February 17, 2015 • 36 mins
Off Nova Scotia, the tiny spit of land called Oak Island has been host to waves of treasure hunters for more than 200 years. Some of them lost their lives in the search for a treasure reputedly buried in a deep pit. But is anything really there?
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from the house stuff
Works dot Com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and Jerry So
this is Stuff you should Know. Oh d, so you're
(00:22):
Nova Scotia accent. Uh no, no, sir, what was that?
Just a howdy? Okay? It did sound funny though. That
was my Heath Hall version. We talked about. You love
that show, didn't you know? I never really watched it.
I don't thinking of my other podcast Ghost, I didn't
watch you how much? Yeah I did. I was from
(00:44):
the South to Toledo. Do you I thought that was
like yocol stuff? No, I mean like it was on
every once in a while. I just passed by. You
know what, wasn't Mini Pearl? She had the hat with
the price tag on. Still that's all anyone started there.
And then there's like some guy with the angel I think.
(01:04):
I think that's is one of the most off requested shows.
Oak Island. Yeah, I've had a lot heard. I didn't
really know much about it, but it seems like every
other week someone's saying Oka Island, guys, do Oak Island.
We're gonna do Oka island. We want everybody to be quiet,
that's right. So that's what we're doing. Did you know
much about this ahead of time? No, not at all.
(01:27):
It's one of those things like you hear about and
you hear a little more and you don't really dig in.
But so the whole thing is just kind of this
neat legend that's kind of out there. Yeah, I don't
know how I missed it. And then once you start
digging and you're like, uh, I understand you say that
with the skeptical tone. Well, I think this is one
(01:47):
of those cases where there's no treasure. I don't know,
there's some weirdness, there's some things that make me say
this is very odd, but I also understand the skeptical
point of view. So well, what I've just kind of
demonstrated is a little bit of the middle of the
road approach to Oak Island, which is unusual. Most people
(02:10):
approach Oake Island either as true believe or treasure hunters
or total skeptics. Like, there's not a lot of middle
of the road. It's a divisive island as far as
islands go. It's only like a hundred and something acres.
It's not a big island. It's off the coast of
Nova Scotia. Hundred forty acres. That's not that's not big. Yeah,
(02:31):
But for as small as it is, you know, it's
pretty divisive. Yeah. I don't think. Uh, I don't see
what the big deal about being skeptical about the I
mean a very treasure. I mean, who cares. Oh, if
you're a skeptic, you have to poop pooh everything. Absolutely,
anything that's even remotely frivolous has to be squashed. But
this isn't even like supernatural or anything. It's just I mean,
(02:54):
I guess there's the curse thing. Yeah, that's that's all.
That's all TV. That's not even lower from what i'd
stand up new. It's like literally just a media creation,
like strictly from the TV show that before that. I mean,
like people didn't really see it as a curse. There's
just buried treasure on Oak Island. Yeah. And if it's
the eighteen hundreds and you're digging for things, there's a
(03:16):
good chance he might die. Yeah, it's dangerous. I read
this really great article written in nineteen sixty five by
Mildred rest All. Yeah, read from the New York Times.
No This was in like Ottawa magazine and it was
written by her. Yeah, I read one. It might have
been the same one. I wonder it was like within
a very short time of her husband and sun dying.
(03:37):
I thought, Wow, this ladies really composed. But then I
read a little further and found out that Mildred Restall
and her husband, Robert, who moved their family to Oak
Island so Robert could hunt for the treasure in nineteen
fifty nine. I think um started out. They met because
they were both circus performers with nerves of steel who
(03:58):
rode motorcycles in a huge globes fear. Well, he would
go like upside down and she would go side to side,
and they would miss each other hundreds of times in
an act. And now after that, I was like, oh, yeah,
this lady, she's tough as nails. Yeah, you never seen
one of those acts. I just didn't realize that that's
(04:19):
what they did, got you, Yeah, and that it seems
kind of odd to have that. I thought it was
a newer act from No, it's totally fifties screams fifties really, Yeah,
see I thought it screened seventies. Oh it does too. Yeah,
you're right, sure, yeah, evil kine evil is why that
screams that? All right, so let's dive in here a well, yeah,
(04:43):
the rest dolls when they moved to nineteen fifty nine,
they were hardly the first people that moved to Oak
Island and set up residents there in order to find
the treasure. But prior to sevent um, Oak Island was
just another island. Yeah, it's still just another island. Well,
just because of all of the attention that's been paid
(05:06):
to it. It's not it's no longer. It's been changed forever.
Prior to seventeen five, though, it was just like whatever,
there's Oak Island until a local kid from Nova Scotia
named Robert McGinnis Daniel McGinnis sorry, um, decided to go explore. Yeah,
and this, Um, you won't find any two people that
(05:26):
agree on these legend stories, even with Daniel mckinnis, because
it's you know, none of the stuff was really written
down until much later. Nothing was written down in sevent
nothing was documented until like the nineteen hundred Well Star
Trek came along. Certainly things like this weren't documented, um
(05:47):
because he was just a boy. He was sixteen years old. Uh,
he was on a fishing expedition and uh, as the
story goes, and we'll just use the most commonly agreed
upon story here. He was, um, he was just kind
of trapes around the island and found like a block
from a pulley attached to a tree, an oak tree,
(06:09):
and then a big sort of cleared out area underneath
it where it looked like, uh, you know, someone had
maybe been digging and reburying something. Yeah, there's like a
depression under this block tackle block from a pulley. Yeah,
it was just cleared out. And he was like, huh,
but j anything, there's a pirate stretcher down there. Yeah,
I mean, being a sevent teenager, he was like, there's yeah,
(06:33):
pirates all are are all over the place. Yeah, and
it's entirely possible. We're talking the eighteenth century. We're talking
a time when piracy was still very much in the
public imagination. Bury treasure was a hot thing. Yeah, I mean,
there is such a thing. And at the very least
if no one, if no single pirate ever buried his treasure,
there is a lot of rumor about buried treasure of pirates.
(06:58):
I think it makes total sense. You know that You
can't carry that stuff around all the time because you
get robbed and looted. So you you know, bury that junk,
come back for it later. Right, make a weird, funny
looking map that looks like a sweaty pillow case and um,
put a big X in the middle of it. So
and then put that in a coffee can and then
(07:20):
bury that in your backyard. That's right, you gotta bury
twice because it's so nice. Uh the pirate really can
you say like a pirate? No, I did not need
he would do that. Um, all right, So he starts digging.
He's his interest is peaked. He gets a couple of
friends comes back the next day. Uh, Anthony Vaughan and
John Smith and use him, you think probably? Uh? And
(07:45):
so they start digging. Reportedly go down about ten feet
and found a layer of like a platform of oak logs. Yeah,
which is you're not supposed to find that when you
dig into a hole under a pulley. No, you're not
supposed to it's not worthy. First they found und a
stone that they took to be man made, like two
ft down, and then ten feet down they found an
oak platform and then supposedly every ten feet after that, Uh,
(08:10):
they kept finding these platforms. Um, and we'll just go
ahead and call this the money pit. What's what everyone
calls it. Yeah, this main location is the money pit
because just the first Oak platform alone says there's treasure
buried here. That's right. Uh. So basically they, um, they
got down as far as they could for three teenage
(08:30):
boys with picks and shovels and said, uh, this this
isn't we're not finding anything and were we need help? Basically, yeah,
we need to bring in some old timey equipment. Yeah,
bigger tools, gets some old timey funding and maybe get
some old timey other people involved. And they did, but
it took like nine years before they came back I think. Yeah.
