Fountain Drive: The House That Dripped Human Blood

You know you must have had a really good night when you wake up the next morning to discover that your entire house is absolutely oozing in vomit.

But it would feel a bit disconcerting if you cast your mind back to the previous night and recalled that you simply drank a couple of cups of cocoa whilst finishing off a 5000-piece jigsaw of Rotherham Town Centre, before retiring to bed without incident.

That would suggest that your entire house is now absolutely oozing in somebody else’s vomit which is an entirely different kettle of second-hand carrots.

And it would feel even more disconcerting if we replaced the mystery vomit with mystery blood which was now dripping from every nook and cranny of your home as if the house itself was rapidly bleeding to death.

It may sound like something from a particularly implausible horror movie, yet this is reportedly exactly what happened one night in 1987 to an elderly couple living at 1114 Fountain Drive in Atlanta, Georgia.

William and Minnie Winston were more than a little perturbed when their property suddenly started spurting out bucketloads of blood from the walls and floors of nearly every room in the house.

Not only was it deeply disturbing, it was also highly inconvenient as it took ages to mop it all up.

And this was no fantasy. A police investigation soon confirmed that the property on the aptly-named Fountain Drive was indeed awash with blood, splashing around in places where it really had no right to splash.

But if the blood didn’t come from either William or Minnie Winston, then who or what did it come from? Could this gentle elderly couple have been harbouring a dark secret? Was the haunted house venting its bloody fury at the injustice of the fate of the previous occupants? Was it a hoax designed to get attention, or a cruel prank perpetrated by a disgruntled family member? Or was there something else entirely going on within these blood-spattered walls?

I should point out straight away that we don’t have a definitive answer to this one, as the mystery was never officially solved.

But let’s see if we can reach our own conclusions as we take a tentative step into the property which will now forever be known as ‘The Blood House on Fountain Drive’.

Leave your umbrella up.

The House on Fountain Drive

The house was born from evil forces brooding silently beneath the Earth. The structure seemingly sprouted from out of nowhere to sit on top of an ancient Indian burial ground where it occasionally scowled at passers-by and randomly burst into flames every couple of years or so.

Well, that’s what I initially assumed anyway after browsing through the brief entry on ‘The Ladybird Guide to Haunted Houses’.

But it turns out that 1114 Fountain Drive was actually built in 1945 in a rough and ready but close-knit southwest Atlanta neighbourhood with a high population of black residents, including everyone who ever lived in this property, for the first seventy years at least.

The red-brick house may have seemed fairly unremarkable to anyone passing by, boasting six rooms and a nice little lawn at the front. There was certainly no immediate indication from the exterior that the whole house was possessed by a blood demon.

The very first resident of the house was a man named Albert Thomson who died under tragic circumstances on the night of Halloween in 1950. There’s clearly already some super-spooky shit going down right there, but we’ll return to the fate of Albert later.

Without wanting to give away too many spoilers though, I think we’re gonna have a tricky time connecting a randomly bleeding house to a man who had died 37 years earlier.

William and Minnie Winston first began renting the house in 1965, and lived there for a good 22 years without ever once needing to contact the landlord about human blood dripping down the walls, which is always a bonus in my book.

That all changed on the night of September 8th 1987, by which time retired schoolteacher Minnie was 77 years old, and was now the primary carer for her 79-year-old husband William. He used to work for the National Screen Service Company which distributed movie posters and advertising materials.

William’s health had become increasingly frail as he was suffering from serious kidney issues, and he now spent once a week hooked up to a dialysis machine installed in the home that cleansed his blood.

William and Minnie now lived alone after 44 blissful years of marriage, during which they raised three children who all grew up to take on respectable jobs, including a son who became a detective for the Atlanta Police Bureau, and a daughter who worked as a nurse in a local hospital.

The kids had all long since flown the nest, which meant that the quiet six-bedroomed house was now just home to William, Minnie, and whatever it was that was living or dying within the heart of the building.

The Night of September 8th, 1987

On the night in question, William told the police and the press that he had retired to bed at around 9:30 pm. Shortly before doing so, he had punched in the pin code for the security alarm as usual, and bolted the doors shut, just as he did every night.

Meanwhile, Minnie had decided to take a late-night bath before joining her husband in bed.

It was just as she was getting out of the bath that she stepped on something sticky on the floor. Something sticky and red.

Minnie later told the police that the substance which looked alarmingly like blood appeared to be gurgling up from beneath the floorboards. And as her eyes darted frantically around the bathroom, she spotted further droplets of the stuff on the floor merging together to form blood puddles, along with thick red stains slowly seeping down the walls.

Minnie’s immediate fear was that something terrible had happened to her husband whilst she had been enjoying a nice soak.

She had no need to worry. William had just been tucked up safely in bed and was only now waking up to join his wife and figure out why she was screaming out his name at this late hour.

