Is This A Picture Of Lizzie Borden's Ghost?

When Joanne Parent visited the Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast last year, she was probably prepared to be creeped out — after all, the house is the site of two particularly famous (and gruesome) American murders. However, what she got may have exceeded her expectations: The Maine-based artist claims that photos of the house reveal an inexplicable figure floating in a mirror, prompting the inevitable question, “Do these photos show the ghost of Lizzie Borden?” Dun dun DUN.

For those of you who are asking, “Wait, Lizzie who ?”, Lizzie Borden was a young woman suspected of killing her father and stepmother in 1892. Andrew and Abby Borden were brutally murdered with a hatchet in their home in Fall River, Massachusetts. Lizzie was tried and acquitted for the murders, but she was ostracized from local society for the rest of her life. Though she was never proven guilty of the killings, she continues to be an infamous figure today, and the house where she lived and where her parents were killed is now a B&B.

Parent told the Penobscot Bay Pilot that she went to the Borden B&B after a friend became the owner and invited her to visit. “The house is super creepy, so I took tons of photographs as we walked around. I was getting a weird vibe, like something was just wrong,” she said. She found the house so unnerving that when she came to the bedroom in which Abby Borden was killed, she wouldn’t actually enter. “I just reached my arm around the door frame and snapped a bunch of photos,” she explained. When she checked out the images of the room’s mirror and washstand a month later, she was shocked by what she saw in the mirror. “You can clearly see the outline of something, like the form of a woman wearing a hood. I showed them to my sister and her husband. I was like ‘Oh My God,’ look at this,” she recalled.

The shadowy outline in the mirror is weird enough, but Parent noticed something else that was strange about the photos: There was a black bar in the mirror that she claims appeared suddenly — she said it wasn’t there when she first posted the photos on Facebook. She asked her Facebook friends, “[N]ow a black strip has appeared in all of my mirror photos. Do you see this? Did you see there was no black strip earlier? Please respond. I’m not joking.”

B&B co-owner Lee-Ann Wilber told the Penobscot Bay Pilot that the black strip is simply a vent in the ceiling. She also had an explanation for the strange figure in the mirror, saying, “It’s an old, old mirror. People think they see stuff in it all of the time. Depending on how you’re standing, you won’t see any anomalies in the mirror unless you take the picture from an angle.” She didn’t discount the idea of mysterious goings-on at the house altogether, however. She said, “We’ve had plenty of pictures that were taken several years ago that can’t be explained, however, by a gentlemen by the name of Glenn Teza, a psychic and spiritual healing teacher from New Jersey. His photos show a mist figure and were taken with Instant Polaroid film and there is absolutely no way to mess with that film.”

Whatever the truth may be, Parent is wary of returning to the, er, scene of the crime. “I’ve been invited back to the house to paint the rooms,” she said, “but I’m not sure I want to go now.”

Image: Hohum/Wikimedia