Toccoa River

Benton, Tennessee, population 1500.

It's a small town nestled on the banks of the Ocoee River, where everyone knows everyone.

And that's especially true at the Ocoee Dam Deli and Diner, where the Second Amendment is celebrated and the chicken tenders are damn good.

The atmosphere is great.

[crickets chirping] [fire crackling] Tilley Bend Baptist Church sits tucked away in the thick forests of Georgia's Blue Ridge Mountains, where winding roads cut through steep hills, and isolated mountain communities trace their roots back to the 19th century.

Located along Old Dial Road in rural Fannin County, not far from the Toccoa River, the church that's there today is a modern wooden building, its dark brown exterior standing in stark contrast to the greenery of the surrounding forest.

Like many of the places we've visited over the years, a- at first glance, there isn't much about this little country church that would suggest anything out of the ordinary.

After all, it's served as a place of worship for generations of local families, with a congregation whose history dates all the way back to 1858.

But according to an old piece of local lore passed down through generations of families in these mountains, the strange, seemingly supernatural activity there might just have something to do with one particular woman who is buried there, a woman known as Elizabeth Bradley to her loved ones, but, uh, to most everyone else, well, they call her the Witch of Tilley Bend.

According to legend, toward the end of the 19th century, two families living in the mountains of north Georgia became embroiled in a bitter feud that would ultimately bring death and tragedy to this small mountain community.

They were the Tilleys and the Stanleys, two prominent families whose settlements were located just a few miles apart near the banks of the Toccoa River.

Now, exactly what started the trouble between these folks has long been lost to time.

The history of the church at the center of the story begins in the 1850s.

On December 19, 1857, Martin Free deeded three acres of land near the Toccoa River to a group of local believers.

The following year, they organized Mount Pleasant Baptist Church and constructed a log church using timber cut from the nearby farm of Isaac Davis.

The church became much more than somewhere people gathered on Sundays.

Over time, the Tilley name became so closely associated with the area that both the bend in the river and eventually the church itself carried the family name, Tilley.

The landscape looks somewhat different than it does today, obviously.

The original church sat closer to the Toccoa River long before the creation of Lake Blue Ridge.

When the Toccoa Electric Power Company constructed a hydroelectric dam in the late 1920s, the reservoir flooded the original church property.