JoAG Classics: Death Lakes

[00:00:01] Speaker A: Okay. [00:00:03] Speaker B: Chocobo Graves. [00:00:08] Speaker A: Okay. [00:00:08] Speaker B: Crossfire. [00:00:11] Speaker A: Mark Lewis. [00:00:15] Speaker B: The. [00:00:15] Speaker A: You'll get caught up in the lyrical. They really phoned that in. Okay. [00:00:23] Speaker B: All right. [00:00:27] Speaker A: Once upon a time, Mark, there was a town called Oscarville, Georgia. But there isn't any more. [00:00:36] Speaker B: Okay. [00:00:37] Speaker A: Not exactly. Oscarville, along with several other Georgia communities, is at the bottom of Lake Lanier. [00:00:46] Speaker B: Oh, okay. Like Atlantis. [00:00:49] Speaker A: It's like Atlantis, but like, sad Atlantis. [00:00:53] Speaker B: Oh, no. [00:00:57] Speaker A: So in 1950, the U.S. army Corps of Engineers began work creating an artificial dam called Buford Dam, which would prevent flooding in the area, and a lake that would supply water and hydroelectric power to Atlanta, which is obviously the huge city in Georgia. So it was a huge, multi billion dollar undertaking that not only required a massive amount of just basic infrastructure work, you know, all the building that goes into it and everything, but also required buying out or otherwise relocating the communities that had existed in the area already. [00:01:33] Speaker B: Okay. Okay. [00:01:34] Speaker A: Many of which had been there for, like, literally generations, largely as farming communities. So this area is just farmland as far as the eye can see. [00:01:44] Speaker B: Where are we in terms of history here? In terms of time? Where are we? [00:01:48] Speaker A: So this is 1950, right? Okay. Thank you. When this happens. But the repercussions of the process have led Lake Lanier to a reputation of being cursed. Hundreds have died there since its completion in 1957. And naturally, it's rumored to be haunted as thick, particularly by one specter, who has been known to appear quite frequently to the 7 million or so visitors that come to the lake every year. Cool. We'll come back to her. So as is pretty much the case, when we look at American history and how we built this country, it's pretty ugly if you examine it too closely. This is clearly becoming a theme. [00:02:37] Speaker B: Yep, there it is. [00:02:39] Speaker A: Every time I talk about anything in our opens, I'm like, hey, Mark, do you want to hear about how terrible this country actually is if you look at it for a second? So I'm gonna do that again today. Lake Lanier is absolutely no exception to the rule. And you can probably get that hint simply by looking at its name as its moniker honors the legacy of one Sidney Lanier, a Confederate army poet. So for those who are not up on US History, those are the baddies in the American Civil War. The Confederates are the guys who are fighting to preserve the institution of slavery in the Southern states and its expansion westward. And that will not be the last racist part of this lake's legacy that we talk about here. Surprise, surprise. [00:03:32] Speaker B: So I am not up on my American history. You'll Be shocked to learn. [00:03:37] Speaker A: Crazy. [00:03:38] Speaker B: I know, I know, I know. I was hooky that day. So who are the Confederates fighting then? What were the other side called? [00:03:46] Speaker A: The Union. [00:03:47] Speaker B: Okay. [00:03:48] Speaker A: Yeah. So the Union are the people trying to keep the United States together, make one country, all that stuff. And the Confederates are like, fuck you. We're getting out of here. We're going to secede from the United States so that we can preserve slavery. Because the north, the Union, had said, we are not going to have slavery up here, and we will not have it continue expanding westward as we move into the rest of what would become what is now the United States. [00:04:15] Speaker B: Whereas the Confederates are like, yes, you fucking will, boys. [00:04:18] Speaker A: Yes, yes, you will. You will not tell me that I cannot do that. States rights. So, yeah, that's the Confederates, and that's who Lake Lanier is named after. [00:04:28] Speaker B: I see. [00:04:29] Speaker A: Great. It's really cool. [00:04:31] Speaker B: So you say this guy was a Confederate poet? [00:04:37] Speaker A: Yeah, he wrote a famous poem. I believe it was called the Song of the Chattahoochee. And, yeah, apparently there had been a lot of, like, arguing over who they were going to name this thing after. And that was the compromise. Let's see. Confederate poet, like, huh. I mean, there's clearly nothing that's gonna be controversial about that name in the future. So there you go. And mind you, by the way, like, as I said, this is built in 1950, right. So this is like 90 years after the Civil War that they named this after this Confederate poet. So, yeah, it's kind of like an intentional choice that they made there about who they were going to honor in their southern history. [00:05:25] Speaker B: Not