If you don’t know Lake Lanier, have you ever heard of Lake Lanier? No, no. Okay, Sean, you’ve heard of Lake Lanier? I have, yeah. I don’t know like all the ins and outs, but I have definitely heard of it. So Lake Lanier is a big lake that is in Northern Georgia. Basically it’s a very famous vacation spot.

It’s close to Atlanta, a couple hours north. It’s not like the city. If you lived in Atlanta, this is where you would go for the weekend vacation. Like you live in Austin, don’t they have that river spot? You go river floating or whatever, rafting. But it’s like, I guess it’s rafting around a raft, but it’s not like white water. Around here we go to Weeki Wachee, Crystal River, or there’s other ones, Ginnie Springs. We got a bunch around here because there’s a lot of natural springs.

Imagine you’re living in downtown Atlanta and you want to go on the boat. You drive up an hour and a half north. Or you want to play golf, there’s a beautiful golf course on Lake Lanier. You guys ready? Let’s dive in. It’s lake day at Lake Lanier. Paint the picture. The shoreline is scattered with happy faces ready to soak in the sun and get on the water. Umbrellas are placed into the sand and parents are covering kids in sunscreen head to toe. Boats and jet skis zip by as swimmers come close to shore.

You’re getting ready to sit down at the lake’s hot new restaurant with a beautiful view of the water, and as you take a sip of your ice cold drink, you hear blood curdling screams as you watch a lifeless body float towards the beach. This seems like the screenplay for a Netflix drama, and it won’t be the last one, because since 1994, 64 bodies have washed ashore of Lake Lanier. How big is this lake? Is this like a good drop spot? Crazy, isn’t it?

I wonder if there’s a specific demographic of person that’s getting killed. Is it like women in their 20s? Who knows, maybe it’s like a serial killer. I’m jumping the gun. So Lake Lanier is massive. It’s 57 miles. That’s pretty big. Also 38,000 acres. It’s 47 miles of riverbed and it’s around 200 feet deep. That’s pretty deep. I mean, it’s a lake. How deep is Loch Ness? It’s 700 feet. Way deeper.

Lake Lanier today is a massive tourist spot where visitors picnic, they camp out, they boat, they swim, they hike, and they take part in world class fishing. But it hasn’t always been that way. It’s a man-made lake and it wasn’t put into place until the 50s, when the government flooded five Georgia counties. The land was ideal for farming and had natural rivers and it stretched across the Georgia landscape. Because of its history, it leaves many wondering if the lake’s dangers are tied to the fact that it’s man-made, or if there’s something underneath it that lies deep.

The area was once home to Cherokee natives and was known as Chestatee. Chestatee is a Cherokee word meaning pine torch or place of lights, because they would use bonfires along the river banks to light their torches, and they would use these torches for hunting deer and other wildlife game. The Cherokee community also established a sacred burial ground called the Sumera Mound, which wouldn’t be discovered until the excavation of the lake took place.

Unfortunately, the 1830s brought about a change for the ancestral lands and the Cherokees who inhabited them. Of course the white people came in and said, no more Cherokee. Here’s some marbles, we’ll take the land. So white settlers arrived in search for gold and expelled the natives from the area, sending them to their doom journey along the Trail of Tears. Have you heard of the Trail of Tears? Oh yeah, I have. The Trail of Tears is where the US government essentially displaced Native Americans and made them walk hundreds of miles, and they died of famine, disease, etc., through that walk. It’s like the Oregon Trail game but way shittier. Just imagine 10,000 natives walking a thousand miles and then half of them dying along the way. It’s crazy.

The ancestral land transitioned in the years following, and by 1912 the area then became 90% white. Classic, of course. So there was a town called Oscarville. Now Oscarville was a thriving black community and it had flourished with farms, families, locally owned businesses, and it was a safe haven. In September of 1912, two events would take place that would once again change the entire community.

