[SPEAKER_00]: warning.
[SPEAKER_00]: This episode contains details that some listeners may find disturbing.
[SPEAKER_00]: 1987 is Atlanta.
[SPEAKER_00]: In elderly women stepped out of her bathtub when she suddenly noticed weird droplets of red liquid on the floor that looked like blood.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then she left the bathroom and saw more.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the hallway, in the kitchen, in the basement.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yet, no one was hurt.
[SPEAKER_00]: No one in the house was bleeding.
[SPEAKER_00]: By morning, police would be standing inside the small brick home and fountain drive, trying to help solve this strange puzzle.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they took a sample of this weird red liquid.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the lab results came back.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was blood.
[SPEAKER_00]: Human blood.
[SPEAKER_00]: To this day, no one can explain why this house seemed to be losing blood.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a study of strength.
[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome back to the podcast.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Michael, thank you so much for joining me.
[SPEAKER_00]: Before I dive into today's story, if you have experienced something scary, could be paranormal, could be something weird, strange, bizarre.
[SPEAKER_00]: I would love to hear about your tale and you might get to be on a future episode of this show.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you think you have something appropriate or you just want to talk to somebody about something scary that happened to you, email me at a study of strange at gmail.com.
[SPEAKER_00]: The home stands at 1114 Fountain Drive, Southwest, and Atlanta, Georgia.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not the kind of place that looks destined for ghost stories or spooky legends.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a modest brick-home in southwest Atlanta in a very ordinary neighborhood.
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1987 it belonged to many Clyde Winston and her husband William Winston known as Willy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Mini was 77, Willy was 79, they had not owned the property, but they had happily leased this house for more than 20 years.
[SPEAKER_00]: Willy was in poor health and on dialysis and many helped care for.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, when many stepped out of the bathtub that night on Tuesday, September 8th, 1987, around 11.30 pm, she first thought something had happened to Willy.
[SPEAKER_00]: She hurried to check on him, woke him up, but he was fine.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was not bleeding and the dialysis machine has been determined to not be the source of the oozing blood.
[SPEAKER_00]: No one else was in the house.
[SPEAKER_00]: The windstins had reportedly locked the doors and set their alarm around 930 p.m.
[SPEAKER_00]: The house was quiet, nothing seemed unusual.
[SPEAKER_00]: As many willy investigated the home, they found this red liquid in several parts of the house, the hallway kitchen living room bedroom basement.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of it was on the floor, commonly, you come across versions of this story where the blood is literally everywhere, it's coming out of the walls and the ceiling, but in truth, it was small round drops, often described as the size of silver dollars.
[SPEAKER_00]: And all of the blood was on the floor, or some of it was very low on the baseboards.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Winston's called for help, police and emergency medical workers arrived expecting to find someone injured, maybe there was an accident, but there was no patient for the EMTs.
[SPEAKER_00]: Here's a quote from the Atlanta Constitution newspaper published on September 10.
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't get scared, Mrs. Winston said, because I didn't know where it was coming from.
[SPEAKER_00]: It didn't smell like blood, most of the blood spots were on the floors and walls, causing investigators to suspect a wounded animal, said detective Richard Price.
[SPEAKER_00]: Police collected samples of this liquid and sent them in for testing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is where the story changes into something that's become quite legendary.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Georgia State Crime Lab reportedly determined that the substance was human blood, more specifically, it was type O.
[SPEAKER_00]: Many of Willy Winston were both reportedly type A.
[SPEAKER_00]: To clarify, that means the tested blood was not Willy's or Minis.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is the detail that keeps this case alive because without it, the story isn't really anything.
[SPEAKER_00]: If it had come back to this wasn't blood, it could be medicine, it could be die, it could be pain, it could be rust, but human blood that doesn't match the residents.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is intriguing and just a confirm.
[SPEAKER_00]: This also means it's not animal blood.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is human blood.
[SPEAKER_00]: So investigators had a serious question.
[SPEAKER_00]: If the blood did not belong to many or willy, who's was it?
