>>52830537Lake 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.
Buried in the lake’s waters are untold lost bodies, they say — the victims of a centuries-old ghost who regularly drags young men to their graves.
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 stabs herself in the heart.
According to locals, who love to retell the tragic tale in one version or another, every year since, “The Lady of the Lake’’ has made it her mission to grab a young man from her watery grave to replace her lost love.
Drowning statistics back up the legend, some residents said.
There were at least 160 drownings at the lake between the mid- to late 1800s and late 1970s, averaging well over one a year — and only three victims were women
longtime Lake Ronkonkoma lifeguard David Igneri, 74, who has a doctorate in colonial American history, said that in the 34 years he helped guard the lake’s beaches starting in the 1960s, there were 30 drownings alone — all male victims.