And they filled it back in because they didn't just
(08:52):
want to leave a big empty hole there. It's an
obvious sign that there's a treasure there. So, like you said,
nine hours later, they did come back, um with investors
nine years later. Now I said years. I will bet
you all the money on Oak Island that you said ours. Uh.
At any rate, it was nine years and they came
(09:12):
back and formed with some funding from the Onslow company. Um,
and that'll be a common refrain here. Uh, And apparently
I did some writing on modern treasure hunting, and it's
all about the funding, you know. It's it's just like
any business. You These dudes have boats and equipment, but
(09:33):
they're like, if you want a piece of this action,
we need some dough out there and find the stuff.
It's like selling future contracts. Yeah, yeah, a potential treasure exactly.
And it's not just treasure hunting that does that. Like
lots of archaeological expeditions are funded like that. If if
your local universities like we got enough problems as it is,
(09:53):
we can't fund your dig you can go to private
investors who ultimately it's still treasure hunting. It's just churched
up church don called archaeological things. So they come back
as the on Slough Company and dig down deeper this time,
and they did find some interesting things, notably things that
(10:16):
shouldn't be there, like coconut fiber and charcoal and putty
and coconuts obviously not native to Nova Scotia. So they're like,
someone has put something down here. Well yeah, also at
the time, um coconut fiber was used as a packing
material though, so clearly somebody was using it as as
some sort of construction material wasn't accidentally dropped there there,
(10:40):
that's right. Um, so a legend has it they dug
down until they hit ninety feet and then found a
flat stone with a coded inscription that they could not
make sense of. Uh. Since then, other people have supposedly
translated it to read forty ft below two million pounds
are buried. Um, there's no stone today, there's no rubbing,
(11:04):
there is no photograph. No, it's called the famous cipher Stone,
and it was supposedly lost in like but yeah, there's
no evidence. Yeah, and so anything you run across, like
in a book or on the web or something, is conjecture. No,
there's no document of this cipher stone. But they do
think that something that accounts for the cipherstone did exist
(11:27):
at some point, but no one knows for certain exactly
what it said. And if you're wondering two million pounds
of what I assumed that they met British currency, Yeah,
that would be funny. Those just like two million pounds
of pirates scat coconut husks. Uh. So they get down
to about close to a hundred feet and then go
(11:48):
home for the day and and drink rum I would imagine,
and then come back and it's full of water, and
they tried to bail it out, but they were basically like,
this is you know seven well, I guess this point
it was eight hundreds, but we're still screwed, right, So
the Robert McGinnis and what was the name of the
company came back with the company what what you just
(12:11):
described as the process that people have followed in the
troubles that people have run into in the every every
ever since. And we'll talk about some of the following expeditions,
because McGinnis's troubles didn't put anybody else off right after this. Okay,
(12:43):
so Chuck, something really weird happened to the McGinnis expedition,
the second one when he grew up became a man,
came back with the Onslow company and dug down became
a man. They went to bed after drinking a bunch
of them, like you said, and then they woke up
and the pit had filled with water. And it's basically
been filled with water ever since. Yeah, which is a problem.
(13:07):
If you're a treasure hunter. You want dry conditions as
much as possible to get to the treasure. Water is
an impediment UM. And it became such an impediment that
ultimately mcginnison on the Onslow company just kind of gave up.
I guess they ran out of funding, right, Yeah, which
has also been a refrain over the years. You can
only dig so long until the person eventually who's funding
(13:29):
he says, I'm gonna pull the plug. But years later, UM,
a question was raised about that flooding. People started to
wonder was that actually an engineered booby trap? And that's
become a question among treasure hunters for centuries on. Yeah.
(13:50):
Of course the skeptics will say no, it is just
uh seawater, because later they found out that it was
actually saltwater uh and there are other similar underground water
tunnels on the island. So they're like, no, this is
just going on on this island. And and the believers
will say no, it was a booby drop set by
(14:10):
the pirates. But the believers in this case have a
kind of strange evidence UM to back up their ideas.
So in eighteen forty nine, after the mcguinnis expedition, the
second one left many years after UM, the Truro Company,
which is kind of tough to say, they showed up
to the island to look for the money pit, and
(14:31):
they started digging again, right, and when they started digging,
they ran into the same problem. There the chaft that
they dug filled with water. So they started to think,
we'll wait a minute, maybe this is purposeful at the
very least, maybe there's some sort of sea caves. And
if there's sea caves that are filling this thing up,
potentially we could stop up the sea caves and then
(14:52):
we can avoid the water problem and keep digging. So
they sent people from the expedition to look all over
the shoreline of the island and they found something really
astounding that, from what I understand still to this day,
is the one thing that confounds all skeptics when it
comes to Oak Island. They found what can really only
(15:12):
be described as a man Maine drainage system that basically
accepts the incoming tide and potentially funnels the tied to
the money pit. Yeah. Um, So you know, they they
continue to dig and drill because they're encouraged by finding
like things they said were metal or maybe even gold
(15:35):
on the Augur's um and even more coconut husk. Yeah.
So they were like, there's something down there, but they,
like you said, it kept flooding and that this is
when they realized it was seawater and they noticed, hey,
it's actually filling up and and falling back down with
along with the tides. So that's when they built a
temporary coffer dam to kind of see what was going on.
(15:56):
And that's when they found this five finger drain and which, yeah,
there's really no explanation that didn't just accidentally happen, No,
And what gives it away is it's um. It's a
hundred and forty five ft wide, and it's about the
height of high the difference between high tide and low tide,
so it's clearly meant to funnel the tied into this drain.
(16:18):
There's five drains. They're obviously finger drains. Finger drains are
like French drains basically, and they all connect into one
larger drain. But the real dead giveaway was the appearance
again of coconut fiber. Coconut fiber was used to keep
the sand out of the stone drain um, and a
layer of coconut fiber on an island off of the
(16:39):
coast of Nova Scotia suggests Man's intervention that's right, but
what that means who knows. Again, treasure seekers will say
that they put this to uh keep you from finding
that treasure. Right, it was evidence in favor of the
idea that the money pit is booby trapped. Yeah, and
I think skeptics will say that the uh. I think
(17:01):
there was a theory that there was a lot of
weird Freemason uh rituals going on, and maybe they buried
some stuff there and not treasure necessarily, but um, maybe
they built this strain to keep people from digging into
their Yeah. Modern treasure huners are like, great, let me
find whatever the Mason's buried. Yeah, you know, even if
(17:21):
it's not gold ingots could be like, you know, the
Secrets of the Freemasons, or yeah, the Ark of the Covenant.
Yeah and all right, they said that could be down
there or the Holy Grail if you want to talk
about some of the legends of what's down there, might
as well. Okay, So, um, the the the predominant one
that Robert McGinnis initially thought of was that it was
(17:42):
pirate treasure because he was a teenager in the seventeen nineties. Right. Um,
Successive people have come to to see the money pit,
if it is sabotaged like it is, and the the
construction that went into it is something that would have
had to have been carried out by a group more
sophistic ca did, better funded and better organized than Captain
(18:03):
Kid's crew, more sober at the very least. Yeah, exactly.
