The Curse of Oak Island

by Randall Sullivan

  Even though it was a September afternoon at the tail end of summer, the weather was as dank and gloomy as it had been from the moment I arrived in Nova Scotia about a week earlier. When I think of the two hours I spent with the surviving children of Robert and Mildred Restall, at a table in a restaurant that had bad food but a good view of Oak Island, the first image that comes to mind is the way Lee sat between her younger brother and me, as if even at this stage of life she felt obliged to protect him. Lee was in her early sixties, wore thick glasses, and had gray hair that she wore shorter than mine. She had long since raised her children and seemed to have achieved some sort of contentment as she settled in for the transit to old age. She also seemed much cheerier than her brother, perhaps because she had paid only a couple of brief previous visits to Oak Island and never lived there. I directed most of my questions to her, both because it made me feel vaguely guilty to interrogate Rick and because Lee was a marvelous source of information about the people her parents had been before they came to Oak Island.

  Mildred was a seventeen-year-old British ballerina in 1931 when she met Bob, who was twenty-five, from Toronto, and working as a daredevil motorcyclist with a circus that was touring Europe that summer. Within a year the two were not only married, but partners in one of the most famous and heart-stopping carnival acts on the planet. The Restalls’ Globe of Death was a steel mesh sphere 20 feet in diameter within which Rob and Mildred rode a pair of motorcycles at sixty-five miles an hour—she horizontally, he vertically. “It was all about split-second timing and perfect trust,” Lee Lamb told me. The couple did it for years and suffered only one serious accident, in Germany, in which Mildred broke her jaw and Bob broke an arm.

  By the 1950s, though, the advent of television had decimated the carnival circuit. Bob brought Mildred and their three young children back to Canada, where they settled in Hamilton, Ontario. Bob was soon working as a pipe fitter but he never got comfortable with domestic life. In 1954 he read an article about Oak Island and one year later arranged a trip to Mahone Bay. “Dad came home from his first visit to the island absolutely enchanted,” Lee recalled. “It was all he could talk about. He thought it was the most fascinating puzzle on Earth.” Four years passed, though, before he could persuade Mildred to join the adventure. When the Harman brothers quit Oak Island in late 1958, Bob saw his chance and began to hector Mel Chappell to give him a chance to take over the treasure hunt. With no better offer on hand at that moment, Chappell in the spring of 1959 signed a one-year agreement with Restall, who agreed to pay the government its 5 percent of any treasure recovered, then to split what was left equally.

  Bob and his eighteen-year-old son, Robert Restall Jr.—Bobbie—arrived in October of that year to set up their camp on Oak Island. Mildred and nine-year-old Rick (Ricky back then) followed in the summer of 1960. Lee had just married and was living in Oakville, Ontario. “So I was spared,” she told me.

  The family’s life savings of $8,500 was mostly gone within months of Mildred’s arrival on Oak Island. Lacking the money to hire men or lease heavy machinery, the Restalls worked the ground on Oak Island with picks and shovels, the same way it had been done back in the eighteenth century. Bob had come to Nova Scotia determined to make up for what he lacked in resources with energy and applied knowledge. For most of the previous three years he had not only pored over the records of every Oak Island expedition between 1850 and 1900, but he also studied dozens of charts of Mahone Bay, looking for whatever might have been overlooked by previous treasure hunters. By the time he arrived on Oak Island, Bob knew the details of the 1937 Roper survey commissioned by Gilbert Hedden backward and forward, and he had made exhaustive comparisons of notes and journals that had been created not only by Hedden, Blair, and Hamilton, but also by McCully, McNutt, and Adams Tupper, among other searchers from the nineteenth century.

  Based on what he had learned, Bob announced that he would devote his energies first to exploring the drains at Smith’s Cove in an attempt to solve the riddle of the flood system. With Bobbie working alongside him, Bob concentrated his efforts on the span of the shoreline between the old cofferdam and the high tide mark. According to the journals they both kept, the two dug sixty-five holes, all between 2 and 6 feet deep, and uncovered multiple sections of the five finger drains, along with thick mats of eel grass and coconut fiber under the man-made beach. In the progress report he submitted to Mel Chappell in 1961, Bob Restall wrote: “We now have a complete picture of the beach work, and it is incredible.” Though a good bit of it had been torn up by the Truro Company crews that first found it in 1850, this work stretched for 243 feet along the inner edge of the cofferdam, according to Bob’s report, composed entirely of “paving stones” overlaid with eel grass, coconut fiber, sand, and rocks. While he had determined that the five finger drains all converged at one point just above the low tide mark, he had not been able to locate the main channel, Bob wrote to Chappell. There were two possibilities: either the drains were no longer connected to that channel, or it was much deeper underground than he could reach by hand digging.

