Haunted Lake Lanier Tours ~ Boat Ride with Captain

Our Haunted Lake Lanier Tour is a fun, educational & a little creepy experience on the water, at night.  It's not meant to scare you into oblivion.  But because of the nature of the history & stories we share including some gruesome details of death and dismemberment, we do NOT recommend children under the age of 18, abuse victims/survivors or those with any sort of PTSD from a tragic event participate or attend this tour. You've been warned.

The history & accounts of the unknown can be triggers for some folks hence the warning.

Also the paranormal investigation portion is for entertainment purposes.  Groups or Individuals are welcome to offer their personal expertise or their own paranormal investigative techniques / use of tools etc., but we try to keep it on the lite and fun side and not get too dark

Lastly, if you are part of a public group tour, then we also ask if the entire group is comfortable with others sharing personal accounts, investigative techniques or tools.  We don't want to make others feel uncomfortable and are sensitive to others tolerance of the unknown. 

Thank you for reading!

Captain Dave

Collective details collated from various publications, websites and local accounts.  

In 1958, just two years after the bridge opened, Delia Mae Parker Young and Susie Roberts sped out of a gas station without paying after a night of drinking and dancing in the town of Dawsonville.  Their feet likely thumped to the pulse of Elvis Presley’s latest hit, “King Creole,” as the faint glow of the headlights on Robert’s 1952 Ford sedan lit their way through the steamy summer southern night on Highway 53 east towards Gainesville Georgia. They were two rebels on the run and racing away from the Dawsonville hot night spot, "Three Gables Roadhouse" — they never made it home.

Eighteen months later, a local fisherman would spot a severely decomposed body of a woman beneath Jerry D. Jackson bridge. In what must have been a gruesome scene, the body floated on the lake’s surface, missing toes and arms without hands; appendages that had perhaps fallen victim to a traumatic end or the slow, digestive tracts of the lake’s catfish. It’s no surprise, then, that they could not be identified by coroners. One clue of who the woman could be was in blue cloth that appeared to be rotting remnants of a blue dress.  Once locals heard of this discovery, they were convinced of its identity.

Locals knew the mysterious body had to be Delia Mae Parker Young.

How did they know this?  They knew it was Delia, they said, because dozens of drivers on State Route 53 had seen her after she vanished, appearing as a ghostly, handless apparition sauntering down the highway in a blue dress.  Most importantly, the police report eighteen months earlier of two missing women detailed their last scene appearance and Delia was noted as wearing a blue dress.  Additionally, this ghost locals were seeing appeared to be lost, they said, almost as if she was searching, but for what no one could say.

Three decades passed as Delia’s legend grew into a local matter of fact. Visiting the old bridge became a right of passage at Dawsonville and Gainesville's High Schools, as generations of young thrill seekers performed their own investigations in search of the Lady of Lake Lanier. Some returned to school the next day swearing they’d seen her. 

The Lady of Lake Lanier exhibited the classic symptoms of a residual haunting, a phenomenon parapsychologists describe as an apparition that appears more like a recording of a previous event than an interactive entity. According to paranormal experts, residual hauntings are most often found at the location of a traumatic event where the energy of heightened emotions are fused to the fabric of a place.

By November of 1990, Susie Roberts was all but forgotten, and the mysterious body found by a fisherman in 1959 lay resting in an unmarked tomb. For all practical purposes, there was little evidence left from the final ride of that Ford sedan, no fabric remaining but the bridge, the highway and a myth.

That’s when fate intervened.

Years of wear and tear had finally caught up with the Jerry D. Jackson bridge. As work began on renovations that would expand and refit the bridge, construction workers dredging the bottom of the lake made a startling discovery. Filled with mud, half-buried on the lake’s bottom, they found the twisted wreckage of a 1954 Ford.

The bones of Susie Roberts were still inside.

Jewelry the skeleton had been wearing helped to soon verify Roberts’ identity, and the discovery made national headlines. Finally, after 34 years, residents of northeast Georgia had a definitive answer to their mystery. Susie Roberts and Delia May Parker Young had run off the road high atop the Jerry D. Jackson bridge.

The unmarked tomb was re-labeled with Delia’s name, and the Lady of Lake Lanier.

Some say you can still find her wandering the backroads of State Route 53, slowly making her way from Dawsonville to the top of the old bridge searching for Susie, others say the two best friends are rejoined in the Lake and for fun, pull unsuspecting swimmers down by their ankles to join them under the surface.

Writer & Paranormal Investigator: Captain Dave Kahn