Lake Lanier

On a summer weekend, Lake Lanier is one of the busiest lakes in America.

It sprawls across nearly forty thousand acres of the foothills north of Atlanta, its long fingers reaching into the red clay hills, its shoreline dotted with marinas, beaches, campgrounds and lake houses. More than ten million people visit every year. They come to swim, fish, water-ski, sail and party on houseboats.

They also drown there. Every year, people die in Lake Lanier — swimmers, boaters, children, adults — in numbers that have given the lake a grim reputation as one of the deadliest in the country. Over the years, local news outlets have counted more than two hundred deaths since it was created.

People who live around the lake have a way of talking about it. They say the lake doesn’t want you there. And some of them say they know why.

The Dam

Lake Lanier is not a natural lake. It was created in the 1950s, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built Buford Dam across the Chattahoochee River to provide flood control, hydroelectric power and drinking water for the growing city of Atlanta.

To make the lake, the government bought up or seized about fifty thousand acres of land along the river and its tributaries. Farms, homes, churches, roads, businesses and whole communities were in the path of the water. Hundreds of families were moved. Buildings were torn down or left standing. Roads and bridges were left in place. Some cemeteries were relocated, the graves dug up and moved to higher ground. Some were not.

The dam was completed in 1956, and the water began to rise. By 1959, the valley was gone. Beneath the surface of the lake today are the remains of what was there before: building foundations, roads, fences, trees, and in some places the outlines of towns.

Oscarville

One of the communities that disappeared beneath the water was a place called Oscarville, in Forsyth County.

Before 1912, Oscarville was home to a thriving community of Black families, many of whom owned land and farms. Then, in September 1912, came one of the most brutal episodes of racial terror in Georgia history.

A young white woman named Mae Crow was attacked near Oscarville and later died of her injuries. Several young Black men were accused. One of them, Rob Edwards, was dragged from the county jail by a mob and lynched in the town square of Cumming. Two teenagers, Ernest Knox and Oscar Daniel, were convicted after a rushed trial and publicly hanged. Historians have long questioned whether they received anything resembling justice.

In the weeks that followed, white “night riders” terrorized Black families across Forsyth County, burning homes and churches, firing guns into houses, and posting notes warning them to leave. Within a few months, nearly all of the county’s roughly 1,100 Black residents had been driven out. Many were forced to abandon their land, which was taken by white neighbors. For most of the twentieth century, Forsyth County remained almost entirely white.

When the Corps of Engineers built Lake Lanier four decades later, much of the land around Oscarville was flooded. The community that had been destroyed by violence was buried under the water.

The Lady of the Lake

The most famous ghost story connected to Lake Lanier comes from a real accident.

In April 1958, as the lake was filling, two young women, Delia Mae Parker Young and Susie Roberts, were driving home from a dance near Gainesville when their car went off a bridge and plunged into the lake. They vanished.

More than a year later, a fisherman found a woman’s body floating in the lake near the bridge. It was badly decomposed, and at first no one could identify it. Years later, it was identified as Delia Mae Parker Young.

And in November 1990, more than thirty years after the accident, workers on a bridge project found a 1950s Ford sedan on the bottom of the lake near the same bridge. Inside it were human remains. They were identified as those of Susie Roberts.

Since then, many people around the lake have reported seeing a woman in a blue dress, wandering near the bridge at night, or standing on the shore, or floating on the water. She’s known as the Lady of the Lake. Some say she reaches up from the water to pull swimmers under.

Why So Many Deaths?

There are real, physical reasons why Lake Lanier is dangerous.

It’s an enormous, busy lake, with millions of visitors, many of them inexperienced swimmers and boaters, and many of them drinking. The water is deep, much deeper than people expect, and it gets very cold just a few feet below the surface. Underwater, there are hazards: submerged trees, old buildings, roads and fences that weren’t removed when the valley was flooded, which can snag boats and entangle swimmers. Drought years expose some of these remnants, and divers report finding old foundations and roadbeds on the lake floor.

Boating accidents, drowning, alcohol and the sheer number of people on the water explain most of the deaths.

But many people who live near Lake Lanier don’t think that’s the whole story. They talk about the people who were driven off their land around Oscarville, and about the graves that may still lie beneath the water. They believe the lake carries a curse, born of what happened there before it was flooded.

Under the Surface

I don’t believe a lake can be cursed. But I do believe that places carry their histories, whether we acknowledge them or not.

Lake Lanier is a beautiful place, full of families having fun on summer weekends. Most of the people swimming and boating there have no idea what lies beneath them: the farms and churches and homes of a community that was driven out by terror, and the graves of people who were never moved.

Maybe the stories of the curse are simply a way of remembering what so many people tried to forget. If so, then the lake, in its way, is still telling the truth.