  He had enjoyed that first summer on Oak Island, Rick Restall remembered. His parents let him explore the island from end to end, accompanied by the family’s Belgian sheepdog, Carnie, who was utterly devoted to the nine-year-old. He fished, swam, and hiked through the woods. In the evenings the family entertained one another by dreaming out loud about how they would spend their future wealth—$30 million by Bob’s estimate. Bob wanted a yacht and talked about sailing around the world. Older brother Bobbie wanted a sports car, a new make and model each week. His mom just wanted a snug home on the mainland with flowers in the yard and neighbors nearby.

  Then winter came. They were living in two 16-by-10-foot shacks without plumbing, running water, or electricity. One doubled as Bob and Mildred’s sleeping quarters and as the kitchen where Mildred cooked their meals on a propane stove. The other was a combination tool-shed and bedroom for the boys. The interiors grew colder, darker, and danker as the rain that fell day after day turned gradually to sleet and snow. There was a tiny oil heater in the main cabin that put out a small amount of heat, but the boys’ bedroom—”if you could call it that,” Rick said—was always freezing. He and Bobbie slept in socks and knit caps, but still shivered in their sleeping bags some nights. “I guess the only blessing for me was that I was so young and didn’t have much to compare it to,” Rick told me.

  Mildred, though, could remember what her life had been like before Oak Island. She became increasingly miserable, exhausted by the continual talk of the search that was the only conversation that Bob and Bobbie seemed interested in. For entertainment, they had not even a radio, only a kerosene lamp to read by and a chessboard. Mildred spent hours every day helping Ricky with his homeschooling courses, but her evenings were becoming long and empty. Bob regularly regaled the family with his theory that Oak Island had been used as a “sort of Ft. Knox” built by forced labor over a period of twenty years under the supervision of the privateers headquartered at LaHave, who needed a place to store the booty they seized in raids on Spanish ships and settlements. Bob thought some of it was the loot that Henry Morgan had carried away from his sacking of Panama City back in 1671. He pointed to the tunnel systems that had been created by pirates in the West Indies, “which could be flooded at will by sea-water” as he put it to a reporter for the Hamilton (Ontario) Spectator. Mildred became convinced that the work on the island had been done by the Acadians shortly before their expulsion from Nova Scotia in 1755, and that they had long since come back to retrieve it, meaning there was no longer any treasure to recover.

  “We were poor and lonely,” Rick told me. “And my mom suffered for it the worst.”

  “I remember watching my mom cut out the rips and tears in one of Dad’s old shirts to make a shirt for herself,” said his sister, Lee, recalling the trip she made to see her family while the rest of them were living on Oak Island. “And I thought, ‘This is insane!’”

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sp; Rick didn’t realize the effects of their deprivation on him until he was much older. “I have splayed feet because rubber boots were the only shoes I owned,” he said.

  By the end of their second winter on Oak Island, Rick said, “My mom went from being a pretty sunny person to a very unhappy one. She became bitter.”

  “Bitter because she couldn’t understand Dad’s obsession,” Lee added. “The mystery of Oak Island was all that mattered to him.”

  Bob was tireless. You had to give him that. And he had drawn his oldest son almost as deeply into the adventure as he was willing to go. The two of them worked seven days a week, literally from dawn to dusk, and then spent hours each evening writing in their journals and discussing what they had learned. Mostly the two of them dug, but they also explored the island and made discoveries that have become part of Oak Island’s lore. There were the three huge piles of stones that formed a triangle on the slope of the east-end drumlin, just below the Money Pit on the northwest side, also. Bob described them as “the ruins of early sentry stations.” He and Bobbie also measured the key distances in what would have been the standard unit of measure for seventeenth-century Englishmen, rods, determining that the distance between the base of the stone triangle and the center of the Money Pit was precisely 18 rods, that it was 2 rods exactly on a true northeast course from the Money Pit to the nearest drilled rocks, and 25 rods from the other drilled stone. Restall was also the first to decide that the Oak Island swamp might be the key to solving the mystery of place. His son Bobbie’s journal is filled with descriptions of their search for the metal “mystery box” that Edwin Hamilton’s caretaker Jack Adams had claimed was buried in a corner of the swamp.

