Haunted Lake Lanier Tours ~ Boat Ride with Captain

Choose one of our night time, late in the day Sunset Cruises to be on the water right above locations that make this lake famous for the darker side of Lake Lanier's history.  Captain Dave tells a few stories of folks that left this world via the waters of Lake Lanier.  Some those perished souls did not exit the waters, they are still there.

Locals estimate over 1,000 unfortunate lake goers have perished in the waters of Lake Lanier. Many accounts of unsolved mysteries of spirits haunting Lake Lanier have been shared and passed around from sailor to fishermen to victim's loved ones. Once visitors find out how many people have died, disappeared and never been recovered, well, it's a sobering uneasy thought especially when you are out on a boat at dusk, floating over skeletons submerged deep and lodged in the tangled Georgia Pines 60-180 feet below. Boo!

On the fun side of this tour, Captain Dave hands out neon glow toys for all guests to enjoy and be somewhat illuminated along with the boats custom LED lighting:) And for the really brave, we can drop anchor and you have the option to take a dip in the dark waters and temp the spirits if you dare.

If you book any of our night Sunset Cruise & Float Tours, you get the Haunted Treatment and Stories if you desire. 

Happy boating, swimming and stay alive on Lake Lanier!

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

In 1958, just two years after the bridge opened, Delia May 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 1954 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 decomposing 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 the body 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 May 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.

Jewlery 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