TLDR
Lake Ronkonkoma on Long Island has recorded 166 drownings since 1893, almost all young men. The legend blames Tuskawanta, a Setauket chief's daughter who killed herself in the lake after her English lover abandoned her, and locals say she pulls one man under each year to replace him.
The Full Story
One hundred and sixty-six men have drowned in Lake Ronkonkoma since 1893. Only three of the victims were women.
Long Island's largest freshwater lake sits in the middle of Suffolk County, a glacial kettle lake formed 17,000 years ago when a massive ice block broke off from the retreating glacier and melted into the earth. It's about 70 feet deep at its southwestern corner, though for centuries the Setauket people believed it had no bottom at all. Stories persisted of fishermen dropping a thousand feet of weighted line without hitting anything solid.
The legend centers on a woman named Tuskawanta (sometimes called Princess Ronkonkoma), daughter of the Setauket chief. Sometime in the mid-1600s, she met an English woodcutter named Hugh Birdsall while walking across the frozen lake. Her father forbade the relationship. For seven years, she paddled to the center of the lake and floated love letters written on strips of bark across the water to Birdsall. He never answered. She rowed out one final time and stabbed herself in the heart.
Hugh Birdsall was a real person. He eventually moved back to England and married someone else.
The curse, as locals tell it, is straightforward: every year since her death, the Lady of the Lake pulls a young man under the water to replace the lover she lost. Dr. David Igneri, who served as head lifeguard at the lake for 32 summers, documented at least 30 drownings during his tenure. Every single one was male. "You can't explain that statistically," he told Patch in 2010. The pattern held so consistently that parents on Long Island grew up hearing their mothers say the same thing: stay out of that lake.
The water cooperates with the legend. Visibility drops to zero past ten feet. The lake bed is smooth sand in the shallows, then drops off sharply into what locals call "the hole" near the southwestern bank. A diving platform built there in the early 1900s became a drowning magnet. Swimmers would step off the sandy shelf into 70 feet of dark water. Ropes were eventually strung across the area as warnings.
There's also the matter of bodies showing up in the wrong places. A murdered Connecticut bootlegger surfaced along the lake's banks in the 1930s with his hat, wallet, and flask still on him. In other cases, drowning victims were reportedly recovered far from where they went under. Early settlers claimed a wagon that fell into the lake resurfaced in the Great South Bay, miles away. A U.S. Government survey eventually explained the mystery: the lake functions as a natural well, tapping directly into Long Island's underground water table. That groundwater connection also explains why the lake's water level rises and falls independently of rainfall. One early 1900s study recorded a 52-inch rainfall deficit in a single year, yet the lake rose seven feet.
Dr. Frederick Mather of the New York Fish Commission found something else odd when he stocked the lake with bass and trout: water temperatures were roughly 12 degrees warmer at depth than at the surface. Reports from the same era mention a powerful whirlpool forming periodically in the lake's center.
The drownings have slowed in recent decades. The last was a woman in 2017, and before that, two men in 2012 and 2013. But the legend hasn't loosened its grip on Long Island. In 2017, sculptor Todd Arnett began carving a 32-foot statue of Tuskawanta from a dying European copper beech tree on Virginia Schutte's property near the shore. The tree was one of five originally grown in Scandinavia, transported to England, and brought to Ronkonkoma by the Newton family generations ago. Arnett's princess holds a cormorant and gazes out over the water. The wood has since begun to rot, and her arms have fallen away.
"I don't think she's evil," Schutte told SciFisland. "I think she's heartbroken. But I still wouldn't go in."
Researched from 6 verified sources. How we research.
