Excerpt of "Forty Whacks"

• Hades and Persephone
• Winchester

Thomm Quackenbush

Author's Note: Lizzie Borden's Bed & Breakfast, e.g. the home in which Andrew and Abbie Borden met their grizzly end, is of this writing up for sale. For a cool $2 million, you could take possession of several ghosts and waves of morbid curiosity-seekers. How could you resist?
If you are uncertain it is valuable real estate, surely this excerpt will convince you of this investment.

When one thinks of a romantic weekend, one imagines ax murder. Usually avoiding it, but tastes vary.

Lizzie Borden was acquitted after a trial. Posterity has chosen to ignore that. To wit, we have memorialized her in schoolyard rhyme, though third-graders miss some of the nuances. Neglecting her acquittal-which was not something one should ignore-no one received forty whacks (to say nothing of forty-one). That is an excessive number of whacks. The victims would be slurry. Also, we say "ax" only because it rhymes better than "hatchet."

(The schoolyard rhyme was no recent invention. Shortly after her acquittal, children jumped rope outside her house while singing it, then ran away when Lizzie yelled at them. It takes juvenile courage to taunt a potential murderer who got away with it twice.)

Lizzie Borden was, thanks to newspapers of the time, one of the first celebrity murder trials, the OJ Simpson of her era. Owing to this morbid curiosity, her home is reported to be haunted. People claim to see Lizzie, though she died in her sixties and not in the house where the murders occurred. Given that this interest remains, and we live under capitalism, her childhood home was turned into a bed and breakfast. Anyone with the requisite few hundred dollars a night and unhealthy disposition is welcome to stay. (I daily leap for joy that I married a woman who agreed to spend our vacation at a murder house.)

Going in, I didn't know that Lizzie Borden was innocent of the crime, only that the evidence that she didn't burn was not strong enough for a conviction. Her guilt and innocence bore only passing importance to our trip. I was no scholar of Lizzie or the crimes, nor did I care to acquit her in my mind. What happened was a history that was beyond my touch. Staying somewhere spooky for the bragging rights of having said I did was close to my fingertips.

I knew more about the ghost. Witnesses report an apparition on the couch where her father lay dead, though who would keep a hundred-and-twenty-year-old, blood-soaked couch? I did not know any other specific hauntings, and I did not try to discover them before our trip in order not to prejudice myself. A preponderance of ghost-hunting hucksters had been through the doors videoing themselves. If I cared to, I could have spent a week watching melodramatic men jump at shadows.

Check-in was five to seven to accommodate the tours before our occupancy and in preparation for our own, more in-depth tour at eight.

Fall River was a city in decline. There were drab brick buildings and check-cashing/liquor stores on most corners. I pictured the town antiquated and historical. The only history we saw was the dark green house where we would be spending the next two nights. We considered the military museum on an actual battleship, but it didn't seem worth the price. Dining was limited unless one loved paella - Fall River was an enclave of Portuguese immigrants.

Pulling into the narrow driveway, we passed between the house and fence. A late-middle-aged woman leaned off the porch, smoking a cigarette. She greeted us with a husky voice and introduced herself as Sue, our guide and caretaker for the night.

In my mind, our guide would be bordering on a tubercular death, either a consummate historian or a Victorian-era ghost. Sue was the sort of woman who would sidle up to you at a bar, buy you a beer, call you honey, and ask in a thick Boston accent how you like the Sox this season. The only thing that tied her to this house was a t-shirt advertising it.

She showed us to the Knowlton Room, named for Hosea Knowlton, the prosecutor in Lizzie's case. He did not stay there and certainly didn't die there. Our room was converted storage space in the attic, but one must name it something. When we booked, rooms with more potential for haunting were available, but at a price point that did not match my hopes for the trip. If there were ghosts, I could only hope they climbed the stairs to visit.

The room was more cramped than the website let on, little more than a bed, two nightstands, a couple of chairs, two mirrors, and a chest of toys in the corner that went unremarked upon by Sue. The ceiling sloped sharply downward, meaning the room had a third of the usable floor space, and I wasted no time in hitting my head against it twice.

"When do we get our keys?" I asked Sue.

"Oh, no keys." She motioned to the period-appropriate latch on our door. "There is no need for them. We're very safe here. If you go out after the tour, I'll leave a key to the front door in the kitchen." Her tone implied that she did not expect anyone would care to leave the house after the tour. The owner supplied the key as a psychological reassurance.

On the ground floor, Sue showed us a room with a sofa and two chairs. "You know about paranormal stuff?"

"A little." I know an unfortunate amount about the paranormal, so much so that my writing had become a way of laundering it. "Knowing the difference between a poltergeist and a haunting and lecturing about puberty and infrasound as explanations if given a chance" is not widely considered a marketable skill.

"Well, the place is supposed to be wicked haunted."

Something struck me about the room. "That's not the same couch, but who would keep something imbued with their father's blood?"

