Lore - Episode 202: Surface Tension

Episode Date: July 4, 2022

Beneath one of America’s largest man-made objects is a dark, painful past. And if the stories are true, it has never truly let go of the world around it. ———————— Lore Resources:  Episode Music: lorepodcast.com/music  Episode Sources: lorepodcast.com/sources  All the shows from Grim & Mild: www.grimandmild.com ———————————— ©2022 Aaron Mahnke. All rights reserved. Access premium content!: https://www.lorepodcast.com/support To advertise on our podcast, please reach out to [e-mail], or visit our listing here.

Humans are capable of incredible things. Look no further than the small wooden box that was pulled from the waters of the Mediterranean back in 1901, because what it held inside was a thing beyond comprehension. Roughly the size of a shoebox. This wooden lump was first believed to be nothing more than a storage container, but as researchers peeled back the layers and separated the pieces, they realized it was something more. It was a housing, a skin, if you will, that covered a small mechanical device.

Beneath the wood were encrusted stacks of small metal gears, along with a number of engraved plates. And over the last century, experts have worked to reassemble those pieces in a sort of humpty-dumpty effort to restore the original design. And what they've learned are two incredible, unbelievable truths. This device was crafted by human hands over 2,000 years ago, and it is the oldest known analog computer on record. Think of it like the innards of an old grandfather clock, but one designed to do a specific task

upon command, to calculate the position of the sun and the moon along with the current phase of the moon and when the next eclipse would take place, all by just turning a dial and a small hand crank on the side. Like I said, humans are capable of incredible things. Looking back, we have a lot to be proud of on our list of accomplishments. When our minds are put to the test, they have the potential to alter the very world we live in. And we've demonstrated this over and over again.

But as you might suspect, not all human effort has made life better. Yes, we might have great power over the natural world, but sometimes we have taken it too far, crossed a line that shouldn't have been crossed by creating something that does the very opposite of making life better. Sometimes in our effort to create, we instead become the destroyer. I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore. The area northeast of Atlanta, Georgia has always had people living there. As far back as 10,000 years ago, hunter-gatherer communities roamed those lands tracking bison

and elk, and the trade routes they forged would stick around for generations. By the time the Spanish explorers arrived in 1540 under the direction of Hernando de Soto, there were large communities and villages all over the landscape there. The various indigenous people groups had spent thousands of years refining their agricultural techniques and expanding their cultures. But the Spanish brought a challenge they weren't prepared for… disease. Historians estimate that upwards of 95% of the indigenous population was killed by European illness.

To better support each other, the survivors of each community banded together in the 1600s to form the Creek Confederacy, which worked for a while. But in the late 1700s, the U.S. government gave much of the Creek land to the Cherokee nation before taking all of the land back from all of them and selling it to white homesteaders and miners. And that's what the region northeast of Atlanta would have looked like back in the mid to late 19th century, white communities living on land that had been managed by humans for thousands of years.

Well, all except for one town, a place called Oscarville. There was a community of roughly 1100 people, mostly agricultural and other industries that supported that work. Almost everyone there was a descendant of an enslaved person, or formerly enslaved themselves. And in Oscarville, they found community and support against a cold and hateful world. In 1912, things in Oscarville took a turn for the worse, though. One woman in a neighboring town wrote a letter to her newspaper that expressed the larger irrational fear that the literacy level in Oscarville was on the rise, and soon enough

they'd be allowed to vote, and that just couldn't be allowed to happen. After a couple of manufactured controversies and the violent lynching of a black man named Robert Edwards, a white mob drove out all 1100 residents of the town. They burned down the schools and churches, and then took the place over for themselves. In 1946, just two generations after the tragedy at Oscarville, the U.S. government approved the Rivers and Harbors Act, and $45 million of the funds were earmarked for the northeast of Georgia. You see, Atlanta was growing, and people needed more of two things, water and electricity.

