Bed, breakfast and murder; Lizzie Borden's home open for tours, overnight stays.

Byline: Laura Porter

A firefighter standing outside a firehouse in Fall River chuckles at a request for directions to Second Street.

"Oh, that's right, it's August fourth," he says, as he points the way. "You want Lizzie's house."

Sure enough, there is a growing line outside the front door of No. 92. Now owned and operated as a bed-and-breakfast by Lee-ann Wilber and Donald Woods, Lizzie Borden's family residence is also open to the public for daily tours - especially on Aug. 4.

On this day, well over a century ago, on a sweltering summer morning, Andrew J. Borden and his second wife, Abby Durfee Gray Borden, were hacked to death with an ax. No one else was in the house except the maid and Borden's daughter, Lizzie, a Sunday school teacher. The brutal deaths galvanized Fall River from the moment the bodies were discovered. When 32-year-old Lizzie was arrested for the double homicide, accounts of her trial and subsequent acquittal captured national attention.

No other suspect was ever named or investigated. Despite Lizzie's exoneration, the number of suspicious details that seemed to suggest her guilt has led to a century-long fascination with the case.

Almost everyone knows the classic children's rhyme, "Lizzie Borden took an ax and gave her mother forty whacks / when she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one." It may well have appeared at the time of the murders, but the eerie singsong has survived. All told, the Borden murders have spawned dozens of nonfiction accounts and novels, plays and movies as amateur sleuths try to solve the mystery of the murders.

"I have always been interested in strange and unusual unsolved mysteries," says Lee-ann Wilber, who, with her partner, Donald Woods, bought the Borden home in 2004. It had been operated as a bed-and-breakfast since the mid-1990s, when Martha McGinn inherited the property where her grandparents had lived in the 1940s and, with her partner Ron Evans, opened it to the public. Wilber, who lived "right around the corner" in Rhode Island, grew up with the Borden case. On Valentine's Day in 2003, she took Woods for a visit to the inn. When McGinn decided to sell, it was Woods who proposed that he and Wilber buy it.

Five years later, they have mastered the dual task of running a business and preserving history. Taken at face value, the Lizzie Borden House is first and foremost a guest house, offering rooms for the night in a charmingly restored, 19th century home.

But of course it is the history that defines a visitor's experience.

Merely the first step into the foyer is chilling. A few feet away, in the sitting room, a black sofa with rolled arms is an almost exact replica of the sofa where Andrew Borden died as he lay napping.

In the adjacent dining room, where guests now enjoy breakfast every morning, the bodies were once laid out on the table, awaiting the arrival of the coroner.

And on the way up the front staircase to the second floor, one pauses just at the point where Abby Borden's body was first glimpsed through the railing, lying face-down on the flowered carpet of a guest bedroom.

It is just this eerie sense of stepping into the footprint of the past that Wilber has worked hard to create for her guests, whether they are taking a tour through the house or brave enough to spend the night in one of eight available bedrooms. These include not only the John V. Morse room where Abby Borden was murdered, named for the cousin who was visiting the Bordens at the time, but also the family bedrooms on the second floor; these include Lizzie's room, her sister Emma's, Abby and Andrew's, and Abby's dressing room. Other options include three rooms on the third floor.

The only surviving photographs of the interior of the house are crime scene pictures of the two rooms where the victims were found. Wilber continues to try to make those rooms as close to the original as possible. "The sitting room is simpler, more accurate now," she says. The key element here is the near replica of the infamous sofa that she discovered on eBay and had rebuilt from the springs up. "It's not where you find it but what you do with it!"

In the rest of the house, Wilber has tried

to include details relevant to the Bordens' lives. In addition, she and Woods removed a building that had been added to the house in the 1920s and run as a print shop; they also built a reproduction of the Borden barn, locating it further back on the lot than the original to allow for more parking. It is now used as an office and gift shop.

Overnight guests can take an evening tour of the house and for entertainment, a local medium, Elizabeth Nowicki, often comes by request to perform seances. Billed by Wilber as "Victorian spiritualism," Nowicki's appearances include personal readings for guests as well as table-tapping seances, quite popular during the Victorian age.

Breakfast every morning is a nod to the Bordens' last meal: "Fruit, coffee, Johnnycakes, homemade bread, five-day-old mutton broth," says Wilber. The mutton broth insisted upon by the miserly Andrew Borden has thankfully been replaced by far more palatable bacon and eggs.

Overnight visitors "come from every walk of life," says Wilber. "They range from amateur ghost hunters to people intrigued by the case to business people tired of the Marriott." And clearly, the Lizzie Borden House offers a very different experience from the Marriott. "We try!" she says cheerfully.

In addition to daily tours, Wilber and Woods

hold annual re-enactment tours to recognize the anniversary of the murders; the day typically draws more than 300 people. Actors portray the key figures in the tragedy, relying on a loosely constructed script to tell a different aspect of the story each year.

Last August, the goal was to show a "house of women in mourning" on the afternoon of the murders, says Shelley Dziedzic, a retired English teacher from New Stonington, Conn., who plays Lizzie Borden.

Wearing long, black silks and holding a black feather fan, Dziedzic has long been fascinated with the Borden case. In this particular re-enactment, she says, "we wanted to ask what happened after" the deaths. "What was (Lizzie's) sister doing? Where was (family friend) Alice (Russell)? The maid is terrified and has quit. It's really a house of women. Did (Lizzie) think she would be charged? The women's issues in this case are fascinating."

Wilber, who wears a long, blue gown and glides in and out of the rooms ahead of the tour groups, acknowledges the occasional disquiet of her work: "Some days I have to force myself not to think that someone was brutally murdered on this spot."

Meanwhile, she and Woods look forward to the future. "We want to expand on tours," says Wilber, "expand the business all the way around." Wilber has appeared on "The Montel Williams Show" and played Lizzie for a feature on the case for the History Channel.

The inn's ongoing arrangement with Ghost Hunting University, which teaches classes all over the country, encourages the exploration of paranormal activity in the house, long rumored to be haunted. Citing the need to "maintain some secrets," Wilber won't divulge the official findings of the ghost hunters who have investigated here. But Woods describes the Borden house as "very active" and his partner hints that she has "had experiences I can't rationally explain."

And her answer to the obvious question:

"I think she was involved," Wilber answers. "But the truth is we don't know. We'll never know."

Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast

92 Second St., Fall River

[phone]

www.lizzie-borden.com

For room reservations or information about tours, call or visit the Web site.

ART: PHOTOS

PHOTOG: Photography by Tom Rettig

CUTLINE: (1) Psychic Elizabeth Nowicki contacts Lizzie Borden's parents during seances held for guests. (2) At right, manager and guide Eleanor Thibault. (3) Ann Marie Good, Kate Bell and Emily Thrasher Good, all visiting from North Carolina, stand in the parlor where Lizzie Borden's father, Andrew, was killed. (4) The Borden family residence is located on Second Street in Fall River. (5) Below left, the Andrew Borden Room at the bed and breakfast.