But to be fair, Minnie probably still felt she had something to scream about. This mystery red substance wasn’t just popping up in the bathroom. As Minnie and a bleary-eyed William began switching on all the lights and poking around the house, they discovered that it was all over the place.

They claimed it was running down the walls of the hallways and five of the six rooms in the house. It was spurting through the floorboards in a motion that Minnie later described as being similar to a sprinkler.

And the crimson slime was even found smeared in some fairly inaccessible areas for an elderly couple, including right behind the television set, and in a cramped crawl space down in the basement.

It was everywhere and it was endless, as if the whole house had been attacked from an unseen enemy and was now enduring prolonged and messy death throes that showed no signs of coming to a merciful end in the immediate future.

There’s a little bit of confusion as to what exactly happened next.

Some reports suggest that the couple soon got busy cleaning the house from top to bottom before heading to bed in exhaustion, only to find that the house was still violently spraying fresh supplies of blood onto every available surface the next morning.

But it sounds more likely that the house was simply still in a bit of a state the following day. It had gone midnight by the time Minnie and William had finished examining every corner of the house, by which time they may have had a half-hearted go at mopping up the worst of it before deciding to deal with the rest after a good night’s sleep.

What we do know for sure is that this certainly wasn’t a regular occurrence. After all the mess had finally been cleared up, the house on Fountain Drive never again gushed blood.

But before the clean-up operation could even get going, Minnie and William decided that it was their duty to telephone the police for the very first time in their lives.

Incidentally, this got me pondering over the chances of managing to get through your whole lifetime without ever needing to – or perhaps without ever choosing to – phone the police.

I’m not sure if there’s a global average on how many times a person is likely to phone the police in their lives, but it seems quite incredible to me that The Winstons were both pushing eighty before they needed to make their very first call to the cops.

Some people apparently phone the police several times a year.

Having said that, I can only ever recall phoning the police once in my whole life, and that was when I very briefly moved to the seaside town of Morecambe in Lancashire back in the 1990s. I was under the impression that it would be full of sandcastles and slot machines and pensioners on the bowling green. It turned out to be full of thieving little scrotes who all looked as if they’d just climbed out of a fucking well. My new house was burgled the very first time I left it to do a bit of shopping, prompting that sole phone call to the police which got me absolutely nowhere.

When I got burgled again the second time I left the house, I didn’t bother phoning them. I just moved.

At the other extreme, I had an old mate back in Rotherham who seemed to call the police several times a month. He once called them because somebody down the pub had shoved a breadcake into his pint of lager. He once even called them because he felt he hadn’t been served enough sausages in his Full English Breakfast down at the local Greasy Spoon Café.

Funnily enough, out of everyone I’ve ever known, he was also the one who got arrested the most frequently.

However, drifting reluctantly back to the point, the incident at 1114 Fountain Drive was enough to prompt The Winstons into finally making their very first report to the police.

It’s interesting to note at this point that neither Minnie nor William was of the opinion that the mystery red substance was blood.

Minnie later reckoned that although she was a bit puzzled, she wasn’t that freaked out by the incident as she felt that the substance didn’t really look like blood or smell like blood.

In fact, she never appeared to believe that real blood had ever been erupting from the walls of the family home. Or at least that’s what she kept insisting to anyone who asked.

The Police Investigation

The police must naturally have felt a little alarmed when they first took the call from an elderly couple claiming that their house was suddenly overflowing with a thick red substance.

The initial assumption was that either this case was going to lead to the discovery of something quite silly and harmless, or it was going to lead to the discovery of a dead body stashed away somewhere inside the house.

Some of the first people to arrive on the scene were a team of Emergency Medical Technicians who quickly checked out Minnie and William to ascertain if either of them were leaking from places that they really shouldn’t.

But not a single scratch was found on either of them, and William seemed to be annoyed by the whole process, bluntly informing the team: “I’m not bleeding. My wife’s not bleeding. Nobody else was here.”

The Emergency Medical Technicians then turned their attention to the dialysis machine.

As soon as it’s mentioned that William was having his blood cleansed on a weekly basis using a dialysis machine installed in his own home, a lot of people seem to assume that there must be some kind of connection between the blood getting cleansed via the machine and the blood spurting out of the walls of the house.

But there’s not really any logical connection to be made here. Dialysis machines help patients filter out the crap from their blood when their kidneys are no longer up to the job.

They work by very slowly removing blood from the patient, and passing it through a series of membranes inside the machine which clean out the waste products in the blood before it’s passed back through to the patient.

It’s not like William was rolling around in buckets of blood whenever he used the dialysis machine. It’s a very slow process, and if there was even the slightest of leaks or faults with the machine, William would have known about it very quickly. It certainly couldn’t have reached a point where the entire house had become drenched with William’s own blood without him realising that something was a bit amiss here.

