By Danny Cherry Jr.

When human blood overtakes a house amid racial turmoil in 1987 Atlanta, terrifying the family inside, a mystery opens up that persists to this day. The untold true story brought to life through a trove of interviews, official records, and rare documents.

It was late into a foggy Tuesday night in 1987 when the house on 1114 Fountain Drive in Atlanta, Georgia, began to bleed. One moment, all appeared as expected in this modest, quiet home. Then crimson fluid oozed down the white walls, seeped through the wooden hallway floors, splattered across the living room carpet, and found its way into almost every crack and crevice of the six-room brick residence.

Minnie Winston--77 with a thicket of grey-speckled hair--was soaking in the bathtub, a place to unwind and escape the stressors of caring for her husband. Her shoulders looked frail and birdlike, but they could carry more weight than her slight frame suggested. Life did not give Minnie much time for herself. Whatever turmoil existed in the outside world was just that now--outside. The house was locked and the alarm activated for the night, their sanctum holding only the two empty nesters.

—

Minnie got out of the tub. As she walked, she stepped into a red puddle. It appeared to bubble up through the tile floor right at her feet. She was confused. “I didn’t get scared,” she later recalled, “because I didn’t know where it was coming from.” Then fear invaded: it looked like blood. Her husband Willie may have hurt himself. The retiree was in ill health and frail, perpetually tethered to his bed by old age and his dialysis machine.

She ran out of the bathroom and into the hallway, calling Willie’s name, searching for any sign of what was awry. When she got in the hall, she froze. The red liquid was everywhere; along the baseboard and smeared across the walls, dime- and silver dollar-sized droplets splattered everywhere around her. That’s when a geyser of blood shot through the wooden floor, projecting out as though the home had nicked an invisible artery, further spreading and painting the hallway red.

She made it to Willie’s room. She shook him awake. “Come look at all of this red stuff coming out of the floor.”

By the time Willie got out there, puddles had settled like a still red lake.

As husband and wife stood gazing in astonishment, so began the case of a “house of blood” that remains unparalleled in both police and parapsychology files, a fault line between a family’s tranquility and the perpetual violence of a world torn apart. 

Brenda Dipple, 28, had come to Atlanta from out west where the Texas native had studied community health at New Mexico State before switching her focus to police science. Her father had been a daredevil paramedic with a rescue crew in Texas, helping wayward souls stranded on mountains and hiking trails. Despite her relative youth, Brenda now had a chance to help people in another way as a lab technician on the Atlanta Police Department’s Major Cases squad. Her role may not have been glamorous, but she could help find justice for victims who had been deprived of their voices. With a proud Black and Latin heritage, she had a big legacy and responsibility to live up to.

Most cases for Brenda and her fellow lab techs were routine, and many were grim. As a blood tech, her energy was channeled in careful observation and collection of samples, cultivating an eye for droplets and patterns that might be missed by the most experienced detectives.

But this day in September brought something far stranger. In the middle of the night, the late-shift homicide squad had been celebrating an officer's birthday with cake. Downtime was not typical for the APD that year; the city had seen a spike in murder--a result of the flourishing drug trade and growing poverty--that nearly tripled from the year before.

The telephone cut into the office chatter. When the detective closest to the phone answered, confusion clouded his face.

"Blood coming down walls? But there's no body?"

The detective on the phone briefed his colleagues. “An elderly couple called the fire department... She says there’s blood everywhere, but no sign of a body.”

One of the detectives present, Steve Cartwright, would document his reaction to this in interviews, police records, and a later memoir, Diary in Blue. 

"How did the couple explain it?" asked Cartwright.

The other detective shook his head. "They couldn't."

Lab tech Brenda Dipple, as well as a slew of other officers, were gradually beckoned to go to 1114 Fountain Drive, which was in the Mozley Park neighborhood on the Black side of Atlanta, located about three miles from the downtown area. The dwellings in this neighborhood alternated between Folk Victorian cottages and Craftsman bungalows that were built on small lots with no driveways.

