The Curse of Oak Island

by Randall Sullivan

  When he arrived at the shaft near Smith’s Cove that he had helped the Restalls dig, Kaizer saw a crowd gathered around it. Those closest to the edge were the young volunteers of the Chester Fire Department, red faced and sweaty in their black coats, helmets, and rubber boots, all wearing frightened expressions. They had agreed among themselves by then that the people at the bottom of the shaft were dead, and all that was left to be done was retrieve the bodies. None of the firemen was willing to be lowered into the shaft; they had decided that the only feasible plan was to lower a three-pronged gaff called a treble hook into the pit and pull the bodies up one at a time with that. The firemen were saying to themselves and to onlookers that it would be a bloody mess, but what else could they do. “My dad said, ‘No way, you’re not doing that,’” Faron remembered. “He said, “I’ll go down.’”

  One of the firemen had an old World War II gas mask and Jim put that on, along with a pair of coveralls, then soaked some rags in water and wrapped them around the mask to help keep it sealed. He tied a rope around both thighs and his waist and told the firemen to lower him into the shaft. He went down four separate times, bringing up the bodies one at a time.

  “After that, Dad wasn’t the same,” Faron told me.

  “My grandmother said it changed him,” Tim agreed, “but that it might have been more what happened after. It was hard to know, because Jim wasn’t one to talk about his feelings.”

  RICK RESTALL AND HIS MOTHER were too numbed by shock to say much to each other or anyone else in the days that followed. “We could barely function and my mother had no idea what to do or where to go,” Rick said. Robert Dunfield, the petroleum engineer from California, and Mel Chappell moved in quickly, ostensibly to offer their help and support. “Dunfield had this aura that was very charming, especially to women,” recalled Lee Lamb. “He seemed like some sort of movie star and people trusted him.” It was Chappell, though, who “before my husband and son were even buried,” as Mildred Restall would put it, urged her to come with him to Halifax to sign a legal transfer of the search rights to Dunfield.

  Within a week of Bob and Bobbie’s deaths, Dunfield had persuaded Mildred to move with Ricky off the island to a house on the mainland, promising to pay the rent for the rest of her life. He kept that promise for a few months, Ricky remembered bitterly, then “just stopped paying.” His mother was most devastated, though, by the disappearance of every chart, map, and document she and her husband had collected before and during their six years on Oak Island, her surviving son said. “Dunfield and Chappell even took our photo albums,” Rick remembered. “My mother never got over it.”

  Bob and Bobbie were buried in the Western Shore Cemetery, where Mildred herself would eventually be interred. The grave of Cyril Hiltz was nearby. Though just sixteen, Cyril was supporting himself by his labor and taking care of his pregnant girlfriend. Before being employed by the Restalls, he had worked as a scallop dragger on a boat based out of Lunenburg. It was lucrative work, but it was also dangerous. Cyril had given it up after a few months because, as he confided to his girlfriend, he was afraid of drowning at sea. Drowning was the official cause of his death on Oak Island just a few months later. The coroner’s verdict was that all four of those who died in the shaft at Smith’s Cove on August 17, 1965, had drowned in the water at the bottom after being overcome by “toxic marsh gas.” Methane, though, is colorless and odorless, and all of the witnesses at the scene had described a rotten egg smell coming from the shaft that day. “My grandmother told me that when my grandfather came home that day she hung his overalls out back,” Tim Kaizer remembered. “But she said they stank even after a week.” And his grandmother agreed it had been a rotten egg smell. “Eventually the overalls got hung up in our mudroom,” Faron recalled. “But my dad never wore them again. He said he could still smell the gas on them.”

  Carbon dioxide, the kind of gas that would have been produced by the fumes of the pump running that day in the shaft at Smith’s Cove, is notable for the rotten egg smell it produces when it collects in an enclosed space.

