There’s something about that cellar

 Who cannot recall the feeling of dread as a child of being sent into the dark cellar alone?  Basements and cellars are by nature, dim, cobwebby, secretive sorts of spaces.  Many visitors to the house on Second Street are reluctant to venture alone late at night into the clammy cellar where once Bridget Sullivan led police to find hatchets and axes.  Lizzie herself made two trips down to the cellar on the night of the murders- once with friend Alice Russell who tagged along with a lamp, and once again fifteen minutes later while Alice was occupied with her door closed. With the bloodied clothing of the Bordens in a pile on the floor in front of the chimney, bits of brain and skull in the reeking folds, it must have been a grisly sight and smell.  The floor in the old laundry room was brick, but the rest of the cellar was packed earth.  The walls of the old water closet can still be made out on the ceiling where broken board and large nails mark out the dimensions.

Beneath the head of the sofa upstairs, Luminol still brings up latent bloodstains in the floorboards in the cellar. An eerie face resembling Andrew Borden glares mysteriously through the whitewashed walls over the wash cauldron in the chimney in the old washroom.  But most intriguing of all is a false brick wall in the southwestern most corner of the cellar, where a gap of six inches is formed between the brick and the outer granite block foundation- a convenient place to drop or conceal  something with the easy removal of a loose brick.  These are the walls which if they could only talk- could reveal a great deal about this dark mystery.