So one of the rumors of what treasure is buried
down there is that the Freemasons buried something or the
Knights Templar buried something, because the Knights Templar, you know,
they were like the militant arm of fundamental Christianity in
(18:23):
like the the tenth century during pilgrimage is a k
the Crusades to the Middle East, right, Yeah, so that
means they got a lot of dough over the years,
they accumulated great wealth, had a big um falling out
with the Catholic Church of course. Yes, supposedly they were
found worshiping Baffa Met, the goat headed breasted Satan, and
(18:47):
that that's sort of like the statue, right, It's exactly
like the statue Oklahoma. Yeah, the one that's being constructed
by the Satanic Temple right now. Yeah, I put that
on our Facebook page. It was very divisive I can
imagine no surprise. Um, I thought it was just a nice,
cool looking piece of art. I mean, man, it's pretty
well done, you know, it looks looked nice. Um. So yeah,
(19:10):
so the Knights Templer has all this dough. They have
a falling out with the Catholic Church for obvious reasons
that you just pointed out, and then they buried their treasure.
So I guess the Catholic Church wouldn't get their hands
on it, right. But among that treasures supposedly is the
Holy Grail, which is what um the Knights were looking
for in Monty Python and the Holy Grail and the
(19:30):
Ark of the Covenant, which is what Indiana Jones is
looking for in Indiana Jones and uh, no raiders have
the Lost arc Um. And so some people have said,
this is where the Knights Templar buried their treasure, this
is where the Ark of the Covenant is. Then other
people have said, whatever, the Knights Templar never made it
to Nova Scotia. But the Freemasons obviously took over the
(19:53):
secrets and protections of the Knights Templar. They're like the
modern day Knights Templar society, and and uh they probably
buried the arc and or the Holy Grail. Duh. Yeah,
And apparently a lot of Mason's have been on these
excavation teams over the years, which of course is evidence
that they're looking for their their old stuff, right or
(20:16):
I mean, it also is entirely possible that there is
a rumor among Masons that this is true. Whether it's
true or not, that could have gotten some Masonic adventures
to go. Look. You know. Another theory um that's been
thrown out there is that um Marie Antoinette uh, during
the French Revolution said got all her jewelry together and
(20:39):
gave it to a woman and said flee, and she
fled to Nova Scotia. And then the French navy came
along and constructed this elaborate system to bury her jewels.
There's another little uh possible theory and supposedly evidence that
backs that up, is that the woman who was given
(20:59):
the jewels, who was entrusted with the jewels, was spotted
in Nova Scotia some time after that. What was she
doing there burying jewels? Another unusual Nova Scotia link is
um that of Francis Bacon. Yeah, I like this one.
So remember Francis Bacon from the scientific method. He was
the guy that really first put that down in written form.
(21:20):
Brilliant man. Possibly Shakespeare. That's one of the theories is
that he was the real Shakespeare. And the idea is
that that he hid his manuscripts in the money pit
on Oak Island, And that seems kind of far fetched.
But apparently Francis Bacon owned land in Nova Scotia. Yeah,
(21:40):
and um, he was a preserver of things in mercury
and supposedly they found flasks of mercury on the island. Um.
I don't buy that one because I've always believed that
Shakespeare was Shakespeare and not Francis Bacon or his sister
or in the other very is uh crackpot theories about
(22:03):
who really wrote that stuff. I like Francis Bacon and Shakespeare,
you know, yeah, yeah, just the thought of it, or like,
do you think the evidence is Uh, I don't know
about the evidence. I don't know enough about it, but
I like the thought of it. It seems like a
pretty cool dude. Uh. So some of the other um
treasure hunters started flocking there in the mid to late
(22:24):
eighteen hundreds because that was just a big time for
treasure hunting. Yeah, well the California gold Rush is going
on in this is why the forty Niners are called that.
That's right, and uh, I think there's kind of a
treasure fever, yeah, going through the land. That's a good
way to say it. So, um, the Eldorado Company in
(22:45):
eighteen sixty six went out there, and they there were
various methods over the years to try and block off
the flow of water. They tried digging shafts and tunnels,
they tried to divert it, they tried to intercept it
um and basically all that ended up doing was causing
a nightmare for future expeditions, to the point where people
(23:09):
had had had a hard time even finding the original
money bit to begin with. Right, A lot of the um,
A lot of the landmarks, I guess you'd call them,
we're just utterly destroyed. Supposedly in that article I read
from um Mrs re Restall, she said that there's no
there weren't any more oaks on Oak Island, any longer trees, Yeah,
(23:31):
which because of excavation, just tore them all down. Yeah,
so it would be very tough to find your way
around if whatever directions were written at a time when
there were plenty of oak trees and used oak trees
as guides, like go to this oak tree and turn left.
Yeah yeah, yeah, so um, yeah, the excavation has definitely
changed the face of that island tremendously. Uh. One thing
(23:55):
we do have that is tangible um as far as
I don't know if you call it evidence or not,
because it really doesn't say much. But Frederick Blair in
nine in the eighteen nineties came with the Oak Island
Treasure Company and he actually found something that still exists.
That's a little bitty tiny piece of parchment paper and
it looks like a curse of letters v I are
(24:17):
on it, But I mean it's small, and it really
leads to nothing other than something man made? Is there
v I? You know, I don't think anyone's any conjecture
about what that means. Six maybe six billion pounds buried
six feet down right, who knows? Um. And then the
(24:39):
twentieth century has seen or saw since we're in the
twenty first century now, successive waves, pretty constant waves of
people coming, yeah, looking for the Oak Island Treasure UM.
One of them was a young Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who
also was a mason. Yeah, he came along as an
investor and apparently um always pining to go back to
(25:02):
Oak Island to search for the treasure, like it got
in his blood. All right. So after this message break,
we are going to look at a few more of
the things that have been discovered there over the years
and what this all means. So Chuck I was saying,
(25:32):
the twentieth century saw a wave after a wave of
treasure hunter come dig and then leave penniless. One of
those people though that, And we also talked about how
Oak Island has been utterly changed. Probably nobody changed the
topography and geography of Oak Island more than a guy
named Robert Dunfield, who was a an engineer I believe,
(25:54):
or no geologist in he built a bridge of a
highway yeah causeway, yeah, from the mainland to Oak Island.
And right after he did that, right after it was completed,
he started moving heavy equipment in and just started digging
like crazy. Yeah. He got down a hundred feet I'm sorry,
(26:16):
a hundred forty down a hundred feet wide and kept
everything a secret until two thousand three, and didn't they
didn't find a lot. They found some porcelain dishwaar from
the sixteen hundreds, which is you know, what was that
doing there could find for sure the early um. But
he of course didn't find a lot either ultimately in
(26:38):
the way of riches because um, he kept having problems
despite his machinery with collapsing uh, caves, heavy rains, more tide,
water and um. But he did say there was a
cavern under some limestone. He did confirm one of these
underwater cavern rumors. Supposedly, Yeah, its accounts for potentially a
(27:00):
natural formation if you're a skeptic, if you're a believer,
then it just confirms the booby trap thing. Um. He
uh finally left after basically he was the guy who
demolished the most landmarks. Um. But shortly after he left
a pair of guys who formed what's called the Triton Alliance, Uh,
(27:24):
David Tobias and Dan Blanket Ship. Uh. They started working
and they actually brought along some high tech stuff in
nineteen seventy which was like underwater camera video camera. It's
probably the size of a small car, right that they
lowered down there and uh, they well, they drilled a
hole and they called it borehole ten X and they
(27:44):
it was filled with water, of course, as all holes
in Oak Island do. But they lowered this underwater camera
down there and they swore to God that they saw
evidence of human remains and treasure tests. That's what they said.
