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Southern Gothic the podcast and you can stream it at Southern Gothicmedia dot com and the host storyteller audio engineer Brendan schck Sneider. I want to take us down to or are you? I want you to take us down to Georgia and Lake Lanier. There's been some over.
The years, divers there have reported some pretty creepy things beneath the murky waters. They talk about freaky catfish as big as volkswagons and something like.
What was it?
The body count there is incredible. Since nineteen ninety four up until about twenty twenty, there were over two hundred people that died in that lake. What's happening?
It's much higher even now it was over six hundred since it was created. Wow time, So it's fascinating, is it? This is one of the stories that I think is really caught on with Lakelaneer and the Curse of Lakelaneer. It's one of the kind of modern ones that hasn't been around for too long, but it's kind of built up. Obviously, with a body count like this, how could it not, you know? The lake. It was built. It's a man
made lake. It was it was built. They damned the Chattahoochee River back in nineteen fifty six, right and in doing this, it took about ten years to essentially purchase all the farmland, all the bottom land out in the Georgia Hills. This is right outside of Atlanta, and they had planned on making this as like an aqueduct water
and hydroelectric power for the city of Atlanta. They knew how much it was growing, and so they purchased all this old all this farm land from all these farmers didn't have a lot of money, and paid rock bottom dollar for it as well, and they went ahead damned the river, opened and opened the river. Excuse me, open the dam. Closed the dam in nineteen fifty six, and all those waters started rising on what used to be towns.
So today, as you mentioned, you know, scuba divers and folks can go down there, and there is still structures from back in the forties that are still there under the waters of the lake. All that there's actually even a drought. I want to believe it was in the early two thousands where the water level was the lowest it had been since the fifties and there were actually some some things sticking out of the lake. There was an old speedway that apparently had some stands sticking out
over by Gainesville. So people got really creeped out by this to think about, you know, there's a city under the lake. But you know, obviously it has earned this reputation. It's a very deadly lake. Just this past year alone, I know, there's about a half dozen people actually passed away on the lake a different reasons. Some drowned, one
was electrocuted this year. So a very lethal lake. Whether that's of this curse that might have might have occurred, or whether or not it's you know, kind of you know, we like our hillbilly fun out there on the lake, so who knows if it's a little bit of hold my beer as well.
The lake.
You know, the lake is definitely a place you don't want to go. Now. There's a couple theories why it's cursed, you know, why we've had all this this dead you know.
One of them, of course, is that at the bottom of the lake, in these old towns and the divers going down, you can find that that there are these old cemeteries down there at the bottom of the lake, and supposedly the Army Corps of Engineers, they were supposed to move all of these interred bodies because you don't consider that sacred, done all the way out other cemeteries, and today you can go to some of the cemeteries around the lake and there are plaques there talking about
some of the tombs there. Some of the plots were folks who were moved from what would have been under the lake, but apparently they didn't do a great job of it. And some of those plots, of course, would have been little family cemeteries right just on their properties. So maybe they missed a few, maybe they didn't. And for years folks talked about Lake Lanier was cursed to the that and the way that described I'm sorry, Richard, no, no, no, you.
Go ahead, continue to continue on.
They described with this curse which people would be swimming in the lake and they might they would say that they would feel like they're being drugged down deeper, like hands were pulling them down. That was a very common experience of feeling that they I even I've talked to since we put out a podcast on the episode. We put out one back in twenty nineteen before it got really big. At that point in time, there wasn't a
lot of information on it. At that point. I've actually had three different first responders email me and talk about pulling people out of the lake and describing similar experiences to where they felt like they were being drugged down deeper, like they were trying, they were being trapped in the water, and that the lake was was causing this. So it's it's a very lethal lake. You know, there's there's there's other theories at the same time, this is this is
one of those stories that's that's flux right now. It's in flux as to how people are interpreting this curse. For a long time, it was we didn't we didn't move these cemeteries. And when I first looked at the story, that was the main one, that the cemetery is under there. This was land that way. But since that time it's evolved. It's evolved with people's understanding of the property and what's underneath.
Because underneath that lake, one of those towns is a town called Oscarville, and back in the nineteen twenties, Oscarville was a primarily African American community and at that point in time it was. It was a lot of sharecropping and things like that. Folks owned farms there. It wasn't a very affluent community by any means whatsoever down there. But back in the twenties, there was a crime committed.
A young woman, a young white woman, was raped, and of course it was an unfortunately classic Southern story we hear far too often during that time period of a gentleman, a gentleman from Oscarville was believed to have committed the crime. And over the course of the next month, the community from there in Forsyth County, the white community and the community of Oscarville, it's just escalated verrey. It is a lot of events that led up to this final just ultimate, horrific,
violent active. All of the people in Oscarville will literally run out of town. It was just violence on top of violence. It was something that looks a lot if you're familiar with the Black Wall Street. What happened there, just folks being run out of town of their home. And Oscarville now sits at the bottom of that lake. So some people do believe that the curse might be might be part of that as well, and that's something that's a more modern giving. And we see that because
TV shows are picking up on it. TV shows are picking up on that history, and they're they're kind of promoting that as the possibility there.
So there is a legend of a ghost of a long dead woman roaming the lake in a flowing blue dress. Tell me about her.
Yes, sir, Yeah, this is an old ghost story that's been around there for a while. So the curse is a little relatively new. But you know, when the lake itself was first, when the dam was closed and the lake started filling up just almost out of the gate, they were having drownings in the lake. Okay, I mean as as the early fifties, there already had a scuba team trained in Gainesville because of some of these problems. But in nineteen fifty eight was when this particular one happened.