[SPEAKER_00]: The detective on the case, Steve Kurt Wright reportedly called it an extremely strange situation.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yes, I emphasize the word strange there because this is a study of strange.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you didn't know, please like and subscribe.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the interesting things to me about this case is that investigators
[SPEAKER_00]: don't really seem to have defined the case.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, it wasn't a murder.
[SPEAKER_00]: It wasn't an assault.
[SPEAKER_00]: It wasn't an attack.
[SPEAKER_00]: It wasn't an accident.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, if police had found a body, if they had found an injured person, there would be a victim to question their beat potential witnesses.
[SPEAKER_00]: If there had been a broken window or a sign of forced injury, then you'd be investigating a burglary.
[SPEAKER_00]: But there were none of those things.
[SPEAKER_00]: Here's a quote from Atlanta Homicide Detective Sergeant Bolton.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have not stopped looking because we know houses don't bleed, but we haven't determined that a crime has been committed and that is our primary concern.
[SPEAKER_00]: There might not have been a criminal case of their investigating, but there was a mystery.
[SPEAKER_00]: The press found out about this story very quickly, and that was probably inevitable.
[SPEAKER_00]: A house oozing blood, I mean, I'm all over that story, I read this kind of stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: So curiosity seekers started coming around, and the Winston's were thrust into a situation they did not like.
[SPEAKER_00]: People were hanging around the home, knocking on the door, wanting to see inside, ghost
[SPEAKER_00]: Here's a quote again from the Atlantic Constitution on September 11th.
[SPEAKER_00]: One thing was certain.
[SPEAKER_00]: By Thursday afternoon, the Winston's were, I rate, over all the hullabaloo stirred up by the strange case.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't want nothing more to do with it, geo from a living room to a reporter standing at her front door.
[SPEAKER_00]: What they've said about all this is lies, just leave us alone.
[SPEAKER_00]: I still don't know where the blood came from.
[SPEAKER_00]: The phone rang all night, people asked me all these questions.
[SPEAKER_00]: Mrs. Winston said, I'm fed up with all of this.
[SPEAKER_00]: From his bedroom window, Winston yelled, there is no blood in this house, now get away from here.
[SPEAKER_00]: End quote.
[SPEAKER_00]: At some point, probably brought on but the annoying attention they were getting.
[SPEAKER_00]: Willy and many reportedly began offering mundane ordinary explanations, rust, mud, die, something in the water, something in the house.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think in a way this is just to get people to lose interest.
[SPEAKER_00]: But those explanations do not match the reported lab findings.
[SPEAKER_00]: I should clarify as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: The blood doesn't reappear that something that gets missed in retellings of this case all the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not like this house is continuously losing blood or had it seeping up through the floorboards.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was just one night.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's one occurrence of this happening.
[SPEAKER_00]: But let's discuss a few theories and we'll start with this was a paranormal event.
[SPEAKER_00]: The paranormal version is really the one that made this case famous, or at least that's how I came across the story.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's easy to understand why.
[SPEAKER_00]: A house that seems to ooze blood is fuel for nightmares.
[SPEAKER_00]: And people assume something terrible must have happened in the past in this house to create this situation.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like bodies are buried underneath the floor
[SPEAKER_00]: It's built on an old Indian burial ground.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, there have been no reports of weird ghostly activity at that house before or sense.
[SPEAKER_00]: Remember, the wind stints had lived in this house for decades and nothing out of the realm of explanation.
[SPEAKER_00]: had ever happened before.
[SPEAKER_00]: The paranormal theory, it does just tend to come up in online articles and comments and shares.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nothing has ever been officially shared by the family or homeowners then or now to suggest this is a haunted home.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you come across reports of ghostly activity or ghost hunters experiencing things, that tends to just be rumour.
[SPEAKER_00]: Unexplained is not the same thing as supernatural.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our next theory we'll talk about is that this was a hoax that somebody intentionally put blood in the house.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this was reportedly the conclusion favored by Lieutenant Walker, who led the investigation.
[SPEAKER_00]: He thought blood had been deliberately splattered around the home, and he spoke with a group from the nonprofit, Georgia skeptics, who reviewed the police files and color photographs and confirmed that the substance was human type of blood according to their report.
