The Curse of Oak Island

by Randall Sullivan

  At least Gilbert Hedden was not taken in for long by the man named Doyle who wrote to him in 1945. This Doyle (who may or may not have been the same one who wrote to Blair in 1934) had enclosed what he described as “a tracing or copy from an old pirate map that is the same as Oak Island, only a little larger.” The difference in size, this Doyle explained, was due to the fact that the island had lost more than 20 feet of coastline in the past two centuries. The letter told an elaborate story of Kidd’s visits to Nova Scotia—”I have proof of this,” he declared—then suggested that the pirate had buried not one but two treasures on Oak Island, only one of which would be found in the Money Pit. The map he enclosed had been sent to him by “a highly educated gentleman,” wrote Doyle, who requested that “when you are done studying it, please return it to me by registered mail.”

  Hedden did study the map—long enough to recognize that it was almost an exact copy of the Mar Del map in Harold Wilkins’s Captain Kidd and His Skeleton Island, with a few slight alterations. While he did not respond to Doyle, Hedden once again puzzled over the map Wilkins had drawn, which showed no less than “fourteen resemblances” to Oak Island. Most perplexing to Hedden, though, was that the compass directions on the Mar Del map were an exact reversal of the compass directions to Oak Island. How could this possibly be a coincidence?

  Perhaps this conundrum was why Hedden continued to correspond with Wilkins long after visiting the man in England in the autumn of 1937. Even after Wilkins began to claim that he was “channeling the ghost of Captain Kidd,” Hedden kept in contact with him. And while there’s no evidence that Hedden ever subscribed to such a claim, it’s not clear either that he rejected it. The mystery of Oak Island had both baffled and consumed him so completely that he was afraid to rule out any possibility. Blair had long since become the same way, and by the time I’d spent a month on Oak Island in the summer of 2016 I felt I understood not only Blair and Hedden but also those who had decided that it couldn’t hurt to listen to any idea, no matter how ridiculous it might seem.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  It was Blair who had sent his manager of operations, A. S. Lowden, to Boston in the late summer of 1895 to sit in on a series of séances that called up the ghost of Captain Kidd. In the report he submitted to Blair from a stopover in Concord on September 12, Lowden admitted, “I went to these sittings not exactly skeptic [sic], but with considerable doubt.” That doubt wasn’t terribly evident in what he wrote next:

  The mediums are a farmer and his wife and sittings are free. Their manifestations have been examined by professors from Harvard College and pronounced genuine. As I told you before, the “control” is the notorious William Kidd. The manifestations are made by raps as neither of the mediums are trance mediums although they can be if they wish. They materialize to the sense of touch and pretty severe touches in some cases. Writing on a slate is another accomplishment. During these séances, many of the answers were rapped out on my knees, not only to my feeling but could be heard as well. He (Kidd) tried to draw the course of the drain down my leg but I could not understand it.

  Now I will tell you some of the information he gave me, using the alphabet to spell out sentences:

  “I came about money.”

  “The money is in Nova Scotia—Oak Island—was put there in 1782 by James (sic) Morgan.”

  He first stated the depth was 90 feet, but thought that it might have been 100 feet. We can get it if we can keep out the damned water. It is not where Morgan put it—sunk eight feet—is in the tunnel to 118 feet—money not all at bottom of Pit. Mate’s money 29 feet south east of Money Pit—about thirty-five feet down—was put there by tunnel from Money Pit. Entrance to tunnel twenty-five to thirty feet down—will get this money in two weeks.

  You will find the drain as sure as hell—you are under the drain—the dam water they have found comes down from the drain entrance to drain to south of the Halifax dam near the big stone. It flows between No. 15 and No. 4 and No. 12—It falls between No. 5 and air shaft—the gate is there—There is money in the air shaft—2nd Mate’s, between one and $200,000—Mate’s share between five and six hundred thousand—Morgan’s share between seven and eight hundred thousand.

  Lowden had attached a diagram to illustrate what he described. Blair apparently studied it closely, but as his attorney, Harris, would dryly observe in The Oak Island Mystery: “As Kidd died in 1701 and Henry Morgan, the pirate, flourished between 1670 and 1688, Blair’s reply expressed considerable doubt as to the correctness of Lowden’s theory.”

