By Charles Shiver
IRWIN CO., Ga. – As summer begins to burn out, and Halloween time approaches with green nuts growing thicker on the pecan trees and colorful sunsets appearing earlier each evening in the western sky, I begin more often to remember beautiful places that I visited as a child during the hottest months.
One of those treasured settings was Crystal Lake, a privately-owned, once-popular water resort in Irwin County, 15 miles east of Ashburn. I recall the tiny fish that would nibble on your leg hairs as you waded in shorts out into the cool currents, and paddle wheel boats that you would move around the lake surface by turning pedals inside the vessels with your sunburned feet.
This Crystal Lake was the last location you would associate with the same place named in the “Friday the 13th” horror movies featuring the machete-wielding, hockey-mask-wearing maniac Jason. Still, some folks cite the resort area’s original name of “Bone Pond” in a grisly legend dating back to the Civil War era. They speculate that this unique body of water is cursed.
According to one version of the legend, an old Justice of the Peace named Jack Walker was hunting for his hogs that had roamed into that area, where a runaway slave named Toney was hiding out. A Yankee sympathizer named Willie Bone was running a gristmill on the lake. Bone tried to hide Toney, but Jack Walker found the slave and tried to take Toney into custody. Bone ended up trying to kill old man Walker by either shooting him or braining him with a rock, and then buried the body in mud.
Walker wasn’t completely dead, however. He tried to struggle out of his premature grave before he succumbed to the dirt filling his airways and lungs. Searchers found one of Walker’s hands reaching out of the mud.
There weren’t any courts during the war, but the authorities empaneled a jury. The jury found Bone guilty and hung him at the lake.
Storytellers say that Toney also was murdered and his body was dumped in the deepest part of the lake.
The legend holds that right after Bone was hung, the water rose up in the lake to the eaves of the mill house, and the gristmill disappeared into the lake.
Another version of the story claims that the supernatural vanishing of the mill is mere fiction. In this account, water did rise up on the old gristmill after Bone was hung, but owners in later years finally moved it or sold it for junk.
Some locals have continued to claim over the years that Toney’s ghost has been seen rising to the lake’s surface, Walker’s spirit walking on the sand, and Bone’s apparition lurking by the tree. On certain moonlit nights, the slave’s spectral hands may be seen reaching up out of the dark waters as if begging for help, or so the story goes.
In the 1920s, investors renamed the 100-acre natural resource from Bone Pond to Crystal Lake. They opened the lake to area residents as a water park with swimming, dancing, bowling, skating, water slides, and more. The lake had crystal clear water with a beach consisting of more than a mile of beautiful white sand. The owners began marketing the resort in newspaper ads and on car bumper stickers as “Crystal Beach.”
Still, disquieting incidents continued to happen. One summer night, a party on the shore broke up in hysteria when the revelers believed they saw the Devil himself rise up from the lake’s depths (that must have been some awesome shindig!).
The storytellers say several people drowned in the lake and it was bottomless at the deep end, twisting down into dark underwater caverns. (One account was that a scuba diver went down and never came back up.)
However, according to the USGenWeb Archives, while apparently supported by hidden underground streams, the lake was at most 75 feet deep in the deepest area (which is still surprising for a body of water in South Georgia). Owners over the years tried to cement the limestone drain that emptied the lake underground occasionally into the Alapaha River.
It appears that Crystal Lake’s reputed “curse” finally caught up with the tourist destination circa 1998. The families of a couple of youths who did drown in the lake sued the resort. Attendance plummeted as South Georgians pursued other newer entertainment venues. The cost of maintaining the lake and ensuring it was full for water recreation became too high. The resort finally closed to the public.
Today, the water slides and beach pavilion rust and crumble silently, alternately baked by the pitiless Southern sun and battered by storms. The lake has dried up, leaving behind what resembles a desolate moon crater surrounded by heavy brush in the most recent aerial photos I have seen online. The owners now use the area for a hunting club, and no trespassing is allowed.
I imagine if anyone who knows the water park’s story were allowed to visit the ghost resort Crystal Lake at dusk, he would still hear the faint echoes of children’s laughter and see the dim outlines of swimmers splashing in phantom waters from a long time ago…
COVER PHOTO: Brian Brown, VanishingSouthGeorgia.com
Find more about Brian Brown and his work here, and here.
NOTE FROM EDITOR: Look forward to a profile on Brian Brown and his successful Vanishing South Georgia project.
