Kile Glover was the entertainer in the family, the pride of his stepfather, the R&B superstar Usher. He sang, he danced – he burned CDs of his own music, styled the covers with self-made art and was otherwise expressing his creativity in internet videos before it was trendy. “He would’ve been a YouTube sensation by now,” says his mother, the celebrity stylist Tameka Foster. But that future was thwarted on a family trip to Lake Lanier, just outside his Atlanta home town, in July 2012.
Kile was only 11 when he was struck by a speeding jetski while tubing and knocked unconscious. Foster, on the island of Saint Martin at the time, managed to get to Kile’s hospital bedside within hours thanks to Usher sending a private plane – an olive branch that came amid a bitterly public custody battle over their two younger sons. As Kile lay on life support, Foster passed the time Googling for information about Lake Lanier. She is still horrified by what she learned.
A reservoir fed by the Chattahoochee and Chestatee rivers in the Blue Ridge mountain foothills that is more than twice the area of Manhattan, Lake Lanier juts north-eastward from the city of Atlanta like a forked tongue, portending danger. It is reputed to be one of the US’s most dangerous lakes, up there with the far larger Great Lakes, with an estimated 700 fatalities over the past 70 years. According to Georgia’s department of natural resources (DNR), the authority responsible for policing the lake, 233 of those deaths have occurred in the last 20 years. But it is the particularly mysterious nature of many of these incidents that fuels talk that this recreational idyll is cursed by restless spirits. “If people really knew what was underneath the water still,” says Dave Kahn, a lake resident and pleasure cruise operator, “they’d think twice about partying here.”
Each tale from Lake Lanier seems more bizarre than the last. This summer alone saw a 27-year-old man who drowned despite wearing a lifejacket and a family of seven narrowly surviving their boat spontaneously combusting. Less than a month before the speeding accident that killed Kile Glover, two young boys had died on the water in nearly the same manner.
Over the decades visitors have related strange encounters that tip into the paranormal – from phantom cries and laughter to full-on ghost sightings. Some swimmers tell of feeling unseen hands pulling them underwater. In 2022 the critically acclaimed FX series Atlanta explored Lake Lanier’s mythology for its season three premiere and played on the differences in perspective between the white locals and out-of-towners who flock to the lake in droves, and Black Georgians, who regularly express their trepidations as a result of news-making disasters – including Kile’s, which thrust Lanier into the national spotlight. But where does lore diverge from truth out on the water – and why do the myths about Lake Lanier abide?
Three sides of violence
Rain spits down from slate gray sky as I meet Kahn a few days before Halloween at a floating tiki bar on the lake’s southern end. And though there aren’t more than a handful of customers on this bitterly cold (for Georgia) afternoon, it’s not hard to imagine the humanity that engulfs this place in summer months: waves of people rushing back and forth from the bar to the armada of pleasure crafts bobbing alongside the dock outside.
Unless you are a Georgian born after 1998, commandeering a rental does not require much more than some credit-card room; an hour on the water can range from $75 on a jetski to $600 for a pontoon, and buyers should beware of traffic. “You’re navigating around people zooming around you on jetskis and people who don’t know how to drive a boat,” Kahn says as he eases his doubledecker pontoon out of the lifeless marina. “On top of that you have to reckon with the spirit of alcohol, the ultimate spirit.”
A sturdy ex-marine who slicks his cropped silver mane back into a mini man bun and sports Air Jordan sneakers at sea, Kahn – AKA Capt Dave – started operating themed boat tours on the lake around his tech day job about 20 years ago, and he leans into the lake’s folklore for his ghost tours.
Before we get to talking, Kahn, who is white, asks: “How deep do you wanna go? Because there’s a lot of uncomfortable racial truths to this story.” After I tell him that I made the 90-minute schlep from the city expressly for his unvarnished version of the legend, he busts out a leather-bound replica book from the Disney movie Hocus Pocus where he collects scary stories. Sometimes, he will pass around handheld electromagnetic field meters to passengers keen for a true ghost hunt (“It’s all part of the entertainment, but it’s also how I keep myself on track”). When I ask if the curse has a proper origin story, he describes Lake Lanier’s waters as a “triangle of dark energy”, each of its three sides reminding us of ugly American history that echoes into the present day.