So September 5th, Ellen Grace, a 22-year-old white woman, claimed that a black man entered her home, sexually assaulted her while her husband was away. A search party for the attacker began and five black men were arrested for the alleged crime. Is this a thing where she was like, she wanted to get with him, and then somebody saw him leave and she’s like, oh he came in against my will when I gave him the key? It was rumored that she was just having an affair. So these five black men were arrested, taken to jail. Mobs of white people showed up, gathered in hundreds surrounding the jail house, and a local black preacher was brutally beaten in the street in front of them. White men chased out other black men as they arrived on the scene. Chaos continued, the National Guard was called. This was Jim Crow South, this is the beginning of the KKK. And anyways, this is one incident.

What a lovely resort town. What a vacation spot. A few days later, a young woman was found unconscious, injured and sexually assaulted in the woods, and her name was Sweetie Mae Crow. She was 18 years old and she was quickly rushed to her home, but she would never regain consciousness. Nearby a pocket mirror is found but is unknown to be related to the scene. People gathered to watch the scene unfold, including a group of black teenagers, one of which was 17-year-old Ernest Knox. He was approached and asked about owning the pocket mirror. He admitted that the pocket mirror was his, and then he became the sole suspect basically.

So then the white residents were like, oh, this dude is the dude, he had a pocket mirror, get him. So then they coerced him into confessing. There’s no cameras, they were like, you’re dead. So then he quote unquote confessed and then was taken to the jail house, and he was joined by four other black men who were also accused of being party to the incident. After these men were arrested, 2,000 white men came to the jail house wanting to basically string them up, take matters into their own hands. They dragged the 24-year-old toward the town square where they beat him with crowbars and he was lynched from the telephone pole. And then they took turns shooting him. It’s so unnecessary.

Two weeks later, Mae Crow succumbed to her injuries and she died. The remaining prisoners were charged with additional murder charges on top of the sexual assault. So basically what they were saying is that she was gang raped, and they took the original guy who confessed, murdered him, and then the other four were then charged with accessory to murder. It’s so interesting that literally this all happened from a pocket mirror. There’s no DNA, no clothes, no hair fibers, just a mirror. And then on top of it these other men who were charged were sentenced to private hanging. A private hanging is where you’re charged and you’re going to be hanged only in front of family. And of course the jury was all white.

A 15-foot high privacy fence was installed so that it would be a private hanging. However, the night before the execution, a mob tore it down, burnt it to the ground, and made the executions public, where 5,000 people watched the boys hang. There’s no law enforcement, they have no power over these citizens, they just do whatever they want. That’s a mob though, 5,000 people, that’s more than a riot. If there was 5,000 black people out there they would have brought tanks in and ran them all over.

So it goes on. White residents continued escalating their threats to black residents, setting fire to their businesses, shooting through the home windows. Night riders would use TNT to blow up churches. This is like Mad Max. Eventually black landowners were like, this I’m out, peace, we’re not going to do this anymore, and they literally just abandoned their homes. But what’s wild about this, 4% of the county was black, so it wasn’t like a massive percent. Anyways, it was a bad time.

So a little bit about Lake Lanier and how it became what it is. In 1946, the US Army Corps of Engineers began to develop plans to dam the Chattahoochee River, a project that would create a man-made lake and assist in flood control, and it provided hydro power and a water supply to surrounding areas, specifically Atlanta because it was very close and a lot of demand was needed for it. So originally it was not intended for a recreational lake. It wasn’t a jet skis and that sort of thing, it was more water nearby that is needed by the city of Atlanta.

Atlanta was getting huge, and water too, because it’s fresh water. Within two years the government began buying up the land that would be flooded for the upcoming project. Now unfortunately the land belonged to 700 farmers, over 59 square miles. That’s a shitload of land, and it’s a shitload of farmers. And the government was willing to pay sellers $50 an acre. I would love to know if that was a good price or if that was like dog shit price. What year are we talking about? 1946.

The closest thing I could find is this thing about farmland prices in 1920. Average farm real estate values reached a pre-World War II peak of $69 per acre in 1920, and then following this peak it declined sharply to a low of $31 per acre in 1934 and remained in the 31 to 34 range until the current uptrend beginning in the 1940s. So it seems like in the 1940s things started going up, so maybe it was around normal price, it wasn’t like dog shit pricing. But why would you want to sell? You sell, then you have no livelihood anymore. It’s like farming, it’s your livelihood.

