[brooding ethereal music plays]
[ducks quack]
[woman] I always knew the stories about the curse of Lake Lanier.
It's always been
the creepy lake, the haunted lake. You know, "You're brave if you go there."
But I was kind of skeptic. [laughs] So didn't really think anything of it.
And then, in 2020, me and my family, you know, we were hanging out at the lake.
We tried to catch some fish, and wasn't really active,
so we were like, "Let's go in the water."
You know, you're brave if you go there. It's a challenge to go there.
So, ever since I was little, basically. It was very cold.
Like, very, very, very cold.
With the kids that we had with us, we were playing Marco Polo.
[echoes] Marco.
[children] Polo!
[woman] And we started drifting out more and more.
[echoes] Marco.
[child] Polo.
[woman] As I was out there in the deeper waters,
I noticed my feet couldn't touch the ground, but I could swim.
As I was swimming, I saw something at my foot.
Thought it was a fish 'cause, you know, you're in a lake.
And then I felt something grab around my ankle and yank me real fast.
And the water completely went over my head.
[anxious music plays]
I started freaking out.
It happened within a span of a few seconds but felt like eternity.
And then I shot back up.
But when I did, because of my asthma, I couldn't breathe.
My little brother saw me, and he s-- swam out there and got me.
I didn't think people would believe me when I got to the shore,
and so I didn't tell anybody at first.
[unsettling choral music plays]
And then I found it was very common
for other people to feel like they're getting pulled under...
as they said, by angry spirits.
I haven't been in the lake since.
I know it sounds crazy, but it's not normal, like, at all.
[theme music plays]
[creepy classical music plays]
[narrator] Thirty miles outside Atlanta, Georgia
lies a lake shrouded in mystery.
Some say it's haunted.
Others say it's cursed.
But its true story and history may be even more unsettling.
[intriguing music plays]
[man] The numbers of times that Lanier Dive Recovery
gets called to come find a wallet, a phone--
- Keys, prescription glasses. - ...a wedding ring, keys.
Thirty-seven wedding rings to date. Can you believe that?
Lake Lanier's a man-made lake
and one of the largest man-made lakes in the country.
It has 692 s-- miles of shoreline.
Deepest part of the lake is 156 feet deep.
The lake was originally built for power generation.
Back in the late 1940s, the Corps of Engineers was commissioned
to come out here and to design and lay out the lake.
[reporter] The biggest town in the South is Atlanta,
the capital of the state of Georgia.
Atlanta was growing exponentially.
I think it jumped up something from, uh, like, 14,000 people
to 200,000 people
within just a few short years.
So, they needed a place
to get the water resources that the city was gonna need.
[Richard] Lake Lanier is fed by two rivers,
the Chattahoochee and the Chestatee rivers.
And when they built the lake, there were a lot of roads, bridges.
There were a lot of single-family homes, mostly farmers.
And those people moved to other places.
Most wanted to do it because of the development that it would provide.
[Steve] The US Army Corps of Engineers started buyin' up a lot of the land,
and ground was broke in 1950.
And the dam was finished around 1954.
And then the lake was officially filled around 1957.
[Richard] This is a beautiful, beautiful lake, and has so much to offer,
which is why we have so many people that come visit every year.
[mellow spacey music plays]
There are over ten million visitors that come to Lake Lanier every year.
They're expecting even more this year.
So there are a huge number of people coming in.
[narrator] The lake has now become the go-to spot
for Atlantans looking to cool off from the summer heat.
But as its popularity grows, so do the rumors.
[Steven] Before working for the Corps,
I'd never really heard any folklore about Lanier outside of it existing.
But within 30 seconds of having an office there,
I immediately got all kinds of stories.
The main stories were the drownings.
Eleven people have died in drowning or boating accidents
on Lake Lanier this year.
Crews are working to recover two men from Lake Lanier.
A reported drowning.
Another drowning yesterday afternoon.
Two more deaths at Lake Lanier over the holiday weekend.
And it wasn't normal drownings,
like someone messed up, and that's just their demise.
It was, you know, a creepy vibe.
He jumped into the water, but he never came up.
[male reporter] She disappeared after jumping off a boat into the lake.
He went under, and so far, hasn't resurfaced.
