The Blood House of Atlanta was a bizarre one-night phenomenon place Atlanta, Georgia, that only occurred just before midnight on September 8th, 1987.
William Winston had to be hooked up to a dialysis machine everyday to have his blood cleansed and the process would leave him exhausted each day, leading Minnie to begin worrying that it was his blood she was seeing. Detective Steve Cartwright investigated the six bedroom brick house on the south side of Atlanta. The police searched the premises but were unable to find any signs of a break-in. Lab results concluded that it was human blood that was collected inside the Winstons' home. Furthermore, it was from someone with Type O blood. When the detective asked, Minnie stated that neither her nor her husband possessed Type O blood.
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The phenomenon started and ended just before midnight on September 8th, 1987, as 77-year-old Minnie Winston stepped out of her bath. She noticed a strange, red spill on the bathroom floor. As she was about to inspect the puddle, she noticed that the wall in her bathroom also had the same reddish stain mysteriously oozing from its surface. She stepped outside and saw that the hallway floor also had pools of the reddish substance blotted across the tiles.
She immediately feared the worst. Her husband, William Winston (79 years of age) suffered from an unnamed chronic illness which meant that he had to be hooked up to a dialysis machine every day in order to cleanse his blood, and this process would leave him exhausted at the end of each day. She woke her husband immediately, and her fear quickly turned to a queasy sense of bewilderment when she saw that William had not been bleeding. The fearful couple checked each of the rooms in their six-room brick house (in which they had been living for 22 years under rental) and found that the oozing blood was also present in most of these rooms. Minds racing, they knew that they had no pets and that their house was completely free of rats, mice and other pests - and so the heavy question lingered over the heads of the elderly couple for the rest of the night. Why was their house bleeding?
Trying their best to get some rest, perhaps even hoping that the problem would simply go away if they slept on it, they were likely dismayed to see that their abode was still awash with blood in the morning. They called the local police who were able to find 'copious amounts of blood' in the bathroom, kitchen, living room, bedroom, hallways and basement of the house. Despite the police claiming that they had found no evidence of wrongdoing, the house was still treated as a crime-scene in order to keep the prying eyes of the public away from it. A sample of the mysterious blood was sent to the Georgia crime lab, which was revealed to indeed be human blood - Type O, to be exact. The frightening thing was that the Winstons both had Type A. A detective by the name of Steve Cartwright said that, despite having been on the force for 10 years, he had never seen anything like the scene inside the house. The police left the scene with palpable bafflement.
As was inevitable, the media got ahold of the case just one day after the blood had first been discovered. Articlees were published in the Atlanta Journal Constitution and the Palm Beach Post. The story was quickly a total sensation. Psychics called radio stations and offered to use their abilities to rid the house of the strange phenomenon, and television stations were flooded with calls asking about the House of Blood mystery. News footage showed footage of six inch by two inch smears of blood on the floor of the house, 'silver dollar sized' pools and even patterns of droplets which looked as if they had been sprayed by an atomiser onto the baseboards, floors and walls.
Not happy with leaving the case as something unexplained, a group of five skeptics (Dr. Joe Nickell, Larry Johnson, Rick Moen and Rebecca Long) made the drive out to the Atlanta Police Department's Homicide Division to scrounge all the information about the case they possibly could. They were able to discuss the case with one Lt. H. Walker, who had been at the forefront of the original investigation. The skeptics (according to a report written by Rebecca Long for the Winter 1994 edition of the Electronic Newsletter of the Georgia Skeptics) were seemingly not on the verge of running out of luck when they were able to review police records and see colour photographs of the blood in various rooms of the house. It is interesting to note that these photographs do not seem to be available anywhere on the internet, but were mentioned as having been published in the aforementioned newsletter after having been obtained through use of the Open Records Act. I have tried to find a surviving copy of this digital publication, but have unfortunately failed. Expect an update to this article if I ever find such a thing...
Presumably much to the chagrin of the skeptics, they found that the sensational case had been reported by the media in much the same way as it had been originally reported to the police. The blood was found to have indeed been Type O, and the couple in question were Type A. However, Lt. Walker had not ruled out the possibility of a violent crime having taken place on the property, and he definitely didn't subscribe to the poltergeist theory as had been posited by Janet and Colin Bord. He believed that someone had deliberately spattered the blood around the house as a twisted hoax. His evidence for this was that family problems had apparently existed within the Winston family, which supposedly gave either the couple or their children a motive for perpetrating a hoax like this. Interestingly enough, the Winstons' daughter worked in a hospital and so could've had access to supplies of human blood. Walker theorised that the children could've carried out this bizarre and morbid hoax to mean that their parents were declared legally incompetent. It was for this reason, apparently, that the Atlanta Police had chosen not to investigate further - they didn't want to cause the family 'possible additional embarrassment'.
Intriguingly, Rebecca Long was confronted with a personal situation resembling that of the House of Blood soon after investigating the Winstons' case. She apparently woke one day to find dozens of droplets of scarlet liquid running down the wall of her bedroom. She briefly considered a massacre of attic-dwelling rodents as a possible explanation, but in true skeptical fashion she dismissed this quickly as being irrational. She studied the droplets and and found that they remained deep red even after they had dried, which wouldn't have been the case if it had actually been blood. Joe Nickell visited her attic and discovered that it was resin melting from her rafters during hot summer days. She was able to study the way in which liquid dripped when it was actually coming out of walls, and compared that to the colour photos of the Winston household. She was able to determine that it seemed unlikely that the liquid on the Winstons' walls actually came from within them, and instead looked as if it had been splattered onto the walls from some distance away.
An occult investigator by the name of Curt Rowlett felt it best to wait six months before investigating the event out of a desire to avoid the initial frenzy and thus get a more rounded perspective. He seems to have successfully done this. He called the Atlanta Police Department in order to be referred to the same Homicide Division as had presumably seen the skeptics months earlier. The original case detective (presumably Lt. Walker) was no longer with the department, but a spokesperson told him that the case was now considered to be closed due to the incomprehensible nature of the details about what had happened. The spokesperson admitted that the police had no idea as to what had caused the blood to appear.
Wanting to talk to someone who was involved in the original case, Curt telephoned the Wilson household and got into contact with Minnie herself in order to arrange a face-to-face interview with her, which is something that the skeptics don't seem to imply that they bothered to do. He described her as being 'pleasant and forthcoming', but it was obvious to him that she was reluctant to expose herself and her life to public scrutiny again. She insisted that she had found that the so-called blood on her walls was just 'rust and mud mixed with water' and that it had been sprayed into the rooms by steam from a ruptured hot water heater in the basement. This was not a viable explanation, seeing as there were only two floor vents in the house and there was no way for anything that might've been inside them (of which there was nothing) to get to the other rooms in the house. The police had also determined that the liquid was actually human blood. Mimi had seemingly made this remark due to her admitted unwillingness to accept that blood might've come from her walls. In order to keep herself comfortable in her preconceptions of reality, she decided that ignorance was bliss...