‘And I’m Bob,’
The bar where the Murder House Club meets is a warm warren of low lights, private corners and dark wood. When I arrive, it’s almost empty. I scan the handful of occupied tables, but don’t see any potential Lizzies. In fact, the only woman in here is me.
‘Lizzie?’ the bartender repeats back to me, bemused. He shakes his head, as if I’ve disappointed him. Then he points over my shoulder. ‘That’s them, there.’
I turn to look.
Four middle-aged men are gathered around a table in the furthest corner. They could be taxi drivers on a break, old school friends meeting for a catch-up, or a pub-quiz team who’ve just hit upon the idea to call themselves the Challengers.
The one directly facing me is slight, greying and wearing glasses.
To his left is a stockier man with thinning red hair and ruddy cheeks.
To his left, sitting with his back to me, is a bald head.
The fourth man is suspiciously tanned for this time of year – or any time of year, really, in Ireland – and his He-Man-esque, ice-blond bob is only exacerbating it.
Three pints of Guinness and a glass of red wine sit on the table, as well as a thick, three-ring binder and what looks like a little plastic doll in a black dress.
When I get close, I see that the doll is actually one of those bobblehead things – and that she has demonic eyes and is holding a tiny, bloody axe.
Glasses is saying, ‘… drone footage, but unfortunately nothing from the ground.’
‘Er, hi.’ The group looks up at me in unison, slack-jawed. ‘Is this the, uh …?’ I can’t bring myself to say The Murder House Club. ‘I’m looking for Lizzie?’
No response.
‘I hope I’m in the right place,’ I say to the guy with glasses because his face seems the kindest, the most open. ‘Because I need your help.’
Help, finally, unlocks something.
Kindest Face jumps up and says, ‘Yes, yes! Welcome, welcome. Here, have a seat.’ He grabs a chair from a neighbouring table and introduces the others as Mikey (Red Hair), Richard (He-Man) and Steve (Bald).
‘And I’m Bob,’ he says. ‘Pleasure to meet you.’
Steve is the only one who doesn’t react in any way. He doesn’t say hi or smile like the others. He just stares.
‘I’m Eleanor,’ I say, sitting down. ‘Is it OK, just showing up like this? I found you on Facebook and it said—’
‘New members are always welcome,’ Bob says cheerfully.
‘Especially ladies,’ Richard adds with a lecherous wink and I smile tightly while wishing upon him a future of erectile dysfunction.
He’s wearing a chunky, tacky gold chain around his neck; I bet the top buttons of his shirt are undone just so you can see it.
Tufts of wiry grey chest hair are trapped in its links.
I turn back to Bob just as he says, ‘I’m glad the name didn’t put you off.’
Richard rolls his eyes. ‘Not this again.’
‘I would have preferred something more along the lines of the Alternative Historical Society.’
‘But the Murder House Club does exactly what it says on the tin.’
‘And, ah, what is it you do?’ I ask. ‘Exactly?’
‘Our goal is to tell the stories of these places,’ Bob says.
‘The full stories. We want to remember what everyone else would rather forget. And we’re also interested in whether or not the places themselves remember.
If that’s even possible.’ He gestures to the binder in front of him. ‘The dream is to publish a book.’
‘And Lizzie?’
‘Lizzie Borden.’ Bob points at the axe-wielding bobblehead. ‘Killed her father and stepmother in eighteen ninety-two in Fall River, Massachusetts. Allegedly. The house where it happened is a bed-and-breakfast now. Mikey’s stayed there. That’s where he got her.’
‘Why did you come?’ Steve says. ‘Help with what?’
He manages to make both questions sound like accusations, and I worry that’s because he already knows the answers.
The real ones, not the lies I’m about to tell.
The caption underneath the photo of my house on their Facebook group read, 1 Delaney Row, off Dundrum’s Main Street, Dublin 14.
On the market for the first time in almost a decade with Harrington Properties, €449,000.
But buyer beware: various tragedies have befallen a string of previous owners going all the way back to 1968, including a disappearance, a possible murder and a bitter family feud.
Bad vibes or just bad luck? Hoping to get inside to have a look!
Deirdre, seeing my face, had tried to reassure me that it was all gossip and rumour, but even with the stain, I wasn’t overly concerned about what had or hadn’t happened in my home.
What horrified me was that, because of this, strangers from the internet were actively trying to get inside it.
That the place in which I’d hoped I could hide was actually a morbid tourist attraction.
That I didn’t just have to worry about drawing attention to myself, but the attention my new home was attracting without my doing anything.