The house to which the police were called mostly blended in with others on that side of town, with a brown-brick façade, green shutters, and concrete steps leading to a walkway that parted the middle of the front lawn. The neighborhood was working class to its core, where systemic, perpetual segregation from better funded white areas of Atlanta meant people had to look out for each other.

Once they recovered from the shock of their discovery, Minnie and Willie carefully explored their surroundings. Willie was a rail thin man whose favorite suspenders looked more 1950s than late ‘80s, and oversized glasses similar to his wife’s. They discovered the blood was not only in the bathroom and hall, but the kitchen and living room as well. In their 22 years living in the residence--and for that matter, in their whole lives--this was the first time they had ever seen anything like it. 

Reluctantly, they had called 911, and because of the unclear nature of the situation the dispatchers cast a wide net. Soon Fountain Drive was dotted with emergency vehicles, blades of blue and red and white light slicing through the thick fog that covered the uneven roads. EMTs came in with a logical goal--to see if one of the Winstons was injured and therefore the unwitting source of blood. There’s not a scratch on either of them, an EMT reported to a colleague. “I’m not bleeding,” Willie confirmed. “My wife’s not bleeding. Nobody else was here.” There was also no leak or contamination from Willie’s dialysis equipment. 

The property managers, a father and son both named Alfred, also arrived, flashlights shining around the dugout basement. There were no burst pipes that could have released some kind of foreign substance. They found more bloodstains beneath the television stand in the basement. Alfred Jr., hands on hips, looked around, baffled.

Detective Cartwright of the APD, whipping out his notepad, sensed an open-and-shut case. It came down to this: houses do not bleed. There are no blood vessels or arteries behind walls; brick and mortar has no heartbeat. If this was blood in the Winston residence, then someone put it there, either via injury, death, or most likely, a simple misunderstanding. 

“How’s your eyesight?” the detective asked Minnie.

“It’s fine. And I know what I saw.” Minnie did not like to be dismissed. The former schoolteacher made it clear she would not be condescended to, a hint the detective took.

Willie, who rocked in his chair in their tidy living room, confirmed his wife’s descriptions.

“Had the house been locked?” Cartwright asked.

“Yes.” And the alarm had been set. “No one could have gotten inside, and I know what I saw,” Minnie repeated.

Except, police officers thought, the so-called blood could be anything--paint or rusty fluid of some kind. 

Brenda Dipple, however, felt unsettled from the moment she arrived. Usually a lab tech was an invisible presence at a crime scene, an afterthought to flashier roles carried out by detectives and high-ranking officers. But this time the young tech could be the key to the whole case. When the unassuming Brenda arrived, the police and all the firemen paused to watch her entrance. Whatever the question was this time, Brenda seemed to be the answer.

Brenda went from one space in the dwelling to the next, quietly going about her work. She took close-up photos of the splatter with her specialized camera, the large bulb flashing and momentarily illuminating the blood a bright red, then humming as it cooled down before the next photo. When she prepared to go down into the basement, she paused, a feeling of fear climbing her spine. 

“This house gives me the creeps,” she remarked.

She got razzed a bit by officers for this--There’s no demonic possession! she was promised. Detective Cartwright, for his part, grudgingly admitted the liquid did look like blood, but began to place a mental wager on it being latex paint, somehow accidentally spread around the rooms.

Brenda took the situation very seriously as she descended into the cavernous space below the floor. She was meticulous in all she did. Even on her off time, she was more likely to be found tirelessly tending to a community garden in her Black community, providing food for her less fortunate neighbors, than relaxing in front of a television. She took her time gathering samples of the fluid that could go to the crime lab to be tested.

When Brenda’s samples were analyzed, the report came back promptly. It was, in fact, human blood, and it was Type O. The Winstons were both Type A. 

Astonished police combed through records for 1114 Fountain Drive, not finding any unusual activity connected with the Winstons. But the house had a hidden history stretching far back to before the Winstons lived there.

The residence previously had been occupied by a man named Albert Thompson and his wife. Thompson, who was Black, was a regional racial relations director for the Federal Housing Authority, tasked with monitoring fair practices around Atlanta. In 1950, Thompson, 41 years old, was driving west at the intersection of Mitchell and Davis streets when a southbound truck rammed into his car. An item in the newspaper the next day listed Thompson as one of several accident victims, adding to his name the gloss “a Negro.”