The first side of the triangle is the violence committed against the Cherokee and Creek Indian tribes who have called this area home for millennia. When white settlers found ore in the nearby Blue Ridge mountains in the 1820s, kicking off the first American gold rush, the US government drove those native inhabitants from their land westward into Alabama, the Arkansas territory and what would become Oklahoma. What was touted at the time as manifest destiny would be remembered as the Trail of Tears, one of the worst forced migrations in history with 60,000 Native Americans displaced and more than 4,000 killed. One documented Trail of Tears removal route ended at what is now the lake’s western bank.
The second side of Kahn’s dark energy triangle is the lake’s connection to the civil war – “pain and sorrow that is still underneath the water”, he says. Before the army corps flooded the area to make Lanier in 1956, it attempted to move the graves of soldiers who had been buried there into nearby cemeteries but left behind many unmarked and abandoned sites to be submerged. The last side is Oscarville, a town settled after the war by many Black sharecroppers and skilled laborers that became the backdrop of post-Reconstruction-era racial backlash. “The community was thriving,” says Foster, who came across the story in her research, “and then the violence started.”
In 1912, local Black men were accused of raping two young white women; one of them, Mae Crow, died two weeks after her alleged attack. The incidents roiled white residents into violence. One Black suspect was shot and lynched by white mobs while awaiting trial. The two men found guilty of Crow’s sexual assault and murder after a daylong trial were sentenced to death by hanging even though it was outlawed in Georgia at the time – and 8,000 people turned up to watch them die. According to the 2016 book Blood at the Root, in which author Patrick Phillips unpacks this painful history, white men on horseback operating as enforcers for the Ku Klux Klan then banded together to drive Black residents out of town, setting fire to their homes, businesses and churches.
In 2022 Atlanta-area resident George Rucker, whose Oscarville roots go back four generations, recalled the stories he grew up hearing about his great-grandfather’s daring escape after the Crow trials: about his family being chased by an angry mob, the mob blocking access to a bridge across the Chattahoochee, and the options being “swim or drown”. His grandfather did not make it. “The main thing they left was property,” Rucker told 11Alive.com, “and my grandfather had 100 acres.”
Within two months Oscarville’s Black population, which accounted for 10% of residents (or about 1,100 people), was reduced to nought. And while the sexual assaults are oft-cited as the impetus for the racial terrorism, Blood at the Root traces the racial tension to the economic stress that gripped Georgia at the time; as white farmers lost their lands to foreclosure, they came to see the free Black people as an existential threat. White residents took possession of significant portions of the deserted land, sometimes for no compensation. But after Congress passed the River and Harbor Act of 1946 to address a national flash-flooding crisis, paving the way for the construction of Georgia’s Buford Dam and the creation of Lake Lanier, hundreds of white residents found themselves forced to sell their ill-gotten land for cents on the dollar as the government claimed eminent domain.
“The first guy that sold got $4,000 for 100 acres,” says Lisa M Russell, a scholar and author who has written five books on Georgia’s hidden history. “That seems like maybe it was a lot for them because they never had money in their hand, but they couldn’t rent a place. They couldn’t even go back to the land [around the new lake] and rent a house because the prices had already gone through the roof.”
‘A floating Atlanta’
Lake Lanier was never supposed to be “the most popular man-made lake in America” as the New York Times declared it in a 1971 article touting its vibrant boating, fishing and camping scene. Planned in conjunction with the Buford Dam in 1956 at a cost of $750,000, a bargain even with inflation, the lake was intended as a flood control solution that would also address metro Atlanta’s freshwater demands. To save money, the army corps compacted layers of soil, clay and rock to form the basin and surrounding embankments instead of completely razing and overlaying the area in concrete. It took two and a half years for Lake Lanier to reach its full pool level. In the process, tens of thousands of acres of farmland, forest and abandoned towns including Oscarville were drowned under several hundred billion gallons of river water.
“I don’t want to say they raped the land,” Russell says, “but they kinda did.”
Meanwhile, developers had rushed in to seize the prime real estate around the water’s edge. “It wasn’t originally supposed to be recreational,” Russell says, “but once they started building the lake they knew it would be profitable. There was so much advertisement for Lake Lanier. You heard about it nonstop.”