So allegedly they just seized people. This is eminent domain. For example, if they’re building a public works thing, it’s in the good of the public for it to be built. Hey, we’re building a highway, your houses were in the track, sorry, even if you don’t want to sell it, they literally kick you out and make you take the money. It’s like the cartel, plata o plomo, you want the lead or you want the cash, which one you want?

So allegedly what the government did is they began to clear areas that were problems. So if you did not sell, they would say basically your home is not fit to live in and it’s a hazard to the community. Condemned. So they would clear your area. You better sell, take the 50 and run. What they started to do is they started to remove old buildings, old churches, they removed 20 cemeteries that were there. What do they do with the bodies? Unmarked graves were allegedly identified then relocated to other areas. Allegedly. I love allegedly.

So within four years, from 1946, by 1950 the dam development began. They started building the dam and it slowly filled the lake to what it is today, and it took about 3 to 5 years to reach capacity. But when it was finished the lake had depths of 250 feet. Today Lake Lanier contains 76 parks, 1200 campsites, 10 full service marinas and 100 little mini islands. Despite the government’s efforts to clear the area, old ferry boats still remain underwater, concrete structures are down underneath the water, and bodies, corpses.

So statistically speaking, and we’ve gotten this from the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, we have total boating incidents, total injuries, total fatalities. 64 people have died on Lake Lanier since ’94 and this is from all causes. So it’s not just straight murders. Have you ever heard of the term BUI? It’s boating under the influence. But some say that since 1956 there are about 700 deaths at Lake Lanier. How do we get that discrepancy from 64 to 700? 64 since the ’90s, and then since completion in like ’56, they say 700 deaths at Lake Lanier, making it the United States’ deadliest lake.

So would you go there now after this episode? No. I mean, but I have been there. I went to a golf course, Lake Lanier Golf Course Country Club, and it’s beautiful. Well, Eric was accepted with open arms. We’ve got a lot of photos and a lot of things. There’s all sorts of weird freaky giant catfish that come up. This is a 200 pound catfish. It’s like the size of a boat. You’ve almost got just graveyards or lost things just underneath the water.

So a couple things that we’ll go over before we dive into the cons. The next part is the haunting of Lake Lanier. This definitely is haunted for sure. So in 1958, not long after the completion which was in 1956, the first tragedy occurred. Delia Parker Young and her friend Susie Roberts were headed to a local roadhouse in Delia’s 1954 Ford. Earlier that night the two were spotted at a gas station with Delia wearing a blue dress, where they left before paying, and that would be the last time the girls were ever seen. The only evidence left behind were skid marks on the bridge across the lake that indicated she had lost control and the car had gone over into the water.

Divers searched relentlessly but their bodies and her vehicle were not found. A year following the presumed accident, a fisherman spotted remains that had floated to the surface of the lake, and the woman’s body wore a blue dress but was not identifiable. Strangely, the body was missing both hands and toes. Why the toes though? That’s such a weird thing to cut off. Hands, okay, fingerprints makes sense, but toe prints, that’s gnarly. Why wouldn’t they just take the whole foot? Authorities assumed it may be one of the girls from the accident, however they were unable to make a conclusion and placed her remains in an unmarked grave.

And it wouldn’t be until 31 years later in 1990 that bridge maintenance would unveil Delia’s car with Susie Roberts still inside of it. She was identified by dental records and it was simultaneously determined that the earlier remains were Delia’s. The girls were then buried next to each other and Delia’s grave was no longer unmarked. Since the tragedy, visitors at the lake claim they see a ghostly figure of a woman in a blue dress near the bridge, and the ghost has no eyes and no hands and no toes. She’s known as the Lady of the Lake, and sometimes she would drag people underwater.

Have you guys ever had an encounter with a ghost? I personally haven’t had one. So I lived in Ohio, we lived on a street called Observatory, in this old farmhouse, first house on the street. My dad said that one night they were sleeping, and my mom would always get up and go to the bathroom or get some water from downstairs. He felt her get off the bed, and he reached over, she’s gone. Then he feels her get back on the bed, and he rolls over to put his arm around her and there’s no one there. He freaked out. And literally my mom was getting water or something downstairs, so she ran back upstairs. So I haven’t personally had it, but there you have it.