Their plan was to build a hydroelectric plant, but to do it, they needed a lake where there wasn't one already. Again, humans are capable of incredible things, and apparently that even includes creating large bodies of water. But to do it, they needed to get everyone who lived there to move out. In the end, it's estimated that close to 700 families were forced to sell their land to the government and move away. The average price per acre was somewhere between $25 and $75, but even those who negotiated

the higher price found it difficult to live on those funds in a new location. And let's be honest, no amount of money can truly make up for losing your home. Once cleared, tall buildings were leveled and fences were removed. Even trees were cut down, close to 10,000 acres of them, in fact, all in an effort to make the future lake bed more navigable. But the work wasn't thorough, and many structures were left standing, especially the ones made of stone or brick. Heck, an entire racetrack, the Looper Speedway, was left untouched.

And while some cemeteries were relocated to higher ground and identified with relocation markers, a number of graveyards were left behind, now resting at the bottom of the water. They called it Lake Lanier, and it officially began to form on February 1st of 1956. It said that many of the former residents gathered on bridges and nearby roads to watch the water slowly rush in and cover their homes. Also people could build a dam to generate power and cash. Of course, some have speculated that the lake was also, at least in part, designed to wipe away the tragedy of Oscarville, but it covered up so many more sins than that.

And in doing so, it broke even more lives and added yet one more tragedy to an already long list. What has happened since then, though, might just be proof that the past isn't ready to let go. The drownings started almost immediately. One of the earliest on record was the death of a 27-year-old man named Hubert Collins. On Friday, July 3rd of 1959, Collins was at the lake swimming with friends when he dove beneath the surface and never returned.

The following summer, in July of 1960, two teenage girls were walking through the water when the lakebed suddenly dropped beneath their feet. Because neither of them could swim, they began to struggle almost immediately. One of the girls' fathers was fishing nearby, but before he could reach them to help, both were gone. It took nearly an hour to find their bodies. A month later, two men were swimming across a small cove they had crossed before, only to suddenly become exhausted in the very middle.

One of the men was rescued, but the other, Frank Mobley, didn't resurface. And then there was the Christmas Day tragedy of 1964. Believed to be the deadliest single day in the history of Lake Lanier, it involved two families, the Browns and the Rogers, who had gathered to celebrate the holiday together. But after exchanging gifts, they decided to pack into a single car, all 11 of them, and go buy apples for their meal later that day. As they crossed Two Mile Bridge, however, the driver lost control of the vehicle, which clipped a guardrail before striking a pole and bouncing off and into the water below.

Seven of the 11 people in the car were killed, including five children, as it sank to the lake bed, 30 feet below. Like I said, there have been a lot of tragic drownings in the lake over the years. Some estimates put the total since 1956 at close to 700 deaths. And yes, I know it's a massive lake, covering 59 square miles and wrapped in nearly 700 miles of shoreline. But even compared to other similar bodies of water, that death toll is unusually high. Maybe it's all the unusual debris that's hiding just beneath the surface.

After all, not every lake has entire towns under its water, and all those surviving structures make it a very treacherous place to swim. But some have wondered if it's more than that. Perhaps, they suggest, all the tragedy and pain involved in creating the lake has also contributed to its overall lack of safety. And if the stories are true, it's easy to see why. Some of the legends are pretty far-fetched, like the stories of the monster catfish that's said to hunt the waters there.

People have described it as large as a Volkswagen Beetle, and there's even a story of the fish eating whole chickens after a farmer's truck crashed into the lake. Others though have reported less comical experiences. Some have apparently heard the sound of church bells ringing from beneath the surface, as if the churches on the lake bed were still mourning the dead. And the graveyards around those churches are rumored to be the home of angry spirits, either angry from being left to vanish beneath the water, or from being moved to higher ground against their will.

Some people believe those angry spirits make themselves known in the form of phantom limbs. Many swimmers over the years have reported brushing against something that feels like another body, even when they are alone in the water. There are even stories of mysterious hands that have reached up from the darkness below to grab hold of swimmers' legs, as if the dead are working to increase their number. And then there's the mysterious raft that's been sighted over the years and the shadowy figure who rides it. Usually seen at night, they say the figure holds a lantern and guides the raft along

the shoreline, slowly pushing itself along with a pole. One pair of fishermen claim to see it in the middle of the night from a distance, but when they approached it, the figure on the raft let out a chilling cry before diving into the water. When the men turned on their lights and pointed them toward the raft, they found nothing there. Just the undisturbed surface of the water. The stories are chilling for sure, and there seems to be enough of them to fill the entire lake.