great. Who would have made that decision? That would have been, like, town planners. That would have been officials. [00:05:31] Speaker A: State. Yeah. State people. Yeah, State government that was working on making this. Yeah. Because it's a state project. It was actually, you know, a United States project. It was a federal project that was being made. So. According to Wikipedia, the lake encompasses 38,000 acres, which is 59 square miles of water, which is 150 square kilometers, and 692 miles of shoreline, which is 1,114 kilometers for your reference. So it's fucking huge. And people obviously lived in all of that space, and agriculture was actually booming in that area. It was kind of famous for the fact that somehow the people who were farming there had done something that resisted a huge boll weevil overtaking thing that, like, had ruined farms elsewhere. But the people who lived in this area had somehow managed to overcome that and still have thriving agriculture there. [00:06:26] Speaker B: So. [00:06:26] Speaker A: So lots of farmland in this area. And they had to be convinced to sell their land to the government for this project, which of course to them the land is like priceless. Convinced, right? Yeah. So they've lived here forever. The families have lived here forever. And now, you know, the government's like, hey, we need this. This is a big municipal project that we have to work on. But they assured them, of course, they were going to give them a very fair price for it, you know, that it was going to go for whatever they were actually worth in order to do this. And then they did, and everyone lived happily ever after. [00:07:02] Speaker B: Fantastic. Welcome to Jack of All Graves. [00:07:04] Speaker A: Jack of all Graves Episode 38 no, that's not what happened. They, the people sold, but they, you know, like I said, they lived there for generations. So it's not like they were up on what like the real estate market was like in Georgia. And it turned out, of course, that they undersold them on this. And they quickly had sellers remorse when they went to move into other areas and were like, we can't afford life anymore and also we don't have our farms. So that was super great. The 700 or so families who did sell were the lucky ones though. Those that didn't want to sell were simply forcibly removed. And the government went on to break down the structures that would be a hindrance to the creation of the lake, like bridges, trees, and anything wooden that could float. They also attempted to move the 20ish cemeteries that existed in the area. But there's no way of knowing for sure whether they were able to get them all, because it was common practice at the time for families to keep small burial plots on their land rather than informal cemeteries. So everything that they didn't deem necessary to do destroy, they apparently just left when they flooded the area, Leading many to believe to this day that there are entire towns sitting at the bottom of lake Lanier. And at least one of those towns has really bad vibes. So one of those towns is Oscarville, the town I mentioned earlier. Oscarville was home to a fairly thriving black community in the early 20th century until in. In 1912, there were two high profile incidents that changed everything. First, a white woman named Ellen Grice accused two black men of breaking into her home and raping her. Then a 19 year old white woman named Mae Crow was sexually assaulted and brutally beaten to death. In the first incident, a man named Ernest Knox confessed and he and his half brother were sentenced to death by hanging, which was carried out 21 days later. A black preacher who had demanded their release and suggested that the sexual liaison might have been consensual, was beaten severely by a white mob and they had to hold him in the jail for his own protection. In the murder case, a black man named Rob Edwards was arrested, but he would never see trial. As was southern custom, A white mob came to the jail, abducted him, and beat and shot him to death before hanging him from a tree near city hall. Several more black youths were tried and sent to Steph by hanging for the crime as well. And I'm sure you can imagine none of them saw a super fair trial by a jury of their peers, as was common again at the time. Now we owe a debt to late 19th and early 20th century black investigative journalist Ida b. Wells, whose work showed that lynchings rarely had to do with actual crimes. Often they were actually economic retaliation. A real quick way to get rid of a black guy with a competitive business was to say he sexually assaulted a white woman. Yeah, sure, mob would take care of him real fast. And she also found that often so called rapes perpetrated by black men were consensual relationships. But in a country with lots of anti miscegenation laws on the books, and in an area particularly hostile to the idea of a white woman consenting to be with a black man, if a mixed race pair