In 1987 Minnie and William Winston had been married forty-four years. For the previous twenty-two years they had rented a six room, red brick home at the corner of Fountain Drive and Morris Street in southwest Atlanta. It was just before midnight on September 8 when Minnie, 77, stepped out of the shower and found the bathroom floor covered with splotches of blood. Mrs. Winston immediately woke her 79-year-old husband, saying, "Come look at all this red stuff coming out of the floor." Spots of blood, ranging in size from a dime to a silver dollar, were found on the floor and lower walls in the bathroom, bedroom, kitchen, basement, and every hall. The substance was also located under a television and in narrow, nearly inaccessible crawl spaces in the basement.
Homicide Detective Steve Cartwright agreed, said that in his ten years of service, "I've never seen anything like this." He called it "an extremely strange situation.""I'm guessing it was an animal," stated Homicide Detective Richard Price. "Hope that's all it was," but it wasn't. The couple had no pets, and there were no rodents in the house.Police were not terribly concerned because William, retired from the National Screen Service Company, was often in bed attached to a dialysis machine, which cleanses the blood of people suffering from kidney failure.However, Mr. Winston seemed to reject his blood as the solution to the mystery, saying, "I don't know what the stuff is.
"The "bleeding house" immediately captured the fancy of Atlanta, drawing crowds from across the metro area. Prying visitors became such a problem that police declared the house a crime scene to prohibit inquiring minds from trespassing.
By September 11 it was known that the blood type of the house was O, and William and Minnie's was A. No matchAtlanta homicide detectives grew frustrated as their work progressed.
"We will continue a routine investigation," stated Homicide Commander Lieutenant Horace Walker, "and if we find that no crime was committed, we're through with it."Detective Price stated, "We're still trying to figure out where the blood came from...we plan to check with the State Crime Lab today about other possibilities."
Police handling of the bloody evidence had come under criticism from the lab. Believing an animal might have deposited the splotches, police had sent fresh samples to Grady Memorial Hospital to determine if it was human or animal blood. Only then, thirteen hours after Mrs. Winston called police, was the State Crime Lab notified.Crime Lab Director Larry Howard stated that they could have learned much more-sex, race, traces of drugs or alcohol-more easily from fresh blood.The only semi-relevant fact discovered by the Crime lab was that it "looked like the blood was projected out of something or shaken off something."
As the police investigation continued, public and media interest intensified. The offices of the Atlanta Journal Constitution, radio and television stations, and the police department were flooded with inquiries from across the Atlanta area and as far away as California and New York."Are the walls of that house really bleeding?" people generally asked. "We were swamped with calls," admitted police spokesman Charles Cook. "This place was a madhouse. Some people wanted to know if the radio stations were joking.""We get lots and lots of calls," an employee of radio station WVEE said. "Several were from psychics saying they could get the blood out of the house." .
The Winston's found themselves besieged in their home by throngs of curious spectators. "The phone rang all night," Mrs. Winston stated on September 10. "I'm fed up with it." Further, she said, "I'm tired of all these people asking me questions." Mrs. Winston declared that she did not want to have anything to do with the controversy. "People are coming out here to see it and troubling us." She was getting little sleep.The passage of another day left the Winston's even testier than before. From inside the house Winnie was heard to shout, "What they've said about all this is lies. Just leave us alone." From the bedroom William yelled, "There's no blood in this house. Now get away from here."One intrepid reporter who gained entrance found spots of blood on the floor and lower walls of the living room, and a quarter sized splotch on the back door. These paranormal mysteries usually just slowly fade away and such was the case with Atlanta's bleeding house.
The Homicide Bureau and the State Crime Lab never identified the source of the blood nor did they detect any indication of a hoax or crime. "It troubles me that we don't have any answer," Crime Lab Director Howard summed up. Law enforcement personnel were disappointed by their lack of results in the investigation, but the supernatural does not tend to stick around for scientific analysis. With the next bloody slaying in Atlanta the bleeding house was forgotten.
