Est. 1989 · Live Music History · Atlanta Entertainment · Lakewood Fairgrounds (1916–) · Southeastern Fair (1915–1975) · Lakewood Speedway (1917–1979)
The Cellairis Amphitheatre at Lakewood — long known simply as Lakewood Amphitheatre — opened in July 1989 on a 75-acre wooded portion of the historic Lakewood Fairgrounds, roughly four miles south of downtown Atlanta. Built at a reported cost of $10 million, the venue was designed from the outset for large-scale popular music, with 7,000 fixed seats and a 12,000-capacity lawn for a combined capacity of 18,920. The amphitheatre is operated by Live Nation and has cycled through a series of naming-rights agreements: Coca-Cola Lakewood Amphitheatre (1989–1998), Lakewood Amphitheatre (1999–2000), HiFi Buys Amphitheatre (2001–2007), Lakewood Amphitheatre again (2008–2009), Aaron's Amphitheatre at Lakewood (2009–2015), and Cellairis Amphitheatre at Lakewood from 2018 forward.
The site has been a center of Atlanta public gathering for more than a century. The Lakewood Fairgrounds were established in 1916 on 117 acres around a 15-acre lake and served as the home of the Southeastern Fair, an annual event sponsored by the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce from 1915 to 1975. The fairgrounds once featured the Greyhound, a wooden roller coaster built in 1915 and operated until 1974, which appeared in all three Smokey and the Bandit films. The adjacent Lakewood Speedway — a one-mile dirt track known as 'The Indianapolis of the South' — operated from 1917 until September 1979 and is documented as the site of multiple fatal racing incidents, including the 1946 deaths of Champ-car drivers George Robson and George Barringer in a four-car crash, the 1950 death of stock-car driver Skimp Hersey from burn injuries, the 1952 death of Frank Luptow when his axle failed, and the 1958 death of USAC driver Art Bisch after a guardrail crash. The surrounding Lakewood Heights neighborhood was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2002 for its concentration of late-19th- and early-20th-century Folk Victorian, Craftsman, bungalow, and shotgun houses.
Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hi-Fi_Buys_Amphitheater
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakewood_Fairgrounds
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakewood_Speedway
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakewood_Heights,_Atlanta
- https://exploregeorgia.org/atlanta/arts-culture/music/lakewood-amphitheatre
- https://georgiaracinghistory.com/2012/08/10/the-history-of-lakewood-speedway/
Touching/pushing
The paranormal folklore attached to the amphitheatre originates from a single anonymous submission to the Shadowlands Haunted Places Index, one of the oldest crowd-sourced databases of American haunted locations. The account describes a rock performer fatally shot on stage by a gunshot fired from within the seating bowl, with witnesses reporting a hand felt on the back of the neck while seated in that section.
No concert fatality matching this description appears in Atlanta Journal-Constitution archives, Fulton County records, or any verifiable news source. The venue's Wikipedia entry, concert archive databases, and Live Nation's event history contain no record of an on-stage shooting death. The claim exists only in paranormal aggregator databases, all of which trace back to the same original submission.
What the site does carry is more than a century of documented loss — racing fatalities at the adjacent Lakewood Speedway from 1946 through 1958, and the slow disappearance of the Southeastern Fair and its Greyhound roller coaster after 1974. Without a named artist, dated incident, or corroborating source, the concert-shooting account is preserved here as folklore rather than documented history, while the broader fairgrounds carry a verified record of early-20th-century public-amusement tragedy.