were caught hooking up, he wasn't going to get a chance to explain himself. He was just gonna get strung up for it. So it's likely that lots of black men were punished for these crimes who had little to nothing to do with them. But we'll never know because their trials were a sham and the terribleness didn't end there. The whites took it upon themselves to form vigilante gangs they called Knight riders because that's super cool. And they made it their job to terrorize the black residents of Forsyth county. And within months, 98% of the black population had fled the area for neighboring counties in fear for their lives. And those that stayed, well, their legacy is at the bottom of Lake Lanier. Some 250 families were displaced by the construction of the reservoir. And their homes and communities were just like completely lost to the water. And that doesn't even account for all the like indigenous artifacts and graves and things like that that are likely down there somewhere as well, because that's who lived there before all of these people came in. [00:11:33] Speaker B: It's yeah, communities, entire communities, entire family lines, entire, completely wiped out. [00:11:39] Speaker A: With no effort made to try to preserve any of this. Just like, meh, sink it, it's fine. But the horrors also don't end there. When they built Lake Lanier, they never intended for it to be a recreational area. It's just a reservoir. It's supplying water to people, it's providing power to people. That was the whole point. But eventually they allowed recreational activity here. And once it became used more and more for that purpose, it began to amass oppressive body count. In the years since it was completed, 675 people are estimated to have died there, including one just last week, a 19 year old boy who dove off a pontoon boat and never resurfaced. And this happened the same day a boat fucking exploded on the lake, wounding several people. Like just a bizarre amount of weird shit like that happens on that lake all the time. I mean the lake itself is murky and unpredictable. It's said that you might step from what is knee high water and suddenly find yourself over a 30 foot drop. There's a ton of like wreckage under the water from remnants of the place that they flooded out to create it, to sunken boats from years of accidents, all kinds of stuff down there. And because of drought. Yeah, go ahead. [00:13:04] Speaker B: Are there ever attempts made for kind of salvage or for. [00:13:09] Speaker A: Not necessarily salvage, but there are divers that go down there and you can actually look on YouTube and find footage. [00:13:15] Speaker B: Of what, underwater expeditions just for historical kind of. [00:13:20] Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's hard to preserve anything and it's so deep at some points it's really hard to go down there and find anything that would, you could sort of resurface that you could see. Like I said, it's extremely murky. If you look up these videos on YouTube, like the visibility is ridiculous. It's just green and like you can't, you can't see very far at all. But you can see a lot of just random junk down there, all kinds of random stuff. And because of drought in recent years, there's been like drought over the past decade. The water level is constantly lowering so it's revealing more and more hazards underneath that will then like run boats aground and entangle swimmers and all kinds of stuff. [00:14:05] Speaker B: If there's going to be a haunted lake anyway, it's there. [00:14:07] Speaker A: It's absolutely this one. Like it's just bad vibes all the way through. [00:14:11] Speaker B: 100%. Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:14:13] Speaker A: Plus on top of all this, there are reportedly catfish the size of Volkswagens down. Oh, can you imagine this? Actually this came up when I was in West Virginia last week too because they said the same thing about the rivers that, that run by their Two rivers sort of intersect right there. And they were, they were saying that like when divers were retrieving bodies after the Silver Bridge collapse, collapse in 1967, they started refusing to go back down into the water because of the giant catfish. They're like, these are terrifying. Like, imagine you're going down there trying to like grab bodies and whatnot and then a car sized catfish just like brushes up against you, big. No thanks, I'll pass on that. Yeah. [00:15:02] Speaker B: So talk to me about the coast. [00:15:04] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I'm getting there. But before we get there, divers have also reported finding actual body parts underwater there. A diver named Buck Buchanan said in 2017, quote, you reach out into the dark and you feel an arm or a leg and it doesn't move. Who's, who knows? Who knows who that. [00:15:29] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:15:29] Speaker A: So on top of the ghosts of so many dead and displaced, there is most notably one haunting reported time and time again. [00:15:35] Speaker B: Just briefly. If I was going to make up an American sounding name, it would probably be Buck Buchanan. [00:15:40] Speaker A: I know, right? [00:15:43] Speaker B: Buck Buchanan. [00:15:44] Speaker A: Yeah, that's his name. [00:15:47] Speaker B: That's the character's name. [00:15:48] Speaker A: Yeah. You can't write this, you can't make it up. That is legitimately this guy's name. Yeah. But In April of 1958, a car carrying two women careened into the lake. The women were Delia Parker Young and Susie Roberts. Delia had borrowed a blue dress for the night out. And according to the Gainesville Times quote, they were traced from the Three Gables to a gas station nearby where they left without paying. There were skid marks along the road near the bridge and it looked as though the car had crossed the center line and went off the side of the road. So probably some shenanigans here, maybe some drunk driving, things like that, like two girls, just like going to a gas station, filling up, ditching, driving off the road, pounding some claws, pounding some claws, some white claw, breaking the law. And they go careening off of this bridge. But they disappeared like they, they could see the tracks or whatever, but they didn't see, like they didn't find a car or anything like that or bodies until 18 months later when a body washed up, missing two toes on her left foot and with no hands. Now, supposedly people had been reporting seeing a woman walking along the bridge who would have like no hands or no arms and wearing blue, looking like she was trying to find her lost hands. [00:17:14] Speaker B: Yes, yes, yes. [00:17:17] Speaker A: And In November of 1990, construction on the bridge led to the discovery of a blue 1950s Ford sedan with a body inside with Remnants of a sweater and a slip nearby. And she was eventually ID'd as Susie Roberts, the other person in this car. But for years, and even to this day, people report that woman walking along the Dawsonville highway bridge in her blue dress looking for her hands. And what do you think? I just want you to take a stab at it. What do you think they call the ghost of old Delia? Uh. [00:17:49] Speaker B: Fucking spooky blue Mrs. No Hands. [00:17:52] Speaker A: You overthought it. It's exactly what you'd expect it to be. They call her the lady of the Lake. [00:17:58] Speaker B: Oh, come on, Hacks. That is some hacks. Yet Spooky Blue misses no Hands. That's what I demand she be relived. [00:18:07] Speaker A: Keep blue Mrs. No hands. I love that so much. And that is the terrible story of Lake Lunar. [00:18:17] Speaker B: I love it. Obviously, I hate it. I hate all of it. But beautifully brought to life and you know, I learned some shit about the fucking American Civil War. Let me just go off on a little tangent here because I have a question that I've been meaning to ask you for weeks, but I've always forgotten until this moment. Okay, so the conversation in the UK currently, there's long been a conversation around Scottish independence from the uk, right? [00:18:49] Speaker A: Yes. [00:18:50] Speaker B: And the conversation around Welsh independence is gaining volume and seems to be gaining traction. You know, Scotland has, rightly so, in my opinion, a big axe to grind with the way that they were dragged out of European Union by the South. [00:19:03] Speaker A: Right. [00:19:06] Speaker B: Could a state in the US decide they wanted out of the United States and to set up as an independent nation? [00:19:16] Speaker A: No, absolutely not. I mean, that's literally what the Civil War was about. It's exactly that. So, you know, it's secession, it's leaving the United States to form your own thing. But there are constantly talks of this. For example, there's an entire region in the Pacific Northwest that is known as Cascadia. And they often talk about seceding from the United States to create their own little weird utopia or whatever that would not be subject to our laws and rules and things like that. But yeah, if anyone actually attempted to secede, that's a thing. We'll go to war over it. And there's no way that a state is going to be able to beat an entire US military in a war. [00:20:07] Speaker B: Because this seems fucked. So if Hawaii, for example, right, we're like, you know what? [00:20:11] Speaker A: No, that's a sample. [00:20:13] Speaker B: Is it? I don't know. I'm really put. [00:20:16] Speaker A: Because Hawaii is like the last state, second last state, right. And the whole thing is that they should be sovereign because they absolutely had it stolen from them. They had their own monarchy and, you know. Yes, they did. [00:20:33] Speaker B: So if they decided we don't want to be part of the United States anymore, we want out, that would result in conflict. In armed conflict. [00:20:40] Speaker A: Exactly. Yeah, yeah. There's really, you know, I mean, we don't even let like, we don't let places that