  Not to mention that the idea of people digging the Money Pit and constructing the flood tunnels without being noticed in 1782, when there were people living on Oak Island and all along the shoreline, was plainly impossible.

  Almost forty years later, though, Blair was deeply interested in the claims of a man R. V. Harris would identify only as “Wilson” who said he had verified that it was the Incan treasure of Tumbes buried on Oak Island by means of automatic writing. Alternately described as either a psychic process or as a spiritual one—or as both—automatic writing essentially produces words on paper without the conscious intent of the person holding the pen. Scientific materialists describe it as an “ideomotor effect” that results from a person entering a dissociative state; persons under hypnosis can readily perform automatic writing they note. What Wilson claimed when he wrote to Blair in 1931 was that he produced his automatic writing by surrendering himself to the spirit minds of a group of men from a bygone age—”A. R.” and “Circle” were two of their names—who had created the Money Pit and buried the great treasure of the Incas on Oak Island. There is no doubt that Wilson impressed Blair with the level of accurate detail he provided about Oak Island without ever having visited the place. In particular Blair was struck by the fact that Wilson said the Chappell shaft overlapped part of the Money Pit, something that was only later proven to be true. Blair was also impressed that Wilson was prepared to invest his own money—between $25,000 and $30,000—into a new search of the Money Pit based on what he had learned from A. R. and the others. While Blair was never able to reach a deal with Wilson—there were negotiations—he clearly gave serious and continuing consideration to the information the man had provided about the construction of the Money Pit and what it meant. Much of what Daniel McGinnis and the others had discovered back in 1795—the sawed-off oak limb, the tackle block, the remains of a road or path between the Pit and the shore—was not left by the original depositors in the sixteenth century, Wilson told Blair, but by an early eighteenth-century search effort that had preceded the putative “discovery” of the Money Pit by more than fifty years. The treasure itself was in multiple locations inside the Pit, according to Wilson, who told Blair that part of it was at a depth of 126 feet about 20 feet behind the west wall of the original shaft. There was also treasure at a depth of 153 feet Wilson said, and more in a “Gothic chamber” that had been constructed at a depth of 175 feet.

  Blair kept the plans and sketches of the Money Pit that Wilson had drawn in his files for the remainder of his life, and he referred to them regularly when planning or discussing some new approach to the problems the Pit posed. Somehow, the man knew things, Blair told Harris, who would observe that “the whole affair was most uncanny. Mr. Blair was undoubtedly greatly impressed by the answers he received [from Wilson].”

  Gilbert Hedden was even more inclined to lend an ear—or a dollar—to persons who approached him with ideas or inventions that would have furrowed the brows of more cynical men. One example of this was the correspondence Hedden carried on for months with J. P. Nolan, a longtime prospector from the mining town of Montague, Nova Scotia, who had introduced himself by writing: “After twenty-five years of study and labour, I have invented a small machine called a ‘gold finder.’ They will not find any mineral but gold and can pick gold veins to a depth of 600 feet and survey them…. Should you care to see a demonstration of my gold finder, I would kindly ask you to come here and see me.”


  After an exchange of several more letters between Nolan and Hedden, the old miner was invited to make a demonstration at the office of R. V. Harris. The gold finder was a mechanism made of four short rods suspended from strings that Nolan held in his hands. “I placed a bag of gold quartz about three feet east of the rods,” the attorney recounted, “and immediately the rods swung in that direction. Then I placed the bag on the floor beneath and the rods turned quickly and definitely towards the floor. The bag was then placed west of the rods and the rods swung that way.” It was all “very uncanny,” Harris conceded wryly, given that “there was not enough gold in the quartz to gild a pinhead, and all this time I had in my vest pocket a rather large gold pocket watch.” No matter where he moved in the room, Harris noted, the rods were not affected. Of course, Nolan and the associate he had brought with him didn’t know about the watch in Harris’s pocket.

