a fishy tale of lake lanier

Last month (July 2026) I traveled to Dawsonville, GA to go to a lake house my father had rented for some family vacation time. After much driving, I arrived in the evening, grateful to rest and reconnect with my dad. The rental home was gorgeous and situated on a hilly bank of Lake Lanier. It had a path leading down from the back deck to its own spacious double decker dock. I was very curious to experience the lake as a few of my witchy friends who were familiar with the area had warned me that this lake was very haunted. A brief internet search had yielded a broad array of strange stories and reports about this lake. It was manmade by flooding over towns where unfortunate events had occurred, seemed to have a much higher occurrence of drownings, disappeared bodies and disappeared boats than it should, and even had its own white lady legend. (They refer to her as “the lady of the lake” which is very interesting to me, as I am an Arthurian legend enthusiast.) When I first got down to the dock it was evening, and the lake seemed peaceful and beautiful to me. I’m not easily scared off or turned away by haunting warnings- if anything, I welcome the opportunity to explore a good mystery. I’m a very experienced witch, after all, so what could possibly happen here that I couldn’t handle? I turned in for the night, excited to spend a few days enjoying the lake.

The next morning, I went down to the dock. The sun was warm and so was the water. I decided to take a first quick paddle in one of the kayaks, just to check out the nooks and crannies of the quiet little inlet on which our dock was situated. As I prepared to get in the boat, my dad jokingly said, “Nik, these beginner kayaks are so steady, there is no way for you to tip it. The only thing that could possibly cause you to capsize would be if a giant striper jumped out of the water and landed in your boat!” I chuckled and said, “yeah, right”, dismissing the ridiculous notion. I’m no stranger to a kayak, and I got in the boat and pushed off to begin my paddle. I got the feel for the boat and after about 5 to 10 minutes, I stopped to just quietly float in the open water for a moment, enjoying the extremely quiet tranquility of a remote finger of a large lake on a Monday morning.

I had only stopped paddling for a few moments when there was a startling splashing commotion next to my boat. Water splashed up in front of my face, and I was completely stunned as not one, but two fish leapt up out of the water, landing directly in the tiny opening of the kayak in which I sat. One of the fish was a normal-looking sunfish type of thing, maybe 8 or so inches long, but the other was a huge fish the length of my leg. Now granted, I’m only five foot three, but if you’ve ever sat in a kayak, you know that you are sitting with your legs straight out in front of you, most of your leg underneath the top of the boat. The large fish flung about violently, and I instinctively used my left leg and left arm to pin him in place. I could see that I was bleeding from numerous spots- you see, this fish had a set of jaws that just looked like two foot-long single-bladed saws hinged together, so between his sharp fins and his even sharper set of vicious teeth, his flailing in the small opening of the kayak against my leg was rough. When I pinned him, his jaw got stuck open, the lip of the top of the kayak in his mouth, so he couldn’t move. I was in control for the moment, but his size and strength were immense, and I knew if I let up at all on the pressure I was using with left arm and leg to keep him in place, he would fling up and I’d get cut who knows where. I wasn’t wearing a life jacket (stupid, I know!) and I couldn’t risk him flinging upward and razoring my face in his escape attempt.

I carefully placed the paddle momentarily across my hip crease, taking care not to lose it while I used my right hand to reach in and pick up the smaller fish and throw it back. I then held my kayak paddle upright and very slowly and awkwardly used it to start working my boat closer to shore. Luckily there were no humans in sight. I was not in sight of the dock where my dad and his wife were, and I limped the boat along with this lopsided row, somehow finally getting it to slide up onto the red Georgia clay shore on private property. Keep in mind that I had been working to keep the razor-jawed fish in place with my left arm and leg this whole time. When I made land, I decided that I would need to jump out of the boat as quickly as I could toward the right side, so that as I let up the pressure on the fish on my left side, I had a chance of being clear of his inevitable slashing zone. I held the paddle up in front of my face like a weapon, hoping I might be able to use it to block with if necessary, and made a jump for it. The instant I released the pressure on the fish, just as I anticipated, he hurtled himself up into the air and thankfully, splashed into the water and darted away on the left side of the boat. I stood on the land on the right side of the boat, still incredulous and stunned.

