by Lisa Mannetti

Created on: May 01, 2007   Last Updated: September 18, 2009

The house is very high and narrow and my first reaction to it is utterly visceral: I feel it like a blow to my stomach that stops my breathing. But how can this be? It's so plain, so drab, not a bit of ornament: No towers or gables or widow's walk.

It's just a house: The windows are tall and thin, the wooden clapboards are painted a dull tan. It's so close to the road, it's nearly on top of the heaving cobblestone sidewalk that runs in front of it. It has to be my imagination working overtime, I think; even if murder was done here. I've read a hundred times how one possible motive was Lizzie's desire to escape the house's confines, its physical limitations and the more serious social restrictions imposed on her by living in the wrong part of town. The house is supposed to be small, not towering.

I look again and it seems to lean over me as I crane my head to see the topmost floor. It looms.that is the only word I can think of it knows and it is watching me. Then I feel a tenebrous connection, as if tendrils are reaching out to me and drawing me closer.Inside I will discover that the house seems large and spaciousnot at all what I expected. I'll sense the power that is in the house, that knows how to play a terrible game of seduction so that it can take root in sensitive or intuitive people; a power that can insinuate itself inside their minds while they are on the premises and in its grip.and follow them even after they've gone.

I don't know who or what haunts Lizzie Borden's house; I sometimes wonder if Lizzie's spirit is held there unwillingly by something larger a more powerful entity that uses the materials at hand, the murderess and her victims. Or perhaps her spirit is a clever one that knows how to gain sympathy; just as Lizzie herself managed to win over the jury who acquitted her of the heinous crimes. Perhaps, like all criminals, she wants us to understand and empathize with her good qualities, to see the very human woman behind the monster's mask; perhaps she wants our forgiveness so we can forget for a little while the image of the axe burying itself in her parents' flesh and bone.
I do know that the first time I visited the house, I was merely curious as I listened to our guide or looked at the replica black horsehair sofa in the sitting room where Andrew was struck 11 times in the head and face with a hatchet. Upstairs, in the guest room where earlier the same morning of August 4, 1892, Lizzie's hated stepmother, Abby was killed in a rain of 19

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