Just to be on the safe side, the dialysis machine was thoroughly checked out anyway, and there were no faults found of any kind.

A father and son team of property managers then arrived on the scene to check if there were any problems with the house itself which may have gone some way to explain the unusual leakage, such as burst pipes or severed gas lines or haunted plumbing.

But again, despite a comprehensive examination of the whole house, the property managers found nothing at all that yielded any clues.

Detective Steve Cartwright wasn’t quite sure what to make of all this when he rolled up to Fountain Drive to investigate.

He reported that his team of officers had entered the property and found “copious amounts of blood” in the bathroom, kitchen, bedrooms, hallways, and down in the basement. He also confirmed that the blood had been found in some pretty bizarre places which would have been difficult for the elderly couple to reach.

But it was a puzzle as to where the blood could have come from or whether it was even blood at all.

He initially speculated that it may have been animal blood. Whilst Minnie and William had no pets in the house, Cartwright wondered if a wounded creature such as a rodent could have sneaked into the property and started burrowing its way through the walls of the house whilst spraying blood everywhere. But considering that Cartwright himself described seeing “copious” amounts of blood, it would seem likely that the creature in question would probably have been a bit bigger than a rodent, and more along the lines of a stray hippo with a penchant for tunnelling through walls.

Detective Cartwright also seemed to share the suspicions of the Winstons that the substance may not even necessarily be blood at all. Whilst he conceded that it certainly looked like blood – a point that the Winstons seemed unwilling to admit in public – someone could have just thrown about a few buckets of red latex paint for shits and giggles.

Of course, there was only one way to find out for sure:

Lick the stuff off all the walls to see what it tasted like.

But wait, Cartwright had an even better idea. He called in lab technician Brenda Dipple to collect samples of the stuff for analysis back at the Georgia State Crime Laboratory. This would at least help determine whether the sticky red substance was human blood, animal blood, your garden variety haunted house discharge, or something else entirely.

The usually tenacious Brenda admitted that her stomach was turning as she roamed around every room in the house collecting samples from what appeared to be a particularly gruesome crime scene.

After she’d packed up for the day, it was then a waiting game to hear what the State Crime Lab could make of the samples.

In the meantime, Detective Cartwright could only shrug and offer the public opinion:

“I’m guessing it was an animal. I hope that’s all it was.”

The Lab Results

The results from the lab certainly provided some definitive answers, but also threw up so many more puzzling questions.

The Georgia State Crime Laboratory concluded that the stuff oozing from the walls of 1114 Fountain Drive was indeed blood.

And it was very much human blood – which immediately rules out the theory that it may have been a rodent, a loose hippo, or an infestation of heavily bleeding badgers.

The lab was also able to identify that they were dealing with Type O blood – and this immediately rules out any connection to either Minnie or William as they were both confirmed to be Type A.

So it was now clear that the house had been dripping with somebody else’s blood, but the police were no closer to finding out who on Earth that blood may have belonged to, and how it suddenly came to be squirting all over a house on Fountain Drive so late at night.

The State Crime Lab appeared to vent a little polite frustration at the police for not calling in the experts a little sooner, as this had prevented the lab from extracting more potentially useful information from the blood samples.

Forensic serologist Ted Staples pointed out that the lab technicians should typically have been amongst the very first to arrive on a scene in which the bountiful evidence was literally plastered all over the walls and floors of the location.

Yet there was actually a 13-hour gap between the Winston’s telephone call to the police, and the request for a lab technician to attend the scene to collect samples.

This proved to be unfortunate as a deep analysis of fresher blood samples would have been able to identify the mystery bleeder’s gender, race, and various other aspects which may have provided more clues.

Ultimately, the long-dried samples could now provide little information other than the blood type.

The Georgia State Crime lab appeared to be a little confused as to why there had been such a delay in asking for their assistance. This may partly have been down to Detective Cartwright initially leaning towards the ideas that the substance may just have been rodent blood or latex paint rather than anything worth taking too seriously.

But the Winstons may also have been at least partly to blame, as they left it until the following morning before they bothered to contact the police in the first place. Maybe that’s because they needed to find out the telephone number though, let’s not forget that they’d never done it before. I’m pretty sure it starts with a 9.

Minnie Winston didn’t agree with the results from the lab anyway. She told the press:

“I still don’t believe it’s human blood. I don’t care what the police say.”

The Case Goes Cold

The police still appeared to be completely stumped when a press conference was held on September 10th.

Detective Cartwright observed:

“It’s an extremely strange situation. I’ve been on the force for ten years, and I’ve never seen anything like this. We have not stopped looking because we know that houses don’t bleed.”

But it was hard to see where exactly they could go from here.

There was the obvious possibility that an intruder had broken into the house who had decided against stealing anything in favour of carrying out a quick spot of unsolicited decorating.