But over the decades since that lake was created, one story in particular has come to define the region more than any other. It's chilling for a number of reasons, but the biggest justification for why the story has been told and retold over the decades is quite simple, because all of it is true. It's one of the earliest episodes in the lake's tragic history. In April of 1958, two women had plans to attend a local dance and jumped into their light blue Ford sedan to make the drive and have some fun. Susie Roberts in her fancy blue dress and her friend Delia Mae Parker Young were headed

for a roadhouse in Dawsonville called The Three Gables. According to most of the retellings, the pair stopped on their way to get some gas and might have even done what was called skipping out back then, leaving the gas station without paying for your fuel. All we know is that their route would have taken them over the Jerry D. Jackson Bridge, a 1,200-foot crossing over Lake Lanier, but they never made it to the roadhouse, and their families never saw them again. Susie Roberts' son Hugh would later state in an interview that some people in his family

believed the two women had abandoned them and left town, maybe heading to Chicago or even Florida. They even wondered if there had been an accident that resulted in amnesia, but these ideas were just theories, nothing concrete. About a year after their disappearance, though, a fisherman was out on the lake when he discovered the badly decomposed body of a woman floating near the bridge. The medical examiner wasn't able to pinpoint an exact cause of death, but the body did show signs of being submerged for a very long time.

In fact, both hands and feet had come away from the corpse, something typical for bodies trapped underwater. But there was no way to identify the woman, and so the body was kept unburied for over a decade in hopes that some family member might step forward. And then, decades after that, in November of 1990, another chilling discovery was made. Workers in the water near where the body had been found were preparing to construct a new bridge when they encountered something large on the lakebed. It was a car, a light blue Ford, to be exact, and when they examined it, they discovered

a 1958 license plate that was registered to a familiar name, Susie Roberts. Soon, a story began to take shape, a better picture of the events of that night in April, all those years ago. It seems that Roberts had most likely lost control of her vehicle as they crossed the bridge, which resulted in the car exiting the safety of the roadway and plummeting into the water below. And there it sat, tangled in tree trunks and debris at the bottom of the lake for over 35 years.

When they found it, Susie's skeletal remains were still inside. So too was her purse, her watch, and a number of her rings. Together with a dental comparison, the authorities were finally certain they had solved the mystery of that disappearance in 1958. And maybe in the process, they also solved the riddle at the heart of a common sighting on that bridge over the years. You see, for decades, people traveling the bridge had reported the ghostly figure of a woman standing to one side.

In some stories, the woman had no visible hands, while in others, she's dressed in a blue dress, making it unclear if she's the ghost of Susie or Delia. Either way, that ghostly rumor has become larger than life over the years. Some report that if you are caught in the water by the ghost, she will grab you and pull you under. How she can manage that without hands, though, is never clear from the legend. All the stories want you to know is that there's a good reason to be afraid. Even today, folks still report seeing the Lady of the Lake despite the mystery of that

disappearance being solved nearly 35 years ago. It shows just how powerful folklore can be, even in the face of logic and reason, and it illustrates how deep a mark some tragedies can leave behind, how the loss suffered by two families can hold on in a way that seems to defy explanation. Lake Lanier is home to so many legends, and judging by its immense size and dark past, discussing there's still plenty of room for more. Everyone loves a good destination holiday. For many people across Georgia and its neighboring states, that includes Lake Lanier.

In fact, close to 10 million people visit those man-made shores on an annual basis. But beneath the surface, Lake Lanier is a massive reservoir of pain and sadness. From the thousands of lives that were disrupted and scattered to the wind by its creation, to the hundreds of accidental deaths over the years since, that one location seems to be as much a low spot spiritually as it is geographically. Even its very name is dripping with a tinge of darkness. It was picked to honor the Southern musician and writer Sidney Lanier. His most famous song was about the Chattahoochee River, with lyrics meant to imitate the motion

and grace of its flowing course through the landscape. But in an ironic twist, the lake that bears his name actually erased much of the river's poetic elegance, turning a large stretch of the Chattahoochee into nothing more than a flat expanse of open water. Not quite the legacy he would have wanted, I would imagine. But the lake itself continues to grow its own legacy as time goes by. Today, the stories of mysterious hauntings has spread beyond the shoreline to include locations in the surrounding area.

