The Lost Colony – America’s Original Mystery

The Lost Colony is America’s first mystery – the original “urban legend”.

In 1587, a group of 117 men, women, and children left England on a ship the size of a school bus to try to start their nation’s first permanent village on the North American continent. Two of the women were pregnant. They all survive the 10-week voyage, making a home on Roanoke Island at an abandoned fort. But only one month into their new life, they are struggling. The group asks its leader, John White, to return to England for necessities.

White had welcomed the birth of his granddaughter, Virginia Dare — England’s first child born in the new land — just a few days before the group’s request. When White returned three years later, his family and all the other colonists were gone, vanished without explanation.

They became known simply as The Lost Colony of Roanoke.

The colonists’ homes appeared to have been dismantled and removed, and the only clue to the group’s whereabouts was the letters CROATOAN carved into a post and CRO carved into a tree. White tried to reach Croatoan Island, now called Hatteras Island, but a hurricane forced his ship to return to England.

The story of the unexplained disappearance of the first English colonists to settle on Roanoke Island in 1587 was first made into a silent film in 1921, called The Lost Colony. It was filmed entirely on the Outer Banks and it was the first movie ever produced in North Carolina.

Elizabeth Grimball, the director of the 1921 film on the Lost Colony, is shown with the cinematographer in this undated newspaper clipping. A native of North Carolina, Grimball was hired by the Atlas Film Company to direct the production.

Elizabeth Grimball, the director of the 1921 film ‘The Lost Colony’, is shown with the cinematographer in this undated newspaper clipping. A native of North Carolina, Grimball was hired by the Atlas Film Company to direct the production.

In the early 20th century, a group was formed to create a “pageant” of the story — an oratorio of the events using pantomime, music, and narration. W.O. Sounders, editor of the Elizabeth City Independent was a passionate proponent of these plans.

But due to the national financial depression, the plans remained dormant until Roanoke Island native and Dare County School superintendent Mabel Evans Jones awakened interest with the 1921 silent film The Lost Colony, which she conceived, wrote, produced, and starred in.

The finished film toured across North Carolina and was the first silent film produced in the state.

The film was restored and screened at the Roanoke Island landmark The Pioneer Theater in 2012.

A scene from ‘The Lost Colony,’ a silent film from 1921 that is being clearly seen for the first time in decades since an old version emerged during a storage-room cleanup recently. The film has been digitized, and historians are getting a fresh look at a 90-year-old interpretation of the famous story. (The Roanoke Island Historical Association)

After her successful film, Jones and other community leaders then create a dramatic pageant based on her film script. On Virginia Dare’s birthday in 1925 a lost colony pageant was performed “sound side” against the natural backdrop of the Roanoke Sound. The “pageant” was very successful and organizers sought to build on their achievement in their preparations for the 350th anniversary of Virginia Dare’s birth. They approached North Carolina playwright Paul Green about developing a new pageant script.

The resulting play written by Green first opened on July 4, 1937. Though it was originally meant to run for only one season, The Lost Colony is now the longest running outdoor symphonic drama in America. Actor and longtime Manteo, North Carolina resident Andy Griffith was among the most famous alumni of the production.

The Lost Colony has been referenced numerous times in various media throughout popular culture, including when the first English child born in what would become America, Virginia Dare, was the main villain in the short-lived television show FreakyLinks. Inspired by The X-Files and The Blair Witch Project, the series premiered on Fox in 2000 and followed a young man who took over his twin brother’s paranormal website, Freakylinks, after his death.

It was later found that his brother’s death was related to his investigations into the Lost Colony of Roanoke Island. It was implied that Virginia Dare was a demon who destroyed the colonists, either directly or indirectly; however, the show was canceled before the end of the first season, and the mystery was never resolved.

The story of the Lost Colony was also the inspiration for the 2007 SyFy network supernatural film Lost Colony (aka Wraiths of Roanoke), and was significantly referenced in the 1998 film Phantoms, which was based on a 1983 novel of the same name written by Dean Koontz; and in the 2010 film Vanishing on 7th Street (below), starring Hayden Christensen (Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith).

The Lost Colony of Roanoke’s mysterious CROATOAN message referenced in ‘Vanishing on 7th Street’ (2010)

Virginia Dare and The Lost Colony were featured prominently in a 2013 episode of the FOX TV series Sleepy Hollow, which is filmed in nearby Wilmington, North Carolina.

The Lost Colony was briefly mentioned in a 2011 episode of the hit FX series American Horror Story‘s first season, before the show based an entire season around it five years later, with a reimagined version of The Lost Colony at the center of American Horror Story: Roanoke, the sixth season of the popular anthology series, which premiered in 2016. On the show, Lady Gaga (pictured below) portrays Scáthach, an immortal witch (the first “supreme”) who bestows evil powers on Kathy Bates’ character, Thomasin, leading to the destruction of the Roanoke colony, which is the basis for the “Lost Colony” narrative in this take on the story.

Lady Gaga in ‘American Horror Story: Roanoke’

The History channel focused on the mystery in a 2024 episode of In Search Of.

In addition to numerous unscripted investigative series and specials that have explored this mystery, there is no end in sight, with Variety reporting in November 2024 on the upcoming feature film thriller Croatoan, directed by Britt Bankhead, who also stars in the film as “a father, whose family road trip leads him to a desolate small town. After his son disappears, Bankhead’s character resorts to teaming with two detectives and parsing the community’s oddballs to investigate the local, supernatural legend of ‘Croatoan.'” While plot details around the mystery remain unknown, the film’s title has historical significance for being the only complete word found by European visitors to Roanoke Island, who arrived on site to discover that more the more than 100 English colonists had disappeared.