Yet William had insisted that he had set the security alarm as usual, and there were no visible signs of a break-in.

We also have to remember Minnie and William’s accounts of the motion of the blood. They weren’t just talking about finding a load of blood which had been dumped in their house and was now streaking all over the walls and floors.

They were talking of blood that was bubbling up from the ground and squirting out of the walls as if it was being pushed out from the grumbling innards of a screaming house. It’s pretty difficult to find a rational explanation for that, unless there was a deeply unusual problem kicking off within the structure of the property, or somebody out there had way, way too much time on their hands.

Maybe either the Winstons or someone else had quickly stashed a load of recent murder victims within the walls of the house and they’d all started leaking out at once. But you would have expected the police to uncover evidence of that when they were investigating the property, unless Detective Cartwright was still too busy peering through tiny holes in his quest to find a rodent.

The police certainly seemed to give the impression that they felt no homicide had taken place at Fountain Drive, but the State Crime Lab director Larry Howard didn’t sound quite so sure. He told the press that he couldn’t rule out homicide, and pointed out that the police wouldn’t still be investigating the matter if they believed it was all just some silly prank or if nothing remotely suspicious had taken place.

Yet whilst Detective Cartwright had clearly stated at the press conference that the police had not stopped looking for answers, it was literally just a couple of days later that Police Lieutenant Horace Walker struck a slightly less determined tone when he declared to the press:

“We have no leads at this time. Usually, where there is blood, there is a body. We will continue a routine investigation and if we find that no crime was committed, we’re through with it. As we see it now, there has been no crime.”

I kind of understand the point that it was tricky to solve a crime if you’re not exactly sure what the crime was supposed to be. Without a dead body, it would appear at least that no serious crime had taken place here, but I’d still feel a bit miffed if I discovered that my house had suddenly become drenched in somebody else’s blood. I might even have been tempted to phone the police for a second time on the grounds that surely some kind of criminal damage law has been broken.

I know my old mate from Rotherham would have phoned the police if somebody had spilled a bit of banana milkshake on his living room carpet.

But whilst interest from the police appeared to be fading, the house on Fountain Drive was attracting keen attention from the local media.

Several Atlanta newspapers ran with sensationalist articles which seemed to suggest that a haunted house of evil was still regularly spewing out blood from every conceivable orifice.

Radio and TV stations went wild with the story as they hosted phone-ins during which viewers and listeners were encouraged to share their wacky theories as to what exactly was going down here.

And a whole bunch of raving nutters – sorry, a whole bunch of paranormal experts and psychics – not only flooded the stations with their own definitive conclusions, they also reportedly deluged the local police department with offers to step in and help rid the house of blood forever via the medium of magic.

Much to the annoyance of the Winstons, crowds of reporters and private investigators and weirdos also began to descend on their home at all hours of the day demanding interviews and guided tours of The House of Hell.

These reporters didn’t usually get much out of the Winstons, although one paper did secure an exclusive interview with their postman who declared that the Winstons were good, private people and that whatever was happening in the house was entirely supernatural.

But all this unwelcome attention proved to be particularly taxing for Minnie who usually had to deal with all the telephone calls and knocks on the door as William was too ill to cope with it all.

She later claimed that she was losing sleep over all the disturbance and intrusion, and the couple eventually began to lose their temper with the callers. After yet another uninvited knock on the door, Minnie was simply heard to shriek from inside the house “What they’ve said about all this is lies! Just leave us alone!”

Even the frail William chimed in on this one, shouting out through the bedroom window: “There’s no blood in this house! I don’t want nothing more to do with it! Now get away from here!”

I suppose it’s possible that by this point, the house had completely consumed their souls.

A Distraction in the Carver Project

Meanwhile, the Atlanta Police Department now had something a little more pressing on their own bloody hands.

On September 14th 1987, two police officers had arrived at a notoriously troubled housing project in Atlanta known as The Carver Project, with the intention of serving an arrest warrant on one of the residents. But whilst they were there, they observed a fiery argument taking place between 37-year-old black resident Eddie Callahan and a woman. After the officers stepped in to intervene, Eddie Callahan reportedly jumped into a car – which may or may not have belonged to him – and sped away from the police who immediately engaged in pursuit.

Shortly afterwards, Callahan left the vehicle and continued to flee on foot, at which point he was fatally shot six times in the back by the two police officers.

From what little information I could dig up about this scarcely-reported event, the two officers were initially suspended without pay, and ultimately left the police force of their own accord.

But this incident was keeping the Atlanta Police Department pretty busy at the time, a point noted by Police Lieutenant Horace Walker when he was next asked by the press about any further updates on The Blood House on Fountain Drive.

He responded: “The house is not a high priority right now, because of the shooting.”

A slightly odd statement to make which some people took to mean that every single officer in the department was now so involved in the case of the police shooting that they didn’t have time to investigate anything else.