[Steve] Even though it is large,
when you hear almost 20 people die in a year
in one particular spot, then yeah,
rumors and folklore do kinda start to fly.
[narrator] The folklore centers around the paranormal
and questions whether or not ghosts may be responsible for the deaths.
[water gurgles]
[creepy lighthearted music plays]
[man] Since the inception of Lake Lanier in the late, uh, 1950s,
there've been something like 700 people that died,
and more than 200 people have since 1990.
And there are supposedly some bodies that have never been recovered.
It's a place and source of controversy over the years.
And when I first moved here, I was involved with the ghost walk,
where storytellers told stories
of paranormal activity that goes on around the lake.
And that was very popular.
Uh, mine, in particular, was the "Lady in the Lake."
[brooding ethereal music plays]
There have been many stories of people having seen an apparition
on the Highway 53 bridge
of a lady wandering around there,
wearing a blue dress.
And they thought that, perhaps--
that the apparition was related to a young woman's body
that had been found
right beside the bridge in the blue dress.
At the time, they couldn't figure out who she was.
But people speculated that it might've been Delia Young,
who disappeared with Susie Roberts about 18 months earlier.
They were both young mothers.
And they were gonna go over to this nightclub
over on the Forsyth County side of the lake
and dance the night away.
[spooky playful music plays]
So, they went over there, and they had a big time, evidently.
Delia in her borrowed blue dress that she thought was so pretty.
And they left to go home and get back in time to take care of their families.
They stopped for gas at a gas station on the way back.
And that was the last anybody saw of them.
[eerie ethereal music plays]
After they turned up missing, people looked along the road there,
but they really didn't find anything.
And so, it just seemed to be that they disappeared into thin air.
I think it was Delia Young's brother who said that, uh,
when the body was found about 18 months after their disappearance,
he felt something pass over him,
and he knew it was his sister.
We are on location where the, uh, lady in the blue dress
is supposed to have haunted these waters.
And a lot of people claim,
in the early morning hours or the fog and stuff,
they see a woman walking across the bridge in a blue dress.
And I've spent lots of nights out on the lake and I've never seen her.
Yeah, I've never seen it either, so...
[melancholy music plays]
Then they were working on the bridge, uh, in 1990, as I recall.
As they were setting some of the pilings down,
uh, they ran into something.
Sent divers down and, sure enough, they found the car.
- And there was Susie Roberts. - Susie.
[Richard] Uh, apparently, they had gone to a-- a party.
And as they were coming back, the car ran off the road.
Both drowned in the car.
And, uh, as far as we're concerned, mystery solved.
- [woman screams] - [brakes squeal]
[car crashes]
So, when Susie Roberts was identified in 1990,
they realized that the body that had been found many years before
was Delia Young.
But she was really identified by default, and that's a tragedy in and of itself.
[Caitlyn] I have heard people saying,
like, "Yeah, we were on the lake at night."
"Thought I saw a lady in a blue dress."
I personally haven't seen the lady in a blue dress,
but after what happened to me, I don't doubt it.
[emotional classical music plays]
[Charlie] There have been many cases of people camping out around the lake
having seen paranormal activity, "ghost" activity.
People losing things that they couldn't really explain,
and having people show up around their campfires
that they seem to be there and then not.
[Caitlyn] If you go on any sort of social media
like TikTok, YouTube, Facebook,
you'll see plenty of comments about how Lake Lanier is haunted.
The lake is literally full of dead bodies.
[Charlie] There are several stories like that.
And people speculated about the fact that when the lake was formed,
it covered all these cemeteries.
I think there are 20 cemeteries that are covered up.
Some of the bodies were moved, but just like Poltergeist,
not all of them.
Ugh! I could not. You don't-- You don't get in Lake Lanier.
I don't even believe in, like, ghosts and stuff,
but that is such a no for me.
[Richard] One of the questions
that I get asked frequently is, "Are there graves under Lake Lanier?"
And I have dove over 5,000 different dives on this lake.
I have seen every corner of it. I've seen the bottom of it.
I probably have seen more of this lake than any other human being ever.
Diver down.
Well, I can assure you,
all the known graves that were here at Lake Lanier were exhumed.
Now, I say that because if we go back to the Native American times,
this was a very popular place because of the rivers.
And there are certainly some unmarked graves from that time.
