Overview
Roanoke Island lies between the Outer Banks and the North Carolina mainland, and on it in 1587 England planted a colony that history lost: when supply ships returned in 1590 the settlers — men, women and children, including Virginia Dare, the first English child born in America — were gone, leaving the word CROATOAN carved at their fort. The disappearance remains genuinely unresolved, studied by archaeologists to this day, and around it has grown four centuries of legend. The best known is the White Doe, a tale that imagines Virginia Dare transformed, glimpsed pale among the trees; islanders and visitors have also told of ghost lights in the maritime woods near the fort site, figures on the old shorelines at dusk, and voices carried on the sound. Fort Raleigh National Historic Site preserves the colony's traces, and the long-running outdoor drama The Lost Colony retells the story each summer. The record should keep the documented mystery in the foreground and present the legends as exactly that — folklore grown over a genuine unknown.