ResearchThe Oak Island Money Pit - what the heck is down there?
Thinking of famous historic treasure hunting, the first name that pops up in almost any extended conversation about the subject is Oak Island. The world's most elusive buried treasure has endured for two centuries since discovery, evading all attempts to recover or even discover it.
The Oak Island "Money Pit": a pit in the middle of a grassy part of a 140-acre island in Lunenberg County on the south shore of Nova Scotia, Canada. Dig down into it and you hit a layer of flagstones. Take out the flagstones and dig down to a wooden plank. Chop through that and dig some more, and discover further barriers of putty, charcoal, still more wooden planks, and coconut mats. Meanwhile, two booby-trapped channels dug from the coast cause the hole to flood with sea-water. Every now and then, an enigmatic clue is dug up, such as a stone covered with strange symbols that no one has been able to translate.This madness goes on for at least 200 feet of depth into the Earth, as far as we've discovered. Who, in the sixteenth century according to carbon-dating bits of junk pulled out of the hole, could have constructed such a mind-bogglingly complex pit in secret? What, if anything, were they hiding down there? And if this is indeed a treasure burial, how did the owners themselves ever hope to recover it?
The triggering of various traps and discoveries of new tricks have marked the quest to discover what lies there. To this date, six people have lost their lives excavating this cursed island. First in 1862 a worker was scalded to death when the digging equipment's boiler exploded. In 1958 a worker being hoisted from the pit fell to his death. In 1965 four more men died in a side shaft dug to intersect the pit; believed to be swamp gas but quite possibly another trap. In between deaths, numerous tunnels and shafts have collapsed, the entire area has been obliterated by decades of excavation, and at one point the whole "bottom" fell out of the pit when crews dug to a certain depth and triggered yet another booby trap, the nature of it's mechanism still unknown. An altercation even arose between two treasure hunters, one of them brandishing a gun, before police arrived to intervene. Indiana Jones' expeditions should be lucky to have so much skullduggery afoot.
Skeptics have gone from dismissing the entire affair as a fabric of hoaxes to contrived explanations saying that the whole pit is in fact a natural - not man-made! - phenomena. The pit itself? Sinkhole, perhaps natural caverns caving in. The planks? They were fallen trees. The coconut mats and bits of parchment? Trash that washed in when it rained. The mystery stone with inscribed runes? Some prankster having fun. And so on. If it is indeed all something explainable by natural events, it would break the record for the most incredible series of coincidences ever found.
Other theories have included semi-educated guesses of what could be down there - Blackbeard's booty, King Solomon's silver, the Holy Grail (the Knights of the Templar are supposedly involved in this one), Freemasons hiding God knows what secrets, the lost episodes of the Honeymooners on Betamax tape... Experts called in have included archaeologists, detectives, history scholars, and psychics using everything from dowsing rods to Tarot cards.
Today, the island is a tourism stop, and little more. Excavations continued on and off, but considering they have bored down deep enough to find nothing but bedrock and the occasional profusion of curious artifacts of no recognizable value, they have largely tapered off. Current treasure hunter's reserves of millions of dollars have been exhausted, and discouraged hunters have given up. Whatever secret lies there, it is presumed that it will never be found out, unless some lucky scavenger stumbles one day on the one clue that will at last solve the puzzle.