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I always knew the stories about the curse of Lickloneer.

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It's always been the creepy, like the haunted lake.

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You know, you're brave if you go there.

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But I was kind of skeptic, so I didn't really think anything of it.

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And then in 2020, my family, you know, we were hanging out at the lake.

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We tried to catch some fish and it wasn't really active.

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So we were like, let's go into water.

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You know, you're brave if you go there.

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It's a challenge to go there.

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So ever since I was little, basically, it was very cold.

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Like very, very, very cold.

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With the kids that we had with us, we were playing Marco Polo.

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Marco Polo!

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And we started drifting out more and more.

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Marco Polo!

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As I was out there in the deeper waters, I noticed my feet couldn't touch the ground, but I could swim.

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As I was swimming, I saw something at my foot.

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I thought it was a fish, because you know, you're in the lake.

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And then I felt something grab around my ankle and yank me real fast.

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And the water completely went over my head.

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I started freaking out.

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It happened with a span of a few seconds, but it felt like a tourney.

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And then I shot back up.

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But when I did, because of my asthma, I couldn't breathe.

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My little brother saw me and he swam out there and got me.

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I didn't think people would believe me when I got to the shore.

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And so I didn't tell anybody at first.

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And then I found it was very common for other people to feel like they're getting pulled under.

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As they said by angry spirits.

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I haven't been in the lake since.

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I know it sounds crazy, but it's not normal lake at all.

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30 miles outside Atlanta, Georgia lies a lake shrouded in mystery.

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Some say it's haunted.

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Others say it's cursed.

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But its true story in history may be even more unsettling.

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The numbers of times that linear dive recovery gets called to come find a wallet, a phone, a wedding ring, keys.

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37 wedding rings to date. Can you believe that?

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Lake Linear is a man made lake and one of the largest man made lakes in the country.

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It has 692 miles of shoreline.

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Deepest part of the lake is 156 feet deep.

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The lake was originally built for power generation.

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Back in the late 1940s, the Corps of Engineers was commissioned to come out here and to design and lay out the lake.

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The biggest town in the south is Atlanta, a capital of the state of Georgia.

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Atlanta was growing exponentially.

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I think it jumped up something from like 14,000 people to 200,000 people within just a few short years.

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So they needed a place to get the water resources that the city was going to need.

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Lake Linear is fed by two primary rivers, the Chattahoochee and the Chess City Rivers.

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And when they built the lake, there were a lot of roads, bridges, there were a lot of single family homes, mostly farmers.

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And those people moved to other places.

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Most wanted to do it because of the development that it would provide.

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The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers started buying up a lot of the land and ground was broke in 1950.

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And the dam was finished around 1954 and then the lake was officially filled around 1957.

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This is a beautiful, beautiful lake and it has so much to offer, which is why we have so many people that come and visit every year.

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There are over 10 million visitors that come to Lake Linear every year.

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They're expecting even more this year, so there are a huge number of people coming in.

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The lake has now become the go-to spot for Atlantans looking to cool off from the summer heat.

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But as its popularity grows, so do the rumors.

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Before working for the Corps, I've never really heard any folklore about Linear outside of it existing.

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But within 30 seconds of having an office there, they immediately got all kinds of stories.

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The main stories were the drownings.

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11 people have died in drowning or boating accidents on Lake Linear this year.

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Crews are working to recover two men from Lake Linear.

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They reported drowning.

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Another drowning yesterday afternoon.

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Two more deaths at Lake Linear over the holiday weekend.

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And it wasn't normal drownings, like someone messed up and that's just their demise.

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It was, you know, a creepy vibe.

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He jumped into the water, but he never came up.

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She disappeared after jumping off a boat into the lake.

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He went under and so far hasn't resurfaced.

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Even though it is large, when you hear almost 20 people die in a year in one particular spot,

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then, yeah, rumors and folklore do kind of start to fly.