technically like Puerto Rico for example, is our territory and they have voted to become a state so that they can actually like be a part of our political system and not just be subject to us. And we don't even let them in. Right. Washington D.C. doesn't have representation in our Congress. Right. Like that. We are terrible with this stuff. We don't want anybody leaving whatever. And we will, you know, exert whatever force is necessary. So as much as many places talk about, you know, trying to secede from here, how is any small part of the United States going to go up against the US Military? [00:21:29] Speaker B: Because, I mean, half of that answer was what I was expecting and the other half is wildly not. I mean, I was expecting it to be, nah, sorry, something, something, Constitution, something something, Bill of Rights, whatever the fuck that is. But the other half. And if they decided they wanted to and decided to unilaterally secede and become sovereign, we would simply invade them. Yeah, that I did not. [00:21:51] Speaker A: Didn't see that part coming, huh? Yeah, that's legitimately, I mean, what happened in the Civil War and then after that, you know, they suffered the repercussions of losing a war just like any foreign government would. Right. Like, so they had to like pay back the United States for war debt and you know, all this stuff like that, even though they were technically part of the United States. Again, that was the like whole point which has bred a lot of resentment out of the south as well. But you know, it's, it's treated as it's a hostile government. Hostile, illegitimate government, and thus they will be crushed as a result. So, yeah, no, it's impossible. [00:22:33] Speaker B: So further to that then, is, is the USA currently actively looking for more states? Is it looking to recruit more states? No, it's done. [00:22:41] Speaker A: No, because also the thing about the United States you have to realize is that we don't like to think of ourselves as imperialists. We. And it makes it very entertaining when you look back historically at things like, for example, the Spanish American War. After the Spanish American War, we got various territories. Cuba was a protectorate of ours, we got the Philippines, we got Guam, you know, a few places after this. And the Way that the president, like, justified this because we didn't like to think about ourselves as imperialists was like, it's actually, like, our duty. And we, like, owe it to the people of the Philippines. Like, it's our Christian duty to take them on. Like, what are we supposed to do? Let them run themselves? They couldn't possibly give them to another group. Like, are we gonna let France or Germany have them? We can't do that. You know, like. [00:23:29] Speaker B: And they're actually already oz. They just don't know it yet. [00:23:32] Speaker A: It was, like, really, like, you know, we must search ourselves and realize, like, it's the best thing for the Philippines to, like, belong to us. So we will begrudgingly take on this territory, even though we don't want it. So, like, the idea of actively now, like, trying to go and get more territories, more states, things like that would be a lot of cognitive dissonance in the way that we think about ourselves as a country. Because we see ourselves as not doing that. We just kind of ignore that. Like, we actually do have several territories. We just don't talk about it. You know, people think Puerto Rico is another country instead. No, that's us. That's ours. [00:24:12] Speaker B: And yet, as you said, you don't even let those guys in, right? [00:24:15] Speaker A: Exactly. They have no power here. They just belong to us. It's a good way to. Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. We are doing America to Puerto Rico. [00:24:27] Speaker B: Let me quote directly from my notes, if I may. [00:24:29] Speaker A: Yes, please do. [00:24:31] Speaker B: Fucking look at these nerds. Oh, mise en scene. [00:24:34] Speaker A: I don't think anyone has ever said mise en scene in such a horny way before. [00:24:38] Speaker B: The way I whispered the word sand. Cannibal receiver. [00:24:41] Speaker A: Worst comes to worse, Mark, I'm willing to guillotine you for science. [00:24:45] Speaker B: Thank you. That's really, really sweet. It's cold outside, but my pancreas is talking to me. I'm fucking. I'm gonna leg it. [00:24:51] Speaker A: You know how I feel about that, Mark? [00:24:53] Speaker B: I think you feel great about it. [00:24:59] Speaker A: You guys want to hear, like, a scary story? [00:25:03] Speaker B: Yes. Yes. [00:25:04] Speaker A: Okay. This is, like, genuinely some, like, horror movie shit. Okay. Of the natural kind. [00:25:12] Speaker B: You'd better. [00:25:13] Speaker A: You. [00:25:13] Speaker B: If you're gonna start like that, you best be delivering. Right? You'd best be planning on delivering. [00:25:18] Speaker A: Okay. [00:25:18] Speaker B: All right. [00:25:19] Speaker