At the very least, we’ll have a houseful of other guests to keep us company. And they’re a big reason why I came. What kind of person wants to, pays to, sleep in a house that’s been host to two sensationally gory murders? I’m expecting morbid goth freaks, comic-book geeks, or video-game-crazy violence fetishists. My preconceptions prove wrong. It’s a fairly normal-seeming bunch. Tim and his wife, Angela, a couple from Nashua, New Hampshire, are clean-cut and look to be in their early 30s. Michael, who works the night shift in a prison, has tattoos peeking from beneath a tight black T-shirt; he and his girlfriend, Lynn, are from New Bedford. Liz and Michelle are two pretty, blond recent graduates of Brockton High School. Shelley, Mike, Heather, and John, two sets of couples, drove down from Derry, New Hampshire, for the night.

But why? Sitting on a divan in the froufrou front parlor, I ask around.

"We were just talking about it one day in the cafeteria," says the aptly named Liz (she’ll be sleeping in Lizzie’s old bedroom tonight). "Other people at the table weren’t interested, but Michelle was. We just found it online and made reservations."

"I wanna get haunted," chirps Michelle. "It’s not worth coming if you don’t get haunted."

Tim didn’t know much about the case but wanted to learn more. "It intrigues me," he says, as staccato violins shriek and crime-scene photos from Unsolved Mysteries flash across the parlor’s TV. "I wanted to come see what it’s all about."

John, on the other hand, couldn’t care less. Later, outside, I ask what brought him here. "Her," he says, dragging lazily on a cigarette as he points to Heather. "I worked all week. I didn’t know nothin’ about this till today. Lizzie who?"

Shelley, sporting kohl eyes and moussed black hair, is the closest thing here to a goth, and that’s not very close.

"I saw this place on the Travel Channel. A couple stayed here, and I guess their mattress flipped over or somethin’? They ran outta here."

That supernatural sleepover prank purportedly took place in the room where we’ll be sleeping. Despite the number of people who profess to be here hoping for a haunting, everyone seems more than okay with not sleeping in "the murder room."

"We’ve had a lot of different types of people come," Dziedzic says, explaining the inn’s clientele. "Goths love Lizzie. They come in their black clothes and their piercings. The punks love her. There was a heavy-metal band called Lizzie Borden a while back. We have doctors, attorneys. A lot of law enforcement."

One couple got engaged at the Borden B&B. Another got married. Quigley tells me about a guy from Queens who slept on the floor, in the very spot where Abby’s body was found. He’s stayed here 38 times.

THE SKY’S orange-purple glow, glimpsed through the parlor’s lace curtains, begins to fade to black. The house is suddenly significantly creepier.

Earlier — with the help of infinitely knowledgeable Fall River denizen Len Rebello, author of Lizzie Borden, Past and Present (AL-Zach Press, 1999) — Dziedzic had led us on a walking tour of Fall River. Now, we take a scarifying tour of the house itself, beginning with the attic, where the Borden’s maid, Bridget Sullivan, kept her room (and where blood-like streams of liquefied creosote seep through walls). We conclude in the basement, where on the night of the murders a policeman glimpsed Lizzie, silent and still, clutching a gas lamp and staring at the pile of bloodied clothes cut from her parents’ corpses.

As the tour ends, Dziedzic chillingly re-enacts Abby’s murder. Telling us to stay downstairs, she ascends to the room where Camille and I will soon try to sleep. As we listen, she acts out the frantic jostling and blood-curdling hue and cry that might have preceded Abby’s death throes. The purpose of this exercise is to see if anyone could have heard the murder. Oddly, the only thing audible is the parlor door rattling ever so lightly.

A minute later, Rebello leads the group upstairs, telling us to pause on the creaky seventh step — the spot where Bridget Sullivan first glimpsed Abby Borden’s lifeless body. One by one, we file upstairs. And one by one, our hearts seize for a moment as we stare between the balusters, through the door, and under the bed, where Dziedzic’s body is stretched motionless across the floor.

Later, as we sit in the very parlor where Andrew Borden had his face chopped off, an antique clock breaks the silence, striking midnight with 12 low-pitched chimes. We erupt in peals of nervous laughter.

"We should do the Ouija board!" says Liz. "Right where the autopsies were!"

Of course a Ouija board is provided gratis by the management. (They also have a Magic 8-Ball squirreled away in a closet; try as I might, I can’t make it say, "Ax again later.")

"Should we do it in Lizzie’s room, or the room where she died?" asks Michelle.

"The basement!" someone says.

