You can book a night in the Lizzie Borden house

On the morning of August 4, 1892, Andrew Borden came home to his narrow frame house on Second Street in Fall River, Massachusetts, lay down on the sitting room sofa, and was killed with a hatchet. His wife Abby was already dead upstairs in the guest room. His daughter Lizzie was tried for both murders and acquitted in ninety minutes.

Nobody was ever convicted. The nursery rhyme did the rest.

What is easy to forget is that the house is small and ordinary. Two parlors, a kitchen, four bedrooms upstairs, no hallway on the second floor so the rooms open into each other. That layout became central to the trial, because it meant almost no one could move through the house unseen.

The building passed through private hands for a century. In 1996 it opened as a bed and breakfast, and it has been one ever since. You can rent the John Morse room, where Abby was found between the bed and the wall. You can sit on a reproduction of the sofa. The house serves the same breakfast the Bordens ate that last morning, which included bananas, johnnycakes and coffee, a menu the maid recited in court.

Guests report the usual inventory. Doors that unlatch. A woman's voice in an empty room. Photographs full of dust that only appears in one frame. The staff keep a logbook of it, and the logbook is genuinely more unsettling than any tour narration, because the handwriting keeps changing.

Skeptics point out that an 1845 house settles, that old plaster ticks, and that people who pay to sleep in a murder scene arrive expecting to hear something.

Either way it is fully booked most of October, and has been for years.