Lizzie Borden's Ghost

The first time Ichabod Poole saw Lizzie Borden behind bars, she was made of plaster and there was a guitar hanging over her head.

This was the old district courthouse on Court Street in Taunton, in the years when it was an arts center and you could climb the stairs, buy a beer, and watch a band in the room where men used to get thirty days for public drunkenness. At the back of the floor somebody had set an old iron jail door into the wall, and behind the bars stood a life-sized figure of Lizzie in a long dark dress with her hands folded. On the wall behind her hung a guitar shaped like a hatchet, painted red where the blade would be.

A customer had made the guitar and given it to the building. Lizzie had been there first. The guitar found her.

Everybody looking for Lizzie Borden goes to the house on Second Street. They stay the night, they hear things, and that house has every reason for all of it.

This book goes everywhere else.

Inside:

• The ten days she spent in the police matron's room in Fall River, because there was no proper cell for a woman of her standing, and what the matron overheard through a door four feet from the couch
• Ten months in the Taunton jail, the keeper's wife who brought her hot dinners, the letters, and the two women the book is dedicated to
• The courthouse on Court Street: the building that moved, what the bands and the bartenders and the sound man saw, the medium who came through, and the closing night in August 2025 when the director walked the dark building alone and went to the jail door last
• Ash Street, County Street, Gardner's Neck, and the pail
• Lizbeth: the new name, Providence in 1897, Nance O'Neil, the night boat, and Oak Grove
• The crowd the streaming show brought, every place in the country that claims her, and a night on Court Street
• A visitor's guide, a full timeline, and sources