Another haunting story of Lake Lanier is that there is a shadowy figure that can be seen late at night. He moved slowly across the lake using a long pole and a lantern to guide the way. One night two fishermen were out at around 1:00 a.m. and they spotted him. They found it odd to see someone else out there so late and in the cold. They called out to him, which is when he stopped and he stood up in his boat. He dove into the water towards them, making a loud splash as he hit the water, but when they shone a light in the direction of the figure it was gone, and so was the boat.

So ghosts aren’t the only thing that seemingly haunt Lake Lanier. Boats hit things in the water but nothing is ever found. People claim that they can feel hands dragging them into the water. Multiple stories of people just saying I felt like a hand was grabbing me into the water. Maybe it’s the catfish. Longtime diver Buck Buchanan is quoted as saying, you reach out into the dark and you feel an arm or a leg and it doesn’t move. The dark of the water, you’re just like, reach on out there.

Here’s the part that gets crazy. In 2023 there were eight people who drowned. Everybody’s just drowning and dying. I wonder what the average drowning stats are per lake across the US. What’s the average drowning per year at a lake in America?

That’s an average of 10 fatal drownings per day, but how many lakes are there? Lakeland an hour from here has like 100 lakes, and Minnesota has the land of a thousand lakes. So maybe that isn’t a good comparison. But also around here we boat all the time, I don’t hear of that many deaths around here, like drowning. At first I was thinking maybe it’s like the BUI, you’re boating, you’re having a good time, you’re drinking, of course you’re going to have more accidents, more deaths. You’re out there on the twisted teas, some high news, trying to show off for the girls, doing a back flip and you smack your head.

Some visitors claim that they hear church bells from the sunken churches that are beneath the lake. Swimmers dive into the lake and they don’t resurface. Rogue waves capsize boats, divers get entangled in fishing lines, trees, structures. It’s estimated that there are around 20 to 30 dead bodies in the lake just waiting to be found on any given day. That’s a lot. Boating, jet ski and car accidents are relatively common, and there’s also a bacteria that lives in the mud of Lake Lanier that has been known to sicken divers and beach goers with a hard to treat illness.

Not only that, there are claims that the lake has freaky catfish that range between the size of a 12-year-old to the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. How wild would it be if you caught a Beetle-sized catfish? Imagine frying that bad boy up. There’s a funny story of a truckload of chickens that crashed into the lake and tipped into it, and so now there’s deformed chickens living throughout the lake. They survived, they prospered, they just turned into ducks. This is like Lake Lanier is a freak show. It’s like a nuclear, some weird stuff.

A few other stories. You got to say, if there’s enough things, can it still be a coincidence if there’s so much going on? In 2017, pretty recent, a man by the name of Kelly Nash disappeared and was later found floating in Lake Lanier with a gunshot wound. It was a relatively normal evening for Nash, but he was feeling a bit under the weather, so when he and his girlfriend went to bed that night he was unable to sleep. Instead he went to the living room to play video games until he could sleep, because his girlfriend worked earlier the next morning and he didn’t want to bother her.

She said that she woke up in the middle of the night around 4:00 a.m. and noticed he wasn’t even in the bedroom. She checked on him in the living room after hearing noises from the TV. She claimed he was acting normal, so she went back to bed. By 7:30 a.m. when she was up again for work, she said that he was nowhere to be found and the video game was idle. She noticed the garage had been slightly open, but Nash’s truck was still parked out front and he left his wallet, phone and keys at home. However, his 9 millimeter was gone.

Sadly his body was found a few weeks later with a gunshot wound, and an official cause of death was drowning. His family later hired a PI to investigate what truly happened, but oddly the investigation unveiled more mystery, because Nash wasn’t involved in anything strange, and so nobody knows what happened. Where was he shot? I have so many questions. What would make him leave his house? Why would he take his 9 mil? It doesn’t really say where he was shot. It does talk about how he was in PJs. His autopsy was not released so we don’t know. But they know there was a wound somewhere.