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The folklore centers around the paranormal and questions whether or not ghosts may be responsible for the deaths.

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Since the inception of Lake Linear in the late 1950s,

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there have been something like 700 people that died and more than 200 people since 1990.

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And there are supposedly some bodies that have never been recovered.

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It's a place and source of controversy over the years.

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And when I first moved here, I was involved with the Ghost Walk.

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Where storytellers told stories of paranormal activity that goes on around the lake.

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And that was very popular.

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Mine in particular was the Lady in the Lake.

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There have been many stories of people having seen an apparition on the Highway 53 bridge.

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A lady wandering around there wearing a blue dress.

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And they thought that perhaps that the apparition was related to a young woman's body that had been found

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right beside the bridge in the blue dress.

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At the time, they couldn't figure out who she was.

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But people speculated that it might have been Delia Young who disappeared with Susie Roberts about 18 months earlier.

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They were both young mothers and they were going to go over to this nightclub over on the Forsyth County side of the lake

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and dance the night away.

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So they went over there and they had a big time evidently.

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Delia in her borrowed blue dress that she thought was so pretty.

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And they left to go home and get back in time to take care of their families.

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They stopped for gas at a gas station on the way back.

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And that was the last anybody saw of them.

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After they turned up missing, people looked along the road there.

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But they really didn't find anything.

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And so it just seemed to be that they disappeared in the thin air.

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I think it was Delia Young's brother who said that when the body was found, about 18 months after their disappearance,

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he felt something pass over him and he knew it was his sister.

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We are on location where the lady in the blue dress is supposed to have haunted these waters.

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And a lot of people claim in the early morning hours or the fog and stuff,

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they see a woman walking across the bridge in a blue dress.

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And I've spent lots of nights out on the lake and I've never seen her.

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Yeah, I've never seen her either.

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So then they were working on the bridge in 1990.

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As I recall, as they were setting some of the pilings down, they ran into something,

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sent divers down and sure enough they found the car and there was Susie Roberts.

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Apparently they had gone to a party and as they were coming back,

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the car ran off the road, both drowned in the car.

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And as far as we're concerned, mystery solved.

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And they were looking for a car.

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Both drowned in the car and as far as we're concerned, mystery solved.

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So when Susie Roberts was identified in 1990,

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they realized that the body that had been found many years before was D.O. Young.

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But she was really identified by default and that's a tragedy in and of itself.

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I have heard people saying, like, oh yeah, we were on a lake at night.

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I was all laid in blue dress.

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I personally haven't seen the lady in blue dress, but after what happened to me, I don't doubt it.

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There have been many cases of people camping out around the lake,

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having seen paranormal activity, ghost activity.

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People losing things that they couldn't really explain

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and having people show up around their campfires that they seem to be there and then not.

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If you go on any sort of social media, like TikTok, YouTube, Facebook,

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you'll see plenty of comments about how Lake Lanier is haunted.

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What's this about Lake Lanier?

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That sucker's haunted and cursed.

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You know anything about Lake Lanier?

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You know this is haunted.

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The lake is literally full of dead bodies.

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There are several stories like that.

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And people speculated about the fact that when the lake was formed,

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it covered all these cemeteries.

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I think there are 20 cemeteries that are covered up.

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Some of the bodies are moved, but just like Baltergeist, not all of them.

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I could not. You don't get in Lake Lanier.

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I don't even believe in ghosts and stuff, but that is such a no for me.

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One of the questions that I get asked frequently is, are there graves under Lake Lanier?

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And I have dove over 5,000 different dives on this lake.

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I have seen every corner of it.

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I've seen the bottom of it.

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I probably have seen more of this lake than any other human being ever.

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Cover down.

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Well, I can assure you all of the known graves that were here at Lake Lanier were exhumed.

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Now I say that because if we go back to the Native American times,

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this was a very popular place because of the rivers.

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And there are certainly some unmarked graves from that time.

