Nestled in a beautiful Massachusetts town lies a creepy hotel with a chilling history.
It is the location of one of America’s most infamous murder mysteries, and for just $250 a night, visitors can stay in the room where one of the gruesome massacres took place.
The Fall River hotel is known as the Lizzie Borden House and is where the woman’s father and stepmother were brutally hacked to death with an ax in 1892.
She was accused of the gruesome double murder but was sensationally acquitted. The murder case remains unsolved to this day.
About 130 years later, the property was purchased by Lance Zaal, who runs US Ghost Adventures, and converted into a bed and breakfast for true crime enthusiasts.
The bodies of wealthy businessman Andrew Borden and his second wife Abby were found in the eight-bedroom mansion on the morning of August 4, 1892.
PIn the oil photos taken of the scene, Andrew lay on the living room couch with a bloodied head that had almost completely collapsed.
Abby was pictured lying on the floor in a pool of blood and suffering from horrific head wounds in an upstairs bedroom.
Lizzie, then 32, found the bodies and alerted housekeeper Bridget Sullivan, who was outside washing windows.
Her sister Emma was away at the time and Lizzie quickly became the prime suspect, with police at the time believing she had murdered the couple to ensure they would get her father’s fortune of $300,000 (more than $10 million today worth).
Pictured: The Lizzie Borden House, now run as a museum, bed and breakfast and believed to be a prime location to see ghosts and spirits
On the morning of August 4, 1892, wealthy businessman Andrew Borden and his second wife Abby were found beaten to death in the eight-bedroom mansion.
The net closed in on Lizzie when it was discovered that she had burned a dress similar to the one she wore on the day of the murders in the week after her parents’ murder.
She claimed the dress was covered in paint, but prosecutors said she burned the blood-stained dress to cover up the murders. Prosecutors also said she had purchased a small ax the day before.
Witnesses at her trial would also later claim that they had seen Lizzie trying to buy prussic acid, now known as hydrogen cyanide, the day before the murders.
Lizzie was arrested on August 11, 1892 and charged with the murders.
But after a highly publicized trial, she was acquitted on June 20 after just 90 minutes of jury deliberation.
It is believed that jurors were influenced by the fact that she was an active member of the local church
Police had also refused to test fingerprints on the murder weapon found in the basement, saying the technique was unreliable.
No one else was ever suspected or taken into custody and the case stalled. Most people still believe that Lizzie probably committed the murders.
The Borden sisters subsequently inherited their father’s estate and in 1894 purchased another house, now known as Maplecroft, where they lived together for many years before falling out in 1905.
Lizzie died of pneumonia in 1927 and was buried next to her parents in the family plot.
A police photo shows the body of Andrew Borden, with his head crushed and completely unrecognizable after someone bashed him with an ax
A similar fate befell his wife Abby Borden, who was found in her bedroom in a pool of blood and with a gaping wound on the back of her head.
Today, the house where the murders took place has been transformed into a museum by day and a B&B/paranormal ghost tour destination by night.
The cheapest room costs about $250 per night.
Many who have stayed there in recent years insist it is haunted, and some even refuse to spend the entire night.
Julie Jordan, editor-in-chief of People Magazine, with Liz Beadle and Emily Penke visited the house on Halloween this year to see if the hype was real.
Together the trio calls itself Ghost mothers and posting videos of themselves on social media allegedly interacting with outside spirits.
They went on tour during the day and heard all the gruesome details about the murders, according to the article written by Jordan.
She and her friends stayed in the housekeeper’s bedroom in the attic, choosing not to stay in the room where Abby died.
Later, they braved Abby’s bedroom and claimed they had set up some sort of system that responded to changes in electromagnetic energy.
They asked the so-called ghosts in the room questions and nothing happened until ‘Emily wanted to know if anyone minded us being there. The lights flashed immediately,” Jordan wrote.
Pictured: the bedroom where Abby Borden was found murdered. She was found on the floor in a pool of blood next to her bed
Julie Jordan (right), the editor-in-chief of People Magazine, recently visited the Lizzie Borden House on Halloween with her friends Liz Beedle (left) and Emily Penke to see if it was as spooky as some say
“Then we all heard what sounded like a man’s sigh from the hallway. The house was empty except for those of us in the room,” she added.
