Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Southern Gothic the podcast and you can stream it at
Speaker 2: Southern Gothicmedia dot com and the host storyteller audio engineer
Speaker 2: Brendan schck Sneider. I want to take us down to
Speaker 2: or are you? I want you to take us down
Speaker 2: to Georgia and Lake Lanier. There's been some over.
Speaker 3: The years, divers there have reported some pretty creepy things
Speaker 3: beneath the murky waters. They talk about freaky catfish as
Speaker 3: big as volkswagons and something like.
Speaker 1: What was it?
Speaker 2: The body count there is incredible. Since nineteen ninety four
Speaker 2: up until about twenty twenty, there were over two hundred
Speaker 2: people that died in that lake. What's happening?
Speaker 4: It's much higher even now it was over six hundred
Speaker 4: since it was created. Wow time, So it's fascinating, is it?
Speaker 4: This is one of the stories that I think is
Speaker 4: really caught on with Lakelaneer and the Curse of Lakelaneer.
Speaker 4: It's one of the kind of modern ones that hasn't
Speaker 4: been around for too long, but it's kind of built up. Obviously,
Speaker 4: with a body count like this, how could it not,
Speaker 4: you know? The lake. It was built. It's a man
Speaker 4: made lake. It was it was built. They damned the
Speaker 4: Chattahoochee River back in nineteen fifty six, right and in
Speaker 4: doing this, it took about ten years to essentially purchase
Speaker 4: all the farmland, all the bottom land out in the
Speaker 4: Georgia Hills. This is right outside of Atlanta, and they
Speaker 4: had planned on making this as like an aqueduct water
Speaker 4: and hydroelectric power for the city of Atlanta. They knew
Speaker 4: how much it was growing, and so they purchased all
Speaker 4: this old all this farm land from all these farmers
Speaker 4: didn't have a lot of money, and paid rock bottom
Speaker 4: dollar for it as well, and they went ahead damned
Speaker 4: the river, opened and opened the river. Excuse me, open
Speaker 4: the dam. Closed the dam in nineteen fifty six, and
Speaker 4: all those waters started rising on what used to be towns.
Speaker 4: So today, as you mentioned, you know, scuba divers and
Speaker 4: folks can go down there, and there is still structures
Speaker 4: from back in the forties that are still there under
Speaker 4: the waters of the lake. All that there's actually even
Speaker 4: a drought. I want to believe it was in the
Speaker 4: early two thousands where the water level was the lowest
Speaker 4: it had been since the fifties and there were actually
Speaker 4: some some things sticking out of the lake. There was
Speaker 4: an old speedway that apparently had some stands sticking out
Speaker 4: over by Gainesville. So people got really creeped out by
Speaker 4: this to think about, you know, there's a city under
Speaker 4: the lake. But you know, obviously it has earned this reputation.
Speaker 4: It's a very deadly lake. Just this past year alone,
Speaker 4: I know, there's about a half dozen people actually passed
Speaker 4: away on the lake a different reasons. Some drowned, one
Speaker 4: was electrocuted this year. So a very lethal lake. Whether
Speaker 4: that's of this curse that might have might have occurred,
Speaker 4: or whether or not it's you know, kind of you know,
Speaker 4: we like our hillbilly fun out there on the lake,
Speaker 4: so who knows if it's a little bit of hold
Speaker 4: my beer as well.
Speaker 1: The lake.
Speaker 4: You know, the lake is definitely a place you don't
Speaker 4: want to go. Now. There's a couple theories why it's cursed,
Speaker 4: you know, why we've had all this this dead you know.
Speaker 4: One of them, of course, is that at the bottom
Speaker 4: of the lake, in these old towns and the divers
Speaker 4: going down, you can find that that there are these
Speaker 4: old cemeteries down there at the bottom of the lake,
Speaker 4: and supposedly the Army Corps of Engineers, they were supposed
Speaker 4: to move all of these interred bodies because you don't
Speaker 4: consider that sacred, done all the way out other cemeteries,
Speaker 4: and today you can go to some of the cemeteries
Speaker 4: around the lake and there are plaques there talking about
Speaker 4: some of the tombs there. Some of the plots were
Speaker 4: folks who were moved from what would have been under
Speaker 4: the lake, but apparently they didn't do a great job
Speaker 4: of it. And some of those plots, of course, would
Speaker 4: have been little family cemeteries right just on their properties.
