WHAT LIES BENEATH - The True & Terrible History of Lake Lanier, Georgia

🌊 It's one of the most beautiful lakes in America. It's also one of the deadliest. More than 700 people have died at Lake Lanier — and the reason why is hiding at the bottom.

💀 In this deep dive, I tell the documented, fully-sourced story of Lake Lanier, Georgia: the town that was flooded to create it, the graves the government admits it never moved, the woman in the blue dress who was seen for 30 years before anyone learned her name, and the 1912 racial cleansing of Forsyth County that was never punished.

If you've only heard the viral version of this story, this is the part it gets wrong — and the part that's far more disturbing than the myth.

🎙️ WHAT YOU'LL HEAR
🛶 Why one lake accounts for roughly HALF of all drowning deaths in Georgia
👻 The Lady of the Lake — the true story of Delia Young, Susie Roberts, and a 32-year mystery
🔥 Forsyth County, 1912: 1,098 Black residents driven out at gunpoint, and not one arrest
🪦 The unmarked graves the Army Corps of Engineers admits remain on the lakebed
🏁 The racetrack that rises out of the water during droughts
🏞️ Cherokee removal, eminent domain, and the land that was stolen twice
✊🏾 The 1987 Brotherhood March: 20,000 people, the Klan on the courthouse steps
🦠 The antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the mud — one more way the lake can hurt you

❓ QUESTIONS THIS EPISODE ANSWERS
• Why is Lake Lanier so dangerous? — A flooded valley full of submerged roads, buildings, standing trees, and sudden drop-offs, plus 11+ million visitors a year, makes it Georgia's deadliest lake.
• Is there a town under Lake Lanier? — Yes: Oscarville and parts of Forsyth and Hall counties were flooded in 1956, and not every structure or grave was moved.
• Who is the Lady of the Lake? — Delia Mae Parker Young, drowned in 1958, found in a blue dress with both hands missing, unidentified for 30+ years until her friend's car surfaced in 1990.
• How many people have died at Lake Lanier? — More than 700 since 1956, with roughly two dozen bodies still unrecovered.
• What happened in Forsyth County in 1912? — A racial cleansing that expelled all 1,098 Black residents in three months, with no one ever charged.

🎧 ABOUT THE SHOW
Just Killing Time with Elizabeth Stanton is a true crime and conspiracy podcast that pairs documented, deeply-researched history with one Kansas host's take on the stories the official version leaves out. Every fact is sourced. Every theory is labeled. You decide what it means. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and iHeartRadio.

📩 THE TIME KILLER FILES
Got a Lake Lanier story or a Forsyth County family history? A true crime or conspiracy from your own community?
Email 👉 JustKillingTimePodcast@gmail.com — Subject line: TIME KILLER FILES. I read every single one.

🔔 Follow the show so you never miss an episode.
Thanks for killing time with me. 🖤💛

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:16

A local diver named Buck Buchanan has been exploring the bottom of Lake Lanier for years. He responded to rescue and recovery calls. He's been down there when they needed someone who could handle what it looked like, what it felt like, and what it found you before you found it. And here's what he said to a local television station. I want you to hear it exactly the way he said it. You reach out into the dark and you feel an arm for a leg and it doesn't matter. That's creepy. Nobody has been able to lay them to rest. They're on the bottom of Lanier. Hopefully you find them before they find you. That's not a ghost story. That's a man who spent years pulling bodies out of a lake, a lake that by Georgia Department of Natural Resources Statistics consistently claims roughly half of all the drowning deaths in the entire state. Not half of the deaths on comparable lakes, half of the drowning deaths in Georgia, one lake. Forty miles to the west sits Lake Altoona. It receives roughly the same number of visitors every year as one third of the deaths. Same state, same demographic, same type of boats, same types of swimmers, same summer weekend culture, and it only has one third of the deaths. So why does Lake Lanier kill so many people? Of course, you know the practical answers are the underwater obstacles, the murky fodder, the hidden drop-offs, the dam currents, the boats, the alcohol. These are all real. Um, but they only explain part of it. Because the real answer is to why this lake is what it is requires you to go back much further than 1956 when the Army Corps of Engineers closed the gates of Beauford Dam and the water began to rise. It requires you to go to 1838 and then to 1912 and to a night in April of 1958, when two women drove off a bridge and one of them lay in an unmarked grave for thirty years. You're listening to Just Killing Time. I am your host, Elizabeth Stanton. This is a true crime conspiracy and stories that keep us up at night. Tonight is a deep dive, and I mean that literally, as one of the most complicated, layered stories I've ever covered. This isn't a simple true crime episode, and it's not a simple ghost story either. It's both of those things, and it's also a history of American racial violence, government overreach, and the question of who gets compensated when the government decides your home needs to be underwater. There's a lot of myth around this lake. TikTok and YouTube have been full of sensationalized versions of this story for years, and some of them are perfectly right. Some of them are wildly royal. And I'm going to tell you the documented, researched version, including where the myths actually miss what happened, and including the things the real history contains that are more disturbing than anything the myths vented. Time killers, I want your Lake Glenier stories at the end of this episode. So let's go on and let's get into it. Before we get to 1912 or 1956, or any of the stories people usually tell about Lake Lanier, we have to start with what was there before any of it, because the land at the bottom of Lake Lanier and the land all around it in what is now called Forsythe County, Georgia, it first belonged to the Cherokee Nation. The Cherokee had lived in this region of the Blue Ridge Mountains for centuries. I mean let that sink in centuries. And by the eighteen twenties and the eighteen thirties, they'd built what was, by every measure, a very sophisticated society. They had, of course, their written language, they had a newspaper, they had a constitution that was embodied on the United States Constitution. They had farms, businesses, schools, and