A Hunt with no End
Since 1795, over a dozen major expeditions have attempted to reach the bottom of Oak Island's Money Pit. An estimated $50 to $100 million has been spent and ...
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The Oak Island Files
The Oak Island mystery, one story at a time
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The Oak Island Money Pit
The Money Pit is a shaft on Oak Island, Nova Scotia, first dug in 1795, with log platforms reported at roughly ten-foot intervals. It flooded with seawater near 93 feet in 1803 or 1804. Searchers have since drilled to...
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What Is Oak Island? The Whole Story, Plainly Told
Oak Island is a small island off Nova Scotia, Canada, where people have dug for more than two hundred years in search of something buried beneath it. Discove...
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Mahone Bay: History of the Waters That Hold Oak Island
Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia, holds Oak Island on its southern shore. The Mi'kmaq called the bay Sebetre and Mush-a-Mush. The French administered it for sixty-fiv...
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Oak Island S13: The Medieval Case
Season 13 of The Curse of Oak Island did something the show had not quite managed before. Independent scientific methods (carbon-14 on swamp leather, archaeo...
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The Real Daniel McGinnis of Oak Island
Daniel McGinnis discovered evidence of a previously excavated shaft on Oak Island around 1795. He recruited John Smith and Anthony Vaughan to help dig, and t...
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Captain Kidd and the Hidden Maps
Captain William Kidd is the name most closely linked to the origin of the Oak Island legend. A dying sailor's confession, first recorded in 1863, placed trea...
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Captain James Anderson: The Pirate Oak Island Owner
Captain James Anderson (c.1748-1796) was a Maryland sea captain who took the American patriot's oath in 1776, defected to the British in 1778, was charged wi...
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The Knights Templar on Oak Island
The Knights Templar and Oak Island are linked through 20 medieval-dated artifacts that converge on the year 1211. The cluster was produced by radiocarbon dat...
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The Ark of the Covenant
The Ark of the Covenant vanished from Solomon's Temple in 586 BC and has never been recovered. For six centuries, the papal cathedral in Rome claimed to poss...
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Freemasons on Oak Island
Multiple pre-1795 Oak Island lot owners were documented Freemasons in Nova Scotia lodges. The physical layout of the Money Pit parallels the Masonic vault of...
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Shakespeare and Oak Island
Four independent researchers have decoded what they believe are hidden directions to Oak Island within Shakespeare's published works. Petter Amundsen found a...
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Francis Bacon's Secret Island
Francis Bacon's posthumous work Sylva Sylvarum, published in 1627, describes both a tidal seawater filtration pit and a method of preserving documents in mer...
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The Portuguese: The Order of Christ
When the Knights Templar were dissolved in 1312, Portugal's King Denis I simply renamed them the Order of Christ. This Order funded every major Portuguese vo...
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Samuel Ball, the Unlikely Oak Island Owner
Samuel Ball was a formerly enslaved man from South Carolina who settled on Oak Island around 1787 and eventually owned nine lots totaling thirty-six acres, m...
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The Roosevelt Connection
Franklin D. Roosevelt invested in the Oak Island treasure hunt as a young law clerk in 1909 and maintained his interest for thirty-six years, corresponding w...
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The Jewels of Marie Antoinette
The Marie Antoinette theory proposes that during the French Revolution, the queen's personal jewels were smuggled out of France by a lady-in-waiting who fled...
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Dan Blankenship and Borehole 10-X
Dan Blankenship was a Florida building contractor who read about Oak Island in a 1965 Reader's Digest article and devoted the rest of his life to the treasur...
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Robert Dunfield and the Destruction of Oak Island
Robert Dunfield was a California petroleum geologist who excavated the Money Pit to 141 feet with a crane in 1965-1966. He built the causeway, relocated the ...
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The Restall Tragedy
Robert Restall and his family lived on Oak Island from 1959 to 1965, conducting a methodical low-budget search focused on the Smith's Cove flood system. The ...
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Oak Island, Ghost Island
The ghosts of Oak Island form a documented body of folklore stretching from the 1850s to the present. This haunted history includes reports of a black dog wi...
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The Geometry of Nolan's Cross
In 1981, Nova Scotia land surveyor Fred Nolan discovered five cone-shaped granite boulders arranged in a cross formation measuring 360 feet wide by 867 feet ...
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