A: I think I'm delivering. This is nature in real life being far scarier than anything I've seen on a screen. So it's August 15, 1984. Abdo Nank, sorry, Abdo Khanjuoni was biking northward towards the village of Jindun near Lake Monoun in Cameroon. That was a lot of ooze. When he descended into a dip in the road, he saw parked next to the road a pickup truck he knew to belong to a local priest. Small town. But upon inspection, he found the priest's dead body on the ground next to the truck. [00:25:57] Speaker B: Oh. [00:25:58] Speaker A: As he continued his journey, he came across yet another corpse, a man's body still astride a stalled motorcycle. And in his own words, he knew something terrible has happened. So he's found a priest on the ground and another guy dead, just standing up on his motorcycle. [00:26:15] Speaker B: The bike is still idling. [00:26:17] Speaker A: Yeah, idling guy's there, but he's dead, I mean. So he continues on in a trance like state and soon he becomes too weak to bike. So he continues on on foot. He passes a herd of dead sheep. He passes stalled vehicles with the occupants all dead. Ascending further up the hill, he runs into his friend Adamu who's walking towards him. And he said he wanted to warn Adamu of the danger and tell him like, turn the fuck back, don't. Whatever is that way is bad news bears. But he'd lost the ability to see speak. So he said, as though in a dream, he shook Adamu's hand silently and the two continued in opposite directions. Nkanjiani managed to make it to his destination alive, but Adamu and 36 others traveling that low stretch of the road at the time weren't so lucky. Wow. People didn't know what to make of the mysterious deaths with no obvious cause. Was it a chemical attack? Was it some sort of government conspiracy? Naturally, it was causing a bit of a panic amongst the people there. And it wouldn't be the last time that would happen. In fact, a similar event would occur just two years later on an even more massive scale. About 60 miles north of Monoun, by the shores of Lake Nyos, a man named Ephraim Che lived in a mud brick house on a cliff above Nyos. So this place neos is sort of separated into villages called Upper Nyos and Lower Nio. He lives in Upper Nyos and both like Lake Monoun. Lake Nyos is a crater lake in Cameroon and it's located on the Cameroon volcanic line, which is a 950 mile long chain of volcanoes and volcanic crater lakes extending from the Gulf of Guinea into Cameroon and Nigeria. And by the way, no one is like sure why there are volcanoes there. Like from a geological perspective, normally we know like how a volcano formed and they're like, they shouldn't be there, but they are. Okay. [00:28:18] Speaker B: The mystery volcanoes of Cameroon. Wow. [00:28:20] Speaker A: Mystery volcanoes of Cameroon. There are some theories about it, but it's super weird to have volcanoes there. So, Anyway, it's about 9pm on August 21, 1986, when Che heard a rumbling sound that sounded like a rockslide. He then saw a strange white mist rising up from Lake Nyos. Feeling a little sick, he told his four children that it looked like rain, and then he went to to bed. Meanwhile, Halima Suli, a cowherd, and her four children had retired for the night at their home down by the actual lakeshore. So that's lower Neos. She heard the rumbling and said it sounded like the shouting of many voices. And then following that rumble, a great wind roared through her extended family's small compound of thatched huts, and she promptly passed out like a dead person. She says in the morning, when Che awoke, he headed downhill, and he noticed that Lake Nyos, which was usually crystal blue, was now a dull red. He noticed that a waterfall he would normally pass was dry. And then as he noticed that, he began to notice the eerie silence around him. No birds, no insects, no people, just silence. And as you can imagine, this freaked him the fuck out. And he was reportedly so scared that, that his knees were shaking as he ran along the lake and came across Halima Suli, the woman who had passed out after the wind blew through her home. She was shrieking and she'd torn off her clothing in grief. She started shouting to him, ephraim, come here. Why are these people lying here? Why won't they move again? In front of him, Che saw the body of Suli's children, Bodies of Suli's children, 31 other members of her family, and their 400 cattle. Suli kept trying to shake her lifeless father awake. Che said on that day, there were no flies on the dead because the flies were dead, too. What? So Che keeps going on downhill to the village, and there he found that nearly every one of the village's thousand residents was dead, including his parents, siblings, uncles, and aunts. [00:30:27] Speaker B: He'd go to here. [00:30:29] Speaker A: Yeah, he thought it was the end of the world. Literally. Like somehow he had managed to survive the end of the world. And all in all, about 1800 people died that