The Night I Spent in Lizzie Borden’s House

When I was five I saw one man’s version of love. This turned me into a writer.

When my mother had an asthma attack in the middle of the night, dad pulled me and my little brother out of our beds and we all went to the emergency room. While the doctor checked mom’s lung capacity, my brother and I played on the floor around her hospital bed. We were caterpillars and we were ecstatic. At some stage, a nurse came into the cubicle, said something along the lines of, “We have an emergency on its way in and it’s probably a good idea to keep your children on the bed with you,” and closed all the cubicle curtains behind her. Dad pulled us up and let us squash mom’s legs while she regained her breath. There was a lot of noise coming from the corridor and so while my mother’s doctor tracked her progress, I snuck off the bed and onto the floor, lifted the curtain just a little bit. I wanted to see what the noise was.

There on a hospital bed, a sister cuddled her little brother. She had curly hair and wore Smurf pajamas, the same kind I had back at home. I noticed their faces and arms were spotty red, that the little boy’s top was wet and dark. Blood. The emergency room doors opened. Another bed was wheeled in. On top of the bed was a woman, all still, covered in blood, her arms and legs a cut after a cut after a cut. The policeman who walked beside the woman told a doctor, “We’ve got the husband in the car. He did it right in front of the kids.” These kids, this woman. A family.

I pulled the curtain down, snuck back onto the bed, held my brother’s hand. I didn’t say a word. Husband and wife. These things my parents were. I wondered: why would a person do a horrible thing to someone they love?

I feel like I have been trying to find the answer to this question my entire life. And I can’t help but feel this is why I met Lizzie Borden.

*

I met Lizzie in a second-hand bookstore in 2005. I should never have looked her in the eye. Habit and instinct saw me in the true crime section, saw me reaching for a book about women who kill. My arm bumped a shelf and a slim pamphlet fell out onto the floor. It was about the Lizzie Borden case. I read the pulpy account of the August 4, 1892 Borden ax murders cover to cover, how the youngest Borden daughter, Lizzie—a spinster and Sunday school teacher—was accused then acquitted of murdering her wealthy father, Andrew, and her step-mother, Abby, in their family home at 92 Second Street in Fall River, Massachusetts. The case didn’t interest me at first, however as I looked at the photo of Lizzie on the front cover, made eye contact with her, I heard a voice crawl into my ear and say, “There was no more love.” Lights flickered. The store was closing. I shrugged it all off, put Lizzie back on the shelf and went home.

That night I dreamed of Lizzie: she was sitting on the end of my bed poking my legs. Lizzie and her smile, the way she looked at me. She poked and said, “I have something to tell you about my father. He has a lot to answer for.” I woke in fright, tried to ignore the dream. But the next night she came back again, poked my legs. “Let me tell you something,” she said as she wiped blood off the carpet. I ignored her. Lizzie came to me every night for a week. I decided the only way to get rid of her was to write down my dreams, write the images she showed me and hope she would eventually leave. I wrote and I wrote, kept thinking of the words, “There was no more love.” This thing, so familiar. I knew it from somewhere.

And so I began researching the case and before I knew it I had started writing a novel.

*

When you fictionalize a historical, unsolved crime like this you need to begin with a view point. If this was about love, if a father had a lot to answer for, then I would consider Lizzie’s guilt in order to explore why someone would do such a thing. This decision meant that the novel would never really be about the case or the trial but about a family that no longer knew how to love each other.

I didn’t want to write the sensationalist story. I wanted to know what was the core of this woman’s guilt? Is it because she had motive, that behind closed doors a daughter and stepmother despised each other so much that one refused to address the other by name? That two sisters were so resentful toward their controlling father that one of them decided to put a stop to it? Is guilt only a matter of context, a particular way of seeing? Reading the newspapers of the time you could assume that the major contributing factor of Lizzie’s presumed guilt stemmed from her inability to outwardly grieve in a way a daughter should. Report after report dwell on the fact that Lizzie didn’t cry like she should have, wasn’t hysterical. For those on the outside, it was clear she was a hiding something. And a woman with secrets is a dangerous thing. And a socially upstanding woman who goes against the natural way of things by reacting with brutal violence is more than a dangerous thing: it is a nightmare. Because if Lizzie could do this what were lesser women capable of doing?

