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Lizzie Borden Took An Axe...

Lizzie Borden as pictured in The Guardian, 1890, and the sign hanging outside the Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast on 2nd Street in Fall River, Mass., in 2018.
Public Domain / Davis Dunavin
Lizzie Borden as pictured in The Guardian, 1890, and the sign hanging outside the Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast on 2nd Street in Fall River, Mass., earlier this month.

One of the most notorious crimes in American history was memorialized in a grisly playground chant — Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks. And when she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one. The Borden family home, the scene of the crime in 1892, is now a bed and breakfast — not for the faint of heart — in Fall River, Massachusetts.

Warning: This is the Halloween episode of Off the Path, and we’re getting into some grisly and macabre American history. You might want to skip this one  but we hope you don’t.

Davis Dunavin loves telling stories, whether on the radio or around the campfire. He started in Missouri and ended up in Connecticut, which, he'd like to point out, is the same geographic trajectory taken by Mark Twain.