In last year’s print issue, we set out to find a half dozen cool overnight adventures on the South Coast. We’ve been rolling them out online for those of you who don’t have the 2016 magazine. Today’s feature is our last in the series: overnighting it at Lizzie Borden’s home. If you’d like to see it as it appeared in the magazine, click here. Otherwise, just read on….
Lizzie. In the drawing room. With a hatchet.
It’s a real-life game of Clue when you visit the Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast and listen to the well-informed tour guides show you around the house where Mr. and Mrs. Borden were found bludgeoned to death on a steamy August day in 1892. The guides provide you with the evidence; you form your own conclusions.
It’s a popular spot. Several thousand people each year take the tour of the Borden home. Only a few hundred are brave enough to stay here overnight. Overnight visitors get a longer tour and the privilege of saying they spent the night at a home where one of the nation’s most infamous murders took place. The very bravest stay in the John Morse room where Abby Borden was discovered in a pool of blood.
Make it through the night and you’ll be rewarded with a breakfast that is much the same as the Borden’s enjoyed on the day of their death (minus the mutton broth).
Suzanne Keefe and her sister Julie Wack took their daughters to the bed and breakfast one cold February night last year. After the tour, their guide told them she would see them in the morning. To Keefe’s surprise, she said, “Oh, I don’t stay here!” The only guests at the house that night, they settled in to the Borden sisters’ rooms and lived to tell the tale. Their overnight stay was not without incident. In the middle of that winter night, the heat mysteriously stopped working.
Stay here if you dare.
Overnight rates are between $200 and $250, depending on the room. For more information, go here or call 508-675-7333. Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast, 230 Second Street, Fall River.
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