Spooky Lizzie's - Paranormal Second Street
Things that go bump in the night, orbs, psychics at Second St.
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Rooms With a Boo
Endless Vacation travel magazine has just issued their Sept-Oct. edition with a great feature showcasing scary destinations. The Lizzie Borden B&B made the top half-dozen along with the Menger Hotel, San Antonio, Groveland Hotel, Groveland, California, Stanley Hotel, Estes Park, CO., Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, and Thornewood Castle, Lakewood, Washington. The article is written with great good humor by Jaime Gross and magnificently illustrated by Claire Louise Mallison.
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Haunted Happenings- ‘Tis the Season
Autumn comes early to New England. Already the sugar maples are beginning to show fiery-orange tips, the corn is mile-high, candy corn is filling the shelves- and #92 is booked for Halloween night. Haunted University will be returning to the Borden House on September 28 and 29 and was a soldout event in days. The urns and barn buckets at #92 are overflowing with colorful chrysanthemums as the old house gets in gear for a busy season second only to August.1892 was a year for for murderous happenings. On the other coast of the United States, at the Hotel Del Coronado, a lady using the name of Kate Morgan checked into the famous Victorian wooden hotel resort. She and her husband were professional card sharps with a scam that paid off. “Kate” now found herself expecting a child, and was worried about how her husband and lifestyle would accommodate motherhood. She purchased a gun and ammunition as she waited for her husband to arrive at the hotel, but was found brutally shot in the head a day later under mysterious circumstances. It wasn’t long before the tales of a pale woman “haunting” the premises sprang up and continue to this day.
Kate Morgan in the 1880’s Murder or Suicide?The Del Coronado is most remembered for the Marilyn Monroe film, Some Like it Hot with Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis. It is still a magnificent structure, and those who visit a certain room, swear the bizarre phenomena is generated by the ghost of the 1892 Kate Morgan. Several books have been written about the case, which remained unsolved and was thought to be a suicide. The books are available on Amazon.com and make fascinating Halloween reading. For more on the story and the historic hotel visit http://www.hoteldel.com/ and one ghosthunter’s experience in room 3312 http://www.eeeek.com/coronadoghost.html
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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.
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The Truth About Orbs
Some folks get pretty excited about these glowing little balls. Are they dust particles? Moisture droplets? Reflections from flash? Whatever they are, there always seem to be plenty of them floating around the crime scene on Second Street- both inside and outside the house. Here are a few exterior shots of the house at night,, and one photo of the Dr. Kelly house, the yellow house, next door where Lizzie’s friend Alice Russell once lived and where another Borden once threw herself and her children down a well in the back yard.
There’s probably a perfectly good explanation for this phenomenon, but in the meantime, orbs are always good cocktail party conversation!