Just over a month later, the question was again raised to Sergeant H. L. Bolton who appeared to give a slightly more promising update when he responded with:

“We have not stopped looking because we know houses don’t bleed. But we haven’t determined that a crime was committed, and that is our primary concern.”

However, it would appear that the police did indeed stop looking very shortly afterwards when the case was officially closed with no conclusion, unless the Atlanta Police Department had simply reasoned that maybe some houses do bleed after all.

I mean, what else could it have been?

Theories and Speculation

The case may still be officially unsolved today after the police felt that all the leads had dried up, but this has done nothing to stem the flow of wild speculation.

The notable lack of any explanation from the police has led many to believe that something beyond human understanding was kicking off at 1114 Fountain Drive. It could have been down to unseen sinister forces at work hiding behind the walls, unusually leaky ghosts, the re-emergence of the ancient Blood Seed demon, or greedy vampires who had clearly over-indulged and were now feeling more than a little ropey.

The 1990 book ‘Unexplained Mysteries of the 20th Century’ by Janet and Colin Bord puts forward the theory that a resident poltergeist may well have been at work.

Or then again, it could have had something to do with the tragic fate of the previous occupant.

Whilst it could be argued that the police didn’t really do an awful lot of investigating into the matter, they did take the time to look through the history of the house, and came across the story of Albert Thomson, the original resident.

Albert was a regional racial relations director working for the Federal Housing Authority who moved into 1114 Fountain Drive with his wife, shortly after it was first built.

One day in 1950, 41-year-old Albert was involved in an accident in which the driver of a massive truck smashed into the back of Albert’s car.

The truck driver was completely unhurt and was let off with a warning not to smash his big truck into other people’s vehicles if it could possibly be avoided.

Albert meanwhile was left in a pretty bad state, yet after receiving relatively brief treatment in hospital, he was packed off back home to Fountain Drive whilst still suffering from internal bleeding.

Just a few days later, on the night of Halloween no less, Albert Thomson died at home from his injuries.

This has led some to conclude that the house itself was gushing out Albert’s blood in rage at the injustice of a black man not receiving the proper medical attention he needed after being hit by a white driver who got off scot-free – and it’s a theory which is given extra credence – apparently – by the fact that the house started bleeding quite close to the anniversary of Albert Thomson’s death on the night of Halloween.

I think the ‘anniversary’ idea might be pushing credulity just a little bit.

I don’t know about you, but if I was a house intent on vomiting blood to mark the anniversary of the unjust death of a previous occupant – not a sentence I ever envisaged writing – then I’d at least try and get it a bit closer to the date, particularly if that special date was Halloween. Ejaculating the blood nearly two whole months before the anniversary seems remarkably premature.

And it does make you wonder why exactly the police were digging so deep into the history of the property in the first place, as if a death from 37 years earlier may have had something to do with the blood flow.

I suspect it very probably didn’t, although Detective Cartwright may just have been checking the history to see if Albert Thomson had ever owned a pet rodent.

So, leaving aside the prospect of supernatural activity, we appear to have ruled out wounded animals as the blood was confirmed to be human. We’ve ruled out murder as no corpse was ever found. We’ve ruled out a malfunctioning dialysis machine or indeed any notion that the blood came from either of the Winstons as it was the wrong type. And we’ve ruled out invisible bleeding intruders as it seems unlikely that anyone would have been able to gain access into the property without tripping the security alarm or leaving behind any evidence of a break-in.

So we’re not left with too many other theories to explore, unless the Winstons were maybe just covering up a rowdy Satanic ritual that got way out of hand.

The Hoax Theory

The most widely-accepted theory of all today is that the whole thing was just a ridiculous hoax, possibly orchestrated by the Winstons themselves or somebody else with close ties to the couple.

I’m not personally convinced that this is the answer, but I feel that many would disagree with me, so we clearly need to explore it in detail.

The concept of it all being a silly hoax reminds me very much of an episode of one of the greatest British anthology TV shows of all time – ‘Hammer House of Horror’.

Produced in 1980, this show was responsible for giving me endless nightmares as a kid whenever I was allowed to stay up late and watch reruns – a situation not helped by my older brother’s insistence on bursting into my bedroom in the middle of the night to re-enact the most terrifying scenes.

In one particular episode entitled ‘The House That Bled to Death’, a mother moves into a new house with her new boyfriend William and her very young daughter Sophia. The house had previously witnessed a grisly murder in 1950 during which a grumpy old husband had hacked his wife to bits.

Soon after moving in, the family are scared out of their wits by seemingly supernatural incidents taking place inside the house, along with the random slaughter of Sophia’s beloved pet cat.

The final straw that prompts the family to move out is when Sophia’s birthday party celebrations are somewhat dampened by the walls and ceilings of the house suddenly spurting bucketloads of blood all over the young guests.