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So some of those remains will still be here in the lake.

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According to some myths and lore,

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disturbing a Native American burial site can lead to misfortune.

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In the case of Lake Lanier, multiple spiritual areas were flooded.

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Now some wonder if that has cast a dark cloud over the lake.

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A lot of people believe that the spirits are angry.

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And that's why they keep taking people under.

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I don't want to say they won't revenge because I don't think they gain anything from it.

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It could even be them reaching out for someone trying to get help, but taking lives instead.

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Most paranormal activity is usually attributed to tragic situations that have occurred.

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And this area was associated with the Trail of Tears.

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Both the Cherokee and the Creek Indians lived in that area,

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and they were made to leave everything behind and walk to Oklahoma.

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In 1830, Congress passed an act which forced the Native Americans of the Deep South

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to relocate to reservations in Oklahoma.

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The grueling journey that followed took the lives of roughly 15,000 Indigenous peoples,

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which is why one chief deemed it the Trail of Tears and Death.

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This was basically the last stop for the Trail of Tears.

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My family is traced back to the Trail of Tears, both sides of my family.

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And I have childhood memories of my family passing down the horror of those stories.

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It's heartbreaking when you stop and realize that they made that trip and in the winter months.

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And how difficult it must have been going a thousand miles

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and leaving everything behind other than what they could carry.

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I knew that it started in Georgia, and I couldn't even imagine how they ever made it.

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To Weber's Falls.

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It was a terrible, terrible tragedy.

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The loss of their heritage, their lands.

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And supposedly there are cases of people seeing Native American apparitions around the lake.

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You would think that the more people are told that it's haunted, they would stay away from it.

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But nowadays, people are drawn by that.

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I went to Lake Lanier. I just wanted to see it for myself.

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I'm from the Bronx, New York, home of hip-hop.

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I came to Atlanta in 1994, and I picked up boating in 2015.

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Boating is cool, man. And I think there's a lot of barriers to entry already.

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And folks shouldn't just be deterred because they say the lake is haunted, you know? No.

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Like, haunting is there's ghosts.

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I ain't seen no ghosts up here.

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I think we gotta deal with the facts.

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You can't come to Lake Lanier and just hop on a boat and think that you're gonna get home that night.

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Without no boat or safety or no training.

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Every time someone dies on this lake, nine times out of ten is because they didn't have a vest on.

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Right? They're partying, they're drinking.

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They're not reading the Coast Guard seaman ship manual.

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You know what I mean?

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I've had to rescue people on my jet skis, grown men that were out of shade or they're drunk.

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So that's not being haunted, right? That's poor decision-making.

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People need to take this place seriously. This is a dangerous lake to boat on.

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We're gonna be down more than 20 minutes. I'm setting the maximum.

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Robert's in charge of safety today.

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Yep.

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Alright. Dive her down.

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Dive her down.

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So many people come to me thinking that the lake is haunted.

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When I travel to other cities even, they say, oh, you're at Lake Lanier.

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Wow, you know, that place is haunted.

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And I can assure you with 100% certainty, it's not haunted, it is not cursed.

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Unfortunately, one of the things that happens here on the lake is we do have people that drown.

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Accidents do happen. This is one of the most dangerous lakes in the entire country.

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When you get down below where there is no light at all, it's so hard to see.

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And it is very eerie.

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We run into some of the strangest things when we're out there.

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There's all kinds of things that can pop up.

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The building is right here going this way. I'm right over the top of it.

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Here's the dwelling that they're diving into here with multiple rooms.

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There are a lot of things like this that are in Lake Lanier.

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There are lots of old bridges. There are some remnants of old buildings.

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There are some full grown trees down there on the bottom of the lake.

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Their trees are just like this. They are full grown, full standing.

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Anything below 30 feet in water, you run into the trees.

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A number of years ago, there was a drought. The lake went down 21 feet.