churches. They had done everything the United States government told them the stipulated peoples were supposed to do. And in 1838, President Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act was enforced by the United States Army. The Army rounded up approximately 15,000 Cherokee and marched them west to Indian territory in now what's called Oklahoma. We call it the Trail of Tears. An estimated 4,000 to 8,000 people died on that march. The southeastern origin of that removal where the forced march actually began was here in this valley on this land. The first disposition of the people who lived in what would become Lake Lanier was not in 1912, it was 1838. It was not a southern state government, it was not the Ku Klux Klan. It was the United States Army acting on an act of Congress with the explicit approval of an American president. I'm starting here because I think it matters to understand what happened at Lake Glenier is not one event with one cause. It's layers stacked on top of each other across more than a century. Cherokee removal, black expulsion, white family displacement, each one using the language of necessity, of progress, of safety, of civilization to justify taking land for people who work on it and had every right to be on it. The lake is beautiful. The water it provides to five million Georgians is real. And underneath it, literally and figuratively are those layers. And every single time you go to Lake Lanier, you're standing on top of them. So after the Cherokee removal, white settlers moved into northern Georgia, and by the late 19th century, Forthside County and the surrounding area had become agricultural communities. Farms, mills, churches, small towns. The community of Oscarville, at the confluence of the Chattabuche and the Chestate Rivers was a typical example. A small crossroads of a few hundred people, mostly white, with a minority black population that had grown through Reconstruction and into the earliest 20th century. In 1910, census recorded 1,098 black residents in Forsyth County. They were spread across the county's farmlands, small towns, and churches. They were landowners, sharecroppers, farm laborers, tradespeople, school teachers, and preachers. And some of those families had been there since before the Civil War. They had been building lives in this county for generations. In September of 1912, all of that ended in less than three months. On September 5th, 1912, a white woman named Ellen Grice in Forsythe County, she called the police and claimed a black man had assaulted her. Five black men were arrested and then released when the case couldn't be established. Three days later, September 8th, an 18-year-old white woman named Mecrow was found unconscious in the woods near her home on Brownsbridge Road, close to the community of Oscarville. She had been beaten over the head. She was unconscious and bleeding heavily. She never regained consciousness. Two weeks later she died of her injuries. Makrow never accused anyone. She never named anyone. She was in a coma from the moment she was found until she died. That fact that the central victim in the subsequent explosion of violence never identified a perpetrator is essential to understanding what happened next. Police found a pocket mirror near the scene that had been sold to a 16-year-old black boy named Ernest Knox. Knox had only recently moved to the county to live with relatives. He was brought in for questioning and, according to a documented record, subjected to what the historical record calls a form of torture known as Loch Clinchy, before he confessed. And then he implicated others. The suspects who were arrested was Rob Edwards, 24 years old, the common law husband of a woman named Trussy Jane Daniel, whose feeling was connected to Knox. And then there was Oscar Daniel, 17, and of course Ernest Knox, 16. What happened next is documented, it's not disputed, it is just simply not taught. September 9, 210, 1912, Rob Edwards was arrested and taken to the coming jail. As news spread, at least 2,000 white men gathered at the jail. The mob broke in, they dragged Edwards from his cell and took him to the town square. They hanged him from a telephone pole, and then they shot his body. The Atlanta Georgian reported the corpse was mangled into something hardly resembling a human form. No one was ever arrested for the lynching of Rob Edwards. No one was ever charged, and of course, no one was ever prosecuted. Oscar Daniel and For his knocks were tried by an all white jury in a one-day trial. Both trials happened on a single day, and both were sentenced to death. On October 12th, sorry, twenty fifth, nineteen twelve, they were publicly hung on a hill outside of Cumming. A crowd of 5,000 people in a county of 10,000 came to watch. A following exists of the aftermath, and in the lower right corner of that photo, a handful, just a small handful of black men stand near a wagon. It's one of the last photographs of black faces in Forsyth County for the next 75 years. Some 5,000 people in a county of 10,000, half the county came to watch. Two teenagers be hanged. Want to be precise about what I am and what I am not saying. I'm not saying Knox and Daniel were definitely innocent of attacking Makrow. The historical record is genuinely uncertain about what happened in those woods. What I am saying is that Knox confessed under torture, and Makrow never identified anyone, and that the trial was a single day, the jury was all white, and that none of that constituted justice by any reasonable standard. And then there's Rob Edwards, who was dragged from a jail cell by a mob, shot, and hung from a telephone pole in the town square before any trial, before any evidence was heard, because he was associated with the accused. The mob was never identified, never charged, and of course never prosecuted. Patrick Phillips, he's the author of Blood at the Rint and Racial Cleansing in America. He said this. In the days and weeks after the executions, bands of white vigilantes known as night riders, so-called because they operated after dark, in groups, burning and threatening, moved systematically through Forsyth County. Their message was simple. The night riders burned black churches, they burned homes, they set off dynamite outside black-owned homes, and they shot into houses with families inside. They posted notices on doors, they blocked roads, and they threatened anyone, black or white, who tried to help the black families escape. By the end of 1912, all 1,098 black residents of Fourth Syth County had been driven out. Many of them left with whatever