The family don’t do too badly out of the whole ordeal, as William ends up writing a best-selling book about it and selling the lucrative movie rights.

But three years later from their swanky new home in California, a still-traumatised Sophia discovers that the whole thing was a scam staged by her mum and boyfriend William in a bid to make lots of money from the story.

The episode concludes with a now possibly-possessed Sophia wandering into the master bedroom to stab William to death.

A bit harsh maybe, but he did kill her cat and ruin her birthday party, so fuck him.

If the incident at Fountain Drive was indeed a hoax, it could well have been inspired by something along these lines, and the initial dismembered fingers of suspension would appear to point directly at Minnie and William Winston.

I mean, let’s stop for a moment to consider how exactly the bloodbath at Fountain Drive was described.

Minnie and William were the only witnesses to see the blood apparently bubbling from underneath the floorboards and squirting everywhere as if it was being piped out from a sprinkler.

After Detective Cartwright and his rodent-hunting posse got on the scene, the detective only ever gave a pretty vague description of ‘copious’ amounts of blood. Not a single mention of sprinkling or bubbling. Not so much as a single tiny gurgle.

Yes, it could be that the possessed bricks and mortar had long since finished choking and spluttering by the time the cops arrived on the scene, but it’s perhaps more plausible that this never quite happened in the first place; Minnie and William were either just getting a bit carried away by the sight of so much blood in their house, or they purposefully made it up as part of their elaborate hoax.

You’d naturally assume that a couple in their late 70s – one of whom was very ill and frail – might have better things to do with their time, and it’s difficult to figure out a compelling motive.

One suggestion is that they did it to get the attention of one or more of their three children with whom there had been a reported rift – a point which we’ll return to in a moment.

Or it could just have been that they did it to get into the papers. One anonymous police officer who attended the scene later told the press: “Some adults will act like children to get attention.”

But when it comes to craving blood-based publicity, Minnie and William just didn’t seem to be the type.

You only have to look at how they reacted when the story broke in the local press, and when they were suddenly besieged by reporters.

The Winstons certainly weren’t opening up the house for blood tours or accepting exclusive interviews to the highest bidder. They were screaming out of the bedroom window at the reporters and pleading with them to go away.

This wasn’t a couple who were desperate for attention. It was a couple who seemed desperate to be left in peace.

I think we should also emphasise that the Winstons never publicly accepted the evidence that the substance found in their house was human blood anyway.

Six months after the incident, the paranormal researcher Curt Rowlett – also a former member of Atlanta rock band The Tombstones – managed to secure a rare interview with Minnie Winston at her home.

As he later outlined in a segment of his book ‘Labyrinth 13 – True Tales of the Occult, Crime & Conspiracy’, Minnie came across as very pleasant and polite, but also quite hesitant to discuss the incident in detail.

However, she did explain to Curt that she believed the substance had emerged from a ruptured hot water heater in the basement that had spilled forth a freaky mix of rust and mud mixed with water which had then been scattered around the house through the air vents.

Quite aside from the fact that this contradicts the evidence confirmed at Georgia State Crime Lab that the substance was definitely human blood, Minnie’s explanation would also have been physically impossible as there were only a couple of small air vents in the house which could never have spread the stuff over such a wide distance and into nearly every room.

It may be that Minnie was well aware that her supposed theory was complete hogwash, and she was simply trying to avoid yet more controversy and publicity.

Or it could be the case that she was actually just trying to convince herself as much as Curt Rowlett because she didn’t want to spend the rest of her years in a house that once rained blood, and preferred to live under the delusion that nothing particularly strange had happened on that night.

For his part, Curt Rowlett went on to conclude in his book that a paranormal event was just as likely as any other explanation which has been put forward to date.

The Daughter Theory

But if it seems improbable that the Winstons were the perpetrators of the hoax, could it have been another family member?

One popular theory is that the blood was lobbed all over the house by none other than their own daughter who worked as a nurse in the local hospital, possibly in an attempt to have the Winstons declared mentally incompetent so that their assets could be seized by the rest of the family.

It’s a theory which was given some credence seven years later by none other than Police Lieutenant Horace Walker who hadn’t initially appeared to show much interest in pursuing the investigation.

In 1994, a team of five members of The Georgia Skeptics, led by Rebecca Long, decided to take another look into the matter. They tracked down Lieutenant Walker for an interview, checked through police records, and pored over several police photographs which were taken at the non-crime scene.

Incidentally, Rebecca Long firmly believes that these photographs depict splashing blood patterns which suggest that the blood was actually thrown at the walls rather than emerging from behind them. However, we can’t check this out for ourselves as it seems that these photographs have never been published anywhere, so we’ll have to take Rebecca’s word for it – but this does fit in with the theory that rumours of bubbling and squirting were greatly exaggerated.