They Whether you're convinced or not, Um Tobias and Blanketship
were convinced enough that to No, Blanketship still lives on
(28:08):
Oak Island. Yeah, he he became sort of the uh,
the main guy that remains today as the main guy.
And this is seventy when they showed up. He's still
on that island and he's supposedly he's oh yeah, yeah,
he's pretty easy old. No, but it was the nineteen
seventies when they showed up and he still lives there. No,
that's what I'm saying he is. He's an old feller.
(28:31):
We hammered that out. He's apparently an ordinary feller. Two,
because there was another guy named Fred Nolan, who is
a famous Oak Island explorer, UM who Well, they ran
a foul of one another, apparently, Um Blankenship had a
rifle obviously in his hand during the argument, and the
(28:52):
cops had to come out and take the rifle away. Yeah,
and supposedly now nobody is allowed on Oak Island, although
I guess there you can if you're filming a TV show. Um,
except for Dan Blanket Ship, who's the only resident. Well
he's part of the TV show okay, so he was like,
come on, um, yeah, what's that history channel? I think
(29:15):
I don't know. Yeah, there's a couple of the people
he's working with today, uh Rick and Marty Lagina. Um.
I think are brothers from Michigan, and they are the
subject to the TV show, which I'll have to check
out at some point. Um. But that's supposedly where the
curse came from? Is that show? Oh? Where had the really? Yeah?
(29:38):
I did not know that, So it's it's been a
present since last year. Um. Frederick Nolan also is the
one who discovered, um, five large cone shaped boulders that
when you look at it above, looks like a cross,
and it is forever known as Nolan's Cross. What does
it mean? Who knows? Maybe the boulders which is sort
(30:00):
of a in the shape of a cross by accident,
but well, fred Nolan bought five plots of land bottom,
so he was a resident there, an inhabitant there too.
I'm not sure what happened Old Fred Nolan though, Yeah,
I'm not sure that's a good point. He may have
been lost to the curse of Oak Island. So we
we keep using like present tense, like it's a It's
(30:22):
entirely true, as anyone with History Channel knows, there's still
people who are looking actively for the treasure of Oak Island, right,
Like they believe that if you put all the evidence together,
Nolan's crossed coconut fibers, the finger drains, um, the evidence
(30:42):
from Blanketship and Tobias their video of stuff, Like, if
you put all this together, there is evidence that there
is treasure down there. Somebody just needs to dig deep
enough in the right place and then bam, they're gonna
find it. Right Yeah, I mean, man, it's they dug
so though and so wide. How how much deeper could
(31:03):
they have gone back in the pirate days? You know,
it just seems very unlikely to me there's any treasure there. Well,
then you would be in the skeptics camp and you
would definitely not be alone. Uh yeah, but skeptic thinking
there may have been something buried or some weird thing
going on there. But I don't know about treasure. Who
(31:24):
knows though, Uh. Skeptics will also say these are natural
sinkholes instead of traps like we said earlier. Um. They
will also say things like, you know, there's all kinds
of underground caverns around here. There's nothing special. I don't
know what they say about finding things like porcelain plates.
I didn't see anything like that. But you know, when
(31:46):
he when the stone has lost, this inscripted stone, Um,
when there's no evidence really the point to except this
tiny piece of parchment paper, like, I don't know, it's
pretty flimsy. Well, none of the excavations started to be
documented until the nineteenth century, So all of mcguinness's early
work is all based on hearsaying conjecture. It's all up
(32:08):
for debate. Whether he was a teenager. Um was the
the tackle block for the pulley? Was that added to
the story later on? Um? If so, then all of
a sudden that that depression under the tree branch just
becomes a depression under a tree branch. You know. The
pulley was the thing. It's it's excuse my physics joke,
(32:32):
but the full crumb of this whole thing, you know.
So Um, if you if you start to look at
it on its face, all of this legend, you realize
that most of it is just legend, and that the
only real physical evidence is that scrap of parchment paper
that no one even knows whether that was planted or not. Well, yeah,
(32:53):
that's That's one of the things skeptics often say, is
that anything you found there is could have been planted
just to get money to fund the digs, right, Like, look,
we found this, uh, this parchment and this porcelain plate,
and there's some gold dust on our auger. Did we
mention the coconut fiber and the coconut fiber again? Right,
so send us another like I don't know, tin mill, yeah,
(33:16):
and we'll keep digging, right, So, uh, there you have
it Oak Island again, though, those those finger trains are
just weird. Yeah, that's weird for sure. It's cool. What
who did what they're Yeah? Basically they just need to
like strip mine the entire island all the way down
there you go. I don't know why anyone I thought
(33:37):
of that yet. Yeah, just completely strip it of all
its natural beauty right until it's nothing left and this
strug your shoulders afterwards, say there's nothing here, right, Yeah,
go man. If you want to know more about Oka Island,
apparently you can watch a weekly television show on it.
You can also type Oak Island into the search bar.
(33:59):
How stuff works. And since I said search parts, time
for listener mail, I'm gonna call this poison ivy. Follow
up from JB. Guys have an interesting story about how
you can get poison ivy from more than just touching it.
When I was eight or so, we lived in California
had a big fireplace. One day, we decided to get
(34:19):
our own firewood from outside and got a couple of
big logs my sister. We were both at about seven
at the time. Uh we She and I used the
fire to rose marshmallows and mixed moors. Great night right.
An hour or so later, one of my sisters came
into my parents room things. She couldn't breathe. Her face
had swollen to twice its normal size, and her eyes
were shut. Her throat was barely able to pass air
(34:41):
through it. An emergency room trip and a shot or
to a steroids later, she was okay, but it took
a while to find out what happened. Apparently the poison
ivy had been removed from the logs we got, but
the sap was still in the wood, and when we
burned them, the sap was present in the smoke, and
my sister was highly allergic and hailed it. Got it
in her throat and lungs and it blew up her
face like a red balloon. Best side note of this,
(35:04):
we had passport photos the next day We're moving to Germany.
So her passport pick was a giant red swollen balloon face.
That is JB and Fort So, Oklahoma. Way to go, JB.
That was a good story. You get the blue ribbon
for it. And I guess she had that passport photo
for a full decade unless she just had it retaken.
(35:24):
Would you would you live with that passport photo? No,
I told you what. I think it'd be funny except
for the whole You know, this doesn't look like you
think that'd be a drag. It would be a huge drags,
a like the hassle. Yeah, but I'm I'm well known
in my family for making funny faces. Anytime I have
a photo idea of any kind taken just for fun,
(35:46):
I've always done it. That is so fun. Emily likes it. Ah,
you got anything else? Nope? Okay, well thanks again for
the awesome story, JB. If you have a great story,
you can tweet to us at s Y s K Podcast.