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And you can see all kinds of stuff come up that people have never seen before.

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There are literally old speedway stands.

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But the speedway was a dirt track.

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And that dirt track is just a little bit of a mess.

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There were so many boating accidents that happened that year. It was unbelievable.

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And I think we had one of the highest number of drownings that particular year.

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Because people were hitting these rocks and trees and things in their boats.

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And having fatal accidents.

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I got you some souvenirs.

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What is that? A wheelbarrow handle?

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That's from a door frame.

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I got you some souvenirs.

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I got you some souvenirs.

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That's from a door frame.

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And that's a brick from the house.

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Unfortunately, we do get called out for having to do a drowning victim recovery.

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And it's one of the sadder things that we do here at the lake.

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We always try to bring closure to the families.

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Things like that happen. It's very, very sad.

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But if more people took better boat or precautions, I think we'd have much safer lake.

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I thought about a lot what's under there.

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I always like explaining things scientifically or try to get a reason for it.

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But I did get grabbed that day and pulled under the water.

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And I don't have any explanations for it.

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It does get frustrating.

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You know, when someone doesn't believe you.

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Sometimes I don't believe myself either, but it happened.

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The truth is, if you are on the waters, even with a life jacket,

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you just don't feel comfortable.

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Could the high number of drownings simply be a result of human error?

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Or is there a more supernatural explanation?

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Some locals point to another historic tragedy buried deep at the bottom of the lake

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as the reason for these tragic deaths.

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Some people would suggest we're at Lake Lanier.

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Some people would say we're Gainesville.

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But in actuality, we're in Oscarville.

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It's literally underneath our feet.

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Growing up, the kids try to scare each other about what's on the bottom of Lake Lanier.

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It's just a little bit of a shock.

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Growing up, the kids try to scare each other about what's on the bottom of Lake Lanier.

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It's trying to creep you out and like, oh, just let me know if you go in the lake,

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you're swimming on top of a city.

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Which, I thought it was a joke at first, but turned out to be the truth.

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It had churches, schools, banks of some sort.

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But there's no marker for the historical value that was there.

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Oscarville was a safe haven for African Americans in Forsyth County.

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Black people live there and white people live there.

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I think as long as people stayed in their place, friendly to their neighbors,

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they were able to have their farms, they were able to work in the cities,

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everybody could get along just fine.

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When you look at Oscarville, there's not a lot I haven't found.

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So we try to gather the materials that we can.

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And then we do lean on oral history.

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And then you put it all together and you come up with something that says,

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maybe this is the whole story that needs to be told.

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My mother told me the story about Oscarville.

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My grandfather, Bird, he formed land over there.

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They had some stores, black zones, some stores there.

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And it was a good place to live.

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Oscarville was a town where the African Americans had what they needed.

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They were able to start their families and make a living there for themselves.

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And they would help each other.

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You know, if you're harvest, what coming in right where you can come and get some hours.

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That's how they got along before the incident happened.

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Things changed in 1912.

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One woman woke up and said she saw a black man standing over her bed.

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That alarmed the white community.

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A few days later, another young woman was found beaten and raped.

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Her name was May Crow.

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I think she was 19 years old.

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And for some reason, it may have just been the habit of the times,

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which it seems like it was.

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If something like that occurred, the first place people went to investigate was to black community.

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Now, there was no evidence. She never regained consciousness.

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So how do you know whom to blame?

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And so they blamed three young African American males.

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And one they took and they lynched even before there was a so-called trial.

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And with that whole narrative of black men attacking white women,

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white people decided that they had to cleanse the county.

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And so they told black people to get your things together and get out.

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And they hung one of the men in town and they would just shoot at him throughout the day.

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Great-granddaddy Bird did see all of this.

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So you knew the danger of not leaving because something like that could possibly happen to you.

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And so people had to leave.

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They didn't have time to pull things together.

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It was a matter of get out in the dead of night and leave Forsyth County.

