For a few weeks in September 1987 a small brick house on Fountain Drive in southwest Atlanta, number 1114, was the most talked-about home in the country. Its owners, William Winston, a 79-year-old retired porter, and his wife Minnie, 77, had lived there for 22 years. On the night of September 8 they reported that blood was coming up through the floor. Laboratory tests showed it really was human blood, and that it was not theirs. Where it came from has never been established.
What happened
According to the couple, William locked the doors, set the burglar alarm and went to bed at about 9:30 that evening. Around 11:30 Minnie was in the bath when she saw red liquid welling up from the bathroom floor. She later told reporters it was spurting “like a sprinkler,” and her first thought was that her husband had hurt himself. He had not. The couple found the same substance in other rooms and called the police shortly after midnight.
Homicide detective Steve Cartwright was among those who went to the house. In a United Press International report the next day he described copious amounts of blood on the walls and floors of at least five rooms, much of it near the floor heating vents. There was no body, no wounded person and no sign of a break-in. William Winston told the reporter that neither he nor his wife was bleeding and that no one else had been in the house. A police spokesman said the department was treating the case as an unusual one precisely because there was no body and no known cause.
The crime-lab findings
Samples were taken from the house that night, and an initial analysis at Grady Memorial Hospital confirmed the substance was human blood. The State Crime Laboratory then typed it. The result, later confirmed from the police file by a group of local skeptics, was type O. Both Winstons had type A blood, which ruled them out as the source. William was a kidney dialysis patient, but responders found no fault in his equipment, and property managers found no burst pipes. Published accounts also stressed that the house had no pets and no rodents.
What the lab could not do was say whose blood it was. Blood typing could exclude the Winstons but could not identify anyone else, and with no missing or injured person linked to the address, there was nothing to compare it against.
Shifting stories and a stalled inquiry
The Winstons were quickly besieged. Reporters came from as far as the West Coast, curiosity seekers crowded the street, the phone rang through the night and a parapsychologist from West Georgia College turned up and was refused entry. As the attention grew, William Winston’s account changed. A week after the discovery he said the stain was red dye that had run from a rug. A week after that he blamed rusty water from leaking pipes. By September 22 he was telling UPI that it was a lie that there had ever been blood in his house.
The police, meanwhile, could not find a crime. On September 22 homicide sergeant H. L. Bolton said detectives had not stopped looking, because houses do not bleed, but that they had not established that any offense had been committed, and the case could not justify a full team while real homicides went unsolved. The inquiry was quietly shelved.
The explanations
The story soon passed into books of strange events. Janet and Colin Bord’s Unexplained Mysteries of the 20th Century blamed a poltergeist, and a 1993 edition of The Book of Lists ranked it among the strangest stories of the decade.
In 1994 the Georgia Skeptics published the most detailed account of the official record. Rebecca Long, Joe Nickell and two colleagues sat down with Lieutenant H. Walker, who had led the original investigation, and examined the police file, including color photographs of the rooms. Walker did not believe in a poltergeist. His professional opinion was that someone had deliberately flung the blood through the rooms to stage a hoax, and he told the group that tensions within the household could have supplied a motive, although no one was ever accused. Long added a physical observation: in the photographs the blood had splashed outward from points of contact, the pattern of liquid thrown from a distance, not of something seeping out of a wall or floor. Because no one had been killed, Walker said, police chose not to pursue the matter and spare the family further embarrassment.
Where it stands
No further outbreak was ever reported at Fountain Drive, and William Winston died about two years later. The blood was real, human and of a type that matched neither resident, and those findings were never overturned. The leading official view is a hoax by an unknown person, supported by the spatter pattern but never proven. With no suspect, no source and no samples tested by modern methods, the Atlanta blood house remains unexplained in the narrow sense: the question was never answered, only dropped.