  “I say Oak Island killed my parents,” Lee Lamb would declare when I interviewed her in 2003 (Mildred Restall, who had never recovered from her heartbreak, had died just a few years earlier). While Rick listened somberly, nodding once or twice, she and I talked about the eerie feel of the island. A gloom created by fog and drizzle had shrouded the island since my arrival in Mahone Bay, but the chills I had experienced on the one visit I made to the island after dark were accompanied by a distinct sense that it was more than the weather that made Oak Island such a spooky place. “There’s a darkness to the place, even when the sun shines,” Lee said. Ten years later, in an appearance on The Curse of Oak Island, she would repeat the sentiment to the Lagina brothers in even stronger language: “I certainly believe there’s a malevolent spirit of some kind on Oak Island.”

  The Kaizer family—Jim Kaizer in particular—would live with that belief. About two weeks after that terrible day, Robert Dunfield offered Jim a job as his night watchman on Oak Island. It was good money for not doing a whole lot, so Kaizer accepted. He didn’t hold it for long, however. Early that autumn, Jim came home in the middle of the night badly shaken. “What I remember most is the way my dad swore,” Faron recalled. “He was just swearing up and down, not like he was angry, but like it was just comin’ out of him. It really scared us. Because we seen him when he would get mad. But he wasn’t violent this time. I realize now he was scared. But he was a man who never got scared so he didn’t know how to express it except by swearing. It went on for about a week and then he sort of settled down. And I remember Mom sayin’, ‘Thank God it’s over.’ Because even she was scared. But Dad still wouldn’t go back to Oak Island. He never went back on the island again, not once after that night.”

  Gradually Jim revealed to his family what had happened, telling Beulah first, letting her tell their sons whatever she saw fit, then eventually confiding in the boys himself. “He told me I wouldn’t believe him, but he was tellin’ me anyway,” Faron remembered. He was in the Restall’s old cabin, Jim said, where he had spent most of his nights on Oak Island. “Dad said it was about eleven or twelve o’clock. He said, ‘I had a little fire goin’. I put some wood on the fire and then I lay down on the cot and closed my eyes.’ And apparently he fell asleep. And he said, ‘I woke up and I couldn’t breathe.’ And he said there was two of the biggest red eyes you would ever want to see looking right into his. And the whole body was covered with hair, tight and curly black hair. He said that was all he could see, because the … whatever it was, was holdin’ him down by his arms and had him pinned so tight that he couldn’t move. But then it smiled at him and said, ‘Don’t ever come back.’ My dad said when it let him go and disappeared the whole building shook. He said it was just unreal. There was no wind, nothin’. And he got in his truck and drove back across the causeway. And he wouldn’t ever go back on the island again after that. He told me, ‘It was the only thing that’s ever scared me.’”

  Even after Jim Kaizer “settled down,” as his son put it, he was different. He drank more heavily and was silent for days at a time, but also erupted regularly into frightening rages. “My brothers and me, when we saw him comin’ back home, we’d all scatter from the house,” Faron remembered. Jim still worked on and off for a local cement contractor and had his own beer bottle recycling business, but he became an increasingly sporadic earner and was in trouble often with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

  His anguish only increased when he tried to confide in others. “People would ask him if he was drinking that night or maybe was overtired,” Tim Kaizer said. “When he realized people didn’t believe him, he stopped talking and just bottled it up inside.”

  “I remember Dad tellin’ Mom certain things,” Faron recalled. “And she would just shake her head and walk away. But he wanted to tell somebody that it was on his mind.”

  He should have seen what was coming, Faron said, when “my dad too
k me aside to apologize for the way he had treated me and my mother.”

  That was 1976. Just a few weeks later, not long before he would turn fifty, Jim Kaizer shot himself in the head with a rifle outside a bar in Western Shore.

  “What I pick up is that there was a group of people and one of them had a gun,” Faron said. “Dad took it, but it had no bullets. But there was a woman, and she gave him a bullet. And he walked away, and he told everybody to stay away from him. And then he done it.”