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The lake didn't exist at the time. It was the Chattahoochee River.

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And they drove some of them to the riverbank and said,

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swim for your life.

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If you can cross that river, Chattahoochee, you can do whatever you want,

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but you have to get out of here.

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That was a bridge, but they weren't allowed to cross it.

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You swim or drown. That was what they let them do.

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Some went north and some went south, but Bird, my grandfather, came to Gainesville.

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Some of them didn't make it.

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I'm not sure how many African-Americans were even there at the time,

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but I hear a lot of heart-wrenching stories.

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Everybody in this area knows about some family that had to leave in the dead of night,

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who lost children, who lost brothers and sisters crossing the Chattahoochee.

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When I think about it, I do get emotional because Bird Oliver's first wife and his two kids

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died when he was fleeing Oskaville.

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And you cannot go back to get them, so he had to keep going.

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My grandmother told me that he sometimes would go out into the woods and sit by himself.

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And maybe this was the time he was thinking about the law system, what he had to really go through.

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And I'm sure he thought about, I had a house. I had always. Now I've got to start over.

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And from what I understand, he wasn't angry. He probably looked at it well.

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If I sit here and be angry about this matter, tomorrow I'm still going to be angry.

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I had to be a house.

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So I tried to look at things in a positive way. That was nasty. It was awful.

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But look at what came out of it.

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You know, all these people was my family.

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Everyone has their different perception of Lake Lanier. Those that have that true connection may feel something

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versus those that hear the story.

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I remember renting an Airbnb off of Lake Lanier. And it was right there on the water.

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And as I walked down, it was a different type of feeling.

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It was like you knew something happened and you could, you can just feel it in your soul.

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I have come up on this hill sometimes and just sit and you can feel certain things.

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So I'm not going to argue the fact that there's not spiritual things on that lake.

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And I can't prove it either.

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When you talk about places that are haunted, Lake Lanier always comes up.

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And when you Google Lake Lanier, you will come to Oscarville.

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So it's hard to separate the two. And I don't think it's anything that's going to go away anytime soon.

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I think this story is becoming more prevalent when it comes to social media and, you know, the TV show.

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Atlanta even talked about it.

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I just feel like I was being pulled.

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It probably was.

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It probably was.

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By what?

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It's a whole town underneath us.

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This is really how people see it. They really see it as the ancestors are the spirit coming to take you under.

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So it was a little comical, but at the same time, do your research so you can see the whole truth.

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The history of Lake Lanier will always be clouded in tragedy.

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Whether or not those tragedies have cursed the area will always remain a mystery.

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I would say if I didn't know the history of it, I would just think it was just a normal lake.

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And people just love the scary stories to tell.

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But after all that happening to me, I would say, yeah, if any place to be haunted, it would be Lake Lanier.

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The fact that people say that they see these sightings and stuff, and I'm like, what do I believe that you saw something unusual like a piece of trash, you know, floating through the air, you know, during a storm?

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Sure. But in terms of people claiming to be dragged down to the bottom, they felt something pulling on their leg.

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No, it's just silliness, absolute silliness.

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I do believe that the dark history of Lake Lanier has a great deal to do with people's perception of perhaps paranormal or odd activity that goes on around the lake.

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This atmosphere lends itself to those sorts of feelings.

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I'm not going to buy into the whole haunted house thing, lady in the lake, you know, I'm just being real as to what it is.

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Like this is a historical archaeological site.

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If you're just going to drive over this lake, over Oscarville and not, you know, acknowledge that, there's going to be a problem.

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Professionally do I think it's haunted? No, I don't.

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But I have been told that the ancestors have long memories.

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And sometimes things happen.

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Some of the drownings at Lake Lanier, they're accidental.

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But so much has happened that people are beginning to think, I wonder if that place is haunted.

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Girl, you know what they did to Oscarville? That's probably coming back to get them.

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So I think there might be a little truth in that.