Thompson was rushed to the hospital and treated. He returned to 1114 Fountain Drive with serious injuries. The other driver, Dub, who was white, had served in the infantry in World War II. He did not have a scratch on him. He was booked for improper brakes, which he claimed caused the accident, and was allowed to walk free with a slap on the wrist.

As Thompson struggled through his convalescence, the event was marked not only by the violence of the collision itself, but also a different sort of violence, the violence inherent in the absence of consequences for the offending party. The event was swept under the rug, while the victim suffered on Fountain Drive with internal bleeding, wounds hidden and ignored.

The Atlanta police held a press conference on September 10, 1987, about the case of 1114 Fountain Drive, acknowledging that “copious blood” was found in the home and that the blood was not from either Minnie or Willie Winston. But they did not have answers. “It’s an extremely strange situation,” Detective Cartwright told a reporter. “I’ve been on the force for 10 years, and I’ve never seen anything like that.” The media, already having heard bizarre inklings about the house starting when the first responders arrived, now blanketed the story. 

With the home having been locked and alarmed during the first appearance of blood, it was a twist on the classic “locked room” mystery, boiling down to a question: “How did the blood get in?” More investigators joined the case. One detective canvassed blood banks to see if any supplies had gone missing. These, too, seemed entirely secure. In fact, with the AIDS crisis at a peak, blood was guarded as a precious resource. It was a second locked room mystery, not just how blood got into the residence but how blood might have gotten out of a secure location such as a blood bank. (It made for interesting optics when a newspaper article headlined “Blood Oozing in Atlanta Home is Human,” showing a photo of an overwhelmed Minnie and Winston, was sandwiched between the headlines “New AIDS Test More Accurate” and “AIDS virus risk noted in partners”.) New investigators had no more luck than the detectives on the scene finding any source for the blood. “We have not stopped looking,” said one of these additional officers, Sergeant H. L. Bolton, “but we haven’t determined that a crime was committed.” The instincts of Brenda, the lab tech, had been borne out--there was something more, something stranger in this story. The fact that the blood was real, as Brenda herself had proven, was just the beginning.

The public was fascinated. Curt Rowlett, 30, was a guitarist for an Atlanta cult rock band called The Tombstones. Easy to spot by his bandana and single hoop earring, Rowlett was also an avid researcher of paranormal claims. He drove to Fountain Drive to see the place for himself. “People were everywhere outside the house,” he recalls. There was something disquieting about the street and the edifice itself. Rowlett, who is white, observed the ravages of segregation in the underfunded neighborhood. There was a kind of creepiness to it, he recalls, very different from the “gothic” iconography that popular culture conditions us to associate with fear. Rather than spires and gargoyles, this sense of horror comes from subtle signs of neglect and abandonment, a fire hydrant not connected to any water or a long unrepaired pothole that by this point seems a bottomless abyss.

Rowlett did not want to disturb the family’s privacy but others were not so restrained. People crowded the Winstons’ lawn and found their phone number, calling them night and day. With Willie on his usual bed rest, every time a news reporter knocked and shoved the camera past the door, Minnie had to be the spokesperson for both of them. “People are coming out here to see it and troubling us,” Minnie lamented. “I haven’t had any sleep today and I probably won’t get any tonight.” Willie was fatalistic, noting of the attention, “Me, I’m not bothered by it because I’m in bad enough shape as it is.” 

A dangerous situation arose from their lockdown. If Willie, already frail, had to go to the doctor, he rightfully could be afraid to leave or, in an emergency, simply not be able to be reached. “I’m worried about him in all this,” commented a friend, who usually drove Willie to the hospital for appointments. “He’s not well.”

Later tonight, more on the house of blood … Local news anchors would tease during commercial breaks. 

The postal worker assigned to the Winstons’ block had to shake his head. They were good people, he would tell those who asked, private people who did not seek attention; they were to be trusted. Whatever was happening, he said matter-of-factly, appeared to be supernatural. 