  When I asked him about it, Dave Blankenship, son of the old Oak Island hand Dan Blankenship and now part of the Lagina brothers’ treasure hunt, said that Jim was remembered more locally for “playin’ Russian Roulette with a single shot twenty-two” than for going down into the shaft at Smith’s Cove on that August day in 1965 to bring up four bodies. The fireman from Buffalo, Edward White, had been honored with Canada’s Medal of Bravery for going down once into that poison gas, Jim had reflected on more than one occasion. But the four times he had gone down were completely forgotten.

  Beulah’s own pain increased considerably after the company that issued Jim’s life insurance policy refused to pay out because the cause of death had been suicide. “Mom had no money, so she went to work in the fish plant,” Faron said. “Her life had been hard and it got a lot harder.” Beulah and Mildred Restall would become close friends. They had both lost their men in tragic circumstances, they both felt cheated and betrayed by people and institutions they had trusted, and they both were forced to work menial jobs to make ends meet.

  Tim Kaizer had grown up hearing about what had happened to Grampa Jim on Oak Island, he told me. “I thought it was a cool story, because when you’re a kid, it’s mythical. But as I’ve understood more about who Jim was, it’s made it seem more and more real. Because for someone like him who was so fearless to be so scared by something that he would never go back to the island, you know it had to be something remarkable.”

  Tim admitted that he had never set foot on Oak Island. A short, thick power lifter who looked like he could have been carved out of a boulder, Tim worked as a paramedic aboard a medevac helicopter and was conditioned to remain calm in traumatic and often frightening situations. “But Oak Island scares me,” he said. “I believe there’s a bad spirit on the island. I believe my grandfather encountered it.”

  Some of that may have to do with what Beulah Kaizer told him when he asked her about that night, Tim said, whether or not she had believed Jim’s story. “My grandmother looked at me, and then she told me that when he came home that night Jim had showed her his arms. And they had huge bruises on them that had been made by handprints.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Robert Dunfield became the great malefactor of the Oak Island story not for how he treated Mildred Restall, but for how he treated the island itself. Dunfield’s motives may not have been as petty as Colonel Henry Bowdoin’s, but the blunt instrument methods the man employed have delivered him to infamy. Whether that is entirely fair can be argued. That it is just in general is beyond dispute.

  The most generous assessment is that Melbourne Chappell and Robert Dunfield decided that since everything else had been tried they might as well declare war on Oak Island and get this thing over with once and for all. Only later would Chappell realize that Dunfield was not everything he appeared to be when he first arrived in Nova Scotia. He was not, for instance, from Beverly Hills but rather from the modest San Fernando Valley suburb of Canoga Park. In 1965, Dunfield was a thirty-nine-year-old UCLA graduate who had made some money drilling oil wells, but not so much that he could personally finance a major operation on Oak Island. To proceed, he had needed investors and found three. There were two other Californians who had made money from oil wells, G. R. Perle of Bakersfield and Jack Nethercutt, whose Beverly Hills home address Dunfield had used on some business documents, giving rise to the wealthy image. The third investor was Dan Blankenship, a successful building contractor from Miami, Florida, whose name would eventually become as closely associated with Oak Island as any in history.

  With the backing of his investors, Dunfield had begun work on Oak Island less than a month after Robert Restall and his son were buried. He started by barging two bulldozers out to the island and with them made clear immediately that he was going to leave his mark on the place. The dozers skimmed 12 feet of soil off the drumlin where the Money Pit was located and dumped it by the tons onto the man-made beach at Smith’s Cove. He succeeded in exposing what all agreed was some of the cribbing of the original Pit, but he had no success at all in stopping the inflow of water. So Dunfield went large.