  Bob believed his family’s most important discovery was what became known as the “1704 stone.” Some would later accuse Restall of planting the stone, but when I asked Rick Restall about that he was indignant. “My dad and brother were digging up one of the areas that covered the five finger drains, dumping the stones off to one side with a bucket and trolley line. My mother and I were wandering on the beach through the stones when one of us turned over a stone by stepping on it, and we saw the date carved into its center: 1704.”

  The stone may have been—probably was, R. V. Harris thought—one found by Edwin Hamilton in 1939, the practical joke of a workman who later admitted to carving the stone. Bob Restall thought the stone was critically important, though, because the date—1704—was when Jacques de Broullain, the French governor at LaHave, had welcomed the pirates of the North Atlantic to rid him of the raiders from Massachusetts.

  Be that as it may, it was on the basis of his discovery of the 1704 stone, along with the 1961 report that he had submitted to Chappell, that Bob Restall was able to raise $11,000 from an assortment of Ontario friends and investors who had been promised half of his share of the treasure. Restall spent most of that money to purchase the very same 1,000-gallon-per-minute electric pump that both Hedden and Hamilton had used to drain the shafts surrounding the Money Pit. Bob set the pump up over the Hedden shaft, recribbing sections of it down to 155 feet, then went to work on the Chappell shaft, using both of these pits to explore the old searcher tunnels that had been dug by the Oak Island Association back in the 1860s. Connected to the surface only by a rope that extended between him and his teenage son, Bob found that many of these tunnels were still in good shape and drove several new stubs off in various directions, but still couldn’t locate the main flood tunnel.

  Restall’s enthusiasm for the search seems never to have waned, even slightly, but by 1964 he was beginning to feel the pressure, not only because of the unhappiness his wife was finding it more and more difficult to conceal, but also because of the fear that Mel Chappell was going snatch his dream from him. Chappell refused to sign more than a one-year agreement with Restall, so each spring Bob endured a period of nearly unbearable tension as the previous year’s contract came up for renewal. Chappell made no secret of the fact that he was looking for a “big fish” with the wherewithal to conduct the treasure hunt on the scale he believed was required, and he brought a steady stream of potential partners to the island, all of them introduced to the Restalls and encouraged to describe their grand schemes. In the summer months, Bob constantly worried about whether this or that group of campers were tourists or potential rivals.

  The worst part for Restall was that the stress of his situation was being aggravated by one of his own investors, a petroleum engineer from California named Robert Dunfield. Restall had invited Dunfield to Oak Island to take a look at his operation, but shortly after the California man arrived Chappell met him and decided that Dunfield might very well be the big fish he had been trolling for. Dunfield’s Beverly Hills business address impressed Chappell mightily, as did the engineer’s analysis of the situation. Oak Island was “a problem in open-pit mining,” Dunfield had declared, one that could only be solved with a combination of high explosives and heavy machinery “on a scale never before tried.” Dunfield admitted it would be expensive, but the California man claimed to have backers who were willing to foot the bill. By the summer of 1965, Dunfield was negotiating his own deal with Chappell, one that would cut out Robert Restall.

  Restall found his way to a wealthy Montreal businessman named David Tobias, who gave him $20,000 for a percentage of the treasure, if one was ever recovered. A mineralogist and marina operator from Massapequa, Long Island, named Karl Graeser also invested in Restall. Bob approached Chappell with an offer to purchase his Oak Island property but was shocked to learn that the price was now $100,000. He had no choice, Bob told his family, but to deliver results to his investors before his latest agreement with Chappell expired in the spring of 1966.

  In June, Restall used some of the money he had received from Tobias and Graeser to hire three men from the mainland to work with him and Bobbie. They were a Mi’kmaq Indian from Robinsons Corner named Jim Kaizer, who was hired as his foreman, and two teenagers from Martin’s Point, seventeen-year-old Andy DeMont and sixteen-year-old Cyril Hiltz. They would concentrate entirely on locating and stopping the flood trap, Bob told his crew of four, concentrating their efforts on the Hedden shaft, but also working in a shaft he and Bobbie had dug previously, 10 feet by 6 feet wide and 26 feet deep, on the line between the finger drains at Smith’s Cove and the Cave-in Pit.

