Lake Lanier, a seemingly innocuous reservoir in northern Georgia, has an alarmingly chilling past. Part of the lake used to be home to Oscarville, a small Black community in which a horrific lynching took place in 1912 that forced all 1,100 Black residents of Forsyth County to leave. If that weren’t enough, displaced cemeteries and unmarked graves had to be flooded during the reservoir’s creation, leading many to claim that the lake is haunted.


Despite the lake’s harrowing history, people continue to use it like they would any other lake, despite it clearly being a better idea to drain it, salt the earth and abandon it to the elements. In fact, one 20-year-old local somehow even lived to tell the tale after recently going missing on Lake Lanier.



Zachary Rutledge of Winder, Georgia, was reported missing by his friends after they lost track of him while swimming. At around 8:30 p.m., his friends were unsure whether he was still in the water or was on foot and contacted the authorities, who mounted a comprehensive search.


The Georgia Department of Natural Resources and Hall County Fire Rescue searched the water, while the Georgia State Patrol carried out aerial searches — all without any luck. Fortunately, Rutledge was discovered just before 9 a.m. the next morning by a Hall County Sheriff’s deputy. As it turns out, he’d swum from the shore to an island and later returned, only to find his friends had already left, forcing him to spend the night alone in a nearby park without a phone to call for help.


Authorities have taken the opportunity to emphasize safety tips to bear in mind when swimming in Lake Lanier, which include not swimming alone, communicating clearly and regularly with other swimmers and keeping track of everyone in your group.


“Not fucking around on flooded graveyards and lynching sites,” on the other hand, is an important safety tip that’s so obvious it goes without saying — or so you’d think.