By Sarah Brill, Science and Technology Editor
Have you ever walked into a haunted mansion and instantly regretted the decision to walk over the threshold? You find that each room goes on for miles with no end in sight and at every turn your mental sanity is disrupted by someone screaming in your face. Well that is not what Lake Lanier in Georgia is like, but there is definitely something paranormal occurring there.
Lake Lanier is nestled in the foothills of the Georgia mountains and has a dark history. In the 1950s, when this lake was created, the community located in these mountain areas were promised by the government compensation for the property they were about to lose whilst making the lake. In the end, “some 700 families sold a total of 56,000 acres to the government, which built a dam on the Chattahoochee River to form the lake.” Unfortunately, the communities which live there were unable to survive on the compensation left to them from the government.
The lake itself was created by flooding all areas including a cemetery. The Army Corps of Engineers stated that they had removed all marked graves, but what happened to the unmarked graves? It was said that these graves, unable to be moved since they were unmarked, were left behind. That means that hundreds, possibly thousands, of graves were flooded in the making of this lake. To top it all off, in 1958 a Ford Sedan carrying two women vered off a bridge and tumbled into the lake. “Some say the ghost of one of the women, dubbed the ‘Lady of the Lake,’ wanders the bridge at night in a blue dress, lost and restless.”
Another encounter involved Buck Buchannon, a longtime diver. He told the media that sometimes in his swims in Lake Lanier he would “reach out into the dark and feel an arm or a leg and it doesn’t move.”
With various witness accounts and stories like Buchannon’s, it is unsurprising that the lake receives a mass amount of visitors per year. It is common knowledge never to disrupt spirits that are at rest, as the Christians would say, regardless, this lake was still created and over 200 people have drowned whilst partaking in recreational activities. This could be due to the mass amount of people attempting reckless water activities or it can be due to restless spirits growing angry at the crowds that flood their beaches.
So be warned, ghostly spirits may be hunting this popular historic lake.
*** ***
Sources:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/31/us/lake-lanier-urban-legends-trnd/index.html