You can post it on our Facebook page at Facebook
dot com, slash stuff you Should Know. You can put
(36:06):
it in an email and send it to Stuff Podcast
at how stuff works dot com. And in the meantime,
while you're waiting around thinking of what to say, go
hang out at our home on the web, Stuff you
Should Know dot com for more on this and thousands
of other topics. Is it how stuff Works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from the house stuff
Works dot Com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and Jerry So
this is Stuff you should Know. Oh d, so you're
(00:22):
Nova Scotia accent. Uh no, no, sir, what was that?
Just a howdy? Okay? It did sound funny though. That
was my Heath Hall version. We talked about. You love
that show, didn't you know? I never really watched it.
I don't thinking of my other podcast Ghost, I didn't
watch you how much? Yeah I did. I was from
(00:44):
the South to Toledo. Do you I thought that was
like yocol stuff? No, I mean like it was on
every once in a while. I just passed by. You
know what, wasn't Mini Pearl? She had the hat with
the price tag on. Still that's all anyone started there.
And then there's like some guy with the angel I think.
(01:04):
I think that's is one of the most off requested shows.
Oak Island. Yeah, I've had a lot heard. I didn't
really know much about it, but it seems like every
other week someone's saying Oka Island, guys, do Oak Island.
We're gonna do Oka island. We want everybody to be quiet,
that's right. So that's what we're doing. Did you know
much about this ahead of time? No, not at all.
(01:27):
It's one of those things like you hear about and
you hear a little more and you don't really dig in.
But so the whole thing is just kind of this
neat legend that's kind of out there. Yeah, I don't
know how I missed it. And then once you start
digging and you're like, uh, I understand you say that
with the skeptical tone. Well, I think this is one
(01:47):
of those cases where there's no treasure. I don't know,
there's some weirdness, there's some things that make me say
this is very odd, but I also understand the skeptical
point of view. So well, what I've just kind of
demonstrated is a little bit of the middle of the
road approach to Oak Island, which is unusual. Most people
(02:10):
approach Oake Island either as true believe or treasure hunters
or total skeptics. Like, there's not a lot of middle
of the road. It's a divisive island as far as
islands go. It's only like a hundred and something acres.
It's not a big island. It's off the coast of
Nova Scotia. Hundred forty acres. That's not that's not big. Yeah,
(02:31):
But for as small as it is, you know, it's
pretty divisive. Yeah. I don't think. Uh, I don't see
what the big deal about being skeptical about the I
mean a very treasure. I mean, who cares. Oh, if
you're a skeptic, you have to poop pooh everything. Absolutely,
anything that's even remotely frivolous has to be squashed. But
this isn't even like supernatural or anything. It's just I mean,
(02:54):
I guess there's the curse thing. Yeah, that's that's all.
That's all TV. That's not even lower from what i'd
stand up new. It's like literally just a media creation,
like strictly from the TV show that before that. I mean,
like people didn't really see it as a curse. There's
just buried treasure on Oak Island. Yeah. And if it's
the eighteen hundreds and you're digging for things, there's a
(03:16):
good chance he might die. Yeah, it's dangerous. I read
this really great article written in nineteen sixty five by
Mildred rest All. Yeah, read from the New York Times.
No This was in like Ottawa magazine and it was
written by her. Yeah, I read one. It might have
been the same one. I wonder it was like within
a very short time of her husband and sun dying.
(03:37):
I thought, Wow, this ladies really composed. But then I
read a little further and found out that Mildred Restall
and her husband, Robert, who moved their family to Oak
Island so Robert could hunt for the treasure in nineteen
fifty nine. I think um started out. They met because
they were both circus performers with nerves of steel who
(03:58):
rode motorcycles in a huge globes fear. Well, he would
go like upside down and she would go side to side,
and they would miss each other hundreds of times in
an act. And now after that, I was like, oh, yeah,
this lady, she's tough as nails. Yeah, you never seen
one of those acts. I just didn't realize that that's
(04:19):
what they did, got you, Yeah, and that it seems
kind of odd to have that. I thought it was
a newer act from No, it's totally fifties screams fifties really, Yeah,
see I thought it screened seventies. Oh it does too. Yeah,
you're right, sure, yeah, evil kine evil is why that
screams that? All right, so let's dive in here a well, yeah,
(04:43):
the rest dolls when they moved to nineteen fifty nine,
they were hardly the first people that moved to Oak
Island and set up residents there in order to find
the treasure. But prior to sevent um, Oak Island was
just another island. Yeah, it's still just another island. Well,
just because of all of the attention that's been paid
(05:06):
to it. It's not it's no longer. It's been changed forever.
Prior to seventeen five, though, it was just like whatever,
there's Oak Island until a local kid from Nova Scotia
named Robert McGinnis Daniel McGinnis sorry, um, decided to go explore. Yeah,
and this, Um, you won't find any two people that
(05:26):
agree on these legend stories, even with Daniel mckinnis, because
it's you know, none of the stuff was really written
down until much later. Nothing was written down in sevent
nothing was documented until like the nineteen hundred Well Star
Trek came along. Certainly things like this weren't documented, um
(05:47):
because he was just a boy. He was sixteen years old. Uh,
he was on a fishing expedition and uh, as the
story goes, and we'll just use the most commonly agreed
upon story here. He was, um, he was just kind
of trapes around the island and found like a block
from a pulley attached to a tree, an oak tree,
(06:09):
and then a big sort of cleared out area underneath
it where it looked like, uh, you know, someone had
maybe been digging and reburying something. Yeah, there's like a
depression under this block tackle block from a pulley. Yeah,
it was just cleared out. And he was like, huh,
but j anything, there's a pirate stretcher down there. Yeah,
I mean, being a sevent teenager, he was like, there's yeah,
(06:33):
pirates all are are all over the place. Yeah, and
it's entirely possible. We're talking the eighteenth century. We're talking
a time when piracy was still very much in the
public imagination. Bury treasure was a hot thing. Yeah, I mean,
there is such a thing. And at the very least
if no one, if no single pirate ever buried his treasure,
there is a lot of rumor about buried treasure of pirates.
(06:58):
I think it makes total sense. You know that You
can't carry that stuff around all the time because you
get robbed and looted. So you you know, bury that junk,
come back for it later. Right, make a weird, funny
looking map that looks like a sweaty pillow case and um,
put a big X in the middle of it. So
and then put that in a coffee can and then
(07:20):
bury that in your backyard. That's right, you gotta bury
twice because it's so nice. Uh the pirate really can
you say like a pirate? No, I did not need
he would do that. Um, all right, So he starts digging.
He's his interest is peaked. He gets a couple of
friends comes back the next day. Uh, Anthony Vaughan and
John Smith and use him, you think probably? Uh? And
(07:45):
so they start digging. Reportedly go down about ten feet
and found a layer of like a platform of oak logs. Yeah,
which is you're not supposed to find that when you
dig into a hole under a pulley. No, you're not
supposed to it's not worthy. First they found und a
stone that they took to be man made, like two
ft down, and then ten feet down they found an
oak platform and then supposedly every ten feet after that, Uh,
(08:10):
they kept finding these platforms. Um, and we'll just go
ahead and call this the money pit. What's what everyone
calls it. Yeah, this main location is the money pit
because just the first Oak platform alone says there's treasure
buried here. That's right. Uh. So basically they, um, they
got down as far as they could for three teenage
(08:30):
boys with picks and shovels and said, uh, this this
isn't we're not finding anything and were we need help? Basically, yeah,
we need to bring in some old timey equipment. Yeah,
bigger tools, gets some old timey funding and maybe get
some old timey other people involved. And they did, but
it took like nine years before they came back I think. Yeah.