  The attorney advised his client, Hedden, to have nothing further to do with gold finders. His lawyer’s advice, though, didn’t prevent Hedden from signing a “no cure, no pay” agreement (meaning money would not be exchanged unless valuables were recovered) in February 1938 with an inventor who claimed to have developed a camera capable of locating the treasure in the Money Pit by taking a photograph from aboveground. The inventor had offered to demonstrate this unique camera to Harris in the offices of another Nova Scotia attorney who represented the inventor. Recalled Harris:

  Fifty two-dollar bills (not coin) were placed in a book on one of the shelves in his law office, their location unknown to the inventor who later entered the room and took a photograph of one side of the room…. The inventor then left the room to change his plate, or film, and the money was placed in the bottom of a briefcase lying on a chair. A second photograph was then taken of the other side of the room, including the chair. When the photographs were developed, copies were sent to the lawyer, marked with rings around the law book on the shelf and around the lower left hand corner of the brief case! The other attorney professed himself converted to a belief in the efficacy of his client’s invention!

  In his report to Hedden, Harris could not help observing that the other attorney’s self-interest might well be served by such a conversion. Nevertheless, after the inventor pestered him for months, Hedden agreed to let the man take a series of treasure-seeking photographs on Oak Island. The man left shortly after arriving, however, claiming he had to make “adjustments” to his camera’s internal circuitry. Hedden, flustered and infuriated, declared the whole thing a hoax and told the inventor never to come back.

  Hedden, however, remained willing to hear out almost anyone who claimed to possess a solution to the problem of Oak Island. Over the years, he listened to many stories, but none was so fascinating as the one told by a professor of chemical engineering at Iowa State University named Burrell Ruth. In October 1939, Professor Ruth had read a story about Oak Island published in the Saturday Evening Post. He immediately fired off a thirty-Page letter laying out the theory that at the bottom of the Money Pit was a vault containing the original manuscripts of the plays and poems that were attributed to William Shakespeare.

  Just as I would when I first heard it suggested in the autumn of 2003, sixty-four years after Ruth’s letter was written, Hedden found the idea preposterous. He was flabbergasted, though, by what the professor had written about the manner in which he believed the Shakespeare manuscripts had been protected against the ravages of time—by immersion in hundreds of gallons of mercury.

  “Your prediction that the Money Pit contains mercury is one of the most amazing coincidences I have ever encountered,” Hedden wrote back to Professor Ruth:

  You can be certain that before sinking nearly a hundred thousand in this venture I explored it from every angle. One of these angles was the folklore, superstitions and legends that have surrounded the Pit since 1800. One of the most widespread and persistent of these legends, and one for which I was never able to find the least basis, was the curious belief that the Money Pit contained mercury. I never gave it any serious thought; it seemed too fantastic. But one point in favor of your theory is that there does exist an old dump on the island in which are the remains of thousands of broken pottery flasks. That this dump is very old is supported by the fact that we found nearby an old coin and ivory boatswain’s whistle which experts tell us date back to the Elizabethan period.

  The “old dump” Hedden described had been found by members of his crew on the shoreline of Joudrey’s Cove during the summer of 1937, while they were searching for markers that might be connected to the drilled boulders and the stone triangle. According to Amos Nauss, the liquid residue found inside the flasks was mercury.

  Hedden kept up a correspondence with Ruth for years, drawing out the professor’s conviction that the man behind the Money Pit and the rest of the works on Oak Island was Sir Francis Bacon, the Lord Chancellor in early seventeenth-century England who was also, according to Ruth, the true author of the Shakespeare plays. This part of the theory, along with the claim that the Shakespeare manuscripts were hidden in a secret vault, was not original to Ruth. The professor himself had first heard it laid out in 1920 as a student at Michigan State University, when he listened awestruck to a presentation by one of the most colorful characters in modern American history, Dr. Orville Ward Owen.