However, the really interesting elements of this fresh investigation by the Georgia Skeptics were the opinions and unofficial conclusions of Police Lieutenant Horace Walker during that interview, even if not everything he said made sense.

Whilst he didn’t completely rule out the possibility that a violent crime had taken place, he thought it more likely that the incident was hoaxed, either by the Winstons themselves or their daughter.

Walker noted that there appeared to be some degree of conflict between the Winstons and at least some of their children, and he pointed out that William’s health condition and his daughter’s job at the hospital gave both of these suspects easy access to blood supplies.

The lieutenant revealed that the Atlanta Police Department had ultimately decided to close the investigation to save the family from any further embarrassment over what he took to be little more than a particularly messy domestic matter.

Now, I have to say I’m a little confused as to why exactly Walker felt that both William and his daughter had easy access to blood supplies.

William’s health condition meant that he had to get his own blood cleansed through the dialysis machine – a blood that didn’t match the type found in the house – but this didn’t mean that he was somehow getting fresh packages of somebody else’s blood delivered to him twice a week. The only blood getting cleansed through the dialysis machine was very much his own.

And whilst his daughter may have worked as a nurse at the hospital, I don’t think she would have been at liberty to just wander off the premises with ‘copious’ amounts of blood.

In fact, it’s hard to see how anyone could easily have sourced a vast quantity of blood for a vicious prank, particularly during the height of the AIDS epidemic when valuable blood was likely to have been stored in highly secure locations.

The police did apparently check out local blood banks at the time for any reports of supplies going for an unauthorised walkabout, but drew a blank.

It’s still not entirely inconceivable that the daughter may have been able to smuggle out vast quantities of blood from the hospital. Or perhaps anyone else at all – such as a neighbour with an axe to grind – could have just scooped it all out of biohazard bins from which nothing would have been missed. After all, it’s not as if the potential culprit would have needed the finest quality blood – they just needed something for a frantic splatter job.

I’m just having a hard time understanding why anyone – be it an aggrieved family member or an aggrieved neighbour or a mischievous prankster – would go to such extraordinary lengths to pull such a stunt, and what exactly it was meant to achieve.

As far as I could ascertain, no member of the Winston family had ever found themselves on the wrong side of the law in the past, and it seems a little unfair to suggest that a daughter with no criminal record would reach the baffling conclusion that the best way of getting her parents declared mentally unstable would be to drench their house in stolen blood.

If it was a hoax at all, I suspect it’s more likely to have been some unidentified party attempting to convince the Winstons that their house was haunted, but it would have been a pretty impressive act of stealth and planning to get in there at the exact right time, splash the blood around almost every room, and then leave completely undetected just before Minnie stepped out of the bath.

Of course, another issue with it being an unrelated third party is how exactly they gained access into the house without tripping the security alarm or leaving any signs of a break-in.

One of the reasons why the police may have been leaning towards the idea of a disgruntled family member is that it’s more likely a family member would have had their own key.

But William specifically referenced bolting the doors shut after setting the security alarm, so even a family member with a key would have been struggling to get inside.

The Most Likely Theory?

There was clearly something very fishy about this locked and bolted house, and this leads me into what I suspect is the most likely theory of all, even if it’s one that we were supposed to have already ruled out…

William Winston has to be wrong about setting the security alarm and bolting the door.

As it seems highly improbable that the couple themselves were involved in a hoax, this means that somebody else must have gained access into the property that night. And as there were no visible signs of a break-in, that would indicate that somebody else was able to just wander in – or perhaps stagger in – through the front door, and that the frail 79-year old William was mistaken in his belief that he had locked up.

I suppose he might even have later figured out that he’d forgotten to lock up, but he daren’t admit that to Minnie in case she attacked him with an axe again.

So this opens up the possibility that an intruder was at work – but not necessarily a burglar or someone attempting to stage a silly hoax.

It could well have been an intruder in serious trouble – a person who for whatever reason was very badly wounded and had desperately sought brief refuge in the home of the Winstons. He had chaotically stumbled around several rooms whilst spurting blood everywhere as William was sleeping and Minnie was in the bath, then made his exit into the night before his presence could ever be discovered.

It might seem odd that just one person could produce so much blood. But we don’t really know for sure exactly how much blood was spread across the house, other than Minnie and William’s possibly over-dramatic claims, and Detective Cartwright’s references to ‘copious’ amounts.

Speaking as somebody who once sliced my hand open on the lid of a Fray Bentos pie, I know from personal experience that just one wound from one person can be enough to seemingly turn the entire house into an absolute bloodbath and make your home look like a murder scene.

Of course, there are many elements to this theory which feel a bit weird.

Such an intruder would have been staggering around in some pretty unusual places, and I’m not sure what he was doing behind the TV set or in the tiny crawl space in the basement. But then again, considering his situation, he may not have been sure what he was doing there either.