"They kept it," Sue answered with derision. "We only have a reproduction because the original burned in a fire." She left the unspoken implication of arson hanging in the air.

Not everything in the house was a reproduction. She was not at liberty to tell us what was original since the current owner rightly feared someone would steal or deface these pieces. I assured her I would not deface any of the pieces. She gave me the stink-eye at my omission.

We had over an hour before the tour was to begin. Sue suggested a tap house behind the courthouse. That was where everyone else staying at the inn went for dinner.

I scanned the other diners. I saw a muscular Italian man leading his buxom, blonde, middle-aged wife away from the bar and was certain I had not seen the last of them. They were too perfectly cast in this horror movie. Indeed, they were guests tonight and had stayed in the house many times. Neither confessed to having seen anything unusual, but the wife refused to enter the basement ever again.

The guests gathered in one of the front rooms in preparation for the tour. I scoped them out-the Italian and his wife, a Scandinavian couple shooting us contemptuous looks while pattering in a language I did not know, two dark-haired men who sat beside us on the sofa and tried at friendliness, and several others shoulder-to-shoulder with their kind. How ridged and awkward it all felt. We were, if nothing else, united by the fact that we had opted to spend a Thursday night in this famous murder house. It did not behoove us to pretend we should be strangers. I could not help figuring in what order we would be picked off. With my camera around my neck, snapping photos of corners and other guests, my chances of surviving into the second act were not great.

Sue carried a plastic binder. She was required to tell us the home and family history dictated to her by the owner but understood why we were staying. She promised to share paranormal occurrences the guides had experienced, along with what photographic proof she had.

She could not let me hold the binder to flip through it in advance of the tour, which was a good move on her part.

The story she related was twisting, surprising only in the specifics but not the likely motivations or methods.

Andrew Borden, Lizzie and Emma's father, and the second victim, was stingy. Though rich, he refused to have such luxuries as indoor plumbing and electricity. Our rooms had a historic chamber pot - not original to the house that Sue would admit - to underscore this deficit. The owner would thank us for not using them. I hoped this was not a warning they had to institute from experience.

The Borden daughters bristled under the skinflint, more so when they understood that Andrew's second wife Abby, the first victim, would one day get half the inheritance that they felt was already theirs.

While I do not doubt their annoyance at oil lamps when people of their station had electricity, I also do not believe they hated their father. They were thirty-something brats who refused to address their maid by her actual name. Likewise, they harbored a decades-long grudge against Abby. If they had homicidal urges, Abby would be their obvious target.

If Lizzie's aims were for her father's fortune, she succeeded. She and Emma received everything since there was no longer anyone in the family who could contest their claim - or no one who might in the presence of woodcutting tools. Lizzie bought a mansion she called Maplecroft in The Hills, the rich part of town, where she threw frequent parties for disreputable people (actors) and lived to old an age with a rotating clowder of cats.

"People in Fall River did not name their homes," Sue intoned, "people in Boston did that." Lizzie's time in prison awaiting trial was not a part of any plan. Living extravagantly for the rest of her years seemed to be more than a fair trade, though.

While I cannot swear that Lizzie was a murderer, she was a thief. Well before the murders, some of Abby's jewelry went missing. Townsfolk reported to Andrew that Lizzie was selling it. Andrew afterward locked his door always but left the key on the mantle as a dare to Lizzie, a statement of "I know what you did, but are you stupid enough to do it again when it could be no one else?"-more poignant given her acquittal. Andrew also had a standing agreement with the shopkeepers to let him know the tally of what Lizzie had stolen from them, which he would pay rather than have his daughter scandalize the family by being arrested.

Sue passed around crime scene photographs, telling us that this was only the second time these were used, the first being Jack the Ripper. They were hazy and monochrome, as should be expected given the era, but it was enough that one could imagine the depravity of the wounds. Sue expected us to be shocked or revolted, but I grew up with the internet. In a cabinet in the dining room were replicas of the parents' skulls, which were graphic enough that photographs became blase. The murder scene photo of Andrew Borden was framed on an end table by the sofa, with a magnifying glass for anyone who wanted to appreciate the savagery.

After the first autopsy on the kitchen table, a second was performed in secret. The police ordered the heads removed, and the flesh boiled off. During Lizzie's trial, there was a dramatic reveal of the skulls, at which Lizzie fainted. People thought she was putting on a show, though it would be shocking to believe her victims were in the ground only to see them boiled to skulls. (After the trial, the skulls were interred in boxes three feet above their bodies. It seemed curious that no one put effort into returning the heads to their rightful places. For that indignity alone, I would be inclined to haunt.)

I noted aloud that there were security cameras in every common room. This was not to spy on us, Sue swore, but as an insurance policy if anything went missing or was destroyed. The owner didn't bother watching the videos otherwise. I later found a subscription stream of the house, which likely employed the same cameras. I wished I had known this before trying to summon the dead while in my pajamas.

