In its September 9, 1987 edition, The Atlanta Journal Constitution published a bizarre story that became known as The House That Dripped Blood.
Atlanta police had been called just after midnight by a woman who claimed that what appeared to be blood was coming from the floor of her home at 1114 Fountain Drive.
In the late 1980s, elderly couple William and Minnie Winston lived in a small private house in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Everything in their lives was calm and normal, except that William had sick kidneys and was connected to a dialysis machine every day, which he really didn’t like and why he was often confused.
Late in the evening of September 8, 1987, 77-year-old Minnie Winston took a bath, dried herself with a towel and as she prepared to leave the bathroom, she noticed a red stain on the floor.
It looked like blood, but Minnie was sure there were no wounds on her body where it could leak. And then she watched She found another red stain around the entire bathroom, this time on the wall. Red liquid slowly flowed out onto the floor.
Minnie jumped out of the bathroom and saw bloody streaks on the hallway floor, smeared on the tiles. She immediately thought that something had happened to her husband and that the blood may have leaked during dialysis. However, when she woke William, 79, there were no sources of bleeding on his body.
There was no blood on or near the dialysis machine. The frightened couple walked through all six rooms of the house and found bloody stains on the floor in almost every room. Their house was old, made of brick and very strong. They have lived there for 22 years and so far nothing special has happened in the house. They had no pets; they had never seen rats, mice or other possible vermin. They didn’t know what to do and finally decided to just go to bed.
The next morning the blood on the floor and walls had not disappeared and in fact there seemed to be more of it. So the Winstons decided to call the police. Police searched the house and indeed found “large amounts of blood” in the bathroom, kitchen, living room, bedroom, hallways and even the basement.
They found no evidence that anyone had been attacked, but they declared the Winston house a crime scene and surrounded it with yellow tape. The couple was allowed to stay in the house.
Blood samples were collected and sent to the laboratory for analysis. First of all, to determine whether it is human blood at all. The answer soon came: yes, human. Moreover, it was type zero and both Winstons had blood type A. According to Detective Steve Cartwright, who led the case, he had worked in law enforcement for more than ten years up to that point, but had never encountered such an oddity.
The police investigated the house again, but ultimately found nothing. A few days later this story reached the press and a crowd of spectators and journalists flocked to the house. And also psychics who offered their services, believing that something supernatural was involved.
Subsequently, a group of five enthusiastic skeptics was formed who decided to get to the bottom of this phenomenon at all costs. They were Joe Nickell, Larry Johnson, Rick Moen and Rebecca Long, who were later joined by Lieutenant G. Walker, who was part of the original team of investigators who looked into the case.
At one point they managed to obtain a police report from the inspection of the house, which contained color photos of bloody stains (unfortunately these photos are not available on the Internet), but no further breakthroughs occurred.
Lieutenant Walker believed that there was no poltergeist intervention (as psychics believed), and assumed that something criminal had happened in the house. He also did not rule out that the spouses could have been persuaded to cheat by promising them money or something else.
Walker then discovered that the Winstons’ daughter worked as a nurse at the hospital and had access to blood donations. According to his theory, the daughter might deliberately put on a “bloody show” to make her parents look crazy and so that they would be recognized as incompetent. Then the daughter would get their house to herself.
Walker found this version very plausible, as he found that there were long-standing serious conflicts between the Winstons and their daughter.
However, he was removed from the case long ago and the official investigation soon reached a dead end and the case was simply closed. A police spokesperson later admitted that they still did not understand where the blood came from.
