About This Carved Stone
A craggy piece of sandstone discovered by surveyor Fred Nolan at the intersection of the two lines forming Nolan's Cross, the megalithic formation of five cone-shaped granite boulders he identified on Oak Island in 1981. Each cone boulder stands roughly nine feet high and eight feet wide, and together they form a near-perfect symmetrical Latin cross measuring 720 feet across and 867 feet from tip to tip. Nolan found the headstone at the precise point where the cross's arms and post intersect. He first noted its presence during his surveys of the early 1980s, but it was not until 1991 that he tipped the stone with a backhoe and recognized it had been shaped to resemble a human face.
The earliest published account of the Head Stone is William S. Crooker's from meetings with Fred Nolan in June and July 1992 (Oak Island Gold, 1993). Nolan told Crooker he found the stone in 1981 lying on its side with the top of the head exposed, dug it up with a backhoe, photographed it, and later laid it back a few feet from the original findspot with the face almost flush with the ground. Crooker describes a sandstone slab with glacial striations, backhoe scratches, and a single well-weathered groove on the face, which Nolan said matched the dagger he had acquired from the heirs of Sophia Sellers. Nolan's reading was symbolic: the Head Stone represented the brain and the dagger pointed to the heart, the brain and the heart of what he called a mathematical equation of survey markers. Crooker records no carved face or sword; the human head shape he reports is the outline of the stone. The photograph reproduced in Crooker's book carries a handwritten note by Nolan giving a time, 3 PM, and a compass bearing, NE 81. Nolan does not explain the annotation in the text; the bearing possibly records the direction the face was oriented when the stone was uncovered, or the direction in which it was meant to be sighted.
The carved features include what appear to be an eye, forehead, nose, mouth, and chin, along with an indentation that some researchers have described as a sword or cutlass. The stone is limestone rather than granite, distinguishing it from the five cone boulders. Geologists brought to the island to examine it could not reach a definitive conclusion, stating it might have been carved or might have been shaped by natural forces. Whether carved or not, the stone appeared to have been deliberately placed at the intersection point rather than occurring there naturally. In Season 4, local stonemasons Monk Chicken and Mike Whelan inspected the headstone and noted that years of exposure and repeated burial had accelerated erosion of the surface, making the features increasingly difficult to distinguish.
The headstone has drawn multiple interpretations. Templar researcher Tobias, interviewed in the south of France during Season 2, described the possible sword carving as consistent with a Templar tomb marker. Norwegian Freemason and researcher Petter Amundsen theorized that Nolan's Cross represents the foundation of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, an ancient Hebrew symbol of ten points called sefirot adopted by the Knights Templar and later by the Rosicrucians and Freemasons, with the headstone sitting at a key intersection. Astronomer and astrophysicist Professor Adriano Gaspani used stellar alignments to date the placement of the cross boulders to approximately 1200 A.D., a period consistent with Templar activity in Western Europe.
Historical Context
Fred Nolan
Where It Was Found
Found at Centre of Nolan's Cross. Location: Oak Island, Nova Scotia, Canada.
