REDDEM Stone

About This Carved Stone

A two-piece carved stone recovered by Rick Lagina, Dave Blankenship, and Jack Begley from the concrete floor of Fred Nolan's former mainland museum in Western Shore, Nova Scotia, during Season 3 Episode 6, aired 15 December 2015. The two pieces fit together like a puzzle along a clean break, forming a single original stone that had been split at some point before Nolan embedded it in the museum's concrete floor. Nolan had told the property's subsequent owners Barry and Karen Publicover that the stones were of significant value to the Oak Island story and that he had cemented them in place to keep them safe. Rick Lagina and the team extracted the two pieces, together with a third separate carved stone bearing what appeared to be Roman numerals, using a jackhammer.

The recovery came as part of a wider Season 3 search for the carved stones associated with Oak Island, prompted by Dan Blankenship's recollection that Fred Nolan had embedded large carved stones in his museum floor years earlier. The most famous of the historical stones, the H/O Stone first found on Oak Island's northern shore in 1921, had been destroyed with dynamite by searchers hoping treasure lay beneath it before Gilbert Hedden saved several fragments in 1936. The Hedden fragments remained on the island until roughly 20 years before the Season 3 visit, when they disappeared. Rick Lagina raised the possibility on camera that the stones recovered from the Publicover property could be among the lost H/O Stone fragments or part of a wider lost set of inscribed boulders.

Stone researcher Terry Deveau examined the two-piece stone at the Oak Island Interpretive Centre. He confirmed the carvings were definitively man-made and identified a straight line and a semicircle on one piece as the letter D. After the two pieces were aligned, Rick Lagina read the assembled inscription on camera as the sequence R, E, D, D, E and probably an M, with the final letter unclear and possibly an H. Rick suggested the M might be an H for Gilbert Hedden, who searched Oak Island in the 1930s and whose name accounts for several of the visible letters. Deveau did not endorse the Hedden reading on camera and left the inscription's meaning open. No subsequent epigraphic study, petrological analysis, or comparison with the lost H/O Stone fragments has been documented for the REDDE Stone, and the inscription remains undeciphered. The Latin word redde, an imperative form meaning return or give back, fits the visible letter sequence but the episode did not raise this reading and no formal linguistic identification has been published.