And they filled it back in because they didn't just
(08:52):
want to leave a big empty hole there. It's an
obvious sign that there's a treasure there. So, like you said,
nine hours later, they did come back, um with investors
nine years later. Now I said years. I will bet
you all the money on Oak Island that you said ours. Uh.
At any rate, it was nine years and they came
(09:12):
back and formed with some funding from the Onslow company. Um,
and that'll be a common refrain here. Uh, And apparently
I did some writing on modern treasure hunting, and it's
all about the funding, you know. It's it's just like
any business. You These dudes have boats and equipment, but
(09:33):
they're like, if you want a piece of this action,
we need some dough out there and find the stuff.
It's like selling future contracts. Yeah, yeah, a potential treasure exactly.
And it's not just treasure hunting that does that. Like
lots of archaeological expeditions are funded like that. If if
your local universities like we got enough problems as it is,
(09:53):
we can't fund your dig you can go to private
investors who ultimately it's still treasure hunting. It's just churched
up church don called archaeological things. So they come back
as the on Slough Company and dig down deeper this time,
and they did find some interesting things, notably things that
(10:16):
shouldn't be there, like coconut fiber and charcoal and putty
and coconuts obviously not native to Nova Scotia. So they're like,
someone has put something down here. Well yeah, also at
the time, um coconut fiber was used as a packing
material though, so clearly somebody was using it as as
some sort of construction material wasn't accidentally dropped there there,
(10:40):
that's right. Um, so a legend has it they dug
down until they hit ninety feet and then found a
flat stone with a coded inscription that they could not
make sense of. Uh. Since then, other people have supposedly
translated it to read forty ft below two million pounds
are buried. Um, there's no stone today, there's no rubbing,
(11:04):
there is no photograph. No, it's called the famous cipher Stone,
and it was supposedly lost in like but yeah, there's
no evidence. Yeah, and so anything you run across, like
in a book or on the web or something, is conjecture. No,
there's no document of this cipher stone. But they do
think that something that accounts for the cipherstone did exist
(11:27):
at some point, but no one knows for certain exactly
what it said. And if you're wondering two million pounds
of what I assumed that they met British currency, Yeah,
that would be funny. Those just like two million pounds
of pirates scat coconut husks. Uh. So they get down
to about close to a hundred feet and then go
(11:48):
home for the day and and drink rum I would imagine,
and then come back and it's full of water, and
they tried to bail it out, but they were basically like,
this is you know seven well, I guess this point
it was eight hundreds, but we're still screwed, right, So
the Robert McGinnis and what was the name of the
company came back with the company what what you just
(12:11):
described as the process that people have followed in the
troubles that people have run into in the every every
ever since. And we'll talk about some of the following expeditions,
because McGinnis's troubles didn't put anybody else off right after this. Okay,
(12:43):
so Chuck, something really weird happened to the McGinnis expedition,
the second one when he grew up became a man,
came back with the Onslow company and dug down became
a man. They went to bed after drinking a bunch
of them, like you said, and then they woke up
and the pit had filled with water. And it's basically
been filled with water ever since. Yeah, which is a problem.
(13:07):
If you're a treasure hunter. You want dry conditions as
much as possible to get to the treasure. Water is
an impediment UM. And it became such an impediment that
ultimately mcginnison on the Onslow company just kind of gave up.
I guess they ran out of funding, right, Yeah, which
has also been a refrain over the years. You can
only dig so long until the person eventually who's funding
(13:29):
he says, I'm gonna pull the plug. But years later, UM,
a question was raised about that flooding. People started to
wonder was that actually an engineered booby trap? And that's
become a question among treasure hunters for centuries on. Yeah.
(13:50):
Of course the skeptics will say no, it is just
uh seawater, because later they found out that it was
actually saltwater uh and there are other similar underground water
tunnels on the island. So they're like, no, this is
just going on on this island. And and the believers
will say no, it was a booby drop set by
(14:10):
the pirates. But the believers in this case have a
kind of strange evidence UM to back up their ideas.
So in eighteen forty nine, after the mcguinnis expedition, the
second one left many years after UM, the Truro Company,
which is kind of tough to say, they showed up
to the island to look for the money pit, and
(14:31):
they started digging again, right, and when they started digging,
they ran into the same problem. There the chaft that
they dug filled with water. So they started to think,
we'll wait a minute, maybe this is purposeful at the
very least, maybe there's some sort of sea caves. And
if there's sea caves that are filling this thing up,
potentially we could stop up the sea caves and then
(14:52):
we can avoid the water problem and keep digging. So
they sent people from the expedition to look all over
the shoreline of the island and they found something really
astounding that, from what I understand still to this day,
is the one thing that confounds all skeptics when it
comes to Oak Island. They found what can really only
(15:12):
be described as a man Maine drainage system that basically
accepts the incoming tide and potentially funnels the tied to
the money pit. Yeah. Um, So you know, they they
continue to dig and drill because they're encouraged by finding
like things they said were metal or maybe even gold
(15:35):
on the Augur's um and even more coconut husk. Yeah.
So they were like, there's something down there, but they,
like you said, it kept flooding and that this is
when they realized it was seawater and they noticed, hey,
it's actually filling up and and falling back down with
along with the tides. So that's when they built a
temporary coffer dam to kind of see what was going on.
(15:56):
And that's when they found this five finger drain and which, yeah,
there's really no explanation that didn't just accidentally happen, No,
And what gives it away is it's um. It's a
hundred and forty five ft wide, and it's about the
height of high the difference between high tide and low tide,
so it's clearly meant to funnel the tied into this drain.
(16:18):
There's five drains. They're obviously finger drains. Finger drains are
like French drains basically, and they all connect into one
larger drain. But the real dead giveaway was the appearance
again of coconut fiber. Coconut fiber was used to keep
the sand out of the stone drain um, and a
layer of coconut fiber on an island off of the
(16:39):
coast of Nova Scotia suggests Man's intervention that's right, but
what that means who knows. Again, treasure seekers will say
that they put this to uh keep you from finding
that treasure. Right, it was evidence in favor of the
idea that the money pit is booby trapped. Yeah, and
I think skeptics will say that the uh. I think
(17:01):
there was a theory that there was a lot of
weird Freemason uh rituals going on, and maybe they buried
some stuff there and not treasure necessarily, but um, maybe
they built this strain to keep people from digging into
their Yeah. Modern treasure huners are like, great, let me
find whatever the Mason's buried. Yeah, you know, even if
(17:21):
it's not gold ingots could be like, you know, the
Secrets of the Freemasons, or yeah, the Ark of the Covenant.
Yeah and all right, they said that could be down
there or the Holy Grail if you want to talk
about some of the legends of what's down there, might
as well. Okay, So, um, the the the predominant one
that Robert McGinnis initially thought of was that it was
(17:42):
pirate treasure because he was a teenager in the seventeen nineties. Right. Um,
Successive people have come to to see the money pit,
if it is sabotaged like it is, and the the
construction that went into it is something that would have
had to have been carried out by a group more
sophistic ca did, better funded and better organized than Captain
(18:03):
Kid's crew, more sober at the very least. Yeah, exactly.
So one of the rumors of what treasure is buried
down there is that the Freemasons buried something or the
Knights Templar buried something, because the Knights Templar, you know,
they were like the militant arm of fundamental Christianity in
(18:23):
like the the tenth century during pilgrimage is a k
the Crusades to the Middle East, right, Yeah, so that
means they got a lot of dough over the years,
they accumulated great wealth, had a big um falling out
with the Catholic Church of course. Yes, supposedly they were
found worshiping Baffa Met, the goat headed breasted Satan, and
(18:47):
that that's sort of like the statue, right, It's exactly
like the statue Oklahoma. Yeah, the one that's being constructed
by the Satanic Temple right now. Yeah, I put that
on our Facebook page. It was very divisive I can
imagine no surprise. Um, I thought it was just a nice,
cool looking piece of art. I mean, man, it's pretty
well done, you know, it looks looked nice. Um. So yeah,
(19:10):
so the Knights Templer has all this dough. They have
a falling out with the Catholic Church for obvious reasons
that you just pointed out, and then they buried their treasure.
So I guess the Catholic Church wouldn't get their hands
on it, right. But among that treasures supposedly is the
Holy Grail, which is what um the Knights were looking
for in Monty Python and the Holy Grail and the
(19:30):
Ark of the Covenant, which is what Indiana Jones is
looking for in Indiana Jones and uh, no raiders have
the Lost arc Um. And so some people have said,
this is where the Knights Templar buried their treasure, this
is where the Ark of the Covenant is. Then other
people have said, whatever, the Knights Templar never made it
to Nova Scotia. But the Freemasons obviously took over the
(19:53):
secrets and protections of the Knights Templar. They're like the
modern day Knights Templar society, and and uh they probably
buried the arc and or the Holy Grail. Duh. Yeah,
And apparently a lot of Mason's have been on these
excavation teams over the years, which of course is evidence
that they're looking for their their old stuff, right or
(20:16):
I mean, it also is entirely possible that there is
a rumor among Masons that this is true. Whether it's
true or not, that could have gotten some Masonic adventures
to go. Look. You know. Another theory um that's been
thrown out there is that um Marie Antoinette uh, during
the French Revolution said got all her jewelry together and
(20:39):
gave it to a woman and said flee, and she
fled to Nova Scotia. And then the French navy came
along and constructed this elaborate system to bury her jewels.
There's another little uh possible theory and supposedly evidence that
backs that up, is that the woman who was given
(20:59):
the jewels, who was entrusted with the jewels, was spotted
in Nova Scotia some time after that. What was she
doing there burying jewels? Another unusual Nova Scotia link is
um that of Francis Bacon. Yeah, I like this one.
So remember Francis Bacon from the scientific method. He was
the guy that really first put that down in written form.
(21:20):
Brilliant man. Possibly Shakespeare. That's one of the theories is
that he was the real Shakespeare. And the idea is
that that he hid his manuscripts in the money pit
on Oak Island, And that seems kind of far fetched.
But apparently Francis Bacon owned land in Nova Scotia. Yeah,
(21:40):
and um, he was a preserver of things in mercury
and supposedly they found flasks of mercury on the island. Um.
I don't buy that one because I've always believed that
Shakespeare was Shakespeare and not Francis Bacon or his sister
or in the other very is uh crackpot theories about
(22:03):
who really wrote that stuff. I like Francis Bacon and Shakespeare,
you know, yeah, yeah, just the thought of it, or like,
do you think the evidence is Uh, I don't know
about the evidence. I don't know enough about it, but
I like the thought of it. It seems like a
pretty cool dude. Uh. So some of the other um
treasure hunters started flocking there in the mid to late
(22:24):
eighteen hundreds because that was just a big time for
treasure hunting. Yeah, well the California gold Rush is going
on in this is why the forty Niners are called that.
That's right, and uh, I think there's kind of a
treasure fever, yeah, going through the land. That's a good
way to say it. So, um, the Eldorado Company in
(22:45):
eighteen sixty six went out there, and they there were
various methods over the years to try and block off
the flow of water. They tried digging shafts and tunnels,
they tried to divert it, they tried to intercept it
um and basically all that ended up doing was causing
a nightmare for future expeditions, to the point where people
(23:09):
had had had a hard time even finding the original
money bit to begin with. Right, A lot of the um,
A lot of the landmarks, I guess you'd call them,
we're just utterly destroyed. Supposedly in that article I read
from um Mrs re Restall, she said that there's no
there weren't any more oaks on Oak Island, any longer trees, Yeah,
(23:31):
which because of excavation, just tore them all down. Yeah,
so it would be very tough to find your way
around if whatever directions were written at a time when
there were plenty of oak trees and used oak trees
as guides, like go to this oak tree and turn left.
Yeah yeah, yeah, so um, yeah, the excavation has definitely
changed the face of that island tremendously. Uh. One thing
(23:55):
we do have that is tangible um as far as
I don't know if you call it evidence or not,
because it really doesn't say much. But Frederick Blair in
nine in the eighteen nineties came with the Oak Island
Treasure Company and he actually found something that still exists.
That's a little bitty tiny piece of parchment paper and
it looks like a curse of letters v I are
(24:17):
on it, But I mean it's small, and it really
leads to nothing other than something man made? Is there
v I? You know, I don't think anyone's any conjecture
about what that means. Six maybe six billion pounds buried
six feet down right, who knows? Um. And then the
(24:39):
twentieth century has seen or saw since we're in the
twenty first century now, successive waves, pretty constant waves of
people coming, yeah, looking for the Oak Island Treasure UM.
One of them was a young Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who
also was a mason. Yeah, he came along as an
investor and apparently um always pining to go back to
(25:02):
Oak Island to search for the treasure, like it got
in his blood. All right. So after this message break,
we are going to look at a few more of
the things that have been discovered there over the years
and what this all means. So Chuck I was saying,
(25:32):
the twentieth century saw a wave after a wave of
treasure hunter come dig and then leave penniless. One of
those people though that, And we also talked about how
Oak Island has been utterly changed. Probably nobody changed the
topography and geography of Oak Island more than a guy
named Robert Dunfield, who was a an engineer I believe,
(25:54):
or no geologist in he built a bridge of a
highway yeah causeway, yeah, from the mainland to Oak Island.
And right after he did that, right after it was completed,
he started moving heavy equipment in and just started digging
like crazy. Yeah. He got down a hundred feet I'm sorry,
(26:16):
a hundred forty down a hundred feet wide and kept
everything a secret until two thousand three, and didn't they
didn't find a lot. They found some porcelain dishwaar from
the sixteen hundreds, which is you know, what was that
doing there could find for sure the early um. But
he of course didn't find a lot either ultimately in
(26:38):
the way of riches because um, he kept having problems
despite his machinery with collapsing uh, caves, heavy rains, more tide,
water and um. But he did say there was a
cavern under some limestone. He did confirm one of these
underwater cavern rumors. Supposedly, Yeah, its accounts for potentially a
(27:00):
natural formation if you're a skeptic, if you're a believer,
then it just confirms the booby trap thing. Um. He
uh finally left after basically he was the guy who
demolished the most landmarks. Um. But shortly after he left
a pair of guys who formed what's called the Triton Alliance, Uh,
(27:24):
David Tobias and Dan Blanket Ship. Uh. They started working
and they actually brought along some high tech stuff in
nineteen seventy which was like underwater camera video camera. It's
probably the size of a small car, right that they
lowered down there and uh, they well, they drilled a
hole and they called it borehole ten X and they
(27:44):
it was filled with water, of course, as all holes
in Oak Island do. But they lowered this underwater camera
down there and they swore to God that they saw
evidence of human remains and treasure tests. That's what they said.