Ultimately, the lake itself was named for Sidney Lanier – a rebel army private, musician and bard who was hailed in the south as the “poet of the Confederacy”. Before a fatal bout of tuberculosis cut him down at age 39, Lanier was famous for waxing lyrical about the splendor of the Chattahoochee and Chestatee river valleys, which the army corps still maintains to help with water flow and the general ecosystem upkeep. “You can see it on sonar, the 90ft granite sheer cliffs that are laced all along both river channels. It was gorgeous country,” Kahn says. “Of course the ironic thing about naming the lake after him is that you can’t actually see any of the stuff he wrote about with your naked eyes.”
Today, Lake Lanier plays host to an estimated 14 million visitors a year, the same tourist traffic as Niagara Falls. Kevin Goss, a corporeal game warden in Georgia’s DNR, likens high season, which span about 100 days from May to September, to “a floating Atlanta”. An exploration of the lake’s floor, which bottoms out at 160ft, can feel more like touring the lost city of Atlantis, with free-standing historical structures, modern-day detritus and even whole, rooted trees emerging from the gloom.
Buck Buchanan, another ex-marine who has been making emergency dives into the lake for the past 40 years as part of his work with local emergency response agencies, was 80ft underwater when he first clapped eyes on the Lights Ferry Bridge – no mean feat in these murky waters. (The surrounding forest and seasonal abscission cut off a lot of the surface light.) Lights Ferry was supposed to be demolished before Lake Lanier was created, but the lake’s water level rose faster than the bridge could be dismantled or removed, so it was submerged.
“Even today, people are still dumping cars in the lake,” Buchanan says. Boats, too. “I’ve seen whole marinas left behind because they sank deeper than 40ft and the owners don’t have the money to pull them up. Those kinds of things are the things that make hazards.”
Once, while searching for a body, Buchanan blindly swam into an upturned pickup truck and accidentally shut the door behind himself with his umbilical cord. Another time, he swam into an old lumber pile. I wondered: when does panic set in? “You learn to leave your emotions at the surface,” Buchanan says.
Altogether, the lake’s combination of entrenched river currents, submerged oddities, craggy perimeter and busy surface traffic make for fast, shifting flows that can overwhelm swimmers, trap people in place and complicate navigation and recovery missions.
On my lake cruise, Kahn tacks over the channel, throttling down at a 102ft water depth to show me an image that has popped up on his sonar screen of a massive vertical protuberance amid a smattering of small arcs.
“That’s a tree, about a 60-footer or more,” he says. “The arcs are fish.” Catfish probably, and on Lake Lanier they come as big as 50lb. Kahn reckons that’s what’s tugging at the swimmers who say they’re being pulled under. “They grab on to ankles, realize they don’t taste good, let them go – and then people say: ‘A spirit just grabbed me!’”
Kahn moves on from that tree on the sonar to other objects on the lake bed. Severe droughts can pull waters back from these stunning underwater relics: faded roadsigns, brick building facades, the concrete steps leading to an auto racetrack that barely saw a decade’s use.
“We are aware of certain cultural sites on the lake,” an army corps ranger told the Gainesville Times in 2008, as public curiosity reached an inflection point after the previous year’s harsh drought. “Most of the ones that are on the lake are more or less old grave plots. We make periodic inspections of those sites to make sure their integrity is maintained and typically we will take the archeologist with us. We don’t usually like to reveal the locations because we don’t want people to loot them.”
The Lady of the Lake
“You know the Lady of the Lake story, right?” Kahn asks me mid-cruise.
That’s the one about the two women who took off from a filling station without paying their gas bill, lost control of their car over a bridge and plunged to their death in 1958. The body of the driver, Delia Parker Young, was later found with missing hands. Over the ensuing years, a number of lake-goers would report seeing such a figure, missing hands and all, haunting the area in a blue dress – with some accusing the phantom of pulling others underwater. “That’s the bridge the car went off of,” Kahn says, pointing to Jackson Bridge in the distance. You mean the bridge I drove across to get here?
“Right,” Kahn says.