night. And any of and many of the victims were found right where they'd normally be at that time, suggesting they died on the spot. Quote, bodies lay near cooking fires, clustered in doorways and in bed. Some people who had lain unconscious for more than a day, more than a Day they'd been unconscious, finally awoke, saw their family members all lying dead around them, and committed suicide. [00:31:04] Speaker B: Whoa. [00:31:05] Speaker A: Yeah. I'm telling you, this is a wild story. And nobody had any idea what was going on here. All we've got is a noise, a fog, a wind, and everyone just dropping dead where they stood. [00:31:25] Speaker B: Jesus. I'm sure you said back at the top. How. When are we talking here? When was this? [00:31:30] Speaker A: 1986. So the first one was 1984, right? Yeah. It's not that long ago we were all alive for this period having happened, you know, so not incredibly long. In Cameroon, everyone is like, what has happened here? Interestingly, folklore was somewhat helpful in trying to figure that out. Okay. Or at least that there was some sort of natural cause. And maybe this wasn't the first time it had occurred. For example, people in the region will talk of magical springs where as soon as a small animal like a toad or bird approaches, they just drop dead. Geologists realized that these haunted springs are hot springs with super high levels of volcanic gases. And they figured the bottom of Lake Nyos, there must be similar springs existing that would release large quantities of toxic gases into the lake. Other folk tales, which are referred to as geomyths, which is a phrase I kind of like, include stories of haunted lakes that will explode or drown people, which could very well be based on past disasters similar to what happened in 1986. A natural phenomenon attributed to supernatural powers like God, spirits, or enraged ancestors. Because they're like, what? How else the fuck would you explain any of this? So for a long time, the shores of Lake Nyos were considered haunted and taboo. Only later, people, people ignoring the local traditions and taboos settled there. So, you know, if you had come from a family that had lived in that area forever, you probably built your house up in Upper Neos. And the reason for that had kind of gotten lost over the years. It wasn't like people were like, oh, we live up here because that lake explodes and kills everybody sometimes. That was. That wasn't it. It was just sort of. Now it's become tradition, and there's, like, a taboo about being down by the lake. So then other groups of people moved in in the 60s, and those are the ones who were living on the lake shore. Who then, when this thing happened, ended up, you know, being obliterated by this. [00:33:32] Speaker B: So I. So I demand to know why I'm. Why we haven't been warned about this, why nobody is talking about it. This feels like it should be gigantic news. [00:33:44] Speaker A: It's in part, I mean, in part because it's Africa and you know, nobody's interested in anything that happens in Africa. And in part because this was so rare that literally a scientist had proposed an explanation for this when the initial thing happened and like was rejected by publication because they were like, that can't be real. [00:34:07] Speaker B: There's ghosts. [00:34:09] Speaker A: Yeah, there was. So Haralder Sigurdsson, right, who was a volcanologist from the University of Rhode island had gone to Lake Monoun and found no signs of a volcanic eruption, which is what like a lot of people assumed that it would be. He detected no indication of temperature increase in the water, no disturbance of the lake bed, no sulfur compounds. But he did find something super weird when he took a water sample bottle from the lake depths. He picked it up and put the lid on it and the lid popped right off. Oh, what do you think that is, Mark? [00:34:48] Speaker B: Uh, it's some kind of gas, isn't it? The fucking water is giving off some sort of messed up vapor. [00:34:59] Speaker A: Yeah, and not even an unusual messed up vapor. It's carbon dioxide. [00:35:04] Speaker B: So natural pop. Then there's soda coming out of the fucking. [00:35:08] Speaker A: There's evil soda rising from this lake. And the thing about CO2 is at high concentration it displaces oxygen air that is 5% carbon dioxide. Snuffs out candles and car engines. 10% carbon dioxide level causes people to hyperventilate, grow dizzy and eventually lapse into a coma. At 30% people gasp and drop dead. It's also colorless and odorless. So Sigurdson realized that carbon monoxide from magma degassing under Lake Monoun had percolated up onto the lake's bottom layers of water for years or centuries even creating a giant hidden time bomb. And then yeah, the penta, like it's just one of those it was only a matter of time sort of things. The pent up gas dissolved in the water he believed had suddenly exploded and released a wave of concentrated carbon dioxide. Nobody had ever seen this before. Yeah, that's literally how it was described as being like seltzer. He wrote up his findings calling the phenomenon a hitherto unknown natural hazard that could wipe out entire towns. And a few months before the Neos disaster he submitted that study to Science, the prestigious US journal and they rejected the paper as far fetched. And the theory remained unknown except to a few specialists. Okay, so that is exactly what was happening. Lake Nios Nyos is really deep. It's 682ft and rests atop a porous carrot shaped deposit of volcanic rubble. Carbon dioxide may remain from this old activity, from old eruptions, or it could be forming now. Wherever it comes from, Underwater springs transport the gases upward and into the deep lake bottom water. There, under pressure from the lake water above, the gas accumulates. Pressure keeps the CO2 from coalescing into bubbles, exactly as the cap on a seltzer bottle keeps soda from fizzing. [00:37:04] Speaker B: Not to want to lower the tone this early in the cast, but it sounds to me as though these villagers were killed by Earth farts, mate. [00:37:15] Speaker A: Basically, yeah. [00:37:16] Speaker B: That's what must be going on there. [00:37:18] Speaker A: Yeah, Pretty much that occurred to me while reading it as well. So, you know, I think that that's sort of inevitable. [00:37:26] Speaker B: If I've learned anything from listening to. [00:37:28] Speaker A: This show, it's stay the fuck away. [00:37:30] Speaker B: From lakes all the time. [00:37:32] Speaker A: I know. [00:37:33] Speaker B: Just don't get in them, don't walk near them, don't live nearby them. [00:37:38] Speaker A: Yeah. Don't put a village next to it. It's true, I wasn't intentionally making this the theme of joag, but it does seem the more that we learn, the more lakes have been trusted. So, in short, something must have, like, disrupted the gas and, like, caused a mixing of the waters. This could have been a sudden drop in temperature in the water that caused it to mix in ways that it wouldn't normally. Or that rumbling that was heard may have been a rock slide and just boulders dropping into the water disrupted it, causing a geyser of this to, you know, come out and just kill everyone where they stood. [00:38:19] Speaker B: It's amazing how absolutely perfectly you are describing Earth farts. Something fell in that it didn't agree with, bubbled up a little bit, didn't sit quite. Villagers dead. [00:38:34] Speaker A: You're right. I can't argue with this. I mean, I want to, but there's nothing I can say. Everything you've said is correct here. So, yeah, what they've done, essentially, which maybe takes it away, hopefully from that particular analogy, is that they figured out that they could put, like, a pipe in there that, like, releases it, releases that, like, gas so that it doesn't build up. [00:39:03] Speaker B: So this is some kind of fart shunt. That's exactly what it is. It's a guff siphon. [00:39:08] Speaker A: God damn it. God damn it. [00:39:12] Speaker B: Not to make light of the scale of the tragedy on the sphere here. It's your. Yeah, it's just your regular Joanne warning that we're not taking the piss. We're not. It is, it is. [00:39:23] Speaker A: But the phenomenon is extremely interesting. And that, of course, yeah, they wanted to make sure that this wasn't just going to happen again. Like, eventually people forget it happened and then more people move back over there and then. And this happens over and over again for all time. So, yeah, they built like this, like, pipe that is supposed to sort of get that out. So it like kind of goes off like a geyser. Like a little Old Faithful kind of situation. Lets out some of that carbon dioxide pressure and hopefully keeps it from being like just this powder keg, this like bomb down there to explode. But it's very expensive to maintain. And also they're like, one bite, it might not do it. There's every chance that it might still do this again. And Lake Meos has not claimed its last victims. [00:40:14] Speaker B: Better out than in. [00:40:18] Speaker A: That is what they say, you know? You know that joke? That joke is in Shrek from that actor you hate. [00:40:26] Speaker B: So another time. But I do, for the record, I fucking do. I would push him into a fucking gut lake any day of the week. I hate his guts. [00:40:33] Speaker A: So am I right? That is a horror movie scenario. [00:40:36] Speaker B: Yes. Completely, Completely. [00:40:39] Speaker A: Just I. The image of people just, like, where they are. Can you imagine the guy, like the guy walking from town, seeing all the dead bodies, encountering his friend and wanting to be like, don't. Yeah, yeah, but just. [00:40:54] Speaker B: And the fact that there was absolutely no sound, you know what I mean? It was silent but deadly, you know? [00:41:00] Speaker A: Sake, Mark. [00:41:05] Speaker B: Do you know what I mean? It couldn't be his. [00:41:08] Speaker A: We quit this show. Oh, my.