HGB Ep. 590 - Lake Lanier

Moment in Oddity - Coffin Hideaway Inspires Profession

Recently I came across an old newspaper article about a man named Tom Williams who grew up in a little town in Vermont. He describes how he came to be an undertaker as his profession. As a child, Tom lived next door to an odd older gentleman by the name of Wilson. Wilson was a cabinet maker by trade and he had some unconventional thoughts about death and burial for the times. His skills in woodworking were something to be admired. The craftsmanship and care he put into his work were stunning. Wilson had said that when his time came, he was not about to go into the earth in a misfit coffin that was poorly made. So Tom's neighbor created a gorgeous coffin of mahogany, with solid silver plates and handles for his personal use. Wilson's coffin was stored in his barn. A location where Tom and his friends would often play hide-and-seek around. One day Tom thought that the coffin which was so nicely furnished, would be a fantastic hiding place. The interior was so plush and comfortable and certainly none of the other boys would think to look within it. Tom would hide in Wilson's coffin many times and actually fell asleep in it once for several hours. Tom loved that coffin and his experience with it as a child is what led him into the undertaker business. When Wilson passed away, Tom prepared his quirky neighbor's body and buried him in the coffin in which Tom used to sleep. There are many strange and unusual places where kids hide while playing hide-and-seek, but choosing to hide in a coffin and subsequently falling asleep, certainly is odd. 

This Month in History - Train Crash in Bangladesh

In the month of June, on the 4th in 1972, an express train crashed in Jessore (JOSH-or-ee), Bangladesh. The Deputy Commissioner of Jessore reported that 10 coaches were destroyed by the impact and many others were thrown from the tracks. In the terrifying accident, at least 76 people were killed and more than 500 were injured. The train was loaded far beyond capacity which was not uncommon in Bangladesh. The express train was traveling from Khulna, a southern port town, when the train-station operator threw a switch to the wrong track as it was passing by the station. With no safeguards in place to avoid such an error, devastatingly, the passenger train slammed full speed into a freight train that was stopped at the station. Not only were passengers killed and injured, but also many people who were standing on the platform. Sheik Mujibur Rahman (RAYh-man), the Prime Minister at the time, ordered emergency relief measures and sent officials for an inquiry. 

Lake Lanier (Suggested by a bunch of listeners)

Lake Lanier in Georgia is an extremely popular recreational area. This is a man-made lake that was created when the Buford Dam was built in 1956 and covers 50,000 acres. Many lakes across America have been fashioned in this way without causing hauntings. That's not true for Lake Lanier. What is it that makes this lake so haunted? Was it the destruction of the black community of Oscarville? Could it be the handful of cemeteries that were supposedly relocated before Lake Lanier was filled? On this episode, we are joined by the hosts of the Spirits Uncorked Podcast, Elizabeth Grimes and her sister Erica. This duo also started Lanier Ghost Tours and they are here to talk the history and hauntings of Lake Lanier! 

One of the sunken towns under the waters of Lake Lanier is Oscarville. Oscarville got its start during the post-Civil War Reconstruction era. A large number of former slaves came to the area to start farms and it was very prosperous. There were over 1,000 residents and many owned or rented farms. Others were tradesmen. Atlanta had a race riot in 1906 and these tensions boiled over to Oscarville, which was north of Atlanta. In 1912, a series of racial conflicts erupted in the town. The first was the Ellen Grice Incident. Ellen was a 22-year-old woman who accused two black men of attempted rape. Five black men were arrested and it was thought that perhaps Ellen was in a relationship with one of the men and that it had been discovered and she was covering her tracks by lying about the attempted rape. Why five men were arrested when she said there were two is beyond us. 

