How Did I Grow Up on the SouthCoast and Not Know Lizzie Borden?

Yes, I grew up here on the SouthCoast. I graduated from New Bedford High in 2003. I'm pretty sure I got a great education. I even got my degree from Johnson & Wales University in Providence.

Yet with all that schooling in the area, somehow I missed the history lesson on Lizzie Borden.

To be honest, I have heard the name numerous times in my travels. Heck, I even heard about Lizzie when I lived in Denver. But I never really took the time to know the story or where it originated -- until I got schooled by everyone here at the Fun 107 studios.

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While they may have given me a quick rundown of the story -- 32-year-old Lizzie was accused and later acquitted of murdering her father and stepmother with a hatchet in 1892 -- I still feel like I need to go and experience everything Lizzie for myself.

The Second Street museum, restored to look the way it did 130 years ago, has been open for overnight stays since the 1990s. Maybe I should be required to visit. Or sleep there.

If it's haunted, as many people say it is, the ghosts may want to teach me about the case.

I don’t think it's an absolute coincidence that I was just at Stumpy's Hatchet House a few weeks ago, throwing hatchets. Is Lizzie trying to tell me something?

Does anyone else find it interesting that the most famous story out of Fall River is the story of an unsolved double murder? Yet, in all my travels, no one has ever mentioned the city in which it happened, just the state.

It turns out Lizzie was my neighbor all along.

Have you ever told someone you are from Fall River and they immediately say, “Oh, yeah, that's where Lizzie Borden 'took an ax?'”

I may have missed out on the Lizzie Borden story, but now I'm going to take a whack at learning everything I can about her -- starting with a tour of the murder house and then Lizzie's other home, Maplecroft, which she purchased following her acquittal in 1893 and lived in for the rest of her life.