So another strange story. Mother’s Day 2020, a gas tank explosion injured two teens, killed the dog. July 2023, an angry beaver randomly attacked a young girl and her father while they were visiting, according to local authorities. Don’t worry, there are no more bad beavers on the loose, they put him down, they shoot the beaver. The same month in 2023, a 24-year-old man jumped into the lake and was mysteriously electrocuted and he died. He just jumped in the water and he was electrocuted. That’s an ongoing investigation right now.

This is starting to get bizarre. Maybe there’s some weird frequency in this area that just makes things go off. Around here if you find a lake you’re going to find a gator, or a spring, you’re going to hear stories of getting attacked by a gator. But who on earth has been attacked by a beaver? Beavers are wild apparently. Another story, there’s a Margaritaville at Lake Lanier Island. They announced they’d be installing a fence around their shoreline because they no longer want guests to swim, because the year earlier a 19-year-old man drowned 30 yards off the shore while he was dining at the restaurant.

At the end of this there’s so many more stories, and keep in mind there are 64 deaths in the lake since the 90s, and that’s just documented. And then also since the 50s there were 700 deaths supposedly. So just to wrap up the official script of this whole thing. Lake Lanier is admittedly home to drinking and partying, and getting on the boat and getting turnt. But the mystery is the fact that it is pretty much the deadliest lake that exists in America. The bad luck, bad decisions, maybe it’s the haunting and the ghosts, but really in history that was covered up and the land was changed forever by the government. You know what I think it is? Maybe it’s the ghost of the lynched black people, and they’re like, these whites, we’re just going to make stuff go off.

Couple questions for you guys. Do you think that it’s possible that a ghost can be drowning people? I don’t think he’s holding their head under. Hold on, we got to start basic first. Do you believe in ghosts? Yeah, I do. Even though I don’t know what they are. I believe in some form, maybe not, what’s the right word, astral form. Just some spirit that potentially has the potential to affect reality, without having a body. So a ghost is a spirit that has no body, that’s the way I perceive it. So in theory then you would subscribe to maybe their hauntings perhaps. Yeah, I believe that haunting is a real thing for sure. I don’t think everything that they say is haunted is haunted.

I don’t like scary stuff, I really am not a big fan of scary stuff. I don’t watch scary movies. I don’t really get scared in the movies, but then I get scared afterwards, like weeks later when I’m like, is my stuff messed up? Then I start making my own stuff up into like messed up and I’m like, I don’t like this. I’m almost thinking that if there was any, the conspiracy horror house right there, I feel like that broke. I think something’s going on there. Anywhere where that many people die, one of them’s bound to get pissed. One of them’s about to be like, no no no, stick around. They’re like, I need revenge and then mess with everybody else.

The reason I also believe that this might have some credence is I feel like hauntings and spirits can only affect so much. I don’t think a spirit’s going to strangle you, but I feel like it’s kind of like the movie Ghost. You ever see Ghost? You can like just move a penny, it can’t do anything else but like blowing in your hair, embrace her with a static electricity. But I feel like maybe they could do a little slip, or shorten the battery in your boat and get electrocuted. If they can bust the door open or turn on the lights, why can’t they strangle you?

Logically, if a ghost can have some sort of force to act on this physical universe and they can push a button and turn on a light, why couldn’t they apply physical pressure to your neck while you’re swimming, or just push down on your shoulder like, oopsies, you’re treading water, they’re like, go down, go down. Maybe they were possessing bodies underneath. I’m just trying to think through this logically.

I remember there was a place where I grew up, this is a scary story. A place where I grew up there was a place that had some railroads, and there was a school bus that got ran over by a train, and so a bunch of kids died. It’s a horrible story. So supposedly you can leave your car parked right on the railroad track, and the kids, the ghosts, you would get pushed away from the tracks. They’re trying to save you. That’s a good ghost, a ghost for good. But my point is, if they can exert that much pressure on a car for that long, why can’t they kill you then?

Eric, do you believe in ghosts? We didn’t ask you. Do you remember any ghost stories, for real, not movies? There were ghost stories told to me in my home neighborhood, but I never saw them. I heard people in my town just talk about it more than one time. There’s one story that I do remember as a kid, and it was in the San Francisco Bay area. It was about this road, and there was some sort of cult or group that was living there, and they were albinos. It was like a spot where you could go if you were a full albino. And then some tragedy happened, they were all killed and murdered, all of them.