Several days later, an eighteen-year-old white woman named Mae Crow was found raped and unresponsive in the woods outside Oscarville. She was in a coma for two weeks before finally passing from the head trauma she had suffered. A confession was coerced out of 16-year-old black male named Ernest Knox. Four other black residents were arrested as accomplices. One of them was Rob Edwards who was shot by a white vigilante group of 2,000 who broke into the jail. They dragged his body to the town square and hung him from a noose. Ernest Knox and another man named Oscar Daniels were found guilty and sentenced to hang. This was illegal at the time, so the judge ordered that the hangings take place behind a blind. The blind was burned down the night before, but the hangings went forward with 8,000 people watching. It was believed that none of these people were responsible for what happened to Mae Crow. 

Then came the night riders who were white vigilantes that attacked black communities in Forsyth County. Oscarville was fire bombed several times and many of its residents died during these night rides. By the end of 1912, many of the black residents of these communities in Forsyth County had left. 98% of Oscarville's black community had left. A very sad statistic is that the expulsions of blacks in North Georgia were the most successful in the nation. Eventually the land that made up Oscarville was sold over time to the government and in 1950 the remains of the town were flooded. 

The Buford Dam was built in 1956 to dam the waters of the Chattahoochee River to form Lake Lanier, which was named for Confederate veteran and poet Sidney Lanier. Twenty cemeteries had to be relocated and 250 families were displaced as 50,000 acres of farmland was destroyed. The lake itself covers 38,000 acres. Construction was stunted several times as funds ran dry and the mayor of Atlanta had to keep returning to Washington, D.C. to pressure for more funds to ensure a water supply for residents of Atlanta. Through the years, the lake has saved the Chattahoochee from drying up during droughts. There have been ongoing fights over water rights, but the creation of lake Lanier seems to have more positives than negatives. Unless one looks at the deaths. There have been at least 500 of them. It's easy for people to get caught in the sunken buildings and other debris. These deaths, along with the destruction of twenty cemeteries has led to hauntings. 

There is the Curse of Brown's Bridge: The "Curse of Browns Bridge" refers to a series of tragic accidents and paranormal incidents reported near Browns Bridge on Lake Lanier, according to Atlanta Ghost Tours. The story centers around two young women, Delia Parker Young and Susie Roberts, who disappeared after a car crash on the bridge in 1958. Subsequent deaths and unexplained occurrences have fueled the belief that the area is haunted, with stories of apparitions, sudden car trouble, and eerie presences.

The Lady of the Lake: It is believed that Delia Young appears as a full-bodied apparition in a blue dress near the lake. 

Spirits of unrecovered bodies from drownings and unmoved bodies from the cemeteries.  

Lydia Rose 003 wrote on Reddit in 2018, " One night while I was swimming in the lake, my aunt uncle and dad up on the camp site, I started to swim to the inner part of the lake, the park where all the rotting buildings are and cars underwater. I was playing by myself when I felt a pull. Something was tugging my leg, it wasn’t a seaweed like plant that grew there, it felt like a hand. Two to be exact, I started to scream and struggle to stay on top, I was too far out for anyone to hear me. I was only 7 but my swimming was pretty strong for a seven year old. I started trying to kick the thing that was underneath me trying no no avail. I gave up. I let it take me under water. I started to drown, when I felt something pull my arms and pull me up I was back to shore somehow and I started to cough and looked up at the man. He looked like a kindly African American person. He wore a hat with no shirt on and swimming trunks. The only problem, my family and I where the only ones camping since it was a Sunday night and I didn’t have school the next day. I thanked the man me coughed up the water. He said it was no problem and started to walk to the camp site. I followed him and asked my dad and uncle who where making hot dogs on the grill, 'that man saved my life' i told them and they looked at me like I had two heads. 'Lydia, what man?' My dad asked confused and I stopped. 'The man that just saved my life and walked up to the camp site he was.' I looked and he was gone. I told them what happened and they looked spooked. My skin was still cold from the water and oxygen or lack thereof." 

To join Lanier Ghost Tours: https://lanierghosttours.com/ 

Check out the Spirits Uncorked: Under the Water Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/5c4IIEYI2WWmHWZPSv6pvr?si=2876580191634691 

 

HGB Ep. 589 - The Elke Sommer Haunting

Moment in Oddity - The Black Banquet

As taphophiles, if Diane and I were invited to a meal at someone's home and our place setting was decorated as a tombstone, we would love the ambiance that our host had created. However, far before our current day, back in 89 A.D. Roman Emperor Domitian hosted a banquet. This event is known to history as the Roman 'Feast of Death' or 'Black Banquet'. The soiree was macabre and the guests at the party were senators. It was held in a black themed banquet hall. The walls and ceiling were painted black, the dishes were black and topped with funerary cuisine of the time, slaves dressed as apparitions brought the various courses of the meal to the guests, and each attendee had a headstone inscribed with their name. During the meal, Emperor Domitian spoke about death and slaughter. The Emperor's goal was to instill fear in the senators, exerting power and control over his guests who thought they may possibly be executed at any moment. Clearly he delighted in the mental torture of his banquet guests. The senators likely spent the entire night wondering if they would be summoned for their execution. Instead, the next morning Domitian sent messengers to notify the guests that their personal gravestones were made of solid silver and that the gravestones and slave boys were a gift. The timing of the 'Black Banquet' occurred during a period when Domitian's reign was marred by political instability and paranoia, hence why he felt the need to intimidate the senators. We all know that tomorrow isn't promised and this Roman "Memento Mori" style of banquet certainly served as a reminder to the guests that it is important to enjoy life because we all must die. But the extent that Emperor Domitian went to for that extra flair and intimidation, certainly is odd.

This Month in History - Melitta Bentz Passes (Suggested by: Ruth Dempsey)

In the month of June, on the 29th, in 1950, Melitta Bentz passed away. Melitta was a German inventor and entrepreneur. Kelly is particularly thankful for the invention she is so widely known for, the paper coffee filter. From a young age, Melitta noticed practical problems and easily came up with solutions. In 1908, when Melitta was married with three children, she solved a problem that made her name famous, even today. At the start of the 20th century, coffee was being brewed by percolators which would oftentimes, over-extract the coffee grinds giving the resulting beverage a bitter taste. Cloth filters were already used in the process of making coffee, however they were challenging to use and clean. Melitta pondered what could be used to produce a better tasting cup of coffee by an easier method. In 1908, she removed a sheet of blotting paper from one of her children's notebooks and with a perforated brass pot, she created the first paper coffee filter. Her results offered a cleaner, better tasting cup of coffee and her design was patented on July 8th, 1908. Melitta and husband Hugo Bentz realized the commercial potential of her invention. They began the manufacturing of her coffee filters in their home, but quickly graduated to factory production. Her invention is still in use today having undergone few changes. Melitta Company remains a world leader in brewing equipment, coffee filters, and sustainable coffee operations.

***???And FUN FACT, listener and Executive Producer, Jacquelyn passes a Melitta Coffee plant in southern New Jersey while traveling on I-295.

The Elke Sommer Haunting

Benedict Canyon. What isn't haunted about this place? Actress Elke Sommer and her husband at the time, Joe Hyams, moved into their Benedict Canyon Drive mansion in 1964. Not long after they unpacked their boxes, they became aware of strange things happening in the house. Some were subtle, but others woke them up in the middle of the night. The couple tried cleansing the house, but ended up running from the home after a mysterious fire erupted. They never lived in the house again. Join us for the story of the Elke Sommer haunting. 

Let's set the stage here for our haunting with our two main players, Elke Sommer and Joe Hyams.

Elke Sommer is a German actress known mainly for her movies from the 1960s and 1970s. She was born during World War II in 1940 and her family was evacuated from Berlin to Niederndorf. Her father was a Lutheran minister and died when she was fourteen. Elke had attended a preparatory school for university and really struggled with her studies. She asked her mother if she could drop out in 1957 and her mother agreed. Elke set off for London to work as an au pair. She attended an English language institute three times a week. Sommer would eventually be able to speak seven languages. The following year she went to Italy for holiday and was spotted by film director Vittorio De Sica when she competed in a beauty contest. Her surname had been Schletz and she was encouraged to change it and she decided on Sommer. 