Our visceral reactions to blood signify a kind of paradox. On the one hand, our blood is what keeps us functioning and alive. But the unexpected sight of blood represents danger and triggers feelings of mortality and doom. For those who dug through the annals of the paranormal, the spontaneous appearance of blood was not novel at all. It had a long if obscure history. The third century bishop Januarius of Benevento worked assiduously in the Roman Empire to help save Christian victims of persecution. He was said to have spent time secretly visiting his peers in jail, and on one of these visits he was arrested and soon beheaded. Since then, blood has been said to appear in locations related to Januarius's ordeal. In addition to more ritualized celebrations that involve observing this appearance of blood, there is a stone in Pozzuoli in Naples, Italy, which is said to have served as a basin for Januarius' nurse to wash her hands in after handling his body. The stone reportedly fills with blood to this day, a symbol of the violence of the past. Believers celebrate the appearance of the blood in honor of the ancient martyr when anniversaries of the events approach.

At the modest house on Fountain Drive, the blood began to appear during the leadup to the anniversary of Albert Thompson’s car accident and, as it happened, another anniversary, which was Thompson’s eventual death on Halloween. For believers of such traditions as Saint Januarius, it had seemed some kind of portal of pain and suffering had been jostled loose in the middle of Atlanta. And by this time for Black Atlantans, pain and suffering had become all too common. 

Days before the blood began to run in the Winston residence, less than half a mile away on Lawton Street, a white Fulton County deputy was looking to serve a warrant on a Black suspect. The suspect fled. As the deputy searched, a car was driving in his direction. The deputy opened fire, striking the Black driver, Lamar Montgomery, 19, in the head. 

The car crashed into a brick wall, shattering windows in a building. Neither Montgomery nor the others in the car had been the suspect for whom the deputy had been searching. Montgomery was brought to Grady County Hospital--the same place Albert Thompson was rushed to years earlier after his car collision. 

The deputy claimed that Montgomery had tried to run him down with his car. But the sheriff’s department found that at least one shot was fired after the car had already passed the officer, piercing the back windshield. 

Montgomery, meanwhile, died in the hospital. The shooting and the outcry that followed were part of a very familiar and tragic pattern. The capital of Georgia shimmers with tall skyscrapers that disappear into the clouds. But below the facade of innovation and diversity is a history of anger and violence towards the Black community. 

For two days starting on September 22, 1906, white mobs, which included civilians and cops, strung up Black residents and left them to hang and swing from lampposts, fed up, they said, with a growing Black population taking jobs. Black businesses were burned to the ground, leaving behind smoldering nubs, which in some cases became some peoples’ final resting place. Black citizens were shot and stabbed where they stood in the streets. Some were simply on the streetcars when they were dragged from their seats and murdered in the middle of the thoroughfare. Unofficial reports indicated anywhere from ten to 100 Black people were slaughtered. 

Blood of Black Atlantans quite literally spilled all across the streets of the city.

The catalyst that fueled Black innovation and progress in the city--eventually giving it the nickname of Black Mecca--was the very hate that shut out Black folks from white businesses and markets, prohibited them from stepping foot in white churches or schools, and ran them far away from white neighborhoods and institutions. Segregation and racial violence left Black Atlantans to float adrift with nowhere to go, putting officials such as Albert Thompson in the 1950s in the position to try to advocate for equality in housing, pleading with the federal government to meet the needs of people rather than just force them into increasingly worse circumstances.  

As Black families moved into the suburbs, white people left the neighborhoods en masse and took with them all the property taxes and wealth that funded schools and hospitals and shopping centers. Blue collar Black families such as the Winstons, who raised three children--each of whom had become a successful adult who gave back to their communities--worked hard to create greater opportunities for the next generation.

As the city’s demographics changed, statistically becoming more diverse, the invisible lines separating the worlds of white and Black Atlanta only grew thicker and, on both small and large scales, bloodier.

Besides staring into blood splatters at crime scenes and her enduring affection for gardening, Brenda Dipple was also a churchgoer, settling on Atlanta’s African Methodist Episcopal Church, through which she’d raise money for good causes, including for research into myasthenia gravis, an autoimmune disease in which autoantibodies found in the blood target neuromuscular function. (Blood even played a part in her philanthropy.) Her position working for Major Cases was not an end goal for Brenda--not content with her role as technician, she aimed to become an investigator herself.