I’m not here to find out more about my house. I want to know more about the people who want to find out more about it.
Specifically, if they’ve been coming round and letting themselves in.
‘I just bought a house,’ I say, ‘and one of the neighbours said something weird to me. Maybe I’m being paranoid, but … Well, I don’t know. I can’t find anything online, but I did find your group, so—’
‘Where’s the house?’ Mikey asks.
In hindsight, it’s the obvious question, but one I stupidly didn’t think to prepare an answer to. I can’t tell them the truth. Thanks to Deirdre’s lesson on national databases, I now know that anyone who knows where I live can pretty easily find my name.
My real one.
And once they have it, it’s surely only a few steps before they find out the rest.
‘Don’t worry about that for now,’ Bob says, recognizing my hesitation. ‘I wouldn’t want to give my home address to these guys either.’ He smiles and I smile back, grateful for the rescue. ‘Do you think this thing is recent or …?’
‘Honestly, I don’t know.’
‘How old’s the house?’
‘Oh, old. Over a hundred years.’
‘And you googled the address?’
‘Yes, but I didn’t find anything.’
‘All a search engine can do is match what you’re looking for with what’s out there, and reports and articles about these things don’t always include the house number. Just a street, typically, or even sometimes a general area. That’s why we recommend reverse image searches.’
I nod like I know what those are.
‘Last year,’ Mikey starts, ‘we saw this house come up for sale for the fifth time in fifteen years. That usually means there’s a problem – the kind of problem we like.
So we checked planning applications, asked about the neighbours, did our usual searches in various news archives …
Nothing. Then Richard here had a brainwave. ’
Richard grins.
‘He gets the main photo from the estate agency’s listing and runs it through Google. What it does, you see, is search for similar images, not necessarily exact matches. And up comes a picture of the house with crime-scene tape and Garda cars parked outside.’
‘A murder-suicide,’ Richard says, eyes gleaming. ‘Man killed his wife and two children before turning the knife on himself. Irish Times archive, digitized long after the fact, because there was no online paper in nineteen ninety-four.’
‘Oh,’ I say.
‘There was no house number mentioned in the article,’ Bob says. ‘Only the name of the road, which was a few miles long and had over a hundred homes on it. We might never have found it with just the address, but a reverse image search found it right away. So you could try that.’
I say I will.
‘And neighbours,’ Mikey adds. ‘They’re great for information, especially if they’ve been living there a long time. LOLs are the best.’ He waits for me to ask what these are and, when I don’t, tells me anyway. ‘Little Old Ladies.’
This makes me think of Annalise, who I’m convinced has a picture on her phone of me standing outside my house yesterday, talking to two uniformed Gardaí.
The question is: what is she planning on doing with it?
I’ve been checking the Dundrummed group chat incessantly, but it’s just been complaints about bike lanes and talk of some kind of community get-together on Thursday evening.
‘What about, like …’ I have to be careful how I word this.
I want to try to get them to start talking about my house without my having to bring it up.
I wonder if they already know about the stain, if that’s why they would’ve been trying to get inside, to look for it.
‘Could there be something inside the house that I could look for? Like, evidence?’
Bob frowns. ‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, I don’t know …’ But then I think, Fuck it. I’ll be here all night if I can’t move this along. ‘Maybe like a stain?’
There’s an exchange of meaningful glances and I worry that didn’t sound at all as casual as I was aiming for. I look from face to face, skipping Steve. I brace for an accusation, or maybe even an outing. Maybe they know exactly who I am and why I’m here, and they’ve just been toying with me.
The silence we’re sitting in starts to thicken with tension.
But then Mikey grins.
‘A stain?’ he says. ‘Like, in the shape of a person?’
‘Or maybe a chalk outline,’ Richard says, laughing. ‘Bit of crime-scene tape?’
‘Sorry,’ Bob says to me, ‘but we never trust stains. The real ones don’t look like anything, so if you find one that looks like something … Well, it’s a little suspicious. It might even have been staged.’
‘Staged?’ I repeat. ‘By who? And for what?’
‘Jokers, for the most part. It started in the US. People selling their house, they draw or paint some stain under the carpet, put it online – Reddit, TikTok, wherever – and hope that the new owners find it and get the fright of their life. Sometimes they even leave markings, notes and measurements, written alongside the stain, as if a full crime-scene team has been and gone.’
‘There’s an easy way to check, though,’ Mikey says. ‘Get some sodium hypochlorite, pour a little on, wait, see if it bubbles.’