[crickets chirping]
[eerie music]
♪ ♪
- It was September 2018.
♪ ♪
Me and my girlfriend and one of my best friends,
we were going up to Tallulah Falls.
It's a state park.
♪ ♪
It was supposed to be a good sunrise that morning.
♪ ♪
The energy in the air was different that morning.
♪ ♪
There was some low fog and moisture in the air.
You know, this is an old road,
and it was just eerie.
♪ ♪
We were coming up to Browns Bridge,
probably going 40 miles an hour.
You know, bam, just saw this figure
walking toward the bridge, totally,
totally out of the place.
♪ ♪
I have never seen anybody walking towards the bridge
like that in 20 years.
♪ ♪
We had to turn around to come back
and see what it was, right?
So, yeah, we come back over the bridge.
The figure was gone.
There's really nowhere for that person to go.
I mean, it's a two-lane road.
It's pitch black.
There's no lights.
There's no houses around here.
Given the fact that we had turned around so quick,
we would have saw something.
It just kind of disappeared.
It was like, you know, what was that?
♪ ♪
I have often heard the ghost stories
of the Lady Of The Lake.
People have always said she's an angry spirit,
an unrested soul.
She's been haunting the lake since the '50s,
walking the shorelines in a blue dress.
♪ ♪
She has no hands, but if she gets hold of you,
she'll drag you to the bottom of the lake.
♪ ♪
Every year, it seems like there's a lot of unfortunate
deaths on Lanier.
You know, seeing what I saw that morning,
it really made me question...
are the stories true?
♪ ♪
[dramatic musical flourish]
[eerie music]
♪ ♪
- I was sheriff here in Hall County
for 12 years, three terms.
♪ ♪
Being sheriff with a lake involved,
it's challenge, to say the least.
♪ ♪
People have stolen cars and run into the lake.
Boats that they've stolen and then
don't want to be discovered for it,
and they sink the boat.
♪ ♪
And then-- then every now and then,
you'll get a ghost story about somebody seeing something
walking on the water.
♪ ♪
There's no way to substantiate it,
and there's no one else who's really seen it.
So it's really hard to say for sure, you know, what happened
or what it was.
[crickets chirping]
People describing something they see on the water,
the ones I've had has been in a mist.
♪ ♪
I have seen mist build up on this lake.
I've seen it come up, and it's just a--
it's a weird kind of feeling and a weird kind of look.
♪ ♪
[birds chirping]
There are a lot of drownings.
I think the most we had in any one year was 20.
♪ ♪
People read about it or hear about it in the news
and hear about a drowning.
And they will ask me point blank,
you know, how did that happen?
You don't have a solid explanation
as to how it happened.
♪ ♪
And I've had some drown that there was no--
no reason and no reason.
Strong, young, athletic people swimming in Lake Lanier
suddenly drown.
And their comment often is the Lady Of The Lake got 'em.
Yeah, she's got 'em.
[intense music]
♪ ♪
The myth behind the Lady Of The Lake
is that she would in some way come
up and pull you underwater.
♪ ♪
If you'd been there and seen it and seen the expression
on witnesses' faces that saw the drownings,
you'd swear up and down something like that happened.
♪ ♪
The people just sink and had wives stand there and say,
I've seen my-- I seen my husband go down,
and he just kept going.
His eyes are open.
He'd see me and just sink.
How do you explain that? How do you explain that?
You can't.
♪ ♪
- Police say a man in his '40s drowned in Little
River on Lake Lanier.
- Fishermen found a decomposing body
floating in Lake Lanier.
Investigators told us the victim is a female.
- Swimming, tonight crews are investigating
a drowning on Lake Lanier.
- He didn't know that last Friday
when he came over it was the last time she saw him alive.
- Most people seemed unaware of the grim discovery on what
for all appearances looked like
a typical day on the lake.
♪ ♪
- There's been a number of people that
have drowned on the lake, and we average
about seven people a year.
♪ ♪
- All good?
- If they're in relatively shallow water,
they'll usually float, because the gas
builds up inside the body, and they'll
come back to the surface.
But if they're in deep water, the pressure is too great,
and they're never going to surface.
And if you don't find the body,
it'll stay there forever.
- You, you?
You're all good.
♪ ♪
- There's 364 shoreline miles on this lake,
and I think I've seen every cove there is.