Speaker 4: So maybe they missed a few, maybe they didn't. And
Speaker 4: for years folks talked about Lake Lanier was cursed to
Speaker 4: the that and the way that described I'm sorry, Richard, no, no, no, you.
Speaker 2: Go ahead, continue to continue on.
Speaker 4: They described with this curse which people would be swimming
Speaker 4: in the lake and they might they would say that
Speaker 4: they would feel like they're being drugged down deeper, like
Speaker 4: hands were pulling them down. That was a very common
Speaker 4: experience of feeling that they I even I've talked to
Speaker 4: since we put out a podcast on the episode. We
Speaker 4: put out one back in twenty nineteen before it got
Speaker 4: really big. At that point in time, there wasn't a
Speaker 4: lot of information on it. At that point. I've actually
Speaker 4: had three different first responders email me and talk about
Speaker 4: pulling people out of the lake and describing similar experiences
Speaker 4: to where they felt like they were being drugged down deeper,
Speaker 4: like they were trying, they were being trapped in the water,
Speaker 4: and that the lake was was causing this. So it's
Speaker 4: it's a very lethal lake. You know, there's there's there's
Speaker 4: other theories at the same time, this is this is
Speaker 4: one of those stories that's that's flux right now. It's
Speaker 4: in flux as to how people are interpreting this curse.
Speaker 4: For a long time, it was we didn't we didn't
Speaker 4: move these cemeteries. And when I first looked at the story,
Speaker 4: that was the main one, that the cemetery is under there.
Speaker 4: This was land that way. But since that time it's evolved.
Speaker 4: It's evolved with people's understanding of the property and what's underneath.
Speaker 4: Because underneath that lake, one of those towns is a
Speaker 4: town called Oscarville, and back in the nineteen twenties, Oscarville
Speaker 4: was a primarily African American community and at that point
Speaker 4: in time it was. It was a lot of sharecropping
Speaker 4: and things like that. Folks owned farms there. It wasn't
Speaker 4: a very affluent community by any means whatsoever down there.
Speaker 4: But back in the twenties, there was a crime committed.
Speaker 4: A young woman, a young white woman, was raped, and
Speaker 4: of course it was an unfortunately classic Southern story we
Speaker 4: hear far too often during that time period of a gentleman,
Speaker 4: a gentleman from Oscarville was believed to have committed the crime.
Speaker 4: And over the course of the next month, the community
Speaker 4: from there in Forsyth County, the white community and the
Speaker 4: community of Oscarville, it's just escalated verrey. It is a
Speaker 4: lot of events that led up to this final just ultimate, horrific,
Speaker 4: violent active. All of the people in Oscarville will literally
Speaker 4: run out of town. It was just violence on top
Speaker 4: of violence. It was something that looks a lot if
Speaker 4: you're familiar with the Black Wall Street. What happened there,
Speaker 4: just folks being run out of town of their home.
Speaker 4: And Oscarville now sits at the bottom of that lake.
Speaker 4: So some people do believe that the curse might be
Speaker 4: might be part of that as well, and that's something
Speaker 4: that's a more modern giving. And we see that because
Speaker 4: TV shows are picking up on it. TV shows are
Speaker 4: picking up on that history, and they're they're kind of
Speaker 4: promoting that as the possibility there.
Speaker 2: So there is a legend of a ghost of a
Speaker 2: long dead woman roaming the lake in a flowing blue dress.
Speaker 2: Tell me about her.
Speaker 4: Yes, sir, Yeah, this is an old ghost story that's
Speaker 4: been around there for a while. So the curse is
Speaker 4: a little relatively new. But you know, when the lake
Speaker 4: itself was first, when the dam was closed and the
Speaker 4: lake started filling up just almost out of the gate,
Speaker 4: they were having drownings in the lake. Okay, I mean
Speaker 4: as as the early fifties, there already had a scuba
Speaker 4: team trained in Gainesville because of some of these problems.