He goes on to tell me that the bridge was also the site of the deadliest single incident on Lake Lanier, when a station wagon went off the bridge on Christmas Day 1964 with 11 people inside. Seven died, five of them small children. It is said that the driver of the station wagon – Mr Brown, who had been drinking “rotgut whiskey”, according to reports from the day – haunts the lake, too. Sometimes, Kahn will stop his tours at the bridge, kill the engine and pull out a flask for a bit more theater. “I’ll say, ‘All right, Mr Brown, I’m going to give you a little drink here if you want to let us know you’re around!’ That’s when the guests pull out the ghost meters.”
Kahn figures there are 27 unaccounted for bodies in Lake Lanier. Buchanan, the emergency diver, knows of at least “12 bodies in that lake right now that have never been found”. Lake Lanier’s congested subsurface environment and rough topography is not all that makes recovery operations especially challenging. Years of pollution only add to the murky picture. “Picture 60 years of beer cans,” says Goss, the DNR corporal. “My God, do people pollute. I’ve found fishing equipment at the bottom of the lake, old metal boats that have sunk, fallen rocks and timber – it’s all down there and can really hide what you’re looking for.”
Goss is often early on scene for drowning incidents. In addition to operating various echolocation readers as part of DNR’s sonar team, he operates one of the department’s “underwater remote-operated vehicles” – a bulky contraption with a camera, lights and gripper that is about the size of a fancy espresso machine.
When 27-year-old Ramon Diaz-Soria went missing in June near a white sand beach on the lake’s western shore after jumping off the side of a boat for fun, Goss was on site shortly thereafter, performing surveys of the disappearance area past nightfall and into the next day. After a 24-hour search with three drones, Goss’s team found Diaz-Soria 60ft underwater. The gripper drone was not able to latch on to the body because of its awkward position, so a diving team was sent down.
Witnesses told authorities that Diaz-Soria had worn a lifejacket that was not properly secured; they said it floated to the surface after he disappeared. The story both stoked more curse talk and served as a reminder of the human errors that are often overlooked in the accounts of Lake Lanier’s accidents.
“Lakes in Georgia are actually not very deep, but on Lake Lanier you can be 30ft away from shore and your next step might take you 60ft down,” Goss says. “People shouldn’t start on Lake Lanier. They should kinda graduate to it.”
‘A massive crime scene’
The most haunting thing to Tameka Foster about Lake Lanier is not the curse, but finding out “that there were tons of fatalities that I didn’t know about prior” to her son’s vacation there. She accepts the official conclusion that the accident resulted from Jeffrey Simon Hubbard, a family friend, jetskiing too close to Kile and a 15-year-old girl as their inner tube was being dragged by a pontoon boat. “He was on a jetski for the first time, having fun and zipping around at like 60, 70mph, and heading toward the boat,” Foster says. “But he didn’t realize there were no brakes, that you can’t stop on water. He tried to divert from the boat, but ended up running over the kids. He had no idea.”
While the girl did recover, Kile absorbed the brunt of the impact and was pulled from the water with grave head injuries. After being airlifted to an Atlanta hospital, he was put on life support. When he failed to show any signs of improvement after two weeks, Foster made the painful decision to take him off it. Hubbard was found guilty of homicide by vessel and reckless boating charges and sentenced to four years in prison.
“He had created his own YouTube channel and had started posting all these news reports talking about Christmas and stuff,” says Foster, recalling her little entertainer’s last years. “A lot of them are still up, thank goodness. Christmas and his birthday, which falls around Easter time, is when I find myself going down the rabbit hole of looking at his videos.” Justin Bieber, Russell Simmons and Taraji P Henson were among the raft of celebrities who publicly mourned Kile. On Kile’s birthday, Usher has made a point of paying tribute to the boy who “still lives in my mind”, and in interviews before last year’s Super Bowl performance the Confessions singer acknowledged that losing his stepson still hurt.
With Kile’s death, Lake Lanier became a trending topic of conversation, particularly among Black American social media users who know the history in Oscarville. The destruction of its Black community lends itself to easy comparisons to the 1921 massacre that took place in Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Greenwood district, colloquially known as Black Wall Street. They also point to the knock-on effects of racial terrorism in Georgia’s Forsyth county. One of five counties that Lake Lanier spans, Forsyth steadfastly maintained an all-white population for decades after driving out Black Oscarvillians and in effect held the color barrier for those exurban Atlanta counties. In January 1987 the Rev Hosea Williams, a prominent civil rights era activist and Atlanta city councilman, led a series of marches to challenge the county’s racist legacy that were met with violence from white supremacist agitators. Weeks later Oprah Winfrey filmed a special episode of her daytime chatshow in Cumming, Georgia – about 10 miles from where Oscarville once stood – to bring national attention to Forsyth’s persisting climate of racial intimidation.