[SPEAKER_00]: photographs from the police files did not look like liquid naturally seeping from the walls dripping from the walls or losing out of the floors.
[SPEAKER_00]: The stains look more like splashes or splatter.
[SPEAKER_00]: If that is true, the title of my episode, The House that Tripblood is incorrect.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm sorry.
[SPEAKER_00]: But hey, I got you to click on the episode, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe you could download it five to six thousand more times that would be fantastic.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'd appreciate it, thank you.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, the Hook's theory does have problems.
[SPEAKER_00]: It needs a person, it needs a method, it needs a motive.
[SPEAKER_00]: Also what it really needs is a source for human typo blood.
[SPEAKER_00]: It probably needs access to the house after the alarm was set or an explanation for how the blood appeared without the Winston's noticing sooner.
[SPEAKER_00]: Interestingly, investigators looked at family.
[SPEAKER_00]: Lieutenant Walker claimed that one of the Winston's daughters worked in a hospital and therefore might have had access to human blood.
[SPEAKER_00]: but that is just a theory, no public evidence proved that the daughter took blood, planted it, or had anything to do with the incident, and again she would have had to get into the home after it had been locked after the alarm was set without any arrest and realizing it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And motive!
[SPEAKER_00]: would be a big question mark I have in that situation.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why would you leave random droplets of blood around your parent's home, including underneath a TV set in the basement, which is true that's where they found some of the blood, it just doesn't make any sense.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our next theory, and one that
[SPEAKER_00]: I admit I'm very intrigued by, is that this was some kind of wounded animal that got into the house, and this was one of the police's first theories.
[SPEAKER_00]: The blood is low on the floor and on low baseboards, including underneath that TV set I just mentioned that is where a small animal could fit.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now on the surface, this theory is logical, it removes the supernatural element, it removes the hoax which is just bizarre, it's something ordinary, it's something simple, but it's human blood.
[SPEAKER_00]: Animals do have blood types, but typo is specifically part of the human ABO system.
[SPEAKER_00]: That does not make the animal theory impossible.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe a sample got switched by accident.
[SPEAKER_00]: Different stains could theoretically have different sources, like maybe they only took a test from one sample when the other weird little droplets could be something else.
[SPEAKER_00]: But there is no solid evidence in the record that any of those things happen.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was also no carguess.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no trail to a den who were a hole in the wall for a small animal to get into.
[SPEAKER_00]: No clear evidence of fur tracks or entry into the house.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our next theory is that this could have been medical or a household source.
[SPEAKER_00]: And what I mean by that is, Willie was on dialysis and could blood from his treatment.
[SPEAKER_00]: spill or drop across the house could medical ways to have been involved.
[SPEAKER_00]: But again, this theory runs into some walls because Willy had type A blood, not type O.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our last theories of this could have been an intruder.
[SPEAKER_00]: Another possibility is that somebody entered the house and left blood behind.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe a wounded person.
[SPEAKER_00]: This theory has one advantage.
[SPEAKER_00]: It gives the blood a human source.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it also creates a lot more questions.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why was no injured person found?
[SPEAKER_00]: How did they enter the house and leave without anybody noticing?
[SPEAKER_00]: Why was there no obvious forced intrigue or forced exit?
[SPEAKER_00]: Why would somebody bleed through multiple rooms and then poof vanish without leaving a clear trail outside?
[SPEAKER_00]: After the reporters left and the curiosity seekers lost interest, the house on felt and drive became a normal home again.
[SPEAKER_00]: Willie and Minnie Winston have since passed on, and the strange event has not repeated.
[SPEAKER_00]: at least not in any documented way.
[SPEAKER_00]: The House and Trips blood is no closer to being solved after all these years.
[SPEAKER_00]: When Sherlock Holmes says, would you have eliminated the impossible?
[SPEAKER_00]: Whatever remains, however, improbable, must be of the truth.
[SPEAKER_00]: What's intriguing is that when you eliminate the impossible in this story, there are too many improbable options left.
[SPEAKER_00]: really strange.