They Whether you're convinced or not, Um Tobias and Blanketship
were convinced enough that to No, Blanketship still lives on
(28:08):
Oak Island. Yeah, he he became sort of the uh,
the main guy that remains today as the main guy.
And this is seventy when they showed up. He's still
on that island and he's supposedly he's oh yeah, yeah,
he's pretty easy old. No, but it was the nineteen
seventies when they showed up and he still lives there. No,
that's what I'm saying he is. He's an old feller.
(28:31):
We hammered that out. He's apparently an ordinary feller. Two,
because there was another guy named Fred Nolan, who is
a famous Oak Island explorer, UM who Well, they ran
a foul of one another, apparently, Um Blankenship had a
rifle obviously in his hand during the argument, and the
(28:52):
cops had to come out and take the rifle away. Yeah,
and supposedly now nobody is allowed on Oak Island, although
I guess there you can if you're filming a TV show. Um,
except for Dan Blanket Ship, who's the only resident. Well
he's part of the TV show okay, so he was like,
come on, um, yeah, what's that history channel? I think
(29:15):
I don't know. Yeah, there's a couple of the people
he's working with today, uh Rick and Marty Lagina. Um.
I think are brothers from Michigan, and they are the
subject to the TV show, which I'll have to check
out at some point. Um. But that's supposedly where the
curse came from? Is that show? Oh? Where had the really? Yeah?
(29:38):
I did not know that, So it's it's been a
present since last year. Um. Frederick Nolan also is the
one who discovered, um, five large cone shaped boulders that
when you look at it above, looks like a cross,
and it is forever known as Nolan's Cross. What does
it mean? Who knows? Maybe the boulders which is sort
(30:00):
of a in the shape of a cross by accident,
but well, fred Nolan bought five plots of land bottom,
so he was a resident there, an inhabitant there too.
I'm not sure what happened Old Fred Nolan though, Yeah,
I'm not sure that's a good point. He may have
been lost to the curse of Oak Island. So we
we keep using like present tense, like it's a It's
(30:22):
entirely true, as anyone with History Channel knows, there's still
people who are looking actively for the treasure of Oak Island, right,
Like they believe that if you put all the evidence together,
Nolan's crossed coconut fibers, the finger drains, um, the evidence
(30:42):
from Blanketship and Tobias their video of stuff, Like, if
you put all this together, there is evidence that there
is treasure down there. Somebody just needs to dig deep
enough in the right place and then bam, they're gonna
find it. Right Yeah, I mean, man, it's they dug
so though and so wide. How how much deeper could
(31:03):
they have gone back in the pirate days? You know,
it just seems very unlikely to me there's any treasure there. Well,
then you would be in the skeptics camp and you
would definitely not be alone. Uh yeah, but skeptic thinking
there may have been something buried or some weird thing
going on there. But I don't know about treasure. Who
(31:24):
knows though, Uh. Skeptics will also say these are natural
sinkholes instead of traps like we said earlier. Um. They
will also say things like, you know, there's all kinds
of underground caverns around here. There's nothing special. I don't
know what they say about finding things like porcelain plates.
I didn't see anything like that. But you know, when
(31:46):
he when the stone has lost, this inscripted stone, Um,
when there's no evidence really the point to except this
tiny piece of parchment paper, like, I don't know, it's
pretty flimsy. Well, none of the excavations started to be
documented until the nineteenth century, So all of mcguinness's early
work is all based on hearsaying conjecture. It's all up
(32:08):
for debate. Whether he was a teenager. Um was the
the tackle block for the pulley? Was that added to
the story later on? Um? If so, then all of
a sudden that that depression under the tree branch just
becomes a depression under a tree branch. You know. The
pulley was the thing. It's it's excuse my physics joke,
(32:32):
but the full crumb of this whole thing, you know.
So Um, if you if you start to look at
it on its face, all of this legend, you realize
that most of it is just legend, and that the
only real physical evidence is that scrap of parchment paper
that no one even knows whether that was planted or not. Well, yeah,
(32:53):
that's That's one of the things skeptics often say, is
that anything you found there is could have been planted
just to get money to fund the digs, right, Like, look,
we found this, uh, this parchment and this porcelain plate,
and there's some gold dust on our auger. Did we
mention the coconut fiber and the coconut fiber again? Right,
so send us another like I don't know, tin mill, yeah,
(33:16):
and we'll keep digging, right, So, uh, there you have
it Oak Island again, though, those those finger trains are
just weird. Yeah, that's weird for sure. It's cool. What
who did what they're Yeah? Basically they just need to
like strip mine the entire island all the way down
there you go. I don't know why anyone I thought
(33:37):
of that yet. Yeah, just completely strip it of all
its natural beauty right until it's nothing left and this
strug your shoulders afterwards, say there's nothing here, right, Yeah,
go man. If you want to know more about Oka Island,
apparently you can watch a weekly television show on it.
You can also type Oak Island into the search bar.
(33:59):
How stuff works. And since I said search parts, time
for listener mail, I'm gonna call this poison ivy. Follow
up from JB. Guys have an interesting story about how
you can get poison ivy from more than just touching it.
When I was eight or so, we lived in California
had a big fireplace. One day, we decided to get
(34:19):
our own firewood from outside and got a couple of
big logs my sister. We were both at about seven
at the time. Uh we She and I used the
fire to rose marshmallows and mixed moors. Great night right.
An hour or so later, one of my sisters came
into my parents room things. She couldn't breathe. Her face
had swollen to twice its normal size, and her eyes
were shut. Her throat was barely able to pass air
(34:41):
through it. An emergency room trip and a shot or
to a steroids later, she was okay, but it took
a while to find out what happened. Apparently the poison
ivy had been removed from the logs we got, but
the sap was still in the wood, and when we
burned them, the sap was present in the smoke, and
my sister was highly allergic and hailed it. Got it
in her throat and lungs and it blew up her
face like a red balloon. Best side note of this,
(35:04):
we had passport photos the next day We're moving to Germany.
So her passport pick was a giant red swollen balloon face.
That is JB and Fort So, Oklahoma. Way to go, JB.
That was a good story. You get the blue ribbon
for it. And I guess she had that passport photo
for a full decade unless she just had it retaken.
(35:24):
Would you would you live with that passport photo? No,
I told you what. I think it'd be funny except
for the whole You know, this doesn't look like you
think that'd be a drag. It would be a huge drags,
a like the hassle. Yeah, but I'm I'm well known
in my family for making funny faces. Anytime I have
a photo idea of any kind taken just for fun,
(35:46):
I've always done it. That is so fun. Emily likes it. Ah,
you got anything else? Nope? Okay, well thanks again for
the awesome story, JB. If you have a great story,
you can tweet to us at s Y s K Podcast.
You can post it on our Facebook page at Facebook
dot com, slash stuff you Should Know. You can put
(36:06):
it in an email and send it to Stuff Podcast
at how stuff works dot com. And in the meantime,
while you're waiting around thinking of what to say, go
hang out at our home on the web, Stuff you
Should Know dot com for more on this and thousands
of other topics. Is it how stuff Works dot com.
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