Outside the taping, protests flared up and several people were arrested – including Williams, who was called a “nigger” on the show by a member of the program’s all-white audience. After the live broadcast, Winfrey was asked how comfortable she felt in Forsyth county. “Not very comfortable at all,” she said. “I’m leaving.” At the time there were no Black people among Forsyth county’s 38,000-plus residents. Today, that number stands at 286,000 – but only 4% of the population is Black.
Lake Lanier curse talk also speaks to the profound legacy of racism – from the transatlantic slave trade to Jim Crow-era policies banning Black people from public swimming pools and beaches – that informs Black Americans’ anxieties around water. It’s at the core of every social media post warning others not to risk the bad fortune that could come from making ancestral misery a literal foundation for fun. “Lake Lanier is not a lake. It’s a massive crime scene,” one Black woman tweeted over the 4 July weekend after a 23ft cabin cruiser burst into flames while under tow in a busy lake cove near a Margaritaville resort, as a family of seven lounged onboard.
In a TikTok video posted in 2024, another Black woman recounted the time she nearly drowned while floating during a 1997 field trip. “Wow, it’s freakin’ trees under here,” she recalled saying to herself as she quickly lost consciousness. She remembered being rescued by a nebulous figure – someone who was not part of her field trip group or a first responder. “All I can tell you is somebody picked me up out the water and walks me to the shore. A Black man. That’s my story, and it’s the truth.” This type of culturally specific survival testimony is what FX’s Atlanta tapped into for its Lake Lanier episode, which opened with a Black man being pulled out of a fishing boat by Black hands and closed with a modern spin on the Lady of the Lake legend. (Perhaps tellingly, the episode was not filmed on location.)
For many white lake-goers, however, Lake Lanier doesn’t become a place to dread until it exacts a personal toll.
An outsized reputation
Martha Milner, a retired schoolteacher, has been coming up to her grandfather’s Lake Lanier cabin since she was a girl. She remembers summer vacation mornings that started with her grandmother packing her a lunch, placing her in a jon boat off the backyard dock and pushing her off to spend the day exploring the limits of the lake with her older brother. It was not until July 2023, when her 24-year-old son, Thomas, was electrocuted after jumping into the lake from that same dock that she began seeing “so many stories, especially on Facebook, about how the lake is haunted and cursed”, she tells me. “But it was our happy place.”
An autopsy report determined that Thomas was electrocuted from electricity leaking into the water around the dock. Whether the current came from their electric box or a neighbor’s, no one can really say. “I kept reading these articles [saying] ‘a man is electrocuted’. No, it wasn’t a man, it was a kid. It was my kid,” Milner says. She has made a point of distinguishing Thomas’s death from the lake’s more reckless incidents, noting he seldom drank and never used drugs. “I wanted people to know that it was not his fault in any way,” she says. “He did nothing that I haven’t done 100,000 times before.”
The media attention that Lanier receives pales in comparison to other area human-made lakes, which can be just as dangerous. Lake Hartwell, a reservoir on the Georgia-South Carolina border, had more drowning and boating fatalities than Lake Lanier did in 2024. In February, Gary Jones and Joycelyn Wilson, a Black couple engaged to be married, disappeared as they were celebrating Jones’s 50th birthday on Lake Oconee – the varicose, 20,000-acre pool an hour east of Atlanta that shares Lake Lanier’s untidy build quality. Authorities discovered their boat circling near the lake’s dam with a large frosted chocolate chip cookie onboard and dredged up Wilson’s body the next day. Jones’s body was found a month later – by Buchanan, incidentally.
“Lanier has this reputation,” Buchanan says, “but it’s not well-earned for this simple reason: we have a lot of uneducated boaters who come here, and the amount of accidents we have per capita is pretty damn low.”