Speaker 4: But in nineteen fifty eight was when this particular one happened.
Speaker 4: There was two women, women by the name of Deliamate
Speaker 4: Parker Young and Susie Roberts, And there were two local
Speaker 4: women down there in Georgia, and they were out there
Speaker 4: in the middle of the night. They were driving to
Speaker 4: a local dance okay, at a local dance hall, and
Speaker 4: they were driving these winding roads. And if you ever
Speaker 4: get a chance to go to the lake. Being up
Speaker 4: there in the middle of the night, I can't imagine,
Speaker 4: but what you're driving on is essentially the top of
Speaker 4: mountains that you don't realize are mountains because the lake
Speaker 4: water is so high now, right because that's what they
Speaker 4: filled in, and so these are ridges, winding roads and
Speaker 4: they're out there in the middle of the night of
Speaker 4: probably about ten o'clock at nine, driving driving those roads,
Speaker 4: and at that point in time, as they neared the
Speaker 4: bridge right by Gainesville, the Dawsonville Highway bridge, they just
Speaker 4: went right over the edge. And we have no understanding why.
Speaker 4: The next day when folks came out and they saw
Speaker 4: what had happened, they saw skid marks going straight over
Speaker 4: the bridge and into the water. So of course, you know,
Speaker 4: they had the dive team come out. Everybody's come out
Speaker 4: there searching the water everything, looking for you know, looking
Speaker 4: for these women something something. It was a nineteen fifty
Speaker 4: four Ford coop that Susie was driving, and they couldn't
Speaker 4: find anything. Spent weeks trying to find these women down there,
Speaker 4: just so they eventually just had to give up. These women,
Speaker 4: you know, just were you know, lost to time, we assume.
Speaker 4: But about a year later, in nineteen fifty nine, a
Speaker 4: fisherman who was out on the lake just in the
Speaker 4: early hours of the morning. He des quite a bit
Speaker 4: of a shock because as he's out there fishing, he
Speaker 4: discovers the remains of a human floating on the surface
Speaker 4: not far from the bridge, and they are badly decomposed,
Speaker 4: just horrifically decomposed. They couldn't they couldn't identify who she
Speaker 4: was even or the cause of the death. But you know,
Speaker 4: everybody just assumed that this was one of the women
Speaker 4: from that night, right, this, this had to have been
Speaker 4: Delia May, Parker Young or Susie, right, But they couldn't
Speaker 4: actually confirm it, right, So it just kind of goes on.
Speaker 4: A thirty one years passed with no resolution whatsoever. But
Speaker 4: in that period of time what ended up happening was
Speaker 4: folks began seeing the apparition of this woman in blue
Speaker 4: out on that bridge. Now, I mean, I'm sure you've
Speaker 4: heard some of the lady and white stories, right with
Speaker 4: the oh yeah, driver rod down the road and picks
Speaker 4: up a lady in white and she disappears in the car. Well,
Speaker 4: I tell you this one is not like that. It
Speaker 4: is much scarier because they say, as they get closer
Speaker 4: to this woman in blue, it always it looks like
Speaker 4: she's looking over the bridge or something. She's in a
Speaker 4: very tattered dress. It's just falling apart. They say, it
Speaker 4: looks awful. And as they get close they realize that
Speaker 4: she doesn't have any hands as well. It's a very
Speaker 4: very ominous spirit at that point in time, and years
Speaker 4: and years. I've talked about this for for thirty years,
Speaker 4: talked about this lady in blue, and sometimes people say
Speaker 4: they still see her. But this is an older story
Speaker 4: in that but after thirty years do pass by. Eventually.
Speaker 4: Back in I believe it was nineteen ninety November of
Speaker 4: nineteen ninety, they're doing construction on that bridge. They're gonna
Speaker 4: they're gonna expand the bridge out of old Dawsonville Highway.