It didn't take long for Sommer to achieve sex symbol status and she emigrated to Hollywood where her popularity as a pin-up girl exploded, particularly after she posed for Playboy. She would make two appearances in the magazine, first in September 1964 and the other in December 1967. Sommer was blond and beautiful with high cheekbones and her acting career would be prolific with over 99 movies under her belt by the time she retired in 2010. She starred as the leading lady in movies with Paul Newman, Bob Hope, Dean Martin, James Garner. Dick Van Dyke, Peter Sellers and Sharon Tate. Sommer even won a Golden Globe in 1964 as Most Promising Newcomer Actress for the film "The Prize." Some listeners may remember her from Hollywood Squares. She appeared on the game show many times between 1971 and 1980. A little fun fact was that in 1984, a bitter feud started between her and Zsa Zsa Gabor, which ended in 1993 with a multimillion-dollar libel suit in which Gabor had to pay Sommer $3.3-million in damages  for defamation.

Joe Hyams was born in 1923 in Massachusetts. He attended Harvard University, but didn't finish because World War II erupted and he enlisted with the Marines. He fought in the South Pacific and received both a Purple Heart and the Bronze Star Medal. After the war, he went to New York University and earned both a bachelor's and master's. The New York Herald Tribune hired him as a journalist in 1951. A stroke of luck got him an interview with Humphrey Bogart. He was given a room at the Beverly Hills Hotel by his editor as a reward for a really great article. As he lounged at the pool, he struck up a conversation with a man near him who turned out to be Bogart's press agent. The agent brought Hyams into the room where Bogart was and Bogart asked what he wanted to drink. When Hyams asked for a Coke, Bogart got pissed and said, "I don't trust any bastard who doesn't drink, especially a pipe-smoking newspaperman or a man who has more hair than I have." Now Hyams must have been a guy with a lot of confidence because he picked up his notebook and headed for the door as he told Bogart, "I don't drink and I certainly have more hair on my head than you do." Bogart told Hyams to wait a minute and invited him to lunch and gave him the interview because he was so impressed with his candor. Hyams was on a roll and within a week, he had interviewed Lauren Bacall, Katharine Hepburn, Frank Sinatra and Spencer Tracy. The Tribune was so happy they decided to keep Hyams in Hollywood and that became his specialty. He worked as a syndicated columnist from 1951 to 1964. Hyams became a powerhouse in the entertainment industry becoming someone that filmmakers relied upon and many movie stars became friends with him. The long-lasting friendship he had with Clint Eastwood was legendary. Studio heads referred to him as "The Dean of Publicity." Films that he worked on included East of Eden, My Fair Lady, Bonnie and Clyde, Blazing Saddles, The Exorcist, A Star Is Born, Woodstock, Chariots of Fire, JFK, Unforgiven, Eyes Wide Shut and Mystic River. All of these are amazing films and three of them won Best Picture Oscars.

In November of 1964, Joe Hyams and Elke Sommer married. She was his third wife and he was 17 years her senior. The couple would eventually divorce after seventeen years of marriage and Joe would refer to them as the best years of his life. They were a good match as they were both deeply immersed in the scene of Hollywood. And they were about to be deeply immersed in the world of the paranormal. They decided to buy a home at 2644 Benedict Canyon Drive in North Beverly Hills. The same Benedict Canyon where the Manson Murders took place and where the Paul Bern-Jean Harlow House is located. Both of those locations were haunted. Now we have a third haunted location. It didn't take long for Joe and Elke to realize that their home was being shared with spirits. Hyams wrote an article for the Saturday Evening Post entitled "Haunted" published in the July 2, 1966 issue detailing their experiences. 