So, some of those remains will still be here under the lake.
[tense music plays]
[thunder rumbles]
[narrator] According to some myths and lore,
disturbing a Native American burial site can lead to misfortune.
In the case of Lake Lanier,
multiple spiritual areas were flooded.
Now, some wonder
if that has cast a dark cloud over the lake.
[water gurgles]
[creepy ethereal music plays]
A lot of people believe that the spirits are angry,
and that's why they keep takin' people under.
I don't wanna say they want revenge, because, like...
I don't think they gain anything from it.
It could even be them reaching out for someone, tryin' to get help,
but takin' lives instead. [laughs]
[Charlie] Most paranormal activity is usually attributed
to tragic situations that have occurred.
And this area was associated with the Trail of Tears.
Both the Cherokee and the Creek Indians lived in that area,
and they were made to leave everything behind
and walk to Oklahoma.
[narrator] In 1830,
Congress passed an act
which forced the Native Americans of the Deep South
to relocate to reservations in Oklahoma.
The grueling journey that followed
took the lives of roughly 15,000 Indigenous peoples,
which is why one chief deemed it "The Trail of Tears and Death."
[ethereal music plays]
[woman] This was basically the last stop for the Trail of Tears.
My family is traced back to the Trail of Tears,
uh, both sides of my family.
And I have childhood memories of my family passing down the horror of those stories.
It's, um, heartbreaking
when you stop and realize that they made that trip,
and in the winter months.
And how difficult it must've been going a thousand miles
and leaving everything behind,
other than what they could carry.
I knew that it started in Georgia.
And I couldn't even imagine how they ever made it,
um, to Webbers Falls.
[brooding music plays]
It was a terrible, terrible tragedy. The loss of their heritage, their lands.
And supposedly, there are cases of people
seeing Native American apparitions around the lake.
[suspenseful music plays]
[Caitlyn] You would think that the more people are told
that it's haunted, they'd stay away from it.
But nowadays, people are drawn by that. [chuckles]
I went to Lake Lanier.
I just wanted to see it for myself.
[power washer whirs]
[man] I'm from the Bronx, New York, home of hip-hop.
I came to Atlanta in, uh, '94.
And, uh, I picked up boating in, uh, 2015.
[ominous music plays]
Boating is-- is cool, man.
And I think there's a lot of barriers to entry already,
and folks shouldn't just be deterred 'cause they say the lake is haunted.
You know? Nah.
Like, haunting is-- There's ghosts.
I ain't seen no ghosts up here.
I think we gotta deal with the facts.
You can't come to Lake Lanier and just hop on a boat
and think that you gonna get home that night
without no boater safety or no training.
Every time someone dies on this lake,
nine times outta ten, it's because they didn't have a vest on.
Right? They're partyin', they're drinkin'.
They're not... readin' the Coast Guard seamanship manual.
[chuckles] You know what I mean?
I've had to rescue people on my jet skis,
grown men that were outta shape or they're drunk.
So, that's-- that's not bein' haunted, right?
That's poor decision-making.
People need to take this place seriously.
This is a dangerous lake to boat on.
[groovy ominous music plays]
We will not be down more than 20 minutes. I'm setting a maximum.
Robert's in charge of safety today.
[Robert] Yup.
- All right, diver down. - [man] Diver down.
So many people come to me thinking that the lake is haunted.
I-- When I travel to other cities even,
they say, "Oh, you're at Lake Lanier. Wow."
You know? "That place is haunted."
And I can assure you with 100% certainty,
it's not haunted, it is not cursed.
Unfortunately, one of the things that happens here on the lake
is we do have people that drown.
Accidents do happen.
This is one of the most dangerous lakes in the entire country.
[eerie music plays]
When you get down below where there is no light at all,
it's so hard to see, and it is very eerie.
We run into some of the strangest things when we're out there.
There's all kinds of things that can pop up.
[man] Good job, brother.
The building is right here, goin' this way.
I'm right over the top of it.
Here's the-- the dwelling that they're diving into here,
with multiple rooms.
There are a lot of things like this that are in Lake Lanier.
There are lots of old bridges, uh, there's some remnants of old buildings.
[Richard] There are some full-grown trees down there on the bottom of the lake.
The trees are just like this. They are full-grown, full-standing.
Anything below 30 feet in water, you run into the trees.
Number of years ago, there was a drought.
The lake went down 21 feet!
And you could see all kinds of stuff come up
that people had never seen before. There are literally old speedway stands.
But the speedway was a dirt track.
And that dirt track is just a bunch of mud now on the bottom of the lake.
There were so many boating accidents that happened that year,
it was unbelievable, and I think we had
one of the highest number of drownings that particular year
because people were hitting these rocks, and trees, and things in their boats
and, um, having fatal accidents.
I got you some souvenirs.
- [man] What is that? A wheelbarrow handle? - That's from a door frame.
And that's a brick from the house.
[gentle mystical music plays]
[boat engine revs]
Unfortunately, we do get called out for havin' to do drowning-victim recovery,
and it's one of the sadder things that we do here at the lake.
Um, we always try to bring closure to the families.
[Bill] Things like that happen. It's very, very sad.
But if more people took better boater precautions,
I think we'd have a much safer lake.
[Caitlyn] I thought about it a lot, what's under there.
I always like explaining things scientifically
or try to get a reason for it,
but I did get grabbed that day and pulled under the water,
and I don't have any explanations for it.
It does get frustrating, you know, when someone doesn't believe you.
Sometimes I don't believe myself either, but it happened.
The truth is, if you are on the waters,
even with a life jacket, you just don't feel comfortable.
[somber music plays]
[narrator] Could the high number of drownings
simply be a result of human error?
Or is there a more supernatural explanation?
Some locals point to another historic tragedy,
buried deep at the bottom of the lake,
as the reason for these tragic deaths.
[musical arrangement intensifies]
[water gurgles]
[David] Some people would suggest we're at Lake Lanier.
Some people would say we're in Gainesville.
But in actuality, we're-- we're in Oscarville.
S-- It's literally underneath our feet.
[Caitlyn] Growing up, the kids try to scare each other
about what's on the bottom of Lake Lanier.
Just tryin' to creep you out and-- Like, "Oh, just letting you know,
if you go in the lake, you're swimming on top of a city."
Which-- I thought it was a joke at first, but turned out to be the truth.
[David] It had churches, schools, banks of some sort.
But there's no marker for the historical value that was there.
[woman] Oscarville was a safe haven for African-Americans in Forsyth County.
Black people lived there, and white people lived there.
I think as long as people stayed in their place,
friendly to their neighbors, they were able to have their farms,
they were able to work in the cities,
everybody could get along just fine.
[mellow classical music plays]
When you look at Oscarville, there's not a lot, I haven't found.
So, we try to gather the materials that we can.
And then, we do lean on oral history.
And then, you put it all together, and you come up with something that says,
"Maybe this is the whole story that needs to be told."
[man] My mother told me the story about Oscarville.
My grandfather, Byrd, he farmed land over there.
They had some stores that Blacks owned... some stores there.
And it was a good place to live.
Oscarville was a town
where the African-Americans had what they needed.
They were able to start their families and make a livin' there for themselves.
[George] And they would help each other.
You know, if your harvest wasn't comin' in right,
well, you can come and get some of ours.
That's how they got along before the incident happened.
Things changed in 1912.
[tense music plays]
One woman woke up and said she saw a Black man standing over her bed.
That alarmed the white community.
A few days later, another young woman was found beaten and raped.
[music intensifies]
[Charlie] Her name was Mae Crow.
I think she was 19 years old.
And for some reason, it may have just been the habit of the times,
which it seems like it was,
if something like that occurred,
the first place people went to investigate was the Black community.
Now, there was no evidence. She never regained consciousness.
So, how do you know whom to blame?
And so, they blamed three young African-American males.
And one they took and they lynched, even before there was a so-called "trial."
And with that whole narrative of Black men attacking white women,
white people decided that they had to cleanse the county.
And so, they told Black people
to, "Get your things together and get out."
[Kyndra] And they hung one of the men in town,
and they would just shoot at him throughout the day.
[melancholy music plays]
Great-granddaddy Byrd did see all of this.
So, you knew the danger of not leaving,
because somethin' like that could possibly happen to you.
[Velma] And so people had to leave.
They didn't have time to pull things together.
It was a matter of get out in the dead of night
and leave Forsyth County.
[Charlie] The lake didn't exist at the time.
It was the Chattahoochee River.
And they drove some of them to the river bank
and said, "Swim for your life."
[Velma] "If you can cross that river Chattahoochee,
you can do whatever you want, but you have to get outta here."
[George] There was a bridge, but they wasn't allowed to cross it.
"You swim or drown." That was what they let 'em do.
Some went north, and some went south,
but Byrd, my grandfather, came to Gainesville.
And some of 'em didn't make it.
[ominous tone plays]
[Velma] I'm not sure how many African-Americans
were even there at the time.
But I hear a lot of heart-wrenching stories.
Everybody in this area
knows about some family that had to leave in the dead of night,
who lost children,
who lost brothers and sisters crossing the Chattahoochee.
[sad sweeping classical music plays]
[Kyndra] When I think about it, I do get emotional
because Byrd Oliver's first wife and his two kids died
when he was fleeing Oscarville.
And you cannot go back to get them, so he had to keep going.
[George] My grandmother told me that he sometimes would go out
into the woods and sit by himself.
And, uh, maybe this was the time
he was thinkin' about the losses and what he had to really go through.
And I'm sure he thought about, "I had a house. I had all this."
"Now I gotta start over."
And from what I understand,
he wasn't angry.
He probably looked at it, "Well,
if I sit here and be angry about this matter,
tomorrow, I'm gonna still be angry. I gotta build me a house."
So, I try to look at things in a positive way.
That was nasty. It was awful. But look at what came out of it.
You know...
all these people was my family.
Everyone has their different perception of Lake Lanier.
Those that have that true connection may feel something
versus those that hear the story.
[mellow music plays]
I remember renting a Airbnb off of Lake Lanier,
and it was right there on the water.
And as I walked down, it was a different type of feeling.
It was like you knew something happened,
and you could-- you can just feel it in your soul.
I have come up on this hill sometimes,
and just sit,
and you can feel certain things.
So, I'm not gonna argue the fact
that there's not spiritual things on that lake,
and I can't prove it either.
[Velma] When you talk about places that are haunted,
Lake Lanier always comes up.
And when you google Lake Lanier, you will come to Oscarville.
So, it's hard to separate the two,
and I don't think it's anything that's gonna go away anytime soon.
I think this story is becoming more prevalent
when it comes to social media.
And, um, you know, the TV show Atlanta even talked about it.
I just felt like I was being pulled.
You probably was.
[man] By what?
There's a whole town underneath us.
This is really how people see it.
They really see it as the ancestors or the spirit comin' to take you under.
So, it-- it was a little comical.
But at the same time, do your research so you can see the whole truth.
[gentle mysterious music plays]
[narrator] The history of Lake Lanier will always be clouded in tragedy.
Whether or not those tragedies have cursed the area,
will always remain a mystery.
[Caitlyn] I would say if I didn't know the history of it,
I would just think it was just a normal lake,
and people just love those scary stories to tell.
But after all that happening to me,
I would say, yeah,
if any place to be haunted, it would be Lake Lanier.
The fact that people say that they see these sightings and stuff,
and I'm like, "What?"
Do I believe that you saw something unusual
like a piece of trash, you know, floating through the air,
you know, during a storm? Sure.
But in terms of people claiming to be dragged down to the bottom,
they felt something pulling on their leg? Uh, no.
It's just silliness, absolute silliness.
[Charlie] I do believe that the dark history of Lake Lanier
has a great deal to do with people's perception
of perhaps paranormal or odd activity that goes on around the lake.
This atmosphere lends itself to those sorts of feelings.
[David] I'm not gonna buy into the whole haunted house thing,
lady in the lake.
You know, I'm just bein' real as to what it is.
Like, this is a-- a historical, archaeological site.
If you just gonna drive over this lake, over Oscarville,
and not, you know, acknowledge that?
There's gonna be a problem.
[Velma] Professionally, do I think it's haunted?
No, I don't.
But I have been told that the ancestors have long memories.
And sometimes things happen.
Some of the drownings at Lake Lanier, they're accidental.
But so much has happened that people are beginning to think,
"Now, I wonder if that place is haunted."
"Girl, you know what they did to Oscarville."
"That's probably comin' back to get them."
So, I think there might be a little truth in that.
[ethereal music plays]