In 1795, a teenager named Daniel McGinnis rowed out to Oak Island off the coast of Nova Scotia and noticed a strange depression in the ground beneath an old oak tree, with tackle-block marks on an overhanging branch suggesting something heavy had once been lowered into it. He returned with friends and began to dig. What they found, over the following two centuries, would become one of the most obsessive and expensive treasure hunts in North American history: a shaft that seemed engineered to defeat anyone who tried to reach its bottom, now known simply as the Money Pit.
Early diggers found layers of oak platforming every ten feet as they descended, evidence that someone had deliberately engineered the pit long before McGinnis found it. At around ninety feet, according to accounts from an 1803 excavation, a stone slab bearing a mysterious cipher was recovered, later translated by some to read “forty feet below two million pounds are buried.” Whether or not that translation is accurate, the slab itself was lost decades ago, one of many maddening dead ends in the island’s history. What is well documented is the flood trap: whenever diggers reached a certain depth, seawater surged in through hidden tunnels, drowning the shaft and washing out everything below. Engineering a trap like that, if that is even what it is, would have required remarkable planning for anyone in the 1700s.
The theories about who built it and why range from Knights Templar hiding treasure and relics, to Marie Antoinette’s jewels smuggled out during the French Revolution, to Captain Kidd’s legendary pirate hoard, to the pit being nothing more than a natural sinkhole that ordinary people have spent two centuries misreading as a mystery. What is not in dispute is the cost: at least six people have died pursuing the treasure since 1861, most recently in 1965, and the pit has swallowed millions of dollars in excavation money from a long line of investors, including a young Franklin D. Roosevelt, who took part in a 1909 dig and remained fascinated by the island for the rest of his life.
The Island That Will Not Let Go
Locals have long called Oak Island cursed, citing a superstition that the treasure will not be found until seven men have died searching for it, a grim tally that some believers say was reached with the 1965 deaths. Fishermen who worked the waters off the island in earlier generations described strange lights moving across the shore at night and figures glimpsed near the original oak tree that vanished when approached, said to be the ghosts of whoever labored to build and guard the pit in the first place. Some island residents have reported unexplained sounds of digging and metal striking stone rising from the ground on quiet nights, long after any excavation crew had gone home.
Modern excavation, chronicled for years on a popular television series, has uncovered genuine artifacts, including old coins, a lead cross, and wood dated to well before McGinnis’s discovery, enough to keep serious researchers convinced there is something real buried on Oak Island. Whether it is treasure, a hoax two centuries in the making, or something closer to what the old fishermen described, the Money Pit has never given up its secret, and it has never stopped taking something from everyone who has tried to make it.