MYTHS OF LAKE RONKONKOMA
Suicidal Princess
Maiden in the Lake
The Bottomless Theory
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Lake Ronkonkoma has been called a place of haunting mystery. There has always been speculation and wonder about its source of fresh water and its unexplained tendency to rise and fall periodically with no apparent relationship to the local rainfall.
Many legends, myths, and superstitions about Lake Ronkonkoma were based on the theory that the lake was bottomless. One of the better-known stories told of a man who dropped a weighted fish line into the hole in the lake and failed to reach bottom. With retelling, the length of the line had grown to be a thousand feet but the story was accepted as being true. There is another story about a wagon that disappeared in the hole and was later found in the Great South Bay.
Another legend, known as the Birdsall Legend, is about a beautiful Indian princess who fell in love with a settler named Hugh Birdsall. Birdsall lived in a log hut on the Connetquot River. The princess was not permitted to see or marry Hugh and for seven years she sent messages to him on bits of bark that floated underground from the lake to his hut. After seven years of waiting, she paddled out to the middle of the lake in her canoe. The next day the canoe carrying her dead body floated down the Connetquot River to her lover. He leaped into the canoe and together they were swept out to sea. The lake is said to weep for her every seven years.
Some of the romance and mystery that had been attached to the lake was dispelled when Hal Fullerton, the Long Island Railroad Experimental Farm Director, and recognized authority on the history of Lake Ronkonkoma, announced that the bottomless theory was false. Deep-sea sounding methods found the deepest part of the lake to be about seventy feet. According to the New York State Conservation Department, this depth was considered most extraordinary however, as Ronkonkoma is only about sixty feet above sea level.