The House that Dripped Blood

The House that Dripped Blood (a true story)

By Bill Schaeffer

I was only 6 years old.   In the beginning of the summer, and my baby brother Scott was sick with the bronchitis.    He was only a baby and had a humidifier running in his room.

Our house was a little one story square home with wide wooden siding.   It was painted white with yellow trim and was built only a few years earlier by Joe Kime, Builder.    In the summer, the house was bright and happy in the sunlight.   We had no air-conditioning and the windows were open.  A few small twig like trees were planted in the front yard and there was a long gravel driveway that lead to the street.   Along the outside of the driveway was a flowerbed where my mother grew an assortment of constantly blooming flowers.   

It was a beautiful sunny day and we were driving home from church.   My father was a salesman and got a new car every two years.   This year we were riding in a new, dark blue Plymouth.

As we turned the corner of our street, we couldn’t believe our eyes.     The house was dripping blood.    This was like a horror movie, except it was real.    Coming out from beneath the wooden siding were long drips of blood red liquid staining the sides of the house.    The stripes were about two inches wide and vivid red.

The drips were randomly uniform and could be seen along the front and sides of the house.    The effect on the bright day was unmistakable.    The happy little house,  white with yellow trim, was dripping blood red streaks of color.

My father was beside himself with disbelief and quickly jumped out of the car to inspect the colored drips.    I was relatively young and quiet natured so I did not know what to think.    I did not know how unusual a phenomenon this was.    To me it seemed only natural that a house should drip blood red color streaks on occasion, because we were witnessing the event right here.

Immediately my father began plans to repaint the house.    The next weekend, my father scraped the paint off the sides of the little house with  long metal razor blade tool.   It was silver with a red handle.   It took the whole weekend and was a lot of work.  It was determined that the wood siding was “green” and the red sap dripping out of the boards gave the blood red color to the drips.    Sitting in the summer sun to dry for a week, my father painted the house the following weekend. 

The entire house was clean and white with yellow trim once again.

This was a tremendous effort and my father worked very hard.   Both he and my mother were mortified by the blood red drips and they talked about it incessantly.   Perhaps it was the humidifier inside for Scott that added moisture to the wood outside, and caused the drips?    Perhaps it was the humid summer heat?  

The weather, however, was sunny and it had not rained.

In any event the house was repainted and the whole event was just a memory.

The next weekend it was another hot and beautiful day as we returned from church.  As the car pulled up the street and into the drive, we saw the house  was “dripping blood”  once again.     I cannot remember if the streaks were exactly the same, but the effect was exactly the same.    Wide blood red streaks of color were dripping from underneath the wooden shingles.    The color looked just as saturated as the previous time and just as uniformly distributed.

My father could not believe his eyes.   He leapt out of the car in disbelief.   This was a phenomenal let down after all that painting work.   My father went back to E & G home center and bought some more paint and a blow torch.   This time he was determined to solve the problem.   After scraping paint off of the whole house he took the blow torch to dry the wood siding.   He went the length of the entire house torching the bare wood with the flame - board by board by board.  Then, he primed the house and painted the entire house once again.

And then, incredibly, it happened one more time.   We were driving home from church on another sunny day in August and the house once more appeared to be dripping blood.   My father was speechless and stunned.     This was beyond belief.   It was incredibly disheartening after already painting the entire house two complete times.

This time, my father called everyone he know to see how he could possibly solve the problem.   He had men come over to the house and look at the problem.   Finally he got some little aluminum wedges that he could hammer up underneath the shingles to let moisture out and keep the wood dry.

One more time, my father scraped the entire house with an aluminum scraping tool.  Then he took the blowtorch and dried the wooden siding till it was almost burnt black.  Then he hammered these little aluminum wedges up under the wooden siding.

Then, after priming the house he painted the entire thing one more time.    After watching all this, I asked if I could help.  My father gave me a paint brush and a small square to work on.   I was very proud to be able to help.  After I finished, I showed my work to my father and he just painted over it, with his big brush, and did not say hardly a thing.

Finally, the problem was fixed and the house never dripped blood again.   Since I was very young at the time, I did not have an opinion as to the cause or uniqueness of this event.   I just watched it unfold over the course of the summer.   My parents maintained that it was the humidifier in Scott’s room that caused the  siding to get moist and drip red colored sap.  

There are several problems with this explanation.   Most houses have a moisture barrier that keeps the inside of the house warm and dry when it is wet outside.    According to my recollection, the house was never damp, muggy, or humid inside -- even when it was raining outside.    There was never any mildew on the floors or walls of any of the rooms.   In fact my mother was a diligent housekeeper and the house was always clean and nice inside.    If a humidifier could cause the siding to bleed, then surely we would have noticed moisture inside at other times.

Another interesting feature is that the blood red drips were always the same density, same size, and same saturation of color.   One would think that if the wood was green; each successive manifestation of sap leaching out of the wood, would be less colorful and less intense than before.   But, this is not my memory of the incident.   Each manifestation was equally vivid and impressive.

I can think of no external events that coincided with this occurrence.   It was not raining and the weather was a beautiful sunny day each time.   In fact, there was very little rain all summer long if I remember correctly.

And then, the summer ended.   And we never really talked about this again.

However, when my parents bought their next house, they got aluminum siding that would never need repainting.   Also, the siding could not possibly leach colored sap, because there was no wood.  And, they got red colored siding.   Barn red siding with white trim.  Perhaps they thought even if the new house dripped blood, no one would even see it against the red aluminum siding.

Additionally, one could say that it is almost as if the house itself was trying to turn red, and then it finally did turn completely red when we bought the next one.

copyright(c)2009, 2014 Wm Schaeffer