When the House of Blood story originally hit the news, it created
quite a sensation. An article in the _Atlanta Journal-
Constitution_ on September 9, 1987, stated that Mrs. Winston had
discovered blood "coming out of the floors". Another
contemporaneous news report described this blood as spewing like a
fountain. These descriptions, plus news reports that the police
had ruled out the possibility of wrongdoing, caused many people to
assume that supernatural forces must certainly be involved.
Credulous inquiries about the house with the bleeding walls soon
flooded local radio and television stations, as well as the offices
of the Atlanta newspapers. Psychics even called to offer their
assistance in ridding the house of blood. It wasn't long before
the Winstons grew weary of all the publicity and commotion.
To investigate the bleeding walls story, several skeptics went to
the Atlanta Police Department's Homicide Division to obtain more
information. Dr. Joe Nickell, Larry Johnson, Rick Moen, and I
discussed the case with Lt. H. Walker, who led the original
investigation. We reviewed the actual police files, including
color photographs of the scene which showed what appeared to be
blood in various rooms of the Winston home. I subsequently
obtained copies of several of the photographs through the Open
Records Act.
Our discussions with Lt. Walker and our review of the police
records confirmed that the substance was human blood, it was indeed
type O whereas the Winstons were type A, and the police did rule
out the possibility of any violent crime. However, Lt. Walker
definitely did not subscribe to the poltergeist theory. It was his
professional opinion that someone had deliberately splattered the
blood around the house as a hoax.
According to Lt. Walker, family problems apparently existed which
gave either the Winstons or their children a possible motive for
perpetrating such a hoax. The Winstons conceivably had access to
human blood because Mr. Winston was a kidney dialysis patient,
leading some people to suggest that one or both of the Winstons
might have hoaxed the blood in order to get more attention from
their children. However, Lt. Walker stated that the Winstons'
daughter worked in a hospital and also had access to human blood.
Therefore it has also been hypothesized that the Winstons' children
could have hoaxed the blood in order to have their parents legally
declared incompetent for financial reasons. Because there had been
no homicide, and to spare the Winston family possible additional
embarrassment, the Atlanta Police opted not to further pursue the
investigation.
Ironically, I had the opportunity to investigate another potential
"Atlanta House of Blood" when I awoke one morning to find dozens of
blood-red droplets running down the wall of my bedroom. Following
a split-second of irrationality, during which I imagined some
gruesome massacre of attic-dwelling rodents, I investigated the
"blood" more closely. Unlike actual blood, which turns black after
it has dried, this substance remained a deep orange-red. Later, a
quick trip to my attic by Joe Nickell revealed that my bleeding
walls were actually caused by resin from the rafters. The miracle
has since repeated itself on every hot summer day that I don't run
the air conditioning.
The coincidental and amusing occurrence of my own "bleeding walls"
did provide some useful information. It gave me an opportunity to
compare the blood patterns in the Winstons' home to the pattern
made by a liquid which actually did come from inside a wall. The
"blood" in my bedroom emerged through the paint on the wall,
approximately eight inches below the ceiling, and left streaks
about a foot long as it ran down until it dried (Figure 1). An
intact droplet shape remained at the bottom of each streak. In
contrast, the blood on the walls of the Winstons' home (Figure 2)
showed a pattern of splashing outward from various points of
contact, indicating that it did not emerge from within the walls
but instead was splattered from some distance away.
To give the authors of _The Book of Lists_ some credit, at least
they included the Atlanta House of Blood in the list of "Strangest
Stories" instead of in the next section, entitled "Strange Events".
Perhaps readers will take a hint, and put the credibility of walls
which ooze blood in proper perspective, when they read this
companion claim from the list of "Strangest Stories":
Mrs. Felina de la Cruz, forty-five, a laundrywoman from
Cabanatuan in the Philippines, claimed to have given birth to
an eighteen-centimeter mudfish on October 13, 1990. She
called it Angelique Jezebel and tried to bottle-feed it before
skeptical journalists. Her husband, Romeo, said he heard the
fish say "ik-ik" shortly after his wife delivered it, but
admitted there were no outside witnesses. They planned to
give it a Catholic baptism. Alas, Angelique Jezebel died the
following January.
See more at: http://www.brownsguides.com/blog/weird-georgia-the-bleeding-house/#sthash.HgWXx2Px.dpuf
