Six Flags Over Georgia

Near the front of Six Flags Over Georgia, the amusement park in Austell west of Atlanta, the story goes that a blonde girl of about nine runs up to guests. She's crying for her mother. Some version of "Mommy, Mommy, please help me find my Mommy" — and then, within about ten yards, she's gone.

An amusement park is the wrong setting for a ghost story. No old house, no battlefield, no centuries of grief. The park opened June 16, 1967, and the legends started almost as fast as the rides. As the legend tells it, the girl was struck and killed by a car near here in the early 1970s. No record confirms it — no name, no date, nothing outside the lore itself. Just the running, the crying, and the few yards before she disappears.

The other ghosts here are performers, which is the strange part. Take Joe.

The legend says Joe was an actor cast to star in the opening number of the very first show at the Crystal Pistol Music Hall in 1967. On his way to work, the story goes, he was killed in a car accident — before he ever stepped on stage. He's been seen since, they say, standing at the edge of the Crystal Pistol balcony, watching the performances he never got to join. Employees report a man singing backstage when nobody's there. Props vanish from the stage and turn up by the railroad tracks beside the building. They blame Joe.

Down in Lickskillet, the park's Old West section, the railroad bridge has its own figures. People report apparitions in 1800s clothing crossing it — said to be echoes of actors from an early Six Flags show that staged an 1800s train robbery.

So the hauntings here aren't tied to a crime or a graveyard. They're tied to the shows. An actor who never made his debut, train robbers who left an impression behind. According to the lore, the figures in 1800s clothing still cross the Lickskillet bridge, dressed for a train robbery the park stopped staging decades ago.