The case of 1114 Fountain Drive cried out for fresh perspective. Investigators privately admitted they were baffled, every clue seeming to lead them in circles. “We have no leads at this time,” a lieutenant assigned to the case announced. “If we find no crime was committed, we’re through with it.” The equation of blood = crime = investigation = solution was not adding up this time, frustrating and agitating the police.

As the media coverage of the “Blood House of Atlanta” spread around the world--appearing as the front page story of a Saudi Arabian newspaper--psychics and parapsychologists circled the case. Their calls flooded the news outlets and police stations, at one point actually blowing a phone line at the police station. “This place was a madhouse,” said a police spokesperson. “We were swamped with calls.” One psychic pleaded to be allowed to help: I can make the blood go away. 

For those with the deepest knowledge of theological and mythological lore who were following the twists and turns of the case, they could identify traces of supernatural manifestations of blood--a more menacing and dangerous possibility, in their eyes, than symbolic appearances of blood such as those surrounding Saint Januarius. In the Bible, the Israelites received a divine prohibition against drinking blood, warned of dire consequences. Sri Lankans reported the presence of a demon called Reeri Yakseya, a fiery red figure riding on a red bull, who controlled all human blood and its diseases. Such beasts appeared under a variety of names across different lands. Another culture’s incarnation, called Blood Seed, was a warmongering demon, whose every drop of blood would sprout another demon.

Meanwhile, hardly a day after blood first flowed through the Winston residence, another egregious police shooting occurred in a Black neighborhood in Atlanta. At a housing project called Carver Homes, labeled a “drug-infested area” by the police, an encounter with police began when Eddie Callahan, 37, who was Black, was seen arguing with a woman outside of the housing project. Two police officers who were there to serve a warrant witnessed this and decided to intervene. That’s when Callahan took off in a car, which someone else accused him of stealing. A chase ensued and eventually Callahan got out to run on foot. One of the white police officers on the scene shot Callahan six times in the back. According to some witnesses, Callahan was handcuffed at the time and lying on the ground. 

It was impossible not to consider the violence against Blacks lurking just beneath the surface across Atlanta when examining the blood mysteriously flowing at the Winston home. A convergence, a nexus of some kind seemed to emerge: the approaching anniversaries of the Thompson car accident and his death on Halloween, as well as the September 1906 massacre in the streets; the police shootings right before and after the time the blood first appeared, all created a closed circuit of wounds. 

Though still a relatively new member of Atlanta’s Black community, Brenda was able to relate to its perspective on police much better than most of her white colleagues. She could understand those feelings of being overlooked and neglected, to those feelings of their lives and deaths not being valued, and to the disorientation and anger that resulted. Brenda’s mother had emigrated to the United States from Guyana, South America, as a child, and those lived experiences of being an “other” and a citizen simultaneously informed Brenda’s outlook. 

Brenda explained to the detectives what she had discovered: there were whispers about 1114 Fountain being a setting of supernatural activity. The case was going in circles, perhaps, because it called for an investigation not only into what was not known, but into the unknown. 

But a change uprooted the case. Having been so eager to solve it initially, the police abruptly began to distance themselves. They aired their infighting in public, accusing the various blood processing labs of having delayed testing and depriving investigators of additional information. Questions were posed about whether the Winstons practiced any ritualistic or sacrificial religions, a race-tinged canard to explain the blood. In another racially charged line of thought, the possibility had been raised of whether a gang-related weapon could have been hidden inside the dwelling, in the process dripping or splattering the blood.

The word hoax was also thrown around. One anonymous police source scoffed that “some adults will act like children just to get attention,” infantilizing the Winstons, parents of three and grandparents of many, who both had spotless records. A whispering campaign began alleging that one of the Winstons’ grown daughters, who worked at a hospital, could have been responsible for planting the blood--the whispers tainting her and the family name and besmirching her profession. Law enforcement also explicitly linked the case to the latest police shooting, though in a manner that positioned the incidents as competing with each other. “The house is not a high priority right now,” a lieutenant announced, “because of the shooting.” A spokesperson put a finer point on closing their work at Fountain Drive even without any answers: “Until such time we have determined a crime was committed, it doesn’t merit a whole group of investigators working on it.”