  In ten days in early October, he built the causeway that has made it possible for countless people (me among them) to drive across a narrow stretch of Mahone Bay from the mainland. Boats and barges had been the only way to reach Oak Island since the beginning of time, and the 15,000 cubic yards of fill that Dunfield used to construct the causeway created a transformation that was dramatic, but not entirely appreciated. The first enemies Dunfield made in Nova Scotia, in fact, were the fishermen who for two centuries had been using the narrow protected passage between Crandall’s Point and Oak Island to access the deeper waters of the bay. Going that way not only shortened the trip for fishing boats, but allowed for a much gentler transition to the sea. I understood how jarred Mahone Bay’s fishing fleet must have been by the change Dunfield wrought one day when I rented a kayak at my hotel in Western Shore and set out to paddle around Oak Island. The gentle waves created by the combination of the island and the breakwaters offshore let me cross the inward bay with surprising ease; my greatest difficulties were negotiating the rocks and massive yellow-brown kelp beds when I got too close to shore. When I paddled around the eastern tip of the island though—the elephant’s nose, Rick Lagina called it—the change was shockingly sudden. The waves here were abruptly two, three, four times as high as they had been just a couple of minutes earlier, and they fell with choppy gray violence all around. It dawned on me very quickly that I was paddling in the Atlantic Ocean. My tiny kayak took on water at an alarming rate, becoming increasingly unstable. I spun it around finally and paddled hard back the way I came, making for a landing spot where I could tip the kayak and empty it before it dumped me into the sea. Gasping from the exertion and momentary panic, I understood how infuriating it must have been to the captains and crews of the fishing boats who found themselves not only adding twenty minutes to their outbound commute but also being forced to deal with the ocean from almost the moment they left the mainland shore. On bad weather days—and there are a lot of them in Nova Scotia—they must have been truly pissed off. And they let Dunfield know it.

  If that bothered him, Dunfield didn’t show it. The first thing he did with his new causeway, the day after its completion on October 17, 1965, was haul out a 70-foot-tall crane that was equipped with a 3-yard link belt “clam-digger” bucket capable of removing 800 cubic yards per hour. Right behind the crane and clam digger was a truck loaded with pumping equipment that could remove 111,000 tons of water per hour.

  Dunfield headed his heavy equipment straight for the south shore, where he ran two shifts of crews numbering up to a dozen men in an all-out effort to block the flow of seawater into the Money Pit. The work began with the excavation of a huge trench 22 feet deep and 200 feet long, parallel to shoreline. Dunfield claimed to have found a previously undiscovered shaft at a depth of 60 feet where “water rushed in, giving us the evidence of a new flood system leading into the Money Pit.” He had confirmed the dye tests made by William Chappell in 1898, when the red dye had come out at three points on the south shore, Dunfield said, and this was one of the places the dye had leaked into the bay.

  The clam digger had been scraping against rock-hard clay up to that point, when suddenly the bucket dropped 3 feet in soft ground. They had entered an 8-foot-square pocket of refill—beach rock, beach sand, eel grass, and other vegetation—that was clearly the work of human hands. He and his crew were on the brink of unc
overing the main sources of the flood trap, Dunfield said, but a week of probing in all directions with the clam digger at a depth of 60 feet revealed no branch that led to the Money Pit and in the end all Dunfield had accomplished was to wreak even more havoc on the south shore than his bulldozers had done on the beach at Smith’s Cove.

  In early November Dunfield directed his men and equipment back to the Money Pit. Within two weeks the clam digger had opened a shaft 50 feet wide and 98 feet deep that encompassed both the Money Pit and the Hedden and the Chappell shafts and erased much of what had been left behind on the east-end drumlin. Ten days later the massive hole was 148 feet deep. Dunfield estimated that he had another 48 feet to go, and he told reporters that either he would reach the treasure or “call it quits.” The owner of the crane, however, chose that moment to remind Dunfield that he had a contract to use it elsewhere. Dunfield had foreseen this eventuality and swiftly brought in a replacement with a 90-foot boom. Almost immediately, though, the machine was beset by a series of mechanical problems that included a blown gasket and a cracked engine block. Many of the crane’s “broken” cables had actually been cut with hacksaws, said Mel Chappