It was a story that Mary Beth McConnell—an only child, a bit of a renegade, single-minded—could understand. Virginia Dare was the first English child born in America. She was Governor White’s granddaughter and was one of the Lost Colonists. Presumably, the history books reported, she died with them at, or on the way to, Hatteras. But as Mary Beth continued her research she learned that not long after the disappearance of the colonists, when more British began to settle on the Eastern Seaboard, local legends about the Lost Colony began to spring up.

One tale was that the colonists weren’t killed right away but survived and continued to live among the local tribes. Virginia Dare grew into a beautiful young woman—blond and fair-skinned, strong-willed and independent. A medicine man fell in love with her but she rejected him and not long after that she disappeared. The medicine man claimed he hadn’t harmed her but, because she rejected his love, he’d turned her into a white deer.

No one believed him, of course, but soon people in the area began seeing a beautiful white doe who seemed to be the leader of all the animals in the woods. The tribe, frightened by the doe’s apparent powers, held a contest to capture her.

One young brave managed to track her down and made a nearly impossible shot with a silver-tipped arrow. It pierced her chest and as she lay dying the doe looked up at the hunter with chillingly human eyes.

He stammered, “Who are you?”

“Virginia Dare,” the deer whispered and died.

Mary Beth had decided to look into the story of the White Doe in earnest. Spending long days and nights in academic archives at UNC at Chapel Hill and at Duke University, reading old diaries and journals from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, she found a number of references to “white deer” and mysterious “white beasts” in northeastern North Carolina. But the sightings weren’t on either Roanoke or Hatteras. The creatures were seen along the “Black-water banks where the Serpentine river flowes west from the Great Swamp.”

Mary Beth knew the power of legend and how there is often truth in even the most fanciful tales. She reasoned that maybe the Lost Colonists, afraid of attack by the local tribes, had left the word “Croatoan” to lead off their attackers and escaped not south but west, where they settled along the banks of the, yes, serpentine Paquenoke River—near Tanner’s Corner in what was now called Blackwater Landing. There the Lost Colonists grew more and more powerful and the Indians—fearful of the threat—attacked and killed them. Virginia Dare, Mary Beth allowed herself to speculate, interpreting the legend of the White Doe, might have been one of the last settlers alive, fighting to the death.