So," Tim says, raising an eyebrow archly as he munches a slice of pizza. "You’re stayin’ in the room where it all happened, huh? I hope we don’t have to write an article about you after tonight!"

My girlfriend, Camille, and I have signed on to slumber in an enormous, ornate bed, next to the spot where a corpulent housewife, chopped up with a hatchet, had once fallen dead with a screamless thud. But what’s to be afraid of? At the Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast in Fall River, we’ll sleep in the very room where, 110 years ago, a nursery rhyme was born.

Lizzie Borden took an ax

And gave her mother 40 whacks.

When she saw what she had done,

She gave her father 41.

Abigail Durfee Borden was actually Lizzie Borden’s stepmother. And the number of whacks she received in the upstairs room at 92 Second Street that muggy morning of August 4, 1892, was not 40, but 19. Lizzie’s father, Andrew, who was snoozing on a sofa in the downstairs sitting room, was the beneficiary of 11 ax whacks, which effectively removed the left side of his face. With the initial blow, his eyeball was sliced in half; a subsequent stroke deprived him of his nose. Autopsies for Abby and Andrew were conducted in the dining room and the sitting room, respectively. A double funeral was also held in the house. Open caskets.

The biggest inaccuracy in that little rhyme, of course, is that Lizzie did it. She didn’t — at least, not in the eyes of the law. For various reasons — mainly a baffling dearth of physical evidence and an investigation and trial that were object lessons in incompetence and conflict of interest — Lizzie was acquitted. She subsequently lived in Fall River as a pariah until her death at age 67. Although limitless alternative theories of who committed the crime, with what, and why have been formulated since, many people think Lizzie got away with murder. The case, destined to remain an eternal enigma, has kept legions of Bordenites enthralled for over a century. As I’m told more than once during my stay at the bed and breakfast, Lizzie is America’s Jack the Ripper, and her trial was the O.J. fiasco of the 19th century. The Lizzie Borden B&B exists for those who obsess over this gruesome, but somehow campy, homicide. It’s for people who want to get close — real close — to where it all went down.

92 Second Street looks nondescript enough. A modest, two-and-a-half-story, drab-beige Greek-revival house just across the street from a slightly seedy bus station, it could be easily passed by unremarked but for a small sign advertising its infamy. After her acquittal, Lizzie moved back here for a short while before using her ample inheritance (the receipt of which many view as her motive) to take up residence on The Hill, Fall River’s tony residential neighborhood. The house on Second Street was a private residence until 1996, at which time owner Martha McGinn, perhaps realizing her property’s lucrative potential, decided to open it as a B&B and museum.

The response was immediate. "There were people waiting for years for this to happen," says Dave Quigley, the B&B’s deadpan, white-haired night manager and breakfast chef. Reservation books were soon filled, and to this day staying there on the murders’ anniversary requires booking more than a year in advance. The media were also quick to descend. Unsolved Mysteries filmed a segment here. Recently, the Chicago cast of MTV’s The Real World dropped by. The "Phantom Gourmet" gives the house’s breakfast — a meal that includes johnnycakes, sugar cookies, and bananas, the last food the Borden parents ate before they were dispatched from this mortal coil — his highest rating. The Travel Channel named the Borden Bed & Breakfast the number-one Creepiest Destination in the World, creepier, even, than intrastate rival Salem (number four).

That’s probably a bit much. (It certainly is to Quigley, a die-hard skeptic. "This is just a house," he says. "I still can’t believe that list. Ridiculous.") But, haunted or not, there is an unshakable aura of discomfiting weirdness about the place. Apart from the fact that two people were viciously murdered here, the feeling of uneasiness comes from the house’s gaudy, sickly sweet Victorian frippery: the clashing florid designs on the carpets and wallpaper, the ghostly old photographs of unsmiling bluebloods whose eyes (of course) seem to follow your movements, the palpable heaviness in the air.

Built in 1845, the house retains many of its original features: the door jambs, doorknobs, and radiators are all the same ones Lizzie herself once touched. And efforts have been made to render the place as it was in 1892, with replica furniture placed exactly where the originals once stood. But if the house takes historical precision seriously, it’s also not above a little cheek. Walking down the stairs, I notice a sign on a low overhang: CAUTION! WATCH YOUR HEAD! THERE HAVE ALREADY BEEN TWO FATAL HEAD INJURIES IN THIS HOUSE!

Despite the efforts at humor, the John Morse guest room (named for the visiting uncle who slept there less than 12 hours after the murders), where we will be bedding down, still manages to unsettle. It’s smallish, with garish floral wallpaper and even more garish floral carpeting. Paintings that once adorned the walls have been replaced with crime-scene photos of Abby’s corpse, inescapable memento mori of what transpired in this room.

It was between the bureau and bed that Abby Borden was felled. Since the space between them is only about three feet, and since two autopsies found that the first blow was fatal, the attacker had to straddle Abby’s supine bulk to rain down those 18 superfluous hacks. Stop for a moment. Count to 18. Takes a while, yes? Some vicious vibes once suffused the stultified air in this room.

As gruesome as the case is, Shelley Dziedzic, the B&B’s innkeeper and tour guide, loves its fabulous kitsch factor. She’s a genial, flouncy woman, outfitted in a flowing black dress with her hair pulled up in prim Victorian fashion. Though her true idée fixe is the Titanic disaster, she’s pored over the Borden story for more than a decade.

"I was one of those people who waited 10 years to get in here," she says as she drives to the Oak Grove Cemetery plot where the Borden clan is buried, and where she plans to have her own ashes sprinkled. "I saw the Elizabeth Montgomery movie [1975’s The Legend of Lizzie Borden] and was at the house the next day. I had a Lizzie tizzy."

She belongs to a club called the Second Street Irregulars, a cadre of similarly obsessed souls who convene to discuss the case, think up new theories, perform re-enactments, and give talks about Lizzie to civic groups and schools. ("Kids just love it," she says. "They’re thrilled with the idea of killing their parents.")

Dziedzic is given to little slips of the tongue that betray her obsession with the Borden case. She laments that most of the footage shot for The Real World wound up being "axed." As she poses for a photo on the couch where Andrew Borden met his maker, she protests that she only has a good right profile — just like Andrew did after that fateful catnap. From her key chain dangles a miniature hatchet.

And she looks the part. "I get to be Lizzie every August 4," Dziedzic says with a devilish grin. "Every year, on goes the corset, the hair gets red, all the gray gets covered, it’s a lot of fun. But after being Lizzie for so long," her voice drops ominously, "you begin to think you are Lizzie."

So as she shows Camille and me to our bedroom, it’s a little startling when she confesses, "I’ve never been able to sleep there. My first night here I was in the Morse room. I never went to sleep. One eye was open, waiting for that bloody head to pop up. I left the door open, with a light on in the hall and a light on in the bedroom. But once, I looked over at the dress in the corner, and the sleeve," she sways her hand gently, "was going like this. My heart stopped. My life flashed before my eyes. There was a woman staying in the room next door. I knocked and said, ‘Can I sleep with you?’ I didn’t even know her."

Terrific, I think. If an avowed Bordenite can’t even muster the gumption to spend a night here, what hope is there for us? But I try to reassure myself. It’s been more than 100 years since those murders. Innumerable people — tourists, camera crews, guests — have trooped through to gawk at the empty spot next to that bed. Besides, I tell myself, I live in an apartment that’s more than a century old. Who knows what may once have taken place in my own bedroom?

Then Dziedzic lets it drop that, for some reason, this room is always colder than the rest of the house. I shiver involuntarily. A glance at the floor where Abby once lay makes my knees go rubbery.