDEN.
The 2nd edition of The Literary Hatchet is finally available for sale in hard copy! Only $8!
The Literary Hatchet is a bi-annual literary edition of The Hatchet: Lizzie Borden’s Journal of Murder, Mystery & Victorian History. The Literary Hatchet publishes contemporary short fiction, poetry, prose, photography, cartoons, and humor by established and emerging writers and artists from around the world. Subjects range from mystery, murder, macabre, horror, monsters, ghosts, and things that go bump in the night.
The FREE pdf file online version of this magazine is available here!