Brenda, who had collected the samples proving the blood was real in the face of skeptics, now found herself pushed out in the rush by officials to drop the case. Back in Texas, her father would always seem to arrive in the nick of time, ferried back and forth by helicopters to scoop up the distressed and vulnerable; in one of these daring rescues, her father had to be lowered down twice from a helicopter before reaching an injured girl. This time around, Brenda could not parachute in to aid the Winstons. With the finger-pointing and politics flaring, she no longer even had access to perform additional blood tests, which might have found crucial peculiarities or singularities. 

If Brenda was deprived of extracting more stories from the blood, so were the paranormalists who were now being ignored by the police detectives when they called to express urgent advice. They, too, had narratives to share, drawn from parapsychology and from world religions, legends, and lore. Some were convinced there was by now a demonic presence on Fountain Drive and begged to be put in touch with the Winstons to warn them. What may have begun as a quasi-symbolic manifestation, a violent disruption to normal patterns, couldallow a parasitic entity a terrifying power over the house. The police, according to these theorists, were in way over their heads. Truth be told, paranormalists were accustomed to being dismissed, but to them the case’s details were no new age mumbo jumbo, it was a tale old as time. There was grave danger but there was also hope. The all-powerful Blood Seed demon, revealed ancient manuscripts composed between 200 and 400 BCE, was once defeated, and could be defeated again... 

On the foggy morning of Thursday, September 11, the chaos at the Winstons’ came to a crescendo, putting 1114 Fountain Drive under siege. Cars lined the street and local news cameras were lugged around, set up to capture whatever they could. Newspaper reporters, hungrier than ever for the latest details, pounded on the door demanding to speak to the Winstons. The phone rang and rang. The house literally shook to its foundation. 

If this kept up, the Winstons would lose all that they had been trying to protect when first dialing 911, the refuge that was their home and the tranquility and safety of their golden years replaced with horror on the inside and intrusion from the outside. With a fixed income, they could not just leave and go elsewhere, nor was Willie's health strong enough for him to be moved safely on short notice. New appearances of blood could not be reported to the authorities without blowback and further allegations directed against them. One thing was clear. They could not rely on anyone, neither journalist nor police officer; neither property manager nor paranormal investigator. They had been treated as curiosities, as passive figures in the story, their information and level of cognition dismissed, their family placed under suspicion. Society was adept at treating senior citizens as invisible and abandoning them, even more so Black senior citizens. Even those in a position to help, those who believed in them--like their natural ally, the young lab tech Brenda--were now barred by police protocols. What became plain with every passing hour was the fact that no one could restore order to their situation. No one, that is, but Minnie and Willie themselves. 

The Blood Seed demon (so wrote the ancient texts) had been on a rampage when confronted by a powerful female figure, a Warrior who is charged with fighting back against those forces trying to destabilize divine rule ...

With the house surrounded from outside, Minnie and Willie took a stand inside. Their home and reputation at stake, they would have to close whatever this portal was--this unnamable rift that channeled the pain of their community.

It was a light bulb moment: To expel the presence, they would have to stage a confrontation, mustering all their inner strength and in the process proving they were not the weak or confused old folks that so many over the course of the ordeal had seemed to believe they were. If the menace had begun in an atmosphere of vulnerability, they would now turn the tables.