  Bob, Bobbie, DeMont, and Hiltz were working in the Hedden shaft for the first half of the day on August 17, 1965. Jim Kaizer was not present. The air was sticky that day, heavy and still, without even the faintest breath of a breeze, Rick Restall would remember: “The kind of day when the only place you wanted to be was the water.”

  Bob and Bobbie and the two teenagers had gone to work at six that morning, just as they did every other day, though. Bob was excited by what he described as a “corkscrew tunnel” he had found near the Money Pit, and in his journal the night before had written that he believed he was “within a few feet” of discovering the treasure and that only four or five more days of work would be required. At 2 p.m. he came up out of the Hedden shaft to remind Mildred he had a meeting in town later that afternoon and would be at the cabin in about an hour to wash up and change his clothes.

  It was about 2:45 p.m. when Bob walked down toward Smith’s Cove to check on the other shaft, where the pump had been running all day. No one actually saw him fall. He was perhaps climbing into the shaft or simply leaning over to look into it when he went in. He must have made some sort of sound, though, because Bobbie told DeMont and Hiltz something was wrong, then ran from the Hedden shaft toward the cove. When he reached the shaft where the pump was running, Bobbie saw his father lying in the black water at the bottom of the shaft, shouted for help, then climbed onto the ladder to go after his father.

  The Restall investor Karl Graeser, visiting from Long Island, made it to the shaft just seconds before DeMont and Hiltz did. The three of them stood on the lip and looked down to see the Restalls, father and son, lying side by side in the stagnant water, unconscious. They
shouted for help also, attracting a crowd of tourists and some teenagers who were camping on the island. All three climbed onto the ladder to go down after the Restalls, with Graeser in the lead. Not one of them made it to the bottom before they fell from the ladder and lay in what was now a pile of unconscious people at the bottom of the shaft. DeMont, the only one to make it out alive, said the last thing he remembered was seeing Bobbie in the water, his hand on his father’s shoulder.

  It was fortunate for DeMont, if no one else, that one of the tourists on Oak Island that day was fire captain Edward White from Buffalo, New York, who had been camping near the shore with his family. Recognizing that there must be some sort of deadly gas in the shaft, White tied a rope around both thighs and his waist, then had the other tourists lower him into the shaft. Captain White had managed to lash a second line around the body of the unconscious DeMont before he, too, passed out. Moments later, he and DeMont were pulled out of the shaft by tourists tugging on the ropes and then revived by two men named Richard Barber and Peter Beamish. Robert Restall, Robert Restall Jr., Karl Graeser, and Cyril Hiltz, however, were all dead. Beamish, a teacher at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, had talked to Bob just the night before, listening with fascination as Restall described how he had found the key to the network of tunnels between Smith’s Cove and the Money Pit. “He was really excited,” Beamish told the Ogdensburg (NY) Journal, two days later. “He was sure he had it this time.”

  It had to have been a ghastly scene on Smith’s Cove that day, but all I know about it is what I heard from Faron and Tim Kaizer, the son and grandson of Jim Kaizer, whom I interviewed one afternoon fifty-one years later at the Fo’c’sle Pub in Chester. According to Faron (who was ten years old back then), by August 1965, Jim had been working with the Restalls for months and had become close to Bob. “He and Mr. Restall were two peas in a pod, both tough and hardworking,” Faron said. “They were the type of men who didn’t have a lot of education, but just knew how to do things.” Jim was a short, stocky, swarthy man with a broad forehead and a heavily muscled physique. He had inherited those characteristics from his four-feet, seven-inch mother, a full-blooded Mi’kmaq, and he got her ferocity as well. “Dad was a hard man,” recalled Faron. “We didn’t cross his words, put it that way.” But his father seemed to have become “calmer” since he started working with the Restalls on Oak Island, Faron said. “Dad really enjoyed goin’ over there. He rarely missed a day, because it was exciting for him.” On August 17, though, Jim had stayed home. Their water pump was busted and Jim’s wife, Beulah, demanded that he repair it; the couple had eight children, all sons, and the laundry was piled to her shoulders. “I remember every time Dad would think he was done, he’d start to go out to his truck and Mom would come out after him and say, ‘It’s not fixed yet,’” Faron told me. “So he’d have to go back inside. Then when he came out the third time, his truck wouldn’t start.” It would haunt Jim later that all these delays had probably saved his life. “Dad was outside workin’ on his truck when my Uncle Maynard drove up with Melbourne Chappell. And Maynard said, ‘Jim, somethin’ happened over at the island.’”