Weird History: The Bleeding House on Fountain Drive

You know when you get home after a long day and your walls start to drip blood? No? Good. Because, apparently, this is an option. Today, we talk about what is sometimes referred to as the Atlanta Blood House or the Atlanta Bleeding House.

A retired couple were home alone at 1114 Fountain Drive on the night of Tuesday, September 8 1987 when 77-year-old Minnie Watson found unexplainable spots of blood on the floor. She alerted her husband, 79-year-old old William, who investigated with her before the couple decided to call the police. And the spots weren't just limited to one location. Blood was found in four or five of the home's six rooms. It was even in the hallway.

Experts were later able to confirm that the mystery blood was definitely type O. According to The New York Times back in 1987, both William and Minnie had type A blood. William was going through dialysis at the time, but that would not account for the presence of an entirely different blood type.

Police were quick to admit that there were no leads, though they did not believe the blood was tied to a homicide. That said, an article in the Atlanta Constitution the following September said that the blood was definitely human. Unfortunately, delays in testing the blood made it difficult to discern much beyond that and the blood type.

So, where did the blood come from? One source reported that the Watsons had been renting the house on Fountain Drive for 22 years. Supposedly nothing like this had happened prior to this during those two decades. The Watsons had no pets, ruling out the possibility that a cat or a dog could have dragged something inside. Minnie was in the bathtub prior to her discovery of the blood and didn't hear anything strange going on in the house. William was in the bedroom at the time and when Minnie fetched him, he didn't have any idea where the blood could have come from, either.

An unsolved mystery is gossip fodder but a particularly strange unsolved mystery garners twice the interest. The Watsons quickly grew tired of the media attention. Eventually, the police closed the case since it was unclear if a crime had been committed. The cause of the bloody spots remains unknown to this day.

There is a lot of speculation online about the Atlanta Blood House, but very few concrete sources. Some people believe it was a hoax. Others suggest one of the Watson's children scattered it around the home to make their parents look incompetent in order to seize their assets. There are also theories that an intruder left the blood spots, though there seemed to be no signs of a break-in. And again, neither Minnie nor William heard anyone come into the home. In the 1990 book Unexplained Mysteries of the 20th Century, authors Janet Bord and Colin Bord even discussed a theory involving a "resident poltergeist". In truth, we'll probably never know for certain what happened that night.

The One Strange Thing podcast covered the case in episode eight and can be listened to here.

1114 Fountain Drive, built in 1945, is blurred out on Google Maps. It is currently not on the market.

[Image Credit: photograph by NEOSiAM 2021 via Pexels]