  A physician from Detroit by day, Dr. Owen had devoted his nights for more than three decades to the study of Elizabethan manuscripts. The culmination of this labor had been a multivolume work published under the title Sir Francis Bacon’s Cipher Story that described how Owen had reached the conclusion that Bacon was the author not only of the works attributed to William Shakespeare, but also the author of volumes that had been published under the names of Edmund Spenser, Robert Burton, and George Peele, among others. Owen’s claims were even more remarkable than that, though, because at the center of his theory was the contention that Bacon had used these works to encode teachings for which he believed the world was not yet prepared. He had decrypted these teachings, Dr. Owen maintained, by the application of his great invention, the “cipher wheel,” which was actually a set of wheels, through which Owen had run a 1,000-foot-long strip of canvas onto which were pasted the complete works of Shakespeare, as well as samples of the works of Spenser, Burton, Peele, and the others, including Christopher Marlowe. This invention was inspired, it seemed, by a passage from one of the works that Bacon had written under his own name:

  Take your knife and cut all our great books asunder

  And set the leaves on a great firm wheel

  Which rolls and rolls, and turning the

  Fickle rolling wheel, throw your eyes upon FORTUNE

  That goddess blind, that stands upon

  A spherical stone, that turning and inconsistent rolls

  In restless variations. Mark her the prime mover,

  She is our first guide.

  Owen explained that when he spun his cipher wheel he discovered that certain words were highlighted and messages were revealed.

  By this process, he had uncovered a secret history of the Elizabethan period, one in which Queen Elizabeth had been secretly married to Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester, who had fathered two sons by her, one being Bacon, the other Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex. After the Queen had Bacon’s brother, Devereux, executed for perceived disloyalty, Bacon had begun encoding his secret history of the realm in works ostensibly written by others, Owen explained, communicating them in the form of questions and answers composed in blank verse. But then Elizabeth discovered that her surviving son had authored the play Hamlet, forcing Bacon to become even more secretive, “circumscribing the scope of that mighty intellect, and forcing the hiding of its best work under masks and cipher, only to be revealed three hundred years later.” The doctor also revealed that Romeo and Juliet was the story of Bacon’s romance with the queen of France, Margaret of Valois, and that Queen Elizabeth had confessed Bacon was her son on her deathbed, only to be strangled by Robert Cecil to prevent he
r from proclaiming Bacon as her successor.

  It was all quite fantastic and a considerable sensation when Sir Francis Bacon’s Cipher Story was published over a three-year period in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Many critics savaged the massive work, among them the famous cryptologists William and Elizebeth Friedman, who scoffed at the notion that Owen’s cipher wheel produced anything more than random variations. Even Owen’s good friend Dr. Frederick Mann denounced him, writing that “we are asked to believe that such peerless creations as Hamlet, The Tempest and Romeo and Juliet were not prime productions of the transcendent genius who wrote them, but were subsidiary devices which Bacon designed for the purpose of concealing the cipher within.”

  Dr. Owen found supporters, however. The idea that the Shakespeare works had actually been written by Bacon had been around long before the doctor’s invention of his cipher wheel. In fact, some of the great minds in Anglo-American history had subscribed to it, among them Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Benjamin Disraeli, and Walt Whitman. Owen’s contemporary Mark Twain had written that he was “inclined” to believe that Bacon had written the Shakespeare plays.

  In the early years of the twentieth century, Owen announced that he believed the original Shakespeare manuscripts, written in Bacon’s hand, were hidden in a vault containing sixty-six lead-lined iron boxes of papers buried either beneath or beside the bed of the River Wye where it divided England from Wales at Chepstow Castle. The expedition Owen undertook to search for these iron boxes in the late summer of 1909 was widely observed. The New York Times, in fact, devoted two full pages to a massive article that chronicled Dr. Owen’s adventure, datelined “London—May 3 [1910]”:

  At the time of Dr. Owen’s arrival in Chepstow, he was accompanied by his friend, Dr. William H. Prescott of Boston, a well-known physician and alienist, who had been interested in the Baconian theory for years. Neither had been in Chepstow before, and knew nothing about its history beyond what had been revealed through the medium of the cipher. Yet to-day Dr. Owen positively asserts he has found every landmark mentioned in the cipher—many of which are known by new names, and only remembered by the older names mentioned in the cipher, by the oldest inhabitants of Chepstow, and, more wonderful indeed, has succeeded in uncovering a strange oaken structure, beneath which Dr. Owen is confident of finding the cache which, he maintains, holds the missing relics.