[regulator hissing]
♪ ♪
We get called by the families when their loved ones
are still on the bottom of the lake and they
want them to come back.
[dramatic musical flourish]
It is not something for the faint of heart.
It weighs on you, for sure.
I don't like to actually keep up with the number,
because I just don't think it's a good statistic
to keep up with in my mind.
I've done four in the past year.
♪ ♪
We don't like to leave anyone on the bottom.
Since we've been working cases,
we haven't left anyone on the bottom.
But there are some people that are still missing,
and they'll probably never be found.
♪ ♪
So I've heard it was 28 that haven't been found.
I've heard another one that said it was 34.
Of course, everyone's heard the story
of the Lady Of The Lake.
But I think it goes back to the '50s.
Two girls were driving and ended up coming off the road
and into the lake, and they drowned.
One was wearing a blue dress.
And they say that the lake is haunted because of her.
[eerie music]
♪ ♪
- The Lady Of The Lake is the best-known ghost
story in-- at least in Hall County.
♪ ♪
The whole incident is based on real events.
It's an actual happening.
♪ ♪
[laughter]
The two women, Susie Roberts
and Delia Parker Young,
they were together, as last reported in 1958,
coming out of Dawson County in Susie Roberts' car,
car, which was a 1952 Ford.
♪ ♪
Susie was 38 years old.
She was a waitress here in Gainesville
at a local restaurant.
And Delia was 22, and she worked
over at a military academy here locally.
Both were mothers.
♪ ♪
They had gone to what we call one
of the speakeasies-type houses that
were available at that time.
♪ ♪
Sometimes they didn't shut down till midnight, 1:00,
maybe later.
Both of the girls were going to go back to Gainesville
and headed for Hall County.
♪ ♪
And they never returned home.
♪ ♪
Nobody knew for sure which way they had gone
or what had happened to them.
And there was some speculation the vehicle went
off a bridge into the lake.
♪ ♪
I'm sure as time went on the families became more and more
aware that the possibilities of being somewhere else
were being eliminated.
♪ ♪
But nobody knew which bridge.
♪ ♪
The girls were in Dawsonville.
There are three basic ways that you
can come in to Hall County.
You can come on Thompson Bridge Road, which is Highway 60.
You can come in on Browns Bridge Road,
and you can come in on the Dawsonville Highway,
which is 53.
Every one of these roads, these three roads,
cross Lake Lanier.
And as you can see, the Dawsonville Highway
crosses it twice.
♪ ♪
- I was a reporter.
♪ ♪
I started working for "The Gainesville Times" in 1957.
♪ ♪
It was a small paper we published daily.
There were always stories going around about people
seeing the Lady Of The Lake.
People would say that they--
they would hear voices from beneath the lake saying,
"Come help me; help me."
And occasionally somebody would say
that they had seen a ghostly figure walking on the bridge.
♪ ♪
When you hear these ghost stories,
they say it's a woman in a blue dress.
♪ ♪
And she has no hands.
♪ ♪
Back in those days, it was big news if a body
was found in the lake.
♪ ♪
More than likely would make the front page.
♪ ♪
I've got the article when they found
the body of a woman.
♪ ♪
It's November 15, 1959.
♪ ♪
About 18 months after
the two women went missing,
♪ ♪
And they found the body of a woman.
♪ ♪
It was found by a fisherman, partially decomposed.
♪ ♪
And it was wearing a blue dress,
and Delia Young was the one that was wearing
the blue dress to the dance.
[laughter]
They said that she had no hands.
When the body floated to the surface, she has no hands.
♪ ♪
- They recovered the body, but they
never were able to identify who the individual was.
Ward's Funeral Home here locally
kept the body until 1970.
No one claimed the body, and they
had a funeral later and buried her with no naming,
without a name.
♪ ♪
Nothing happened for years and years
and years, until 1990.
They needed a new bridge.
The bridges that were in there currently
were built back in 1956.
And those bridges were becoming less than safe.
So they left the old bridge in place
and built a new bridge next to it.
- 7835.
Code six.
105 North Avenue 52.
- I remember getting the call.
I was in my office at the time,
and they told me that the construction workers
had struck a car.
And so my immediate reaction was to contact the dive team,
then I came out and took a look.
♪ ♪
They were in the process of trying to pull the car out.
I could tell this was an older model Ford.
♪ ♪
They took to two or three hours just to get all the mud
and stuff out of there.
And that's when they discovered bones.
The cause of death was drowning.
♪ ♪
And that situation had to be pure terror.
♪ ♪
They identified the vehicle
and identified the license plate.
♪ ♪
I knew pretty much then we had the Lady Of The Lake.
♪ ♪
- It was quite a big deal when they found
the car and the body inside.
♪ ♪
Here it is.
♪ ♪
These are just clippings.
There's some pictures in the folders, too,
like this picture when they were pulling the car out.
♪ ♪
And notice the tires are still--
the white sidewall tires were still intact after they
washed some of the mud off.
♪ ♪
This was two days after the car was found in the lake
and identified that this belonging to Susie Roberts.
♪ ♪
And the body that they had previously found
had been unidentified and buried in an unmarked grave.
They identified it was Delia Young.
♪ ♪
They had a service for her, and they also had
a service for Susie Roberts.
For the community at large, the people that had followed
the story over the years, I felt like they believed this
then was the end of the story.
That solved the mystery of the Lady Of The Lake,
put it to rest.
♪ ♪
But some stories don't go away.
♪ ♪
[horn honking]
[metal crunching]
♪ ♪
- I'm feeling a little nervous heading back to Lake Lanier.
I haven't been back here since the incident.
One of my buddies just called me up,
saying that one of his friends had a lake house.
And it was just like, it was a really hot day.
I didn't have anything better to do.
So I was like, why not?
♪ ♪
And it was just supposed to be all smiles,
you know, just doing teenager things like just having fun.
♪ ♪
Yeah, like, I'm getting goose bumps thinking about it,
like literally.
Like, it's definitely not something that I'm--
like, I'm still a little uncomfortable talking about it,
because I could have lost my life in this very lake.
[engine revving]
I've never driven a jet ski in my life.
♪ ♪
I'm driving. I'm like, wow,
I'm going so fast.
I have this under so much control, and, you know,
I really didn't.
♪ ♪
I really didn't know what happened.
I just remember right before I hit.
♪ ♪
And the next thing I know, I'm just floating in the water.
♪ ♪
I'm in the middle of the lake.
I'm really alone.
It's no one around.
♪ ♪
And I could have sworn I heard something like a screech
or like a yell,
a noise I've never heard of in my life.
♪ ♪
At that time, I felt something grab me.
♪ ♪
I felt myself being pulled.
It was like a force that was kind of sucking me down.
♪ ♪
I felt like I was about to drown.
♪ ♪
If that life jacket wasn't on, I would have been under.
[panting]
♪ ♪
I just freaked out.
I'm like, I got to get out of this water
as fast as possible.
♪ ♪
Never again. Never again.
I see it as a warning of don't come back.
Like, that was my warning, and it's definitely cursed.
It can't not be cursed.
♪ ♪
- The Hall County Fire Department's
marine rescue boat crew recovered the body
near the Gainesville--
- --trying to help a friend in a lake is being called a hero.
His death is the ninth so far this year on Lake Lanier.
- Around 7:30 in the evening, game wardens from the Georgia
Department of Natural Resources were
called there of a possible drowning
at a home in Little River.
Bystanders--
- On July 4th weekend, yet another person
died at Lake Lanier.
I have told you guys for years to stay away from Lake Lanier.
My little brother, Mansir, was 16 years old at the time,
almost drowned at Lake Lanier.
He's not the type of person to make something like this up.
And he was like, you need to get on social media
and warn people about this lake, not to go there.
♪ ♪
I think the first thing that I Googled was "Lake Lanier
deaths," and something that popped up
was one of the deadliest lakes in the United States.
And people keep going to it.
And I was like, what the heck?
Why are people still going to this lake
if they understand that people continue to die here?
Y'all, does this place look familiar?
It looks like a wonderful, awesome summer hangout
where people go and drink and have fun on Lake Lanier.
However, the real story of Lake Lanier
is something that is more dark and more cynical
than you ever learned.
Delved into the history of this lake,
yet people are still choosing to go
to a lake that's haunted.
Doesn't make sense.
- And another person has drowned.
- The first video that I started went viral,
got millions of views.
Stay the heck--
This one had 3 million views--
away from Lake Lanier.