"Nooooooo!!!" says everyone else.

"The room where she died" it is. Sitting in the very spot, Liz and Lynn set to work communing with the other side.

"Did Lizzie commit the murders?" Liz asks tremulously. "Did Lizzie commit the murders? Did Lizzie commit the murders? Won’t answer me."

Then, apparently, the planchette creeps toward the letter Y.

"Ooooohhh myyyyy gaaaawwwwwddd!!! Herfingersaren’tonit herfingersaren’tonit herfingersaren’tonit!!!"

About this time, Camille starts to show signs of being pretty freaked out. I rib her about it, but in truth I’m feeling much the same. We’d both come to Fall River with a smirk, expecting that this would be a good laugh, maybe a jokey scare. Neither of us is quite ready for the legends we now hear about a "gray lady" staring down at the sidewalk from our bedroom window, or the sounds of children laughing and playing marbles audible in Lizzie’s bedroom after midnight, or the brush of a hand across a tour guide’s shoulder as she crosses in front of Andrew Borden’s couch, or the ghost of Abby’s black cat, allegedly beheaded by Lizzie in a fit of pique, prowling the halls, or the ghostly impression of a body that once appeared on our bedspread.

It would be easy enough to brush off these stories as apocryphal were it not for the sporadic reports of our new friends. Shelley was changing in the attic bathroom when the lights went out. Naked, she went out into the murky dark to investigate and found the switch flipped to the off position. For some reason, Michelle’s digital camera isn’t working. And when I creep upstairs alone for a roll of film, I flip on the lights of the Morse bedroom and they flash blindingly bright, with a crackle, then fade just a bit. My heart skips a beat, and I fly sheepishly downstairs.

"I hope you find something exciting on your film," I remember Dziedzic telling Camille earlier. "We’ve seen what they call orbs over the head of the sofa and upstairs above the floor where Mrs. Borden died. Curiously, people sometimes come here with new cameras and they don’t work for some reason. Once, when I posed upstairs in the position of the corpse, someone had a digital camera, and we put the pictures on a laptop so we could see them right away. The furniture came out, but not the body. That’s really the freakiest thing that has happened to me. Everything was there except the body."

At this point, Camille and I would be happy to stay awake all night. We’re certainly in no hurry to retire to that room. But, inevitably, everyone else soon tiptoes away to their corpse-free suites. Time to bite the bullet.

As soon as I close the door behind us, I feel guilty for needling Camille about being afraid. I cast a look at that stretch of florid carpet and glance at the photograph of that hulking, prostrate body. But I put on a brave face. For Camille’s sake.

We lie on that bed for hours. Each of us thinks the other is asleep. We’re both wrong. We’re also both afraid to change position, lest we roll over to see Abby Borden standing above us with a ghostly look of plaintive remonstrance, gray matter gushing from the huge flaps of skin dislodged by Lizzie’s ax. My legs are falling asleep. My left arm is falling asleep. Every part of me is falling asleep except my brain, which keeps replaying the murder, in Dolby Surround Sound and carmine Technicolor, again and again. Camille tells me later she tried to occupy herself by singing songs in her head. The tune that kept repeating itself was the Magnetic Fields’ "Chicken with Its Head Cut Off."

But as the sun rises, I do something strange: I wake up. I’d slept for an hour or so, after all. The dress is still in the corner. It’s not moving. The floor next to the bed is still empty. I tap Camille on the shoulder. "We made it."

I cast a last look at that snatch of carpet, and for a second I feel a twinge of guilt. Abby Borden may have been dumpy and ugly and, according to most reports, self-centered and mean. And a veneer of playful kitsch may have enveloped the crime in the ensuing decades. But Abby Borden was murdered. And I’d paid for the opportunity to sleep where it happened.

But enough about that. Outside it’s sunny and warm. Downstairs is redolent of Dave Quigley’s johnnycakes. I have to admit, though, that even after that almost-sleepless night, I’m a little disappointed not to have felt Andrew Borden’s bony fingers brush across my shoulder, or to have heard the eldritch mrrraow of a ghost cat. Being flipped over in my bed would have been a bit much. But the swaying dress sleeve that scared Shelley Dziedzic into a stranger’s bedroom? That I could have handled.

"Actually," says Dziedzic, "I’m pretty sure it was moving because it was in front of an air conditioner."

The Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast/Museum is located at 92 Second Street, in Fall River. Call (508) 675-7333 or visit www.lizzie-borden.com. Mike Miliard can be reached at mmiliard[a]phx.com.