It’s strange that such a commotion didn’t wake up William or disturb Minnie in the bath, particularly when so much blood was found in the bathroom.

And I would have thought the police may have eventually uncovered evidence of a seriously wounded individual bleeding all over the local neighbourhood, and made the connection to the incident at Fountain Drive.

But it’s not really possible to come up with any answer which definitively ticks all the boxes on this one. What we do know is that something truly bizarre took place on 1114 Fountain Drive that night, and the exact reason why is likely to be equally bizarre.

My money is on the theory that doesn’t involve somebody stealing blood and purposefully scattering it around a house for no immediately discernible reason. But you might be more inclined to go with the hoax theory. Or with the lack of any single satisfactory answer, you might be more inclined to believe that demonic forces really were spewing out their bloody rage from deep within the bowels of the possessed house.

If Detective Cartwright is reading this, that makes at least one person out there who still thinks it might have been a rodent.

The Aftermath

The house on Fountain Drive never again rained blood, although I kind of suspect that Minnie and Winston would have chosen to keep quiet about it even if it did.

William died just two years later in 1989, whilst Minnie continued to live in the same house right up until her death in 2015, which by my mathematical reckoning, means that she made it to the ripe old age of 104.

One final curious point: If you take a virtual tour of Fountain Drive today on Google Maps Street View, you’ll notice that the house has been completely blurred from view.

This is not massively uncommon in itself. Any homeowner can request that Google blur their house from the map if you’re worried that burglars might use the image to plot a route inside your house, or you’re concerned that somebody might want to take a look at the colour of your curtains.

Apparently, once this has happened, the house will remain blurred forever, even if a future owner wants it put back on the map.

But it does make you wonder who made the request to Google to blur the house and why.

It may obviously have been down to the publicity-shy Minnie Winston seeking to put a stop to any nosey parkers who want to take a closer peek at The Blood House on Fountain Drive.

However, it seems blindingly obvious to me that it was the house itself that made the request, just in case one of those interfering Google camera vans happens to be tootling along next time the house on Fountain Drive unleashes a terrible typhoon of human blood.

Frequently Asked Questions

What happened at 1114 Fountain Drive in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1987?

On the night of September 8, 1987, the house at 1114 Fountain Drive in Atlanta, Georgia, suddenly started spurting out bucketloads of blood from the walls and floors of nearly every room. The incident involved an elderly couple, William and Minnie Winston, who were living in the house at the time.

What was the initial reaction of the police to the incident?

The police were initially alarmed and investigated the property, confirming that it was indeed awash with blood. They considered various possibilities, including animal blood, a hoax, or a prank, but were unable to determine the exact source of the blood.

What was the result of the lab analysis of the blood samples?

The Georgia State Crime Laboratory concluded that the substance was indeed human blood, specifically Type O. This ruled out the possibility that the blood came from either William or Minnie Winston, who were both Type A.

What was the reaction of the Winstons to the lab results?

Minnie Winston did not agree with the lab results and insisted that the substance was not human blood. She suggested that it might have been a mix of rust and mud from a ruptured hot water heater, although this explanation was deemed physically impossible.

What were some of the theories proposed to explain the incident?

Several theories were proposed, including a hoax orchestrated by the Winstons or someone close to them, supernatural activity, a poltergeist, or a connection to the tragic death of the house’s first occupant, Albert Thomson. The most widely-accepted theory is that it was a hoax, possibly to get attention or to declare the Winstons mentally incompetent.

What was the police’s final stance on the incident?

The police initially stated that they would continue investigating, but interest seemed to fade quickly. The case was officially closed with no conclusion, and the police suggested that it might have been a hoax or a domestic matter.

What happened to the Winstons after the incident?

William Winston died in 1989, and Minnie Winston continued to live in the house until her death in 2015 at the age of 104. The house was blurred from view on Google Maps Street View, possibly at Minnie Winston’s request to avoid further publicity.

What was the significance of the house’s location and history?

The house was built in 1945 in a close-knit southwest Atlanta neighborhood with a high population of black residents. The first occupant, Albert Thomson, died tragically in 1950, which some speculated might be connected to the blood incident, although this theory was largely dismissed.

What was the public and media reaction to the incident?

The incident attracted significant media attention, with local newspapers, radio, and TV stations covering the story. The house was dubbed ‘The Blood House on Fountain Drive,’ and crowds of reporters and private investigators descended on the property, causing distress to the Winstons.

What was the role of the dialysis machine in the investigation?

William Winston used a dialysis machine to cleanse his blood due to kidney issues. Some speculated that the machine might be connected to the blood incident, but it was thoroughly checked and found to have no faults. The blood type found in the house did not match William’s, ruling out any connection to the dialysis machine.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: Fountain Drive: The House That Dripped Human Blood
• Hero image source by Ciell / openverse, by-sa.