they could carry. They lost their homes, they lost their crops, they lost their livestock, they lost their businesses they had spent, you know, decades building. The land, much of which had been bowed outright by those black families, was simply taken. The legal title work was sometimes done, sometimes not, and many properties passed into white hands without a sale and without any legal transfer of title at all. According to um Wikipedia, they said many black properties ended up in white hands without sale and without that legal transfer of title. Much of this land was in the village of Oscarville, Georgia. Eventually, the village was submerged under the waters of Lake Levier. I want to add a piece of context that the popular versions of this story often miss. Forsythe County was not the only Appalachian Georgia County where this happened. It was part of a regional pattern. So Wikipedia goes on to say that this anti-black campaign was widespread across the Appalachian, Georgia, with Forsythe being the third county to expel its black population after towns and unions, while whites soon afterwards expelled blacks from the surrounding counties of Fannant, Gilmer, and Dawson. So Townsend Union County had already driven out their black residents before Forsythe did. And after Forsythe came Fannant, Gilmer, and Dawson. The Forsythe expulsion wasn't a one-off act of racial terror in one bad county. It was the most successful execution of a broader regional campaign to make a whole stretch of Appalachian in Georgia all white. And the campaign worked. The Forsythe County map stayed effectively all white for the next 75 years. So two things happened recently that I want you to know about because the story of Forsyth County 1912 is not over. In 2020, soil from the site where Rob Edwards was lynched was collected and donated to the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. It joined soil for hundreds of other lynching sites across the United States. Part of the Equal Justice Initiative's ongoing effort to acknowledge what was done and where it was done. In January of 2021, 109 years after the lynching, a historical marker was finally unveiled in downtown Cumming, Georgia, documenting the lynching of Rogue and Words. 109 years, that's how long it took to put a marker on the place where it happened. And I want you to hold that timeline for just a second. From 1912 to 2021, from a man hanged on a telephone pole in front of a crowd while no one was ever charged to a mall plaque in 2021 in downtown County. This is the speed at which America acknowledges what was done. There is a gap between what happened and what we're willing to say happened. And the Atlanta History Center, the WABE, produced a six-part podcast in 2024, cool, 1912, hosted by journalist Rose Scott and a digital storyteller, Sophia Dodd. If you want to go deeper than this episode can go, that podcast is Gold Standard. It's where the descendants of the expelled families speak in their own voices for the first time about what their grandparents and great-grandparents lost. So skip forward. 34 years after the expulsion, it's 1946, World War II is over, Atlanta is growing, and Atlanta is thirsty. In 1946, the United States Congress passed the Plun Control Act, which authorized the construction of Beaufort Dam on the Chattahoochee River. The stated purposes were three. Flood control downstream, hydroelectric power generation, and critically water supply to the rapidly growing city of Atlanta. The plan called for damming the Chattahoochee where it ran through the foothills of North Georgia, about 50 miles northeast of Atlanta, and creating a reservoir that would impound nearly 38,000 acres of water. The valley they chose to flood included Oscarville. It also includes parts of Hal, I'm sorry, Hal Kennedy, Dawson County, Gwinnick County, and Lumpkin County, every direction. Ground was broken on Beeford Dam on March 1st, 1950. The project would take more than seven years to complete at a final cost of approximately $45 million in 1950's dollars, which is approximately $500 million in today's money. The dam itself, when finished, would stand 231 feet high and 2,470 feet long. According to Lake Sydney Lanier Memories Oral History Archive, Buford Dam was officially dedicated on October 9th, 1957, in a ceremony officiated by a number of elected officials, including U.S. Senator Russell B. Richard B. Russell, Georgia Governor Murden Griffin, and Atlanta Mayor William B. Hartsville. There were three white men at the Ribitcay, the Confederate veterans, poets name on the damn reservoir. And a Senate seat, Russell's, that would later have a federal office building in Washington, D.C. named after him. Now, we need to talk about who got paid and who did not. To build the lake, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers acquired approximately 56,000 acres of land through imminent domain. The government's legal authority to seize private property for public use without with sorry with compensation. That's important. So they started buying of land in April of 1954. The white families who were displaced, about 250 households at the dam site, and approximately 700 households total in a broader flood pool were compensated for their properties at appraised value. Not always a generous price. Some families fought the core for years for what they thought that their land was worth, but they were compensated, and that was something. The black families whose land had been seized in 1912, many of those land titles had passed into white hands without sale, without legal transfer, without a single dollar being paid by the 1950s when the Corps of Engineers came in to buy that land, and it all did white owned for 40 years. So when the Corps wrote checks, the checks went to those white owners. The descendants of the black families who had originally owned that land, the families whose grandparents had been chased out in gunpoint in 1912, they received nothing. They had no legal standing in the 1950s transaction. Their families had been forced off the land four decades earlier. The land had changed hands through racial terror, not through legal sale, and the federal government, when it paid out, paid out only to the people who held the legal title at the time of intimate domain seizure. And this is the part of the Lake Linear story I think people miss the most often, and I think it's the most important. The popular version of the story says that the lake was built to cover up the black town of Oscarmill, and that's not quite right. We'll talk about why in a minute. But the truth is