The curse of Lake Lanier

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• Lake Sidney Lanier, north-east of Atlanta, Georgia, USA · Georgia local belief

  The curse of Lake Lanier

  Told, never investigated

  

  Lake Lanier, a reservoir made when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dammed the Chattahoochee River in the 1950s, is said to be cursed or haunted because so many people have died in it. More than 200 people died at the lake between 1994 and 2022, by Yahoo News' citation of USA Today and Georgia's Department of Natural Resources, against upwards of 11 million visitors a year. The land beneath it includes Oscarville, whose Black residents were driven out in 1912.

  For many Georgians, and in the telling of Black Georgians especially, the story is bound up with the racial expulsion of 1912, when every Black resident of Forsyth County, including the community at Oscarville, was driven out by mob violence, decades before the reservoir flooded the land. A historian quoted by Yahoo News stresses that Oscarville was lost to that violence, not to the lake. The deaths behind the legend are real people with families.

  Earliest written source not verified

  Marquise Francis, Yahoo News, 8 September 2023 (archived)

  Tradition · not evidence