So at this point, Joe and Elke haven't seen anything, just this guest at the house. Hyams explains in the article that he is a man of facts, not given to this type of fantasy. And his wife Elke fears nothing. She once killed a rattlesnake in their backyard with gardening shears. Two weeks after moving in, they were about to have their reason and fearlessness challenged when Elke's mother comes to stay. Hyams writes:

So the couple are trying to explain these strange things with reason. Even though two guests have now seen the same strange man in the house, it surely must just be someone outside of the house. Which to us would be pretty troubling. We'd opt for a ghost frankly, rather than a prowler. The couple are also trying to blame the ghostly party sounds on outdoor noises like trees. How do trees make party noises? The real test is about to come because Joe is left alone at the house for a few weeks while Elke went to Yugoslavia to make a film. Hyams felt like he was never alone during that time, as though something were always watching him. And then he started finding the window in the bedroom downstairs always unlocked and wide open in the morning after he made sure everything was locked up tight. He also heard the front door open and close twice at night. But he always found it locked. 

At this point, Hyams decides to put the house under some surveillance. He picked up some electronic detection equipment and three miniature radio transmitters. He also got three portable FM radios and plugged a tape recorder into each. He placed a radio by the driveway entrance, another at the front door and a third on the bar in the dining room. And since the chairs where making noises, he used chalk to outline where they were on the floor. That night, sure enough, the mic on the bar picked up the noises of chairs moving. Joe picked up a .38 caliber pistol he had and he crept downstairs to catch the intruder. He flips on the switch and aims his gun and...nothing. The room is empty. And even weirder, the chairs were still within their marks. Here's what he wrote about what happened next, "Upstairs, later, I listened to the tape recording. The noises had stopped when I went downstairs. The sound of the switch snapping on, and even my nervous cough, had come through clearly - and so had the sound of chairs being moved after I left the room again." 

Joe was unnerved enough that he invited a friend, Gordon Mueller, to come stay with him and there was no activity during that time. Then Joe headed to Yugoslavia to meet up with Elka and left Gordon at the couples house and let's just say, Gordon was NOT alone. He felt that the house was really creepy and he stayed in the downstairs bedroom with the window that opened on its own. And the window opened on its own. Gordon moved to the couple's bedroom since it had a lock on the door. A private detective kept an eye on the house and found doors and windows open even though Gordon had locked it up tight before leaving. Joe and Elke returned and the noises in the dining room continued, which stopped bothering them because it was such a regular occurrence. They left the house again for a trip and Joe stopped by to get the mail and their pool man, Marvin Chandler was there. Marvin asked Joe if someone was staying at the house and when Joe said "no" he told him, "That's what I thought. But last Tuesday afternoon I saw a man in the dining room - a big man about six feet tall, heavy-built, with a white shirt and black tie. When I went to the door to ask him when you were coming back, he disappeared - just seemed to evaporate in front of my eyes." 

Despite all of this, Joe still didn't believe that what was happening in the house was paranormal. He knew there had to be an explanation. When a friend suggested that someone might be squatting in the house somewhere, Joe got the original blueprints for the house to see if there were any secret rooms. Nope. He had termite inspectors get under the house and see if there were any openings, Nope. Joe checked the attic for himself. Nothing. And thus began a time of soliciting the services of several mediums. Several claimed to see spirits in the house. One was supposedly a young woman who had died in Europe from a lung illness. Why she would be here, who knows. Another clairvoyant claimed a European man who had a mustache and was heavy-set liked to hang out in the dining room. And another medium who worked with the LAPD to find missing people said she saw a sloppy man who was in his 50s that had been a doctor and died of a heart attack. This was backed up by a visit from Spiritualist Brenda Crenshaw. She went into the dining room and said, "I see a man above average height, about 58 years of age, a doctor who died of a chest or heart condition outside the country." These last two really hit home for Joe because he was in the process of writing a book about a doctor and they hadn't been able to finish because the doctor died. The mediums had said that the ghost claimed to have unfinished business with the man of the house.