A lot of people in the comments were
kind of expressing things that happened to them
or saying they had family members drown there.
♪ ♪
It's all similar experiences to what my brother,
Mansir, had described to me.
I believe that's a supernatural experience.
I mean, it seems very simple to me.
♪ ♪
People don't just drown there because they're
horrible swimmers, and people don't just drown there,
you know, because it just happens.
It happens because that lake is haunted.
There's an entire graveyard under there
and buildings that are under there.
U.S. Army Corps actually created this lake
by flooding an entire town.
♪ ♪
- The town was much smaller when I grew up here.
♪ ♪
A lot of the old-timers around here
know the history of the lake,
but of course they are fading out.
And then you have a lot of newcomers.
They don't probably know much about how
the lake was created, the why it was created.
Lake Lanier is a manmade lake.
The federal government bought the land along the river.
The creation of the lake was not unanimously appreciated.
There was a lot of land that had been held
by families for generations.
They were reluctant to give up their land,
you know, at any price.
And that's why a lot of it went through
the court process.
There was a lot of tree cutting
and tearing down of buildings.
They had to tear down barns and other structures,
and some homes were demolished.
♪ ♪
It was a strange experience to watch the river become a lake
and then flood all these bottom lands,
where there had been cornfields
and some cotton fields.
♪ ♪
- I don't think a fraction of the people
have any idea what's underneath the water here.
They think it's a sandy bottom, and it
must have been all farmland for miles and miles and miles.
I mean, nothing can be further from the truth.
♪ ♪
- This is the old Fouts house.
It was made out of granite by the farmer
who wanted to build a house that
was impervious to a tornado.
- Yeah.
Looking down this sonar right here,
you can actually see the rooms.
You can actually see how the house was shaped.
And we have a before picture from the '20s when
the house was originally built.
This is all that's left of it now.
♪ ♪
So you can see, looking at the sonar right here,
this is a cluster of trees.
The trees that you see on the side of the lake
right here right now are still standing below us.
So anything below 35 feet of water,
there's full-grown trees down there.
The only thing that's different is all the leaves
and stuff are gone, but the branches are all still there.
♪ ♪
When someone drowns, sometimes people
will get caught in the trees,
and they'll be stuck in the limbs.
One of the most dangerous lakes I've ever been in.
I've never seen anything like this.
- Here's your bridge.
The stuff's missing off of it.
You can see part of the wooden bridge here.
I just zoomed in on it here.
So you can see the roadbed running,
and here's where the little bridge
that goes on across the lake.
It does show you the roadways and stuff that fed
up here towards Oscarville.
So this is one of the main roads
that came into that town.
[regulator hissing]
♪ ♪
And there's nothing left of it.
Oscarville is nothing more than a concrete pad.
All the buildings were bulldozed
down when they built the lake,
and there was nothing left of it.
♪ ♪
- When I started to dig deeper into the history of Lake
Lanier, the formation of the lake,
how evil the initial formation was,
I truly understood why the lake would be haunted.
♪ ♪
Oscarville was a thriving Black community
of farmers that acquired this land post-Civil War
in the late 1800s.
They had churches.
Hell, they had schools,
people that were basically starting
their own Black communities that had self-determination.
In 1912 was when an 18-year-old girl named Mae Crow
was raped and badly beaten.
They were Black boys that were accused of doing this.
They were beaten just unmercifully.
They were marched to their deaths,
and they were hanged in front of hundreds of people.
♪ ♪
There were 1,100 Black people that
resided in Forsyth County.
After these incidents happened, they were all,
virtually all, driven out by violent force.
♪ ♪
They just drove these people out and took their land,
and there's no shame.
♪ ♪
If we fast-forward to the 1950s and the flooding
of Lake Lanier, this land was sold to the government.
They sold land that wasn't rightfully theirs.
♪ ♪
And all eventually to make way for Lake Lanier,
a lake where people go and drink booze and swim.
♪ ♪
The reason why I think that the supernatural element
is there is because you still have bodies
of people that were not moved.
♪ ♪
Oscarville had their own cemeteries.
They tried to move all the graves,
but they were unable to move some of the graves.
And those graves were people from the pre-colonial period,
so Native Americans, from the antebellum period,
Black people that were enslaved,
and then from the Civil War period.