The Blood Seed demon is believed by some to be the king of all demons, and now snarls in rage at being challenged by the powerful female Warrior and her allies. She charges with a long blade, slicing into the beast, and splattering its blood. But the drops of blood begin to shift, to move, to change and grow…

Minnie and Willie blocked out the growing clamor from outside. The founders of Methodism, the denomination they had in common with Brenda Dipple, had believed superstitions of the old world lurked in the form of demons. Their task became the opposite of Holy Communion, in which Christ’s atoning blood was welcomed in the form of wine. The question of how the blood and wine coalesced was accepted as a mystery rather than subjected to ecumenical explanations; and now in this case, the dark spiritual manifestation of blood, with its own unexplained mysteries, had to be repelled instead of invited. The church addressed spiritual warfare, pointing to a way out in the first Epistle of Peter: “Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. Resist him, standing firm in the faith, because you know that the family of believers throughout the world is undergoing the same kind of sufferings.” The Book of James added the mantra, “Resist the devil, and he will flee.” Willie faced his bedroom and that bed in which he spent so much time prostrate, unmoving, struggling through dialysis, entirely dependent on others. The bedroom was feet away from the spot where blood came through the floor like a sprinkler. “There's no blood in this house,” Willie shouted, “now get away from here!”

Minnie screamed, “I don't want nothing more to do with it!” She faced the living room, where blood had been pouring over the baseboards. “Just leave us alone!” 

The blood drops grow into replicas of the Blood Seed Demon. Now there are four demons, six, eight… each creature poised to attack, surrounding the Warrior and her dwindling allies…

Reporters hearing the screams tried to see inside, some assuming that the Winstons' admonishments were directed at them. 

Get away from here!

Leave us alone! 

No blood in this house!

With power rising in the Winstons' voices, something seemed to have changed.

The morning fog was lifting into a gray afternoon, the sun peeking through. At the street, a reporter named Walter who had been covering the story noticed a peculiar onlooker. An elderly woman with a bright yellow scarf around her head and pink tennis shoes stood at a maple tree, focusing her gaze on the brick structure like she was trying to peer through its façade. Unlike others, she wore a look of understanding rather than confusion. Eager to find more about the oddest story of his career as a reporter, Walter decided to approach her.

He asked her if she knew anything, or if she could explain it at all to him?

The Warrior, revealing herself as a goddess, begins to devour the drops of blood as they fall, swallowing them and preventing their transformation into beasts, leaving the Blood Demon unguarded and vulnerable, at last, to being slayed.

Unfazed by the question, the mystery woman at the tree still looked up at the residence. “It's a scientific matter,” she said. Then, just as Walter seemed to think he might make headway, the mysterious woman added: I won't explain any further.

Asked who she was, the woman refused to give her name before disappearing. By that point, the house seemed to have shifted into silence.

Inside, Minnie and Willie Winston were alone, together, harnessing the strength of generations. 

take the blood house home. click here for the limited-run t-shirt

—

Time would go by, the news cycle would move on, the parade of people would clear out and leave the street and the neighborhood to be--once again--largely ignored.

The walls of the bleeding house, from accounts close to the family, never bled again.

The shootings that took place shortly before and after 1114 Fountain Drive began to bleed had similar outcomes in the justice system. The sheriff’s deputy who shot 19-year-old Lamar Montgomery was fired, but a grand jury refused to return an indictment. The officers involved in the police shooting of Eddie Callahan at the Carver housing project were suspended without pay before a jury came back deadlocked, with the officers leaving the department and moving on with their lives.

The Winstons returned to their lives as private people, sometimes spotted relaxing in lawn chairs in their wired-in backyard. Curt Rowlett, the rock & roll paranormal aficionado, decided to try calling them on the phone after things quieted down. Minnie answered. Rust and mud, she explained when talking about what the blood had been. That answer was, of course, a deflection, considering the human blood present had been an undeniable fact. But by this point the Winstons were content to put the chapter behind them and say little else about it. When Rowlett asked point blank whether the house had been haunted or had otherwise been a site of a supernatural event, Minnie changed the subject. Believers and skeptics, paranormalists and police alike, all came to believe that Minnie was never able to share all the horrors they experienced behind closed doors. 

Brenda Dipple later achieved her goals of becoming an investigator, serving in that role for the Medical Examiner’s Office for years. She remains in Atlanta and uses her expertise to pursue justice as part of a nonprofit devoted to providing investigative services to low income defendants, whose rights the system is all too often poised to block.

Willie Winston passed away peacefully a little more than two years after the events of the blood house. Before assembling at the chapel, Minnie and their loved ones reflected privately on his life, gathering together in the family home at 1114 Fountain Drive, once again a quiet sanctuary from violent injustices raging outside.

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