actually worse than the myth. The truth is that the land was taken twice, once by racial terror in 1912, and once by imminent domain in the 1950s. And the people who had the strongest claim to that land had no legal standing in either transaction. The 1912 expulsion didn't just cost those family their homes, it cost their descendants a chance at compensation. When the government came back 40 years later with checks in hand, that is what generational injustice means in practice. The land was stolen once by racial terror, and a second time when the government finally paid for it, and the people had been driven off with no legal way to get that money back. And let's not forget the Cherokee, because they were the original owners of that land. And they were driven off of it first. Here's what was in those 56,000 acres before the water came up, though. Approximately 250 families displaced from their homes at the dam site, and approximately 700 households at a brown flood pool, 15 businesses forced to close or relocate, six churches removed or destroyed, 20 cemeteries with their remains, approximately 700 graves exhumed and reinterred. Infrastructure left underwater, not removed. Roads, bridges, building foundation, well houses, outbuildings, the Looper Speedway Race Track, a half-mile dirt track, grandstands and all, unmarked graves whose locations were not documented. Note the Army Corps of Engineers made every effort to locate burials using the technology and records available at that time. In 2020, a corps spokesman stated that limited capabilities of that time make it likely that not all unmarked graves and burials were located. Unmarked graves included those of enslaved people and freedmen whose deaths were not documented, remained on the lake bed. And I have to think there's got to be, of course, Cherokee too. Like that little nugget just keeps getting left off of people's conversations when they talk about Lake Lanier. So ground was broken on march first, nineteen fifty. On February first, nineteen fifty six, the gates at Buford Dam were closed for the first time, and the water began to rise. It took two more years for the lake to reach full pool. And on August first, nineteen fifty-eight, the year later, then planned, delayed by drought. The deepest point of the lake near the dam is approximately two hundred feet, and the vast majority of the lake bed, including most of the drowned community, sits under about sixty feet of water on average. Now the Looper Speedway was a half mile dirt track off old Cleveland Highway owned by a man named Max Looper. His nephew, Edwin Looper, worked there in high school. Edwin described it this way. So they ran races on Saturdays, and they mostly ran 39-4 coups through coups through the one guy ran an old Plymouth. The speedway closed in the early 1950s as the lake's Blackwaters crept closer. It disappeared under the rising reservoir and has been largely forgotten. In 2007, a drought dropped Lake Linear to record low levels, 20 feet below full pool. An all-time record low was set on December 26th of that year, 1,050 feet above sea level. Full cool is 1071. The top rows of the Looper Speedway's old concrete grandstand broke the surface of the water. Concrete sees rot seats rising out of the lake like something from a dream or a nightmare. Visitors photographed him, and then the rains came and the water rose and the racetrack went back under. The same drought also revealed road surfaces, bridges, the topsible building foundations, and the lake's floor is not featureless sand. It is a landscape, a drowned one, but still recognizably a landscape. So conspiracy label clearly the myth that circulated for years on TikTok and YouTube, amplified in 2023 by comedian Amber Ruffin in a viral clip that received millions of views. Lake Linear was built specifically to flood Oscarville, a thriving black town, as a deliberate act of racial erasure. The documented record confirmed by the Atlanta History Center, the WABE. Atlanta History Center said this, Patrick Phillips' Blood at the Root, and then independent academic research said Oscarville was not a thriving black town in the 1950s when the core of engineers started buying land. By 1950, Oscarville had been effectively all white community for nearly 40 years, because the black residents had been driven out by racial terror in 1912. The lake was not built to cover up the 1912 racial cleansing. It was built because Atlanta needed water. The Army Corps of Engineers displaced white families belonged with whatever remained in the area. The 1912 expulsion happened. The descendants of those families are still alive and still tracing their families' histories. That part of the story is not missed. But the lake was not built to bury the evidence. The lake was already changed. Sorry, the land was already changed before the lake came. So I want to talk about the honesty of myths versus reality here because some versions of the Lake Lanier story have gotten the details wrong in ways that actually obscure what was genuinely disturbing. The popular TikTok and YouTube version says Lake Lanier was specifically to flood Oscarville, a all-black town that was thriving as a deliberate act of racial erasure. That's not right. Here's what is right. Oscarville was not an all-black town at the time the lake was created. We've already covered this, that it's been for 40 years a white community. The lake was not built to cover up all of that cleansing. It was built because Atlanta needed water. And so that has to be very, very clear in this podcast. The white families who'd absorbed that land after the expulsion, they were the ones that received the payments under. And the black families that had been terrorized off their land decades earlier received nothing. So Lake Lanier has been more than 700 documented deaths since it was created in 1956. That blows my mind. An average of 15 to 20 deaths per year. Georgia Department of Natural Resources statistics show that Lake Lanier consistently accounts for approximately half of all drowning deaths in the state, despite just being one of eight key lakes in Georgia that the DNR monitors. It's unbelievable. Like, it's so many people. And before we go into any further about Lake Lanier's death numbers, I want to give you my own personal Kansas reference point on this because comparing Lake Lanier to Lake Altina is good, but comparing it to a lake I actually take my boat on every summer is better, in my opinion. I frequent two lakes here, and only one I actually boat on in south central Kansas. It's El Dorado State Lake, about an hour just kind of northeast of Derby, Kansas, about 800, sorry, 8,000 acres of water. So it's only 8,000 acres of water. It was built in 1981 by the Army Corps of Engineers, sitting on the western edge of the Flint Hills. And then there's the other lake on the other side of town. This is the one I don't take my boat on, but um I have been there and of course enjoy the drinking water of it. It's west of Wichita. It's about a 9,500-acre lake, and it was built in 1965, and it supplies a big chunk of the Wichita area drinking water. Roughly the same total surface area as Lake Linear's deepest sections combined. So both Kansas lakes have drowning incidents. Every state does. People take dumb chances, boats hit weather. I don't really think it's that. I think alcohol gets involved. You know, I mean, maybe there's a drowning because you're an inexperienced swimmer, maybe, but I usually I'm gonna say it's alcohol that gets involved, and that's my own personal opinion. But here's what I want you to hear. The Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks tracks drownings and boating incidents statewide. They do not break it out the data by individual lake the way Georgia DR does. They don't need to, because no single Kansas lake produces the kind of body count that requires its own dedicated annual report. I thought that that was a necessary detail to stick in this podcast. Lake Lanier has had its own dedicated tracking because Lake Lanier alone produces approximately half of all the drowning deaths in the state of Georgia. One lake, one out of eight that the Georgia DNR monitors half of the deaths. So when I take my boat out on El Dorado, I'm thinking about life jackets and weather. And I'm thinking about boat waves and sunblock. I am not thinking about who used to live on that land before the dam went up. I'm not thinking about graves that were left behind. I am not thinking about whether the lake is going to find me before I find it. Because nobody used to live at the bottom of the El Dorado Lake. Not in the way that someone used to live at the bottom of Lake Lanier. And that's the difference. Not the size, not the depth, not the visitor count. It's the history. The lake receives an extraordinary volume of visitors, uh, 11 to 12 million per year, roughly the same number as Visit the Louvre in Paris. Significantly more than many national parks. That volume alone explains some of the statistics for sure. But not all of it. Lake Altoona's comparable numbers prove that visitor count alone is not the whole story. What explains the rest is what's on the bottom of the lake and what you cannot see. Unlike a natural lake, Lake Lanier contains an entire underwater landscape. We've talked about it. There's roads, building foundations, well structures, bridges, rebar, the bones of twenty cemeteries, 700 graves officially relocated, and an unknown number that were not. There's trees, some of them still standing, 60 to 70 feet tall, rooted in the old valley floor and reaching up towards swimmers and boats. There's old boat pools from decades of accidents. There's fishing wire, lawn, furniture, the accumulated debris of 70 years of human recreation on top of the accumulated debris of the world that was drilled to create it. Visibility is severely limited. In many areas, you can't see more than 20 feet. Which that kind of blew my mind a little bit too, that you can see 20 feet under the water. Because in Kansas Lakes, that is not the case. Like I can't, if I'm in the water, because we have mud like Elder Red Lake is just a big mud hole, right? And if I'm in the water, I cannot see my feet in the water. So that just shows you the difference of the two lakes. So you cannot see what is below you until it has you in Lake Linear. The lake's depth varies dramatically, and without warning, in one step, a swimmer can go from shallows into a sudden drop off of 60 to 80 feet of water. And those drop-offs are where the old valley contours are, where a road used to be, or where a field edge used to be. Now they're vertical cliffs underwater. The Georgia DNR owned spokesman, when asked why Lake Lanier has so many deaths, gave a very diplomatic answer. He said there are simply more incidents on Lake Lanier due to the volume of visitors. The dive team has a less diplomatic framing, though. Lieutenant Commander Chris Temple, the group leader, estimates that at any given time there are approximately twenty-four unrecovered bodies on the bottom of Lake Lanier. Lake Lanier's single deadliest day was Christmas Day in 1964. Two families, the Rogers family and the Brown family, both from Gainesville, Georgia, were sharing a station wagon driven by Mr. Brown, and they were heading to an apple orchard. Witnesses later reported that Mr. Brown had been drinking heavily. The car spun out of control and went off a thirty foot embankment into the lake. Eleven people were inside, four adults and seven children. Mr and Mrs. Rogers survived. Two of their three children drowned. Mrs. Brown, Mr. Brown, and three of their four children drowned. Seven people died. People at the scene jumped in the water trying to save them. Divers were called. The water was thirty feet deep where the car went in. They could see nothing. Seven people died on Christmas Day at Lake Lenie, six years after Delia Young and Susie Roberts had gone off a bridge, and two years after the lake had reached full pool. So in July of 2020, sorry, 2012, 11-year-old Kyle Glover, the stepson of RB artist Usher, and the son of Atlanta television executive Ryan Glover, was on an inner tube on Lake Lanier with a friend. A man on a personal watercraft named Jeffrey Simon Hubbard ran Gover them. Kyle suffered a severe brain injury and he died two weeks later. He was only 11 years old. Hubbard was convicted of homicide by vessel in 2014 and sentenced to four years in prison. Kyle Glover's mother, Tamika Foster, has spent years calling for the lake to be drained and cleaned. In 2023, she filed a change. 2019, eight deaths, 2020, 7 deaths, 2023, 8 deaths, the most since 2018 and 2019. And in one week and alone, in July 2023, three separate fatal accidents occurred. A man drowned after being electrocuted, a woman jumped from a boat and drowned, and a 27-year-old man disappeared while swimming and was found several days later. 2023 was the deadliest year on Lake Lanier since 2019. Local news covered it as a milestone, and by the following summer, it was competing for the same milestone again. There's something the Army of Corps of Engineers spokesmen said about the lake that I think deserves to be repeated plainly. In 2020, spokesman Caesar Yeeber was asked about the unmarked graves, the burials that were not relocated before the lake was filled, and he said, Well, the Corps made every effort at the time to locate unmarked burials, the limited capabilities of the time made it likely that not all unmarked burials were located. They know this. They have said so officially. Eleven million people visit Lake Lanier every year and they are swimming in water that contains the unlocated remains of people who were buried in that valley before it was flooded. People whose names were not recorded, whose markers did not survive, whose families may not know where they are. That's not a ghost story. That's a documented fact stated by a federal government spokesman. April sixteenth, nineteen fifty eight, the lake had not yet reached full pool. So two years after the dam gates closed, two months before the lake would hit its intended level, the water was still rising. On the evening of April 16th, Susie Smallwood Roberts, 37 years old from Dawsonville, picked up a friend, Delia May Parker Young, who was aged 23, for a night out. Delia borrowed a blue dress for the occasion, and they spent time at a roadhouse called the Three Gables in Dawsonville. Account suggests they had been drinking, and at a gas station they had allegedly left without pay. So they're driving on State Route 53, apparently being menaces to society at this point. They crossed over Lake Lanier at Dawsonville Highway Bridge, later known as the Jerry D. Jackson Bridge, in Susie's 1954 flu Ford Sedan. The car went over the bridge. Police searched the lake, but they found nothing. No car, no bodies, nothing. Eighteen months later, in November of 1959, the fisherman found a body floating near the bridge. It was badly decomposed. It was wearing scraps of a blue dress and it was missing both hands and two toes from the left foot. The condition of the body made dental identification impossible. Nobody could identify it. The body was buried in an unmarked grave at Volta Vista Cemetery in Gainesville, and for decades people near Dawsonville saw a woman in a blue dress near the bridge. Some say she was walking, some say she was wandering. All said she appeared to be searching. Some said she had no hands. The ghost of a woman in blue without hands near the bridge where the car went off in 1958. That is the lady of the lake. In November of 1990, 32 years after the accident, workers doing construction on the bridge found something at the bottom of the lake. A 1954 Ford Sedan. The car's 1958 license plate was identified by James Roberts, Susie's son, as belonging to his mother. A watch found inside was also identified as Susie's. It took 32 years to find that car. 32 years for James Robert, who had grown up without ever knowing where his mother was. His father Frank had died in 1972, still not knowing. The family had heard rumors for decades. Maybe she was in Chicago or maybe Florida, or maybe she had survived with amnesia and just never found her way. She was at the bun of Lake Lanier the entire time. With the carp identified as Susie's, the decomposed body in the unmarked grave was identified as Delia Yan. She was reinterred with a proper marker. Susie Roberts was buried near the Cenotaph, the placeholder stone that her family had maintained for decades. Her stone reads Died April 1958. Found November 1990. I want you to hold the actual human story of this for a moment before we go back to the ghost version. Thirty-two years search. A son who grew up not knowing where his mother was, and a father died not knowing. Rumors for decades that maybe she ran away, maybe she had amnesia, maybe she was in Florida. The whole time she was 30 feet down at the bottom of Lake Lanier in her car with the 1958 license plate. The Lady of the Lake legend describes a woman wandering near the bridge with her missing hands wearing a blue dress. The actual story is that a woman lay in an unmarked grave for 30 years because the other body, the one in the car, took 32 years to find. You just don't need to invent a myth to acknowledge that. Remember, Forsyth County was the western shore of Lake Lanier, the county that drove out the 1,098 black residents in 1912, then became in the 1950s and 60s the site of one of Georgia's most popular popular recreational lakes. A sundown county, a place where black people were not safe after dark. A sundown county, that's terrible. Gosh, I've never heard that word until I wrote this episode. A sundown county is a place where black people were not safe after dark. Signs posted on County Roads in the 1960s read, and I'm going to quote you this exactly as it appeared because the casualness of it tells what you need to know. This one's a bad one. It said. Black visitors to Lake Lanier described being harassed and turned away from the lake shoreline in Forsyth County well into the 1980s. A civil rights march in 1963 that included black campers at Lake Lanier were met with hostility. A black firefighter named Miguel Marcella was shot in the count. And in January of 1987, a karate instructor who had moved to Forsythe County from California, his name was Charles Blackmore. He organized what he called a Walk for Brotherhood to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day. He believed Forsythe County was ready to move past its history. He received threats. He lost local support. He canceled it. A veteran civil rights activist named Hosea Williams, and this, as soon as I heard his name, I knew exactly who she was, only because of his granddaughter. The same Jose Williams, who was marched across the Edmund Petitus Bridge in Selma in 1965, decided the march would happen anyway. So on January 17, 1985, approximately 75 marchers, most of them from Atlanta, arrived in Cummon for the Brotherhood March. They were met by a crowd of approximately 400 clan members, neo-Nazis, and local sympathizers throwing rocks and bottles at the marchers enchanting racial slurs. The Georgia State Patrol escorted the marchers out for their own safety. One week later, on January 24th, the march happened again, and this time approximately 20,000 marchers showed. According to the Oxford American The Haunting of Lake Lanier, they said this Coretta Scott King was there. John Lewis was there, Jesse Jackson was there. The Ku Klux Klan was there. The KKK held a rally on the courthouse steps. Among the crowd countered protesters' signs read James Earl Ray, great American. It was the largest civil rights demonstration since Dr. King's funeral in 1968. So 75 years after every black resident had been driven from Forsyth County, 20,000 people marched to the courthouse incoming to demand the right to be there. The KKK held a rally on the courthouse steps to oppose them. And I want to add that personal connection here that brings the whole 1987 Brotherhood march a lot closer to people today that people realize. Reality TV star Porsche Williams The Real Housewives Atlanta or H O A and Bravo she's talked about him publicly many times. And you might have seen her on um oh what's the show that is so traitors. She was on Traitors as well. So Porsche Williams so her father was Hosea Williams II grandfather was Hosea Williams the civil rights leader. The man who marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday in 1965. The man who was on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel with Dr. King the day King was assassinated. The man who led 2000 marchers into Forsyth County in 1987 to demand that black people have the right to stand on that ground. Porcha Porche Porche Portia was five years old at the 1987 Brotherhood march. She was a little girl and she has talked on television about being chased by the clan as a child while she was with her grandfather at protests. When she was arrested at a Black Lives Matter protest in 2020 she said this on Watch What Happens live and I'm going to read it to you exactly the way she said it quote My grandfather in the movement he was called the bull in a China cabinet. He was a lieutenant in front he was the one who would rally everybody together and get everybody enraged and passionate about the cause. So me being how I am is exactly how he was he was just as outspoken and passionate as me. Unquote. And here's a little detail that brings this full circle in a way that honestly kind of feels a little bit surreal. Portia Williams got into a physical fight with another real housewives cast member during season eight on a yacht excursion on Lake Lanier itself. The granddaughter of a man who marched 2000 people into Forsyth County to demand the right to be there ended up on a brule on that very lake that sits on top of the land her grandfather fought to reclaim I think there's something genuinely powerful about that. The reality TV story you watched Fight on a Bravo show was raised on bloody Sunday stories. Her grandfather is the reason two 20,000 people walked into Cumming Georgia and her grandfather is the reason Forsyth County had to start unwriting what it had spent 75 years writing. And every time Portia Williams shows up on television whether she's on a yacht on Lake Linair getting into draw or she's being arrested a Black Lives Matter protest she is whether the audience knows it or not a direct continuation of a march that began on a bridge in Alabama in 1965 passed through a courthouse in Cumming, Georgia in 1987 and is still happening in 2025. And that to me is what civil rights legacy actually looks like not a textbook A Grandchild though my favorite my favorite fortune moment on Real Housewives is not the Lake Linear incident of course it's when she went to see the museum of the Underground Railroad and genuinely asked while she's looking around where's the railroad God love her. Ugh she's so good. That is to me what civil rights legacy actually looks like not a textbook a grandchild. By 1990 the black population of Forsyth County had grown from zero where it had been for 75 years all the way up to 16 people 16 in the county of more than 4000. By 2024 that number has grown to roughly 4% of the population better than zero still less than the demographics of the surrounding Atlanta metro area. So Jose Williams was not a man who was going to be intimidated. He marched across that bridge in 1965 and got beaten by state troopers and he spent his whole career walking to rooms that did not want him there. And in 87 in a county that hadn't had a black resident since his grandfather's generation he walked into Forsythe and said no we are going to be here 75 years after this county tried to erase itself 2000 people came back to say the opposite and I don't think I could overstate how rare it is in American civil rights history that the 1987 Brotherhood march doesn't make it into the history textbooks. It should so Lake Lanier is officially named Lake Sydney Lanier after a 19th century Georgia poet who was among other things Confederate veteran. Lanier served in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. He was captured and he wrote a famous poem called The Song of the Chattabuche about the Berry River that feeds the lake that bears his name. Since 2021 there have been organized efforts to rename the lake activists have argued that naming a federal infrastructure project after a Confederate soldier on land that was taken from Cherokee people and then black families and through eminent domain is let's say historically loaded. The lake is named for a Confederate soldier it was built on the land first taken from that Cherokee and I don't know if it's just an interesting footnote in the story. Here's a detail that most lakeline coverage skips entirely the silt at the bottom of the lake harbors a unique antibiotic resistant string to Staphylococcus bacteria. So divers and swimmers have been infected with a difficult to treat illness after contact from the lake floor. It's not widely publicized it is documented though. And when Lake Lanair kills you there's a lot of ways to do that. That's just that's crazy. Like an antibiotic resistant trade of Stavalocopus bacteria sits on floor. So Lake Lanair's dive team is cold out of bucks made 13 times per year for rescue and recovery operations. The team's experiences have been described as uniquely difficult. Members have been trapped by submerged tarps, tangled in fishing line, disoriented by underwater landmarks that have changed or disappeared over the years, and one member suffered blown out air drums during a recovery attempt. The team leader, Lieutenant Commander Chris Temple estimates that approximately 24 unrecovered bodies are at the bottom of Lake Glenier at any given time, not historical remains from the original value. These people who have drowned in the last several decades and their bodies have just never been recovered or retrieved. Georgia, Alabama and Florida have been fighting over Lake Lanier's water in court since the 1990s the lake supplies drinking water to five million Georgians. Alabama and Florida which are downstream on the Channamuche River system have legal claims to share in that water. And in 2013 Florida sued Georgia in the United States Supreme Court over the water. In 2021 the court dismissed the complaint unanimously ruling that Florida had not been proven serious injury. The dispute it's not fully resolved the water from Lake Lanier is too important and too contested for it ever to be simple. The 20th sorry 2007 to 2009 drought though in Georgia partly caused by a faulty lake gauge that led the Army Corps of engineers to accidentally release excess water dropped Lake Lanier to record lows. The whole time low water level was breached on December 2607 like I said at 1050 feet above sea level more than 20 feet below full pool. And the stadium seating of that Luber speedway that emerged the roads emerged the foundations resurfaced people drove to the lake to see what came up out of curiosity they just wanted to see and what they saw was the submerged world Georgia in the 1940s in the 50s partially intact rising briefly into view before the rains came and the water rose and it went right back under the past at Lake Linear does not stay buried every drop it resurfaces again. So conspiracy labeled clearly conspiracy theories about Lake Linear are widely circulated on TikTok and YouTube, paranormal investigation sites and the Southern Gothic media. They're presented as theories not as documented facts. Theory one Lake Linear is cursed by the ghosts of the black residents of Oscar who drove the down in 1912. There is no documented evidence for this the 1912 expulsion happened and the lake came 44 years later. But the claim itself is part of how the story gets told online. Theory number two sudden rogue waves come from nowhere and they capsize the boats many boating accidents on Lake Lanier are described by survivors and witnesses as involving inexplicable wells swells not well swells or sudden water and disturbances. The Coast Guard's documented explanation clue boat wakes, damp flow effects and visibility issues. Some local accounts disagree theory number three boats hit underwater objects that aren't there when searched only to find nothing when the area is searched. That's crazy that there are accounts of fishermen and boaters who say their boats struck something solid in open water only to find nothing when the area was searched. The Corps of engineers documented explanation underwater landscape is complex. There's debris drifts and the most phantom options are simply submerged trees and cool structures that the boater did not see theory 4 strong swimmers have drowned in shallow water near the shore for no apparent reason. Documented and real the Georgia DNR explanation is that underwater obstacles, drop-offs and entanglement hazards make even calm water drowning much more likely than it would be in a natural lake. That doesn't mean the claim a conspiracy it makes the claim genuinely strange and genuinely documented at the same time so I'm not telling you that any of those conspiracy theories are true. What I'm telling you is that they exist and they're widespread and that's what the documented history of this lake is in places weirder than the conspiracy theories themselves. I mean Time killers this one is personal why most of my episodes are not Lake Lanier is Georgia's Lake. If you live in the South if you have family in Georgia or Tennessee or the Carolines there's a reasonable chance you have a Lake Lanier story and I would love to hear every single one of them tell me about the time you went and something felt wrong. Tell me about the accident you witnessed or tell me about the friend who won't go near that water. Tell me about your family members whose attitude towards the lake you never quite understood until you learned what you learned today. If you're a descendant though Forsyth County black families if your family was among the 1,098 people driven out in 1912 I especially want to hear from you. Your family's stories deserve to be heard and your experience of learning that history deserves to be heard. And the big one the one I'm asking every single episode from here on out send me your stories your original hometown stories of murder conspiracy or unsolved crime the thing that happened in your town that never made the news the case that just doesn't make sense to you the death in the official story that does not account for turning your submissions into just killing time files. Dedicated episodes where I read your stories aloud. So real stories from real people from the time killers themselves. So send everything to JustKillingtime podcast at gmail.com and put time killer files in the subject line so I know it's you. And trust me when I say if I read every single one I promise. So time killers I would also love to hear your take on this do you think Lake Landier is haunted? I'm not asking maybe in the ghost sense but in the full sense of a word but can a place be haunted by what happened to it? To the people who were driven off or drowned or buried in it? By the decisions that were made by people who did live there and didn't ask? I don't know. I I do know that personally myself I will never step foot in that water and I don't know that I even want to lay eyes on it just based on what I know about it. I think that water is sentient. I think that it contains memory and um I don't think you could say enough prayers for me to step one foot into that water in 1938 though the United States Army marched the Cherokee people off that land in 1912 white vigilantes drove the 1098 Black Residents office land and in 1956 the Army Corps of Engineers flooded 56,000 acres for this land for the benefit of Glana's water supply. And since 1956 more than 700 people have died in that water 15 to 20 per year on average most of them in the summer most of them in ways that could have been prevented twenty-seven bodies are at the bottom of Lake Lanier right now unrecovered and retreating to the families who lost them. And in spring when the drought years come the stadium seats might have loop for a speedway rise above that speed that waterline. The old roads repair and for a few weeks you can see what was there before the water. And then the rain comes and it goes back under Lake Lanier is one of the most beautiful recreational lakes in America and it is also one of the most consequential pieces of land in American history if you know where to look I am Elizabeth Stanton. This has been Just Killing Time thanks for killing some time with me today.

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Alexa what is a chemtrail chemtrail trails left by aircraft are actually chemical or biological agents deliberately sprayed at high altitudes for a purpose undisclosed to the general public in clandestine programs directed by government officials.