Sue motioned to a glow-in-the-dark Ouija board under the table, then to a wooden one leaning against the bookcase. "You can use either of those, but I have to tell you that the wooden one is supposed to be evil. Someone put it under the couch before a psychic walked through. He immediately said to move the couch and to burn the board, though we didn't."

We visited every room, all rented by one of us. Alongside attempts at historical authenticity were Samsonite suitcases in corners and modern clothes on hangers. Sue explained where Abby's body had lain and then been moved around by the police to protect her modesty. She showed us into Andrew's room, where guests leave coins, either to prevent Andrew from haunting them in the night or to induce it. Sue was not clear which would happen. Far more people left coins there and were not haunted.

I had the strangest headache, pressure around the crown of my skull, that appeared in some rooms and ebbed in others. Without my bringing it up, Sue mentioned this happens to some people. This only made me focus on every pang and question every absence, like a proper neurotic.

Tourists not renting rooms do not go to the three rooms on the third floor. One belonged to Bridget, the Irish maid. The other two were storage. The rocking chair in Bridget's room had been seen rocking with no outside influence, though it was unclear why this should be. There was a rag doll on it. I glared at the chair, willing it to move. It didn't. The room beside ours was known as the "safe room." Paranormal shenanigans do not occur there.

When we all piled into my room, Sue spun a yarn about children drowned by their postpartum mother next door. Why should they come to haunt this house? If they chose to, why would they bother with this attic room? The owner had not supplied the chest of toys in the corner. Those were from earlier guests hoping to placate or provoke the children.

Our last stop was the basement, where police found an ax head stained with dark red, though it was not a murder weapon, only rusty. Sue had no stories about basement hauntings, nothing that would justify the blonde wife's refusal to come down. She showed us to an alcove, the brickwork of which sort of looked like a face if one used the flash on one's camera and squinted after being primed what to see.

"It even looks like the eye is screwed up," said Sue, "like Andrew's was after the hatchet."

After the tour, Sue left us alone in the house. Above the gift shop, the owner had her apartment, but it was not expected we would need her. Some guests have because they so unnerved themselves. She must dread it as a duty in her ownership.

I sat in the study, across from the replica couch, and wrote in hopes another guest would care to disturb me and suggest something creepy. The two dark-haired men introduced themselves as paranormal investigators, and we played with the evilest Ouija board. None of the planchettes worked right, the felt on the legs worn away. I went old school and purloined a drinking glass from the cupboard. The researchers were impressed by how well this worked, which is why our ancestors used them for spirit boards. They professed to be experienced with the paranormal, so I was surprised that they didn't know the glass trick.

The board gave mostly gibberish answers, though it wrote the word VISIT before spouting what the researchers believed was Bulgarian and Latin based on Google translate. Had Andrew Borden turned into a travel agent in the afterlife?

When the board repeated the same four letters, lacking a vowel, I asked, "Is that an acronym?"

The glass hovered without landing on a letter.

"Do you know what an acronym is?"

NO

I asked the board to speak the answer concisely and in English. It responded CONCISE, which did fulfill my request in the most smart-ass way possible. That was definitely Andrew.

A bald psychic, Dennis, appeared. He had befriended the owner some time ago and seemed to have no other reason for being here. In the horror movie, the psychic would be not-so-secretly possessed or a descendant of the Bordens out to punish tourists for our blasphemy. In reality, Dennis had a key to the house and was otherwise harmless.

I did not sleep well.

Dawn through the window woke me. I placed an extra pillow over my face to block it. When Amber woke, she panicked that the ghost children were smothering me. She was not going to stop the ghost children, but she would observe and record. Even at the expense of my life, she figured I would rather have been a part of the paranormal, particularly if it made for an entertaining story at her murder trial.

Dennis was back before breakfast to ask us about our experiences. The other guests mumbled about cold spots and eerie feelings. He seemed irritated that we wouldn't play along by fabricating a good enough story. He told us of shadows he'd seen when sleeping on one of the sofas. How liberally did he use this key? Coming downstairs to see him snoring on the couch would unnerve me more than bumping into a specter. The longer he talked, the more I understood that his appearance last night was in hopes that we would hire him to conduct a seance. His tack was too subtle for me. I would have personally taken up a collection if he outright said it.

The house supplied the same breakfast the Bordens had that fateful morning: johnnycakes, home fries, chorizo, juice, and fruit. Some of the sickness Abby Borden attributed to poisoning was likely what her doctor diagnosed as "summer sickness." More plainly, the family left unrefrigerated mutton out for days in the summer and suffered from brutal bacterial food poisoning.

"Mutton is off the menu," the cook told us.

I was not sorry to hear this.

No one talked over breakfast, at least in English, which left stagnancy. People chatted so much at previous communal bed and breakfasts that the meal went on for an hour. These people wanted to eat and away from this damned place. If they experienced a haunting in the night, they refused to say more over johnnycakes.