Urban Legends Investigated: The Bleeding House

You would think, judging by the title of this post, that the Bleeding House is just another myth or urban legend. Because let’s be honest here: there’s no posisble way a house could actually be bleeding from its walls, right? Even if a gory murder was committed inside the property, at most you’d find blood splatter colouring the walls, but not blood seeping from the walls. And definitely not in every room of the house.

Blood dripping from the walls in every room of a particular house, that’s the stuff of nightmares. Of horror movies. Of fiction. It couldn’t possibly be true.

Except that this exact thing occurred at a house located at 1114 Foundation Drive in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1987.

History of 1114 Fountain Drive

The house itself was an ordinary house, built in 1945, with six rooms, and by all accounts an ordinary home you would find in just about any street.

The house belonged to William and Minnie Clyde Winston, who had already lived in the house for over two decades before the weird events occurred. They had raised three children in the house, and they were respectively 79 and 77 years old. They had never complained about any odd phenomena in their house, and by all accounts, they were an ordinary couple.

There was nothing that made them or their house stand out from any of the houses in its surroundings, until of course it began bleeding blood.

It happened on the evening of 8 September of 1987, and the phenomenon was not just limited to one room either: the entire house, including the halls and basement, suddenly, inexplicably became covered in human blood.

The evening of 8 September 1987

Minnie Winston had taken a bath on that very evening, and when she emerged from the bathtub at around 11:30pm, she noticed that the floor was sticky. Initially perhaps she thought that the cause of the stickiness was water, but when she looked down, she noticed a red substance. It seemed to be spraying through the bathroom’s tiled floor.

Minnie and William started to investigate and found out that the substance was everywhere: the hallways, kitchen, living room, even in the house’s crawlspace. It was on the floor and walls in nearly every room of the house.

The Winstons must have been horrified. Panicking, they called 911, who dispatched EMTs and police to the scene. All the police and EMTs could uncover was that the subtance looked a lot like blood, but neither of the Winstons were bleeding, there had been no crime committed, there was no body in the house – nothing at all that could give an explanation as to why the walls were covered in blood.

The police thought that perhaps it was a sickening prank by someone who had burglarized the Winstons home, but the Winstons had locked their doors and set their security alarm at 9:30 pm that night, at which time the house was clean. Between then and when Winnie made the discovery, the house was soaked in blood, without the alarm being tripped, and without any evidence of an intruder gaining access.

Unnerved but figuring out they needed to do something, the police took samples of the substance and sent it off to the State Crime Lab. The results came back a few days later, indicating what police had already feared. The substance was blood.

But even worse? It was human blood.

Possible causes investigated

One avenue that was checked was if the blood was the result of William Winston’s dialysis equipment – he was a kidney patient who needed dialysis – malfunctioning. But the lab tests confirmed the blood was neither his nor his wife’s. The blood found on the walls was Type O and both Winstons had Type A blood.

The police remained baffled but eventually two possible explanations presented themselves. Either the bleeding walls were a hoax, and police were presumably even suspecting the grown daughters of the Winstons to have planted the blood. It was also alleged that maybe William Winston had received blood from the hospital to be used in his dialysis, and had smeared the walls with it. This theory was featured in the Georgia Skeptic’s newsletter in 1994. But considering the blood wasn’t even the same type as his, this seems elaborate and near impossible. In addition, there is no clear motive for why William Winston would have done this?

The second option was that whatever was going on at The Blood House, it was supernatural in origin. What exactly it was – a ghost, blood demon, a vampire throwing up all over the walls – even the most seasoned paranormal enthusiasts and parapsychologists could not provide a clear answer to. The rain of blood incident seems similar to other events, causes also unknown but presumed to be paranormal in nature, that have happened in the past and were documented in a variety of books, such as rocks falling out of the sky or a rain of blood falling from a clear sky.

What happened to the Winstons?

After the events, the Winstons stayed in the house. Understandably, because it had been their home for over two decades, but if it were me, I would likely pack my stuff and get the heck out of there.

William Winston passed away about two years after the incident, but Minnie Winston continued to live for many, many years and eventually passed away in 2015.

The walls at 1114 Fountain Drive never bled again – until this day.

Is it a hoax or not?

All we can say for sure is that on the night of 8 September 1987, there was blood smeared across the walls of 1114 Fountain Drive, colouring both the walls and floors bright red. There were police reports of this, and although the case is still open and the cause remains unknown, the fact that there was human blood on the walls, not belonging to the inhabitants, is duly proven.

In other words, the urban legend of the Bleeding House is completely true.

But what the cause is of this blood – if it appeared out of nowhere, due to a paranormal phenomenon, or if it was an elaborate hoax? We may never know for sure.

Urban Legends Investigated

Previously in this series:

• Urban Legends Investigated: The Noise Coming From Inside Children
• Urban Legends Investigated: The Expressionless
• Urban Legends Investigated: Dear David – Part 1 / The Story
• Urban Legends Investigated: Dear David – Part 2 / Is Dear David Real?
• Urban Legends Investigated: Slender Man

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