Tui Snider Offbeat & Overlooked: Submerged Cemeteries & Mermaids

Earlier this year Tui Snider asked if I’d like to be a guest on her Tui Snider Offbeat & Overlooked YouTube Channel. There was only one way to answer: You betcha!

Tui is simply lovely —and lively. I wish I could remember how it was I first came to know her, but my mind is failing. I want to say I asked her to be a guest some years back when I had a weekly show on Paramania Radio. Had we discussed her book, Understanding Cemetery Symbols: A Field Guide for Historic Graveyards (Messages from the Dead)? I’m thinking that we had.

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Anyway, around the time she asked if I’d like to be a guest I had the Nashville mermaid on my mind. I also thought Tui’s show was still more cemetery-focused, and I was positive I’d seen a marking for a submerged cemetery on one of the nautical charts I’d been looking at for Percy Priest Lake.

Um, maybe I should back up up a second.

The Nashville Mermaid

I had noticed on a discovery+ paranormal programming highlight earlier this year that one of the Paranormal Caught on Camera episodes was called “Mermaid in Nashville.” Since I live in Nashville, and we have a boat on one of the lakes, I wondered if the Nashville mermaid lived in Percy Priest Lake.

Turns out, that’s exactly where she’d been spotted. I got excited because our boat slip faces the dam, which is where it looked like the mermaid footage was caught.

I was pretty sure there were no mermaids really living in Percy Priest. As I dove into the case more, with the help of a fellow HJ writer, William Uchtman, and one of our boat neighbors, Richmond, however, it led me to AquaMermaid School. Which confirmed my suspicions: the Nashville mermaid was not real. The spot near the dam is where the Nashville AquaMermaids sometimes meet up for a mermaid swim. That’s probably what the woman who caught the footage had filmed.

A Cemetery Under Percy Priest Lake?

Another thing I was sure that I had spotted was a submerged cemetery while checking out the chart for Percy Priest Lake on my Navionics app.

Percy Priest Lake is a reservoir operated by the US Army Corps of Engineers. It was created when the Stones River was dammed up back in the 1960s. According to the Davidson County Cemetery Survey Project, in order to do it, “the federal government acquired 20,000 acres of land, located in Davidson, Wilson and Rutherford counties.”

Well, that included relocating people —both the living and the dead. For the dead, that meant relocating 2,243 graves from 97 cemeteries. They were moved to either Mt. Juliet Cemetery or a cemetery designated by family members or descendants. It also involved the removal and re-setting of 478 gravestones and monuments, as well as the installation of 1,738 new concrete graves markers and 109 Section markers.

The Navionics chart indicates submerged bridges, buildings, roadbeds, and even churches.

 

 

 

There are many cemeteries around the lake, but I swear I saw the word “cemetery” IN the lake one time when I was scanning a chart. However, if it exists, I can’t find it now.

Am I misremembering? Did I just get confused with the church symbol and mistook it for a cemetery?

I’ll never know, but if I ever do come across a marking for a submerged cemetery again, you better believe I’ll screenshot it immediately!

Tui Snider Offbeat & Overlooked

So the Nashville mermaid and submerged cemeteries are what I’ll discuss with Tui on May 13 at 4 pm Central (5 pm Eastern/2 pm Pacific).

It’ll be live, but you can also watch the recording if you miss it.

Check-In

Do you know of any lakes with submerged cemeteries?