Your
True Tales
February 2005 – Page
26
Emmy
Borden's Ghost
by Alfred Travieso
On Friday, June 13, 1997, I got invited and attended a special séance at the Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast Museum by Martha McGinn, owner of the inn, located in Fall River, Massachusetts. On that night, a psychic was going to be filming a documentary and at the same time conducting a séance. The Philadelphia Inquirer, a newspaper from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania was going to be there to cover the exclusive event. I was working for a local radio station and covered the opening of the Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast Museum before, so they invited me to cover this event as well (I was the only New England media that was invited to cover this exclusive event). Just in case you didn't know:
Lizzie Borden took an ax, And gave her mother 40 whacks.
When she saw what she had done, She gave her father 41.
Lizzie was the Fall River, Massachusetts's girl that was acquitted of murdering her father, Andrew J. Borden, and her stepmother, Abby. Besides covering the event, Terrie and I were spending the night there as well. When we started, there were 13 of us joined hand-in-hand, eyes closed and seated in a séance circle, it was a weird cool feeling and the lady hosting it Jane Doherty of South Plainfield, New Jersey, sat right across from me and asked me if I had lost a family member recently. I said "yes" and she said that my mom wants me to stop paying money for repairs on my car and to put it toward a new truck! Which is what my mom and I always use to talk about. Well by now you could tell how I felt.
When the séance was all set and done, everyone invited just hung around and talked to one another. I notice that we were all hanging out together; nobody wanted to be left alone. When it was time for bed, Terrie and I had Emma's bedroom (Lizzie's sister). I had taken my portable audiocassette recorder and placed it on the nightstand to the right of the bed between the bed and the wall. I remember Terrie and I lying down about 5:00 a.m., when it was starting to get light out. I pressed record on my recorder and tried to get some sleep.
In the morning, we had breakfast and went off to the cemetery to see the graves. What happened the next day was unexplainable! I listened to the audio tape that I recorded the morning before on my way to and from work, at first you hear Terrie and I talking, then silence, then the silence turned to me snoring, I heard plenty of that, then about 35 minutes into a 45-minute tape I heard what gave me the creeps and made me rewind it over and over again to make sure I heard what I heard!
You hear my snoring then as I'm snoring you hear a female voice giggling. I played that audio tape on the air at two different radio stations and it definitely gave everyone the creeps. I called Jane Doherty at home and told her what I have recorded that night. She wanted me to send her a copy as soon as possible. After she heard the tape and after a little research, she called me and told me that what I had heard and what I recorded was the laugh of Emma Borden, and that she could not explain why she was laughing! It was Emma's bedroom that Terrie and I had slept in that night!
I recently talked to Jane who told me she has used my tape on her radio show, in her documentary video, book and at her college lectures (Rutgers University in New Jersey). If you're wondering if I believe in ghost: Hell, yeah!
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