In the beginning, the Lizzie I was writing was born out of her first sin, that inability to outwardly emote, but I knew she was much more complex than that. But as the years of drafting went on, I couldn’t quite capture Lizzie in the way I wanted to, couldn’t completely understand her without a physical context. A part of me desperately wanted the truth. And I would do almost anything to find it. I decided I needed to go to her, go the scene of the crime.

So I booked myself into Lizzie’s bedroom for a few nights at 92 Second Street. That’s right. The Borden house is now a lovely, if slightly creepy B&B. I was as thrilled to find this out as much as you are right now.

*

I had arrived at the house in Fall River with old images I had found online still fresh in my mind: a neighborhood of single and double storied houses surrounded by semi-overgrown lawns and tree-lined footpaths. That Second Street doesn’t exist anymore. Many houses and trees have been knocked down, making markers of crime testimony harder to pinpoint. I tried to locate the houses Bridget had gone to when Lizzie had sent her to fetch a doctor upon discovering her brutalized father. Instead I found a construction site, a half complete courthouse. The irony was not lost on me. Modernity had grown around the Borden house like weeds. Finding relics of them would be that little bit more challenging. But I had hopes that inside 92 Second Street the past had remained relatively static, the way Andrew might’ve wanted his wife and daughters to be: family-strong blood together in the house, no one in, no one out. I had hopes.

From the outside the Bordens’ is a polite house: a small lamp guides you to the front door and the front steps are old-man gray, the concrete smattered with sand-sized glass flecks that radiate when the sun moves out from behind a cloud. The windows are dressed in floral drapes and a singular juvenile-sized tree stands to the left of the yard, well behaved. Nothing here seems out of place. I looked to the roof, saw a pigeon preen under wing atop the chimney. The preening stopped and the pigeon looked down at me, cooed, and I pulled my suitcase behind me, headed for the house.

Buried under car fumes and the blunt-chalk scent of construction work was the smell of citrus, made my mouth beg for a drink. Where was that smell coming from? It was impossible not to think: here’s where hundreds then thousands of people came to watch Andrew and Abby be taken from their home in coffins, came to see the grieving adult children who had spent a lifetime by their father’s side. I imagined Lizzie waving to friends as she got onto a carriage, the way her pale face might’ve appeared underneath her black mourning bonnet: a sunken morphine smile. I kept walking, couldn’t help but imagine Lizzie everywhere. It was like a strange dream.

I passed the side door where Lizzie once told her neighbor, Mrs. Churchill, “Do come in. Someone’s killed father,” and headed to the barn, a replica of the original which now doubles as a gift store and the bed and breakfast reception. You wouldn’t believe the things they had there: books and DVDs about the crime, fake pears, Lizzie Borden bobbleheads, axe earrings, posters, t-shirts, tea towels—all kitsch, all great, all slightly unnerving. Once I’d checked into Lizzie’s room, Lee-Ann, the owner of the house said, “Please make yourself at home.” I smiled. These are words you want to hear. She smiled back, a lick of guilty pleasure, and said, “Tomorrow night we have a full house but tonight, you’re our only guest.” I considered leaving right there and then, the idea of being in the house alone completely terrifying. And yet. The chance for a truth, the chance to uncover Lizzie without anyone else around. I wanted it. I went upstairs, sat on Lizzie’s bed, as she did mine all those years before. And I waited for her.

*

Over the course of my time in that house, I met amateur ghost hunters, bio-scientists armed with luminal spray (“We’re only here for the blood stains,” they told me), “Carrie-obsessed” college students whose idea of a good time was to have sex in haunted houses while watching horror films, unsuspecting retired school teachers looking for a place to sleep, a lone English lawyer living in Lisbon, whose mother read him bedtime stories of the Borden murders, and a cast of wonderful tour guides who all have their own theory as to what happened that fateful August day.

In that house I also met the Bordens, or at least traces of them. One of them brushed their hand across my forehead as I drifted off to sleep. Another one pushed me in the chest while I made a cup of tea in the kitchen. At different times during the day and night, I caught the faint smell of tobacco pipe and lavender but could never trace the origin. I saw a tall shadow of a man walk through the sitting room as I read old newspaper clippings in the dining room. But you should know: I only believe in ghosts when I write.

Specters find a way of coming for you. And so it was in that house that I began to unpick the question that had haunted me since childhood. It was there that I came face to face with a small understanding of why a person would do such a horrible thing to someone they were meant to love.

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See What I Have Done, by Sarah Schmidt, is available now from Grove Atlantic.

Originally published in Literary Hub.