“Lake Lanier gets all the publicity because it started as a dog and pony show from the very beginning,” says Russell, the historian. “All those other lakes – Lake Oconee, Lake Allatoona – you’ve never heard of ’em; nobody knows how they were built. But Lake Lanier? Oh, it’s everybody’s business.”
In 2013, Foster, who lives in Atlanta, established Kile’s World Foundation, which keeps her son’s legacy alive by supporting children in the arts. A decade later she started a petition to drain Lake Lanier to prevent more tragic accidents, though she concedes the low odds of the state shutting down one of its biggest tourist draws. “Every time there’s another fatality, it rehashes everything for me,” she says. “I’ll be getting better, and then I’ll hear about another child, another man or another woman. I think they really should just excavate it, get all those old buildings and trees from down there. At least make an attempt.”
Less than a year after Kile’s death, Georgia’s governor, Nathan Deal, signed the Kile Glover Boat Education Law mandating Georgians born after 1 January 1998 complete a boating safety education course and carry a boating license before operating any motorized watercraft on state waters. However, while it was a step toward reducing accidents, most visitors to Lake Lanier pour in from neighboring states and are only required to watch a 15-minute safety video before they can rent a water craft.
At the same time, Georgia introduced another law honoring the boys who died just before him, 13-year-old Griffin Prince and his nine-year-old brother Jake, that lowered the legal blood-alcohol limit for water craft operators from 0.10 to 0.08 – matching the standard for motor vehicles. Still, alcohol consumption remains a perennial problem on Lake Lanier, which accounted for 157 combined boating under the influence citations in 2023 and 2024, the largest share in the state. On the day I met up with Kahn, I noticed a sign on the gangway curiously leading out from the floating tiki bar back to the parking lot: “Please No Open Alcohol On Shore.”
“I’ve been doing this a long time and I’ve had days where I’ve been like, ‘That was kinda close,’” Kahn says of his frequent run-ins with reckless boat cruisers. “It’s always alcohol-related. They don’t think of it as the same as drunk-driving. It’s just what they’re used to, fishing and drinking. They don’t think they’re gonna get caught.” The odds are certainly in their favor, given that DNR only has about a dozen wardens total to patrol all 59 sq miles of Lake Lanier.
Ultimately, it’s the lake’s urban legends actually helping to raise awareness of the area’s inherent risks. “I think social media has done a lot more for safety than boating ed,” says Goss. “People respect the water now, whereas beforehand they were uninformed. I think the accident rates are trending in the right direction.” In fact, there was a decline in total drownings and BUIs on Lanier in 2024 compared with the previous year.
Not everything can be accounted for. Ancillary bits of lake lore – the disembodied cries, the phantoms dwelling on sunken houseboats, an underwater church bell that still tolls – amplify the curse talk but are not easily explained. “A guy asked me one time if I believe in ghosts,” Buchanan says. “I said no, but I sure do believe in karma. And the reason why I say that is the land that Lanier is on has been stolen and sold three times – from the Native Americans, from the [Black] sharecroppers, and the [white residents] who eventually got run off by the government.
“I’m not going to say that I believe in ghosts. I’m going to say I believe in bad juju, and there’s enough of it here to go around.”
When I asked Goss if there’s any larger meaning to extract from Atlanta literally drinking in all this dark water – if it explains the jinxed sports teams, the trippy music scene, the abominable traffic, the horny political landscape – he said he doesn’t really think about that. What he does think about is tourists’ lack of awareness for what lurks beneath the surface. “I don’t think there’s anything inherently evil about the lake. I think people make poor decisions based on their preconceived notions of what a lake is.”
As Kahn and I tack farther north, we pass Summerour Mound – a 9ft high archeological site dating to the late Woodland period that has become exposed in the prevailing drought conditions. Excavated before it was flooded by Lake Lanier, it has been linked to Indigenous funeral customs and is believed to have served as the not-so-final resting place for a number of Cherokee elders and chiefs. I get a chill, not from the nippy weather this time. Kahn asks if we should press on to Jackson Bridge. I consider the dark energy, my own young son expecting me to scoop him up from school after this cruise, the Atlanta friends who flinched when I said I was venturing out here and demanded, in no uncertain terms, that I return in one piece. I tell Kahn not to bother, that we had covered enough ground.
Best not to tempt fate.