I checked my wounds- I had bleeding scrapes on my left foot, ankle, thigh and arm. They weren’t bleeding too heavily though, so I felt safe to paddle back to my home dock. As I pulled up, my dad and his wife could see I was bleeding, and couldn’t believe the story. “A giant striper really DID jump into your boat??” Dad was shocked. It was not at all lost on me that my dad had spoken in jest, and then the imaginary event had proceeded to manifest. We still don’t know if his joke was a moment of prophecy or of causation, speaking the scene into being. We are, after all, directly descended from Samuel Wardwell of the Salem-hanged, and Samuel was the one person who was actually on record as having real prophetic skill. I cleaned myself up and proceeded to do a Google search for images of stripers. When I saw them online, I knew instantly that that was not my fish. A striper is a striped bass, and that fish looked really normal and unoffensive compared to the one with whom I had grappled.

After some attempts at searches where I described its horrific jaws, I found it. The fish that had crammed itself into my kayak Edward Scissorhands-style was a gar. It is a prehistoric fish, and I verified that they were known to live in Lake Lanier. I had never seen a fish in the wild like this in my life. I urge you to search for images of large gar, so you can picture exactly who I encountered. I was reeling for some time after this whole debacle, still having a hard time believing it had all happened. I was proud of how calm and focused I stayed, and I knew that without a life jacket on, many people would have panicked and gotten much more injured and possibly capsized and maybe even drowned. Having learned that gar could get much bigger than this one, I could also begin to understand how drowned bodies in this lake could easily disappear, possibly being quickly eaten. I definitely felt like I had been tested by the spirits of the lake- its sentience had somehow sensed this too-bold witch and reacted by providing a pretty dangerous jump-scare.

I stayed on the dock, pensive, for quite some time. Eventually, my dad and his wife went back up to the house and I took advantage of the alone time with the lake to do some magick. I took a few strands of my hair and began to work some knot magick of protection into it, speaking into each knot to ensure that I and my family would be protected from any lake or lake-spirit-related-harm for the remainder of the vacation. I would only be there for a few days, but my dad and his wife and my brothers and nephews would be hanging out there over the coming weeks. I didn’t want to make any further presumptions about the spirits or curses of this lake. When I finished my knots, I placed the knotted hair into the lake as an offering, speaking to the lake respectfully. As soon as the barely visible hair was out of my hands, the skies opened and a torrential downpour ensued. Since this was a covered dock, I sat there, dry and sheltered, extremely aware of the obvious purification and energetic reset that this sudden weather was providing. I thoroughly enjoyed sitting down there alone, in the wild weather, the thundering sound of the hurling rains loud on the lake around me. It was a poignant exclamation point of a response to my magick, and I knew that the lake and I were good.

The successive days that I spent there on Lake Lanier were lovely. I swam and kayaked without fear. I saw 20-30 deer a day, numerous bald eagle sightings, had perfect weather, discovered some beautiful kudzu magick, had sacred, close-up encounters with great blue herons twice, and had a nice time with my dad, his wife and my brother. I was able to do some dream divination regarding why I had the gar attack experience, and I dreamt of a spirit craving human attention and energy and using less-than-honest means to get it. The trip overall was very restorative though- you would have never known that I had just been bombarded and cut by a wildly thrashing, three-foot long horror-movie looking gar fish with razor jaws.

I will conclude by saying this: Lake Lanier is no joke, and while deceptively beautiful, its energy is savage and it’s not hard to reveal the anger that simmers beneath its surface. If you go there, don’t do as I did and just start off assuming everything will be fine. Start off on the right foot from the beginning. Speak to the spirits humbly, make sure the lake knows you are an ally, and make offerings. Blessed Be.