The Sound & Shore Folklore Register

Coastal Westchester oral tradition · vol. IV · maintained by volunteers since 1974

Cycle watch Record 14 enters its 300th year on 31 October 2026 — the only open cycle the Register currently holds. Read record 14 →

The Register is a volunteer effort to write down what people along this shoreline have been telling each other for three hundred years — before the last person who heard it firsthand stops being able to tell it.

We hold 141 transcripts covering New Rochelle, Pelham, Larchmont, Mamaroneck and the islands. Six are summarized below; the rest exist on paper in the curator's files and are digitized as volunteers and funds allow. Accounts are transcribed as they are given to us. The Register does not verify them, and asks readers not to treat them as verified.

A painted wooden sign reading Thomas Paine Cottage, 1784-1804, with visiting hours, standing in deep fallen leaves. The dark shingled cottage sits at the end of a path behind it.
Locus — record 14 — The Thomas Paine Cottage, Sicard Avenue, New Rochelle, late October. The ground behind and to the right of the house is the wooded tract described in the 1726 account, and is the only open cycle the Register currently holds. SSFR/NR/14-a

Digitized Records

No.AccountStatus
03

The Drowned Regatta

Larchmont Harbor · first recorded 1887

Eleven boats left the club line in a flat calm and twelve came back across it. The twelfth was never identified and is not in the club's register for that year.

Transcript held
07

The Cart Road Lights

Pelham Manor · first recorded 1902

A double file of lights walking the line of the old cart road — always downhill, always on the night of the first hard frost, never once seen going back up.

Transcript held
09

The Glen Island Bell

New Rochelle · first recorded 1849

A bell heard plainly from the water, on a stretch of years when the island had no bell on it at all.

Transcript held
14

The Watchman's Curse

New Rochelle, Sicard Ave. · first recorded 1726 · returns 1826, 1926

A greedy watchman went down in the mud with his cobalt lantern still in his fist, and a girl put the largest missing shard of its glass under a floorboard in 1926. It has not been moved since. He comes back for it once a century.

Cycle open
18

The Fogbell Keeper of Davenport Neck

New Rochelle · first recorded 1911

The keeper who went on ringing through the fog for nine hours after the station was decommissioned and the bell had been taken off its mount.

Transcript held
22

The Ice House Boy

Mamaroneck · first recorded 1934

A boy who stops people on the road and asks for help carrying a block of ice up to the house. He is never there on the way back down.

Transcript held

Submitting an Account

If you have heard one of these stories from someone who heard it firsthand, the Register wants the transcript. Write to the curator with the account in the teller's own words, the year you heard it, and the road or the stretch of shoreline it belongs to. We do not print the names of living witnesses without their permission.