And this road, it’s in the bay or in San Jose, and at night people would say that they saw albinos. You would drive it at midnight and there would be albinos just coming out into the road in the middle of the night. What looks more like a ghost than an albino, by definition? Honestly that story is probably one of the more ones that I believe. People would swerve out of the way. And we would go drive the road, and you never saw anything, but I still kind of believe it. If you and I drove that tonight I would be never driving it. I would just not swerve, I would run anything over that was in the way.

So what do you guys think on Lake Lanier? Do you think it was a bad luck lake? It seems like thousands of people go there and they just rage party, Weekend Warriors. I think it’s more on that side, just a lot of party, a lot of booze, and you end up with accidents more than other places just because it’s such a party spot. Although I kind of like the idea of the ghost. I would feel better if it was ghosts and not just the stupidity of man causing all this death and destruction.

If us three went and we had a boat day, we would talk about it, we would build it up. Kind of like Loch Ness, you’d be like, I saw a snake. I would only be thinking about, you feel that, I felt something the whole time. I would want to actually not go deep enough in the water, just stay on shore and put your feet in. I feel like that could be the same way with literally anywhere on earth. You find out the true history of it and you’re like, I don’t want to be outside.

I think there was a lot of really dark stuff that happened, and typically you would presume that if there was going to be some sort of haunting it would likely be around areas where there’s massive trauma and terrible things happening. Because my concept of a ghost is like a spirit who didn’t want to leave and was pissed. It’s usually not because nice things happen. Some stuff happened and they’re like, I have a vendetta and they can’t pass on. So you think it might go all the way back to the lynching? Yeah, that’s what I thought.

But what about the girl on the bridge, the blue dress, the haunted lady? No one knows what happened. What if they were ran off the road? But what about the hands and the toes, that’s so weird. Maybe the catfish ate them. The fact that the hands got cut off is super messed up, that has to be a murder. It’s just a rape and a murder. It might not have nothing to do with the lake. But the friend was still in the car, so maybe they got her out, maybe she hit the gas trying to get out, they pulled her out, the car goes in, friend dies, and then they toss her in. It’s weird that if it was just an accident, why was she not there?

For our listeners, what I would be interested in is if there’s a podcast that goes over that true crime specifically. Maybe there’s an episode out there that somebody can recommend, or if anyone has any other cool stories that they know that would add some more context, more clarity, that’d be cool. If you have felt the pull. I mean, in the dark when I was playing the golf course I didn’t have any feelings, I didn’t have any astral pull. My golf game was horrible. You kept pulling to the left, you blamed it on the ghosts.

I was like eight millerites deep and I was like, this game sucks, I’m not even here to play, I’m just here to socialize and sell. Were you there for like a work trip? Yeah, it was like a sales tournament. So you’re quote unquote losing on purpose to make the sale. There’s something about the cart girl and it’s just like a whole thing.

I think there’s something there. There’s clearly a lot of messed up stuff that’s happened. Also the city folk, they go up there even in the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, and they just be like, all right, we can do what we want, and then clearly the law enforcement doesn’t give a damn. Kind of like Lake Tahoe. Lake Tahoe is the central place for mobsters from LA to go, and Vegas to go, and just kill everybody, and then just pop back. Maybe this is a lake conspiracy. This is where you go to kill people. You got the Ozarks, you got Lake Tahoe, you got Lake Lanier, all these places that they go out in the wilderness and then they just dump stuff and then they leave. Dump their problems.

My wife is trying to plan a trip for this summer to go. Not Georgia, anywhere. It is Georgia, it is Lanier, 100%. There’s nowhere else to go, that’s the only one. We’re going to live stream from Lake Lanier, 100%, we got to do this. Lady of the Lake, I’m going to find out what lake it is. Don’t you take your kids on that. This might be my last episode.

Anything else on this? I think there’s something going on. It’s either ghosts or people are just killing people, no pun intended. A lot of deaths. If eight people die a year that’s one a month, that’s eight people drowning. There’s 12 months, give or take, so it’s one every five weeks. The point I’m making is that there’s a lot of deaths. Whatever, agree to disagree.