There was two women, women by the name of Deliamate Parker Young and Susie Roberts, And there were two local women down there in Georgia, and they were out there in the middle of the night. They were driving to a local dance okay, at a local dance hall, and they were driving these winding roads. And if you ever
get a chance to go to the lake. Being up there in the middle of the night, I can't imagine, but what you're driving on is essentially the top of mountains that you don't realize are mountains because the lake water is so high now, right because that's what they filled in, and so these are ridges, winding roads and they're out there in the middle of the night of probably about ten o'clock at nine, driving driving those roads, and at that point in time, as they neared the
bridge right by Gainesville, the Dawsonville Highway bridge, they just went right over the edge. And we have no understanding why. The next day when folks came out and they saw what had happened, they saw skid marks going straight over the bridge and into the water. So of course, you know, they had the dive team come out. Everybody's come out there searching the water everything, looking for you know, looking
for these women something something. It was a nineteen fifty four Ford coop that Susie was driving, and they couldn't find anything. Spent weeks trying to find these women down there, just so they eventually just had to give up. These women, you know, just were you know, lost to time, we assume. But about a year later, in nineteen fifty nine, a fisherman who was out on the lake just in the
early hours of the morning. He des quite a bit of a shock because as he's out there fishing, he discovers the remains of a human floating on the surface not far from the bridge, and they are badly decomposed, just horrifically decomposed. They couldn't they couldn't identify who she
was even or the cause of the death. But you know, everybody just assumed that this was one of the women from that night, right, this, this had to have been Delia May, Parker Young or Susie, right, But they couldn't actually confirm it, right, So it just kind of goes on. A thirty one years passed with no resolution whatsoever. But in that period of time what ended up happening was folks began seeing the apparition of this woman in blue
out on that bridge. Now, I mean, I'm sure you've heard some of the lady and white stories, right with the oh yeah, driver rod down the road and picks up a lady in white and she disappears in the car. Well, I tell you this one is not like that. It is much scarier because they say, as they get closer to this woman in blue, it always it looks like she's looking over the bridge or something. She's in a very tattered dress. It's just falling apart. They say, it
looks awful. And as they get close they realize that she doesn't have any hands as well. It's a very very ominous spirit at that point in time, and years and years. I've talked about this for for thirty years, talked about this lady in blue, and sometimes people say they still see her. But this is an older story in that but after thirty years do pass by. Eventually. Back in I believe it was nineteen ninety November of
nineteen ninety, they're doing construction on that bridge. They're gonna they're gonna expand the bridge out of old Dawsonville Highway. And as they're down there and they're dredging the bottom of the bridge, what do you know, they found something
down there. They found that nineteen fifty four forward down at the bottom, and they, of course they pull it up and drop it on the land, and what do they realize that there's someone inside and still behind the wheel, right, And you know, at this point they really, you know, they weren't really able to identify the remains, but all the personal belongings in the car, they were able to
find that this was Susie Roberts. This was one of those two women, and she had been down there, trapped under the water in ninety plus feet of water at that point, you know, she had was basically stuck within the tree trunks and the mud at the bottom because again, this is a man made lake and there were all trees still under there, so a lot of just you know, a lot of things down there to get stuck in.
And you know, now this was certainly something to celebrate at that point in time, you know, because the families now identify not only her body, but also the body, you know, of the other woman, because they were able to connect the two at that point. So ever, since then, that's what folks believe. They say that that lady in blue that was actually Glia May Parker Young out there looking for her friend who had not been found yet
down at the bottom of the lake. Now, you know, I tell people I love this story personally because it does kind of have a happy ending. But I personally learned something different from this. I went out and visited the lake and went out and did a little extra research and in doing so, as I mentioned earlier, I like going to cemetery. Sorry, Richard, It's something I grew up doing and we.
Just y I enjoyed it too. I enjoy it too.
It's wonderful. It's you know, whether whether it's a haunting or not, it's a lifetime of stories every couple of feet, you know. And I decided to go out to the cemetery where they're buried, is the Alta Vista Cemetery right there in Gainesville, and it kind of I don't know if it was to pay respects or or something like that. And we went out and we looked around and we visited it because it was wonderful that now they really had proper burials. Their names were on the graves at
this point in time. But you know, when when we went up to it, got a really big shock. When we went up to Delia May's tombstone. It was interesting because you know, those women they had gone missing all the way back in the nineteen fifties, but on this tombstone was this little trinking right next to the headstone that said I love you Mom, and it was at that point in time, you know, she had she had
a kid at that point when she went missing. And this man now has even since passed away from old age. At this point, he was in his seventies. But there was just this one little reminder that these these people who have been telling this ghost story about for years and years are real people, and there's a real humanity attached to what we what we do here when we tell ghosts stories. So it's a little more heartbreaking for me.
When they when they found her body in the Ford Coop, what about her hands, Brendan.
Exactly, Well, that's what that's exactly what they discovered is that she didn't have hands, and my apologies to miss that. You know, obviously she even picked apart pretty badly by some of the creatures down there, so her body was again, they weren't even able to identify the original woman who was found either from all the decay and everything. So that no hand. That that just kind of leads into what the story said. Of course, you know that that the ghost was missing her hands.
Did you ever take a swim in Lake Lanier? I will believe, would you, now, Richard, No, not a chance.
Not a chance, I'll tell you. You know, I think it's up for debate, you know how much what is true or what isn't at this point. But I'm not gonna I'm not gonna risk it. No.
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