Human blood on the floors and walls

In its September 9, 1987 issue, the Atlanta Journal Constitution published a bizarre story that became known as The House That Dripped Blood.

Atlanta police were called just after midnight by a woman who reported what appeared to be blood coming from the floor of her home at 1114 Fountain Drive.

In the behind schedule 1980s, elderly couple William and Minnie Winston lived in a petite private home in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Everything in their life was peaceful and normal, except that William had kidney problems and was connected to a dialysis machine every day, which he greatly disliked and was therefore often in a bad mood.

Late on the evening of September 8, 1987, 77-year-old Minnie Winston took a bath, dried herself with a towel, and as she was getting ready 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 from which it could leak. And when she looked around the bathroom, she found another red stain, this time on the wall. The red liquid slowly flowed from it onto the floor.

Minnie jumped out of the bathroom and saw bloody streaks on the floor in the hall, smeared on the tiles. She immediately thought that something had happened to her husband and that blood might have been leaking during dialysis. However, when she woke up 79-year-old William, there were no sources of bleeding on his body.

There was no blood on or near the dialysis machine. The frightened couple went through all six rooms in the house and found bloody stains on the floor in almost all of them. Their house was ancient, brick and very mighty. They have lived there for 22 years and so far nothing unusual has happened in the house. They had no animals; they never saw rats, mice or other possible pests. They didn't know what to do and finally decided to just go to sleep.

The next morning the blood on the floor and walls had not disappeared, in fact there seemed to be more of it. So the Winstons decided to call the police. Police searched the house and did find “copious 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 home a crime scene and marked it with yellow tape. The wife was allowed to stay at home.

Blood samples were taken and sent to the laboratory for analysis. Mainly to determine whether it is human blood at all. Soon the answer came back, yes, man. Moreover, it was type zero, and both Winstons had blood type A. According to detective Steve Cartwright, who led the case, he had been working in the police for over 10 years, but had never encountered such an oddity.

Police searched the house again but ultimately found nothing more. A few days later, the story hit the press, and a crowd of onlookers and journalists gathered outside the house. And also fortune tellers who offered their services, believing that something supernatural was involved.

A group of five enthusiastic skeptics was then formed who decided to get to the bottom of this phenomenon at all costs. These were Joe Nickell, Larry Johnson, Rick Moen and Rebecca Long, who were later joined by Lt. G. Walker, who was part of the original investigative team on 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 there were no further breakthroughs.

Lieutenant Walker believed that there was no poltergeist intervention (as the psychics believed) and assumed that something criminal had occurred in the house. He also did not rule out that the spouses could be induced to commit fraud by promising them money or something else.

Walker then discovered that the Winstons' daughter worked at the hospital as a nurse and had access to blood donors. According to his theory, the daughter may have deliberately staged a “bloody show” to expose her parents as crazy and incompetent. Then the daughter will get the house herself.

Walker considered this version to be very probable, as he learned that there had been a solemn conflict between the Winstons and their daughter for a long time.

However, he had long been removed from the case, and the official investigation quickly reached a dead end and the case was simply closed. A police spokesman later admitted he still didn't understand where the blood came from.