That's a lot of bloodshed.
That's a lot of people that were wronged in society whose
graves you just flooded over.
♪ ♪
Absolutely I believe the lake is cursed.
I've heard a lot of people talk about the Lady Of The Lake,
how there's just one person doing the hauntings.
But I personally believe that it's multiple spirits.
♪ ♪
I think those spirits want justice.
I think those spirits want people to stop swimming
on top of their graves, and they've
been craving it for years.
I feel that if the spirits don't get justice
or accountability there's going to continue
to be regular drownings, regular sightings.
I think there's going to continue to be
paranormal activity there.
♪ ♪
- The fact that people think this is cursed or haunted
is just absolutely ridiculous.
It's not.
but unfortunately because it is such a big lake,
you know, with 364 shoreline miles and 10 million visitors
every year, there are bound to be accidents
and things are going to happen.
The reality is they just panic and they don't
know how to swim very well.
I mean, that is the truth.
They think they're better swimmers than they are.
So I think just overconfidence a lot of times and thinking,
oh, I don't need a life jacket.
Most people can't tread water for more
than a few minutes at best, and they get tired and exhausted.
And when that happens, fate has a cruel way
of catching up with you.
This is actually the location where
one of the drownings occurred.
They decided to go for a swim out here
in the middle of the lake without life jackets,
and they'd got in trouble.
Passing boat came by, saw that they were all in trouble.
He came over and rescued two of them,
but the third individual unfortunately drowned.
He was on the bottom for 86 days,
and we found him at 112 feet caught in the trees.
And that was a tough one.
♪ ♪
It's never easy to do.
I mean, you talk about finding a drowning victim,
it's never easy, and it's never fun.
It's just about making sure that we bring them
back and provide the family with some comfort
in knowing that they can have a proper funeral and service.
♪ ♪
[sighs]
♪ ♪
You can't unsee it.
And you never forget it.
♪ ♪
But it brings closure to the family,
and that's what matters.
♪ ♪
- I really do empathize with the families that have lost
their loved ones at that lake.
And that's why I try to warn as many people as possible
do not go because angry spirits do not discriminate.
And that's just the unfortunate aspect of vengeance.
Sometimes it can be blinding.
My brother could have become a victim.
I'm glad that he got a second chance,
but I think that if he would not have gotten
that second chance he would have just
been another news article--
"16-year-old boy drowns at Lake Lanier,"
you know, and I would have been covering
that on my social media.
From what he tells us, it was a near-death experience,
and it's one that still haunts him.
- When I found out about the history of the lake,
my heart sunk.
Like, when I tell y'all, it was just like, what?
Like, I was just sitting in this water like, literally.
And then after that, I mean, my first reaction was like, OK,
it makes sense why, you know, this happened.
Like, this lake is messed up. Like...
♪ ♪
[grunts]
Definitely think it's cursed.
It's no way these bodies just keep popping up, you know.
And it can't not be cursed because that's
a lot of bad energy.
♪ ♪
I think that I could have been a victim.
I think, you know, whether people believe it or not,
I think God saved me.
That day, I think God saved me.
♪ ♪
He could have let me go, but he didn't.
You know, I could have died.
I didn't.
♪ ♪
- I suppose I've recovered around 15
bodies from the lake.
♪ ♪
I think the ones that stick with me the most
is a young man, a very strong athlete.
♪ ♪
He was swimming back and forth across one of the coves.
He got in the middle of that little cove and sank.
♪ ♪
Why did that happen?
[chuckles] I don't know.
I don't know why it happened.
♪ ♪
Just drowned, I mean, like that.
♪ ♪
The body that was found in 1959 under Dawsonville Bridge,
I don't believe was the Parker young lady.
I don't believe that that was her.
[laughter]
♪ ♪
There's just too much time lapse between the two.
You're looking at a year to a year and a half.
♪ ♪
Uh-uh, not in this lake.
I don't want to be gross, but, I mean, catfish will get you.
I mean, if you're down there and a body is down there
any period of time at all, the catfish will get you.
The turtles will get you-- one or the other or both.
♪ ♪
So the body that was located under Dawsonville Highway
was not Parker Young.
♪ ♪
My feeling is that she is still in Lake Lanier.
♪ ♪
The Lady Of The Lake is still down there.
♪ ♪