Death looms so large over Georgia’s Lake Lanier that people say it’s haunted.

Since it was filled in 1956, it’s estimated that nearly 700 people have lost their lives in its waters or at its banks in boating accidents, drownings, and unexplained events. Official reports list at least 24 people as “missing” there because what lies below the lake’s surface makes searching it nearly impossible.

Beneath those unrecovered souls, wrecked boats, discarded nets, and silty waters lie the charred remains of the Africa-American community of Oscarville, GA.

Before 1912, Oscarville’s people thrived as farmers, teachers, ministers and tradespeople of all sorts.

Their world started to unravel on September 5th of that year, when a white woman accused a Black man of entering her bedroom and attempting rape. When a local preacher mentioned that perhaps the woman had not been entirely forthcoming in her account, suggesting the encounter may have been consensual, he was nearly beaten to death right in front of the Oscarville courthouse.

Tensions between the segregated populations of Forsyth County were so high that the Governor of Georgia activated the National Guard to stand patrol and keep the peace.

Just 4 days later, that fragile peace was shattered when another white woman was found dying in the local woods, an apparent victim of yet another sexual assault. 

The only evidence police turned up was a pocket mirror claimed to be property of a 16-year-old boy named Ernest Knox. Hardly a smoking gun, but enough to satisfy the white folks of Oscarville, especially when Ernest confessed to the crime and gave up the people who were going to help him dispose of the body. Suppose it didn’t matter much that Ernest made that confession from the bottom of a well just before he was nearly drowned in it.

Ernest and 3 supposed co-conspirators—Oscar Daniel, Oscar’s 22-year old sister Trussie, her boyfriend Big Rob—plus an alleged witness, were all transported to the county jail in Cumming, GA. But there was no point. A mob estimated in the thousands stormed the jail, killed Big Rob, and dragged his body into the street. He was hung from a light post and used as target practice while the others inside could only listen to their potential fate.

Trussie accepted a plea bargain in exchange for testifying against her brother Oscar and was forced to be his executioner (see the sub-headline in the article above). Charges were dropped against the witness. But Big Rob was already dead, and Ernest and Oscar were doomed to the same fate.

On October 25, 1912, Oscar Daniel and Ernest Knox were publicly lynched before a crowd estimated at as many as 8,000 spectators. People gathered around the gallows for picnics, and PBS reports that one of the boys was so small a special noose was created to ensure the momentum wouldn’t decapitate him and splash anyone’s Sunday dress with blood.

You don’t even have to imagine the scene. You’ve probably seen the images of vast crowds gathering under the feet of a Black man. Though these images are rarities now, in 1908, they were so frequently mailed, the U.S. Postmaster was forced to ban them. “Even the Nazis did not stoop to selling souvenirs of Auschwitz,” TIME Magazine’s Richard Lacayo writes. 

But the terror didn’t end with two lynchings. Over the next few months, each sunset brought nightmares to Oscarville. 

“Night riders” went door-to-door demanding that Black people vacate the town. When some people didn’t comply, the threat escalated. Their homes were shot into, animals killed, crops destroyed. Anyone who remained after that fled their property in the middle of the night as it went up in flames. Nearly 1,100 African-Americans—around 98% of Forsyth County’s Black population—were forced out of Oscarville, some still paying on property they’d abandoned until it was foreclosed.

Of course, all of that land was immediately seized by you-know-who.

And nearly just as quickly, things started going wrong.

In 1915, a boll weevil infestation killed crops on Oscarville’s land that was illicitly seized by white farmers and banks. Though they ultimately survived the weevils, being one of the few regions in the state to escape total decimation made them eager to share their methods. (It was chicken poop. They got a bunch of chickens to poop in the soil.) Perhaps too eager. They gained the attention of the mayor of Atlanta, who was developing a dam to ensure the city’s water supply, hydroelectric needs, and flood control. He spent 2 years working with the Army Corps of Engineers to seize nearly all of that recovered farmland. What little was actually purchased was far undervalued, and left the handful of African-Americans left who owned their land through generations with nearly nothing.

When the dam was complete, the waters completely submerged charred buildings, cemeteries, bridges, and any trace left of those who lived and died in Oscarville. Then they named those waters after a Confederate soldier. Though Oscarville is the only Black community under Lake Lanier, it wasn’t the only one Black people were run out of. Towns, Union, Fannin, Gilmer and Dawson Counties all have a history of violently exiling its Black residents. Even today, only 4% of Forsyth County’s almost 250,000 residents are Black.

So is Lake Lanier haunted? No one can truly answer that question.

But is it filled with ghosts? Absolutely.

@indeskribeabull

Top 3 places NOT to visit in GA #fyp #lakelanier #folklore #hauntedlakes #tourguides #stayhome

♬ Lake Lanier – Jerrilyn Lake

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