Kile Glover was the entertainer in the family, the pride of his stepfather, the R&B superstar Usher. He sang, he danced – he burned CDs of his own music, styled the covers with self-made art and was otherwise expressing his creativity in internet videos before it was trendy. “He would’ve been a YouTube sensation by now,” says his mother, the celebrity stylist Tameka Foster. But that future was thwarted on a family trip to Lake Lanier, just outside his Atlanta home town, in July 2012.
Kile was only 11 when he was struck by a speeding jetski while tubing and knocked unconscious. Foster, on the island of Saint Martin at the time, managed to get to Kile’s hospital bedside within hours thanks to Usher sending a private plane – an olive branch that came amid a bitterly public custody battle over their two younger sons. As Kile lay on life support, Foster passed the time Googling for information about Lake Lanier. She is still horrified by what she learned.
A reservoir fed by the Chattahoochee and Chestatee rivers in the Blue Ridge mountain foothills that is more than twice the area of Manhattan, Lake Lanier juts north-eastward from the city of Atlanta like a forked tongue, portending danger. It is reputed to be one of the US’s most dangerous lakes, up there with the far larger Great Lakes, with an estimated 700 fatalities over the past 70 years. According to Georgia’s department of natural resources (DNR), the authority responsible for policing the lake, 233 of those deaths have occurred in the last 20 years. But it is the particularly mysterious nature of many of these incidents that fuels talk that this recreational idyll is cursed by restless spirits. “If people really knew what was underneath the water still,” says Dave Kahn, a lake resident and pleasure cruise operator, “they’d think twice about partying here.”