Some of the most common tales are about the woods and the sounds that echo from them during the night, the sounds they say of a woman screaming. As I said before, humans are capable of incredible things, both deeds of wonder and works of tragedy. And while Lanier's shimmering shoreline might stand today as proof of the power of the human will to conquer, it's also a lasting reminder of our cruelty. All too often, it seems, we are the engineers of our own pain. I hope you've enjoyed today's day trip to the cool waters of Lake Lanier and the glimpse

it provided to the world beneath the surface. But don't fool yourself into thinking it's the only time in history that humanity built something impossible at the cost of broken lives. In fact, there's another lake that has eerie similarities to Lanier, and if you stick around through this brief sponsor break, I'll tell you all about it. It's easy to hear about a massive human-made body of water like Lake Lanier and believe it's unique. But while every story has its own nuance and special characteristics, the fact of the matter

is the people of Georgia who created it weren't really breaking new ground. No pun intended, I promise. Well, maybe. Just a decade earlier, in the center of the English county of Derbyshire, another community needed to make a difficult choice, one that came at the cost of a number of communities. And it's a story that might require us to revisit the true meaning behind the notion of being haunted by the past. There had already been two other reservoirs in the area, both of them built around 1912

and they all served a similar purpose to Lake Lanier, to provide water to the surrounding geographical area. But as needs increased, a third reservoir was required and so the Ladybauer Dam was built. When they finished it in 1943, water immediately started to collect, forming what is today known as the Ladybauer Reservoir. Each of the three are connected by rivers, and on the map, the trio resembles a long chain of narrow lakes. And that new additional reservoir came at an unusually high cost.

Two local villages, Ashopton and Derwent, were low enough that the flooding of the valley would surely wipe them off the map. So much like in Georgia, plans were underway in the years leading up to the flooding to move everyone to a safer location. The cemeteries were exhumed and the bodies were relocated to the nearby town of Bamford. And while in Ashopton that meant completely leveling all of the buildings, much of Derwent was left standing, and that included the church, which held its last service on March 17th of 1943.

Oh, and the next day, its church bell was moved to a neighboring village and installed there, which means locals could still hear the sound of Derwent from time to time, in a manner of speaking. Nothing remained once the flooding was complete, say for a single historic 17th century stone bridge, which was dismantled and moved to a different location. And after that, with the dam complete, the waters were allowed to flood in, covering both towns. I can't find statistics on the number of drownings in the area in case anyone wanted

to compare those to Lake Lanier, but there have been a number of reported hauntings, although they mostly belong to a very particular activity. Flight. It seems that during World War II, British pilots trained for a maneuver known as dam buster raids by flying low to the water toward one of the dams. It seems the layout and conditions were similar to dams in Germany, and well, the practice makes perfect, I suppose. Today there are stories of ghostly planes flying low over the water, headed toward Derwent

Dam. Some people have even been able to identify the model of aircraft, but as to why those spectral airplanes have chosen to haunt these reservoirs there, no one really knows. Oh, and one last thing. Back in 2018, the region there experienced an unusually dry season, resulting in a dramatic drop in the water level of the Ladybauer Reservoir. And as a result of that, the remains of Derwent seemingly rose from the water. Locals braved the mud and debris to pull souvenirs from the muck, and one man almost died in

the process. It's easy to take this world for granted. The places we live, the people we see, and the relics of human activity that we often leave behind. But in the case of the Ladybauer Reservoir, hundreds of people had to say goodbye to the very place they lived and worked for generations, which, if you ask me, is a steep price to pay for a small bit of progress. It seems we can bury the past under an entire lake if we want to, but that doesn't mean

that it's always gone for good. This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research by brand new team member Jenna Rose Nethercott, and of course music by Chad Lawson. Lore is much more than just a podcast. There is a book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television show on Amazon Prime Video. Check them both out if you want more lore in your life. I also make and executive produce a whole bunch of other podcasts, all of which I think

you'd enjoy. My production company, Grim and Mild, specializes in shows that sit at the intersection of the dark and the historical. You can learn more about all of those shows and everything else going on over in one central place, grimandmild.com. And you can also follow this show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Just search for Lore Podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button. And when you do, say hi.

I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening.