Just down the road from the University of North Georgia’s Gainesville campus is Lake Lanier, a 38,000 acre reservoir that draws more than 12 million visitors each year, according to the Lake Lanier Association.
That level of traffic has helped Lake Lanier build a national reputation as both a popular vacation destination and one of the most dangerous lakes in the country, with a longstanding belief by both tourists and local community members that it may be haunted.
According to historians, local officials and business owners, these two contrasting reputations are dependent upon each other. Together, they form a cycle where tragedy creates folklore, folklore fuels tourism and tourism increases the likelihood of more tragedy.
Elizabeth Grimes, the owner of Lanier Ghost Tours, relies on this cycle to stay in business. Her company takes small groups on seasonal pontoon boat tours of the lake, where tour guides combine history with popular folklore to explain alleged paranormal happenings.
“We talk about where those [stories] come from from a historical standpoint, and then we talk about why they have become so infamous,” says Grimes.
Among the most well known is the story of the “Lady of the Lake,” which Grimes says is “the most seen apparition” on Lake Lanier. The story is rooted in an event from the late 1950s.
After the mysterious disappearance of Delia Mae Parker Young in 1958, people began reporting sightings of a pale, ghostly woman in a blue dress, with no hands, either wandering the Jerry D. Jackson Bridge or walking across the water below it before vanishing into thin air, says Grimes.
“There was, in fact, a woman that drowned in the lake,” says Deanna Gillespie, a history professor at UNG who has studied the social impacts of Lake Lanier extensively. “She and her friend had gone over to a dance as the lake was filling in Dawsonville. Coming back, there was a new bridge that didn’t have guardrails yet, and she drove off the bridge. So they just kind of disappeared, and nobody knew what happened to them.”
While Young’s body, clad in a blue dress and missing its hands, was discovered by a fisherman in 1959, it wasn’t identified until construction workers dredged the lake bed around the Jerry D. Jackson Bridge in 1990 and found her car, explains Gillespie.
“There have been a lot of firsthand accounts of people who have seen a mysterious woman in a blue dress, and I’ve talked to several of them,” adds Grimes. “They’re all really fascinating stories.”
During her tours, Grimes also shares stories about crimes that took place in and around Lake Lanier, like a 1990s murder case in which a man’s head was encased in concrete and dumped into the lake.
Michael LeJeune, a 27-year-old cocaine dealer, admitted to killing and beheading his client, 39-year-old Ronnie Davis, over a $250 drug debt, says Grimes. LeJeune then solicited the help of his girlfriend, Rekah “Kelly” Anand, to burn Davis’ body before cementing his head into a concrete block and dumping it into Lake Lanier.
“They never have found that head,” says Grimes. “There are no ghost stories in reference to that particular story, but it’s just one that kind of stands out.”
Another frequently discussed story is that of Oscarville, a predominately Black community located in a part of Forsyth County that is now underwater. Gillespie says the commonly held belief that a “prosperous Black town” was flooded to create Lake Lanier is not accurate. Instead, she says racial violence had already displaced much of Forsyth County’s Black population decades before the lake’s construction began in the 1950s.
She explains that in 1912, a young white woman named Mae Crow was found beaten, raped and later died, leading to the arrest of three Black teenagers from Oscarville: Rob Edwards, Ernest Knox and Oscar Daniel. Before any trial, a white mob broke into the jail, dragged Edwards out, beat him, hanged him from a lamppost and shot him to death. Knox and Daniel were later convicted by all white juries and executed by hanging.
“In the midst of all of that, there was a lot of white vigilante violence that drove all Black people out of Forsyth County…and they successfully did that until the 1980s,” says Gillespie.
Grimes says many people believe the lake’s alleged haunting is tied to the racial violence that took place in Oscarville.
“People do attribute the haunting of Lake Lanier to those events that happened in 1912, like it could be a curse or something,” she says. “And you know maybe it could be, maybe it couldn’t be, but that is something that people are always interested in and people want to talk about.”
She says people also believe “the Curse of Lake Lanier” may have been caused by the flooding of numerous cemeteries during the lake’s creation.
Gillespie debunks the theory, explaining that when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built the lake, “they didn’t want coffins bobbing up in the water,” so they worked with local funeral homes to relocate cemeteries. Still, she says, many people believe that some unmarked graves from family burial plots may have been left behind.
“A lot of people come, and they have stories that are really similar to each other,” Grimes says. “We hear a lot of things like, ‘When I was little, and I was in this lake, I saw something…that looks like a hand,’ or ‘I saw something in this lake that looks like a body part.’”
Those stories, she says, are part of what draws people to Lake Lanier in the first place.
“A lot of people want to go see Lake Lanier because it’s got a mystery around it,” says Grimes. “There are a lot of places in the country that have sort of a haunted reputation, and people go visit them because of that…Then they come to visit, and they see how beautiful [the lake] is and how big it is, and I think that can be a really good thing for the local economy.”
“People like ghost stories,” adds Gillespie. “People want to go to places where there are ghost stories.”
Gillespie says, “There are people who believe it’s haunted, and I believe that they believe that…but I have not seen any evidence of actual ghosts at Lake Lanier,” she explains. “But as a social and cultural historian, [I see how] those stories serve a purpose.”
She says these ghost stories often reflect the community’s attempt to “make sense of the dangers of the lake,” which cause roughly 10 to 20 deaths a year.
“Lake Lanier is a dangerous lake, in part, because there’s still stuff under it that people…can get trapped in,” says Gillespie. “It’s hard to come back up if you’ve gone down that far, and you drown. So it’s kind of a way to make sense of that.”
Before the lake was created, she says the area was a river valley where about 700 families lived and farmed. When the federal government approved the Buford Dam project in 1948, those families were forced to relocate, taking smaller structures, like chicken coops, with them, but leaving behind larger structures, like houses and churches.
“When the lake filled, it filled over those things,” says Gillespie, adding that a former student who frequently dove in Lake Lanier reported finding items like window frames and teacups on the lake’s floor. Gillespie says these physical findings often reinforce the idea that Lake Lanier may be “haunted” by its past, drawing more tourists to the area and creating a greater risk for accidents. Thus the lake becomes more “dangerous.”
“I don’t think that’s exactly a fair label to give Lake Lanier,” says Victoria Clevenger, the executive director of the Lake Lanier Association. “I don’t think it’s a haunted thing or that there’s a ‘Curse of Lake Lanier’ or anything like that. I think it’s to scale with the use of Lake Lanier and its recreational activity.”
With millions of visitors each year, boating accidents and drownings are common, she says. According to data from the Department of Natural Resources, between 1994 and 2018, there were more than 100 drownings and nearly 1,000 boating incidents on Lake Lanier, resulting in hundreds of additional injuries.
Clevenger says many of those incidents are preventable.
“I think that it’s a human error,” she says. “If a lot of people were safer on Lake Lanier, whether that means wearing a life jacket or understanding boating laws within the state of Georgia, a lot of those accidents, if not all, could be completely avoided.”
Yet, those accidents create the stories that feed directly back into the lake’s reputation, drawing even more visitors and increasing the likelihood of more tragedies. In that way, the lake’s reputation sustains itself.