The American Society for Psychical Research suggested that Elke and Joe hold some seances. They held five of them. Joe was unimpressed and felt that they got no information. So he asked the couple who had owned the house before him and Elke if they had experienced anything strange and they had heard the noises in the house. Particularly disembodied footsteps in the dining room. Once when this happened, it scared the woman so much that she called for a taxi. She told Joe, "I locked myself in the upstairs bedroom and called a taxi. A short time later it arrived and stopped in the driveway by the front door. I kept waiting for the taxi driver to ring the bell, but he didn't, so I shouted to him from the bedroom window. When he answered, I ran down the stairs., got into the car and asked the driver why he had not rung the bell. The driver told me he saw a man standing by the door and assumed he was the fare. The man had vanished when I shouted from the window."

Elke was pretty scared after all this, so Joe agreed to have the house exorcised. The clairvoyant who conducted the cleansing commanded the spirit to leave in the name of Jesus Christ. She then told the couple that the spirit left. At the time that Joe wrote this article in 1966, the couple had no intention of moving. Elke concluded that the spirit was her father. Joe finished this article with, "The night after the exorcism, I locked the downstairs doors, checked all the windows carefully, and went to bed anticipating a quiet night. Just as i was falling asleep. Elke nudged me and said, 'Listen.' I sat up in bed and listened. The dining room chairs were moving again."

Joe Hyams wrote another article for the June 3, 1967 Saturday Evening Post. The couple had now been in the house three years and they had left. Joe titled the article "The Day I Gave Up The Ghost." The reason they left was a mysterious fire that started in the dining room. Joe wrote:

 

Interestingly, one of the mediums had told the couple that she had a vision of a fire starting in the dining room and she told Joe to up their fire insurance. He regretted not taking her advice. The fire was so hot that it melted their silverware. The reason the ghost may have set the fire? The couple had been told that making the place unfamiliar by redecorating might chase the ghost away. Maybe they just pissed it off. They had also been talking about moving, which may have displeased the ghost as well. The fire was almost completely contained to the dining room, despite wall-to-wall carpeting and lots of draperies.

Despite the fact that the ghost seemed to have knocked on the bedroom door to alert Elke and Joe about the fire, Elke insisted they move because something in the house, she thought, had tried to burn them alive. Interestingly, Joe maintained in the second article that he and Elke still didn't really believe in ghosts. The house was bought and resold seventeen times in the next few years and is privately owned today. Through the years, numerous people had witnessed strange events at the house. Many people would claim to get such a weird feeling from the house that they wouldn't even enter the house. Joe and Elke eventually divorced and Joe died in 2008. Elke is still alive and living in Los Angeles. She's in her 80s.

A photographer named Allan Grant came to the house after the fire to take some pictures for Joe's article. He was a skeptic when he arrived, but he was a believer by the time he left. He said, "Something happened that spooked me. On one roll of film that I shot in a particular room where they first spotted the ghost there were about four or five frames of film that were progressively fogged down to the end of the frame, giving it a ghost-like appearance, especially (of) Joe Hyams, who was in the shot. When that was processed and I took a look at it, I thought, there’s no way that would happen…in the center of a roll…something else had happened that I couldn’t explain and I’ve spent years as a photographer and that had never happened to me before….Something did happen in that house." Grant reasoned that a sticky shutter or sticky diaphragm could cause some of the issues, but with some of the pictures, both of those things would've had to have happened and he said that would be "quite a coincidence."

In the end, Joe and Elke had 36 sensitives and mediums come through the house and while none could agree on who the spirits were, they all had the same conclusion. The house was haunted. Was the haunting of Elke Sommer real? That is for you to decide!

Photo: Angelo Frontoni, portrait of Elke Sommer and Joe Hyams at their home in Benedict Canyon