Indian Princess

The myths and legends surrounding Lake Ronkonkoma would be easy to dismiss as silly superstition were it not for the eerie reality: For many decades, someone drowned in Lake Ronkonkoma almost every year.

Lake Ronkonkoma is Long Island's biggest and deepest lake. For some time, Indians thought the lake was bottomless because people who had drowned there would often just disappear, their bodies never recovered. However, even though this myth persists, the lake is certainly not bottomless; it measures about 70 feet at its deepest point.

The most prevalent legend is about Princess Ronkonkoma, an Indian princess who died at the lake in the mid-1600s. One version of the story is that she was walking across the ice one winter when she met and fell in love with an English woodcutter named Hugh Birdsall, who lived across the lake. However, her father—chief of the Setauket tribe—forbade their relationship. So every day for 7 years, she would write letters on pieces of bark, row to the middle of the lake, and float the letters across the lake to Hugh. Then, after all those years of being kept apart from her love, she rowed to the middle of the lake and stabbed herself to death.

https://patch.com/new-york/sachem/the-legends-of-lake-ronkonkoma