Her conclusion was that the house is “definitely creepy and there may still be a few ghosts hanging around, perhaps trying to solve the mystery of what exactly happened there.”
Some people have since wondered if the couch in the foyer is the same one the deceased father was found lying on.
However, it was completely contaminated and destroyed after the test, so the one that stands there today is a replica.
Since launching as a bed and breakfast, the Borden house has found itself in a dispute with a local business owner, resulting in two lawsuits.
The hotel owner sued Miss Lizzie’s Coffee, a door down from the Borden home on Second Street, for alleged trademark infringement in September 2023.
In the lawsuit, Zaal argued that the cafe’s use of the ax logo and other similar iconography “deceptively confuses unsuspecting customers.”
However, U.S. District Judge Leo T. Sorokin ruled on October 27, 2023 that the coffee shop did “nothing” to imitate U.S. Ghost Adventures’ operations and said the company does not trademark the word “Lizzie.”
Pictured: The entrance to the Lizzie Borden House, which changed hands in 2021
Just down the street is Miss Lizzie’s Coffee, which also uses aspects of Lizzie Borden’s story in its business
Sorokin also pointed out that the ax logo used by Miss Lizzie’s Coffee was different from the one on the hotel’s sign.
Zaal appealed this decision, but lost again in November 2024, when a three-judge panel of the First Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the lower court’s ruling.
“Ghost Adventures’ challenge to the court’s assessment of the strength of the numbers is dogged by legal confusion,” Judge Bruce Selya wrote in his opinion. “We don’t have to go any further.”
More recently, Zaal filed a $50,000 defamation suit against Joseph Pereira, the owner of the Lizzie Borden-themed coffee shop, and an unknown author of a Facebook page that has posted scathing criticism of US Ghost Adventures.
Zaal brought the latest case to Bristol County Superior Court in July, claiming Pereira defamed him in a lawsuit Article from March that ran in New Bedford’s WBSM.
In the interview, Pereira slammed Zaal and his company for what he described as “bullying tactics.”
He also warned potential witnesses who might plan to make allegedly false statements on behalf of US Ghost Adventures that he would charge them with perjury.
Pereira added that he would write a book titled Miss Lizzie & Me, which will “cover some of the intricacies of it all and the truth of what really happens with these so-called ghost adventures.”
US Ghost Adventures argued that these statements are defamatory, especially since Pereira accused Zaal’s company of perjury.
As part of that case, Zaal also sued the person behind the “Boycott the Lizzie Borden House” Facebook page.
Pictured: the interior of Miss Lizzie’s Coffee Shop, which can continue to operate because both lawsuits against it are pending
Joseph Pereira, the owner of Lizzie’s Coffee Shop, is pictured here in a mugshot. After being involved in a lengthy legal battle with Lance Zaal, the owner of the Lizzie Borden House, he claimed that his criminal record was leaked by a witness from Zaal’s company to embarrass him.
That since-deleted page called Zaal a “liar” and the company “unethical and predatory,” according to court documents.
No one appeared in court to represent “Boycott the Lizzie Borden House” and Meta, Facebook’s parent company, declined to reveal the identity of the page’s creator “except in response to a valid subpoena,” according to the civil complaint.
As for his part in the case, Pereira tried but failed to dismiss the defamation charges against him.
Pereira also argued in an appeal brief filed in July that a US Ghost Adventures witness spread his “criminal record across the Internet and (sent) copies to various vendors and agencies that (Pereira) uses” in hopes of embarrassing him to take.
He has been charged with theft about three dozen times since 1982. He was last arrested in December 2019, reported The Herald Newsa local newspaper from Massachusetts.
In 1996, Pereira pleaded guilty to stealing more than $119,000 from more than a dozen people and spent 15 months in prison, The Herald News and The Standard-Times reported.
Both the federal trademark case and the defamation case are open and ongoing, according to court records.
And the battle to be the one to make money off the Lizzie Borden murders is expected to continue, as the murder case is one of Fall River’s main claims to fame.