Speaker 4: And as they're down there and they're dredging the bottom
Speaker 4: of the bridge, what do you know, they found something
Speaker 4: down there. They found that nineteen fifty four forward down
Speaker 4: at the bottom, and they, of course they pull it
Speaker 4: up and drop it on the land, and what do
Speaker 4: they realize that there's someone inside and still behind the wheel, right,
Speaker 4: And you know, at this point they really, you know,
Speaker 4: they weren't really able to identify the remains, but all
Speaker 4: the personal belongings in the car, they were able to
Speaker 4: find that this was Susie Roberts. This was one of
Speaker 4: those two women, and she had been down there, trapped
Speaker 4: under the water in ninety plus feet of water at
Speaker 4: that point, you know, she had was basically stuck within
Speaker 4: the tree trunks and the mud at the bottom because again,
Speaker 4: this is a man made lake and there were all
Speaker 4: trees still under there, so a lot of just you know,
Speaker 4: a lot of things down there to get stuck in.
Speaker 4: And you know, now this was certainly something to celebrate
Speaker 4: at that point in time, you know, because the families
Speaker 4: now identify not only her body, but also the body,
Speaker 4: you know, of the other woman, because they were able
Speaker 4: to connect the two at that point. So ever, since then,
Speaker 4: that's what folks believe. They say that that lady in
Speaker 4: blue that was actually Glia May Parker Young out there
Speaker 4: looking for her friend who had not been found yet
Speaker 4: down at the bottom of the lake. Now, you know,
Speaker 4: I tell people I love this story personally because it
Speaker 4: does kind of have a happy ending. But I personally
Speaker 4: learned something different from this. I went out and visited
Speaker 4: the lake and went out and did a little extra
Speaker 4: research and in doing so, as I mentioned earlier, I
Speaker 4: like going to cemetery. Sorry, Richard, It's something I grew
Speaker 4: up doing and we.
Speaker 2: Just y I enjoyed it too. I enjoy it too.
Speaker 4: It's wonderful. It's you know, whether whether it's a haunting
Speaker 4: or not, it's a lifetime of stories every couple of feet,
Speaker 4: you know. And I decided to go out to the
Speaker 4: cemetery where they're buried, is the Alta Vista Cemetery right
Speaker 4: there in Gainesville, and it kind of I don't know
Speaker 4: if it was to pay respects or or something like that.
Speaker 4: And we went out and we looked around and we
Speaker 4: visited it because it was wonderful that now they really
Speaker 4: had proper burials. Their names were on the graves at
Speaker 4: this point in time. But you know, when when we
Speaker 4: went up to it, got a really big shock. When
Speaker 4: we went up to Delia May's tombstone. It was interesting
Speaker 4: because you know, those women they had gone missing all
Speaker 4: the way back in the nineteen fifties, but on this
Speaker 4: tombstone was this little trinking right next to the headstone
Speaker 4: that said I love you Mom, and it was at
Speaker 4: that point in time, you know, she had she had
Speaker 4: a kid at that point when she went missing. And
Speaker 4: this man now has even since passed away from old age.
Speaker 4: At this point, he was in his seventies. But there
Speaker 4: was just this one little reminder that these these people
Speaker 4: who have been telling this ghost story about for years
Speaker 4: and years are real people, and there's a real humanity
Speaker 4: attached to what we what we do here when we
Speaker 4: tell ghosts stories. So it's a little more heartbreaking for me.
Speaker 2: When they when they found her body in the Ford Coop,
Speaker 2: what about her hands, Brendan.
Speaker 4: Exactly, Well, that's what that's exactly what they discovered is
Speaker 4: that she didn't have hands, and my apologies to miss that.
Speaker 4: You know, obviously she even picked apart pretty badly by
Speaker 4: some of the creatures down there, so her body was again,
Speaker 4: they weren't even able to identify the original woman who
Speaker 4: was found either from all the decay and everything. So
Speaker 4: that no hand. That that just kind of leads into
Speaker 4: what the story said. Of course, you know that that
Speaker 4: the ghost was missing her hands.
Speaker 2: Did you ever take a swim in Lake Lanier? I
Speaker 2: will believe, would you, now, Richard, No, not a chance.
Speaker 4: Not a chance, I'll tell you. You know, I think
Speaker 4: it's up for debate, you know how much what is
Speaker 4: true or what isn't at this point. But I'm not
Speaker 4: gonna I'm not gonna risk it. No.
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