Lake Lanier in Georgia might be one of the most popular U.S. Army Corps of Engineers-owned lakes in the country, but its violent backstory and more recent history of deaths have given it a reputation for being haunted. Just this week, a young man died at the lake.
Terrell Shelton, 21, vanished after going under the water at Lake Lanier at around 2:30 p.m. on Saturday, June 13, according to a CBS News report citing the Hall County Sheriff’s Office. His body was eventually recovered, the Georgia Department of Natural Resources confirmed, per WSB-TV.
A GoFundMe fundraiser established by Shelton’s sister, Calista Shelton, said that his family has “broken hearts” following the young man’s death and an obituary said he was a Florida native who was working at an Amazon warehouse. By Wednesday evening, nearly $3,000 had been raised for the family to cover funeral and memorial services.
Authorities said Shelton was swimming near an island when he disappeared. According to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the lake has more than 100 small islands surrounding it.
While the area in the foothills of Georgia’s Blue Ridge Mountains is now filled with water that attracts around 12 million visitors each year, it wasn’t always a lake. In fact, Lake Sidney Lanier didn’t exist until the 1950s, when the Army Corps of Engineers.
It’s authorized for flood protection, power production, water supply, navigation, recreation and fish and wildlife management and it has more than 690 miles of shoreline. Shelton was swimming near Robinson Park, one of nearly 50 recreational areas on the lake.
What was in the area before it was Lake Lanier? Well, around 200 years ago, it was home to a town called Oscarville that had a “thriving Black community,” according to a 2023 article about the “haunted” lake published in Teen Vogue. Then came September 1912, when a white 18-year-old named Mae Crow was found injured after she was assaulted in the woods and later died from the wounds.
“Despite the absence of witnesses or evidence, a 24-year-old Black man, Rob Edwards, was arrested. Edwards was then taken from the county jail by a mob of white residents, brutally beaten with crowbars, shot repeatedly, and dragged to the town square where his mutilated body was lynched,” said Teen Vogue.
Edwards’s wife, Jane Daniel, their neighbor Ed Collins, Jane’s cousin Oscar Daniel, and Oscar Daniel’s cousin Ernest Knox, were also arrested, the outlet added. Oscar Daniel and Ernest Knox were just teens, but all-white juries convicted them and they were reportedly hung in front of 5,000 spectators.
“In the aftermath of those brutal killings, during September and October 1912, mobs of white people set fire to local Black churches and Black-owned businesses,” said Teen Vogue’s article. “They forced all of the Black residents out of the county,” referring to Forsyth County near Atlanta.
By the time Oprah Winfrey visited Forsyth for a 1987 episode of “The Oprah Show”, the county hadn’t had a Black resident in 75 years. As of 2023, nearly 73% of the affluent county’s residents were white.
Before Winfrey’s visit in the 1980s came the flooding of Oscarville to make way for Lake Lanier, named after a Confederate soldier. Teen Vogue’s report noted that historians have said many of the community’s structures weren’t removed before the lake was created, including unmarked graves. Longtime diver Buck Buchannon said that he has felt body parts while under the waters of Lake Lanier, according to a 2017 report from CNN.
“You reach out into the dark and you feel an arm or a leg and it doesn’t move,” he said.
Other scares waiting at Lake Lanier have included “invasive mystery snails” found there in 2024, according to the Georgia Department of Natural Resources. These snails are known to harbor parasites.
Lake Lanier has also developed its reputation as “Georgia’s deadliest lake” and one of the deadliest in the nation due to hundreds of fatal accidents reported there, including the 1964 deaths of five children and two adults when a driver lost control of their car and flipped into its waters, Teen Vogue noted. Another notable Lake Lanier death was the 2012 drowning death of Klive Glover, the 11-year-old son of Usher’s ex-wife Tameka Foster. She has since petitioned to drain, clean and restore the lake.
Georgia officials have reported more than 200 fatalities since the mid-1990s tied to water-related incidents, USA Today reported. In Shelton’s case, CBS News reported that marine units, rescue boats and dive teams searched the area throughout the afternoon and evening to find his body in an area that was roughly 30 feet deep.
With such a gruesome history, it’s not surprising that people believe Lake Lanier could be haunted. However, CBS News said that public safety officials point to the lakes many visitors as a risk factor for the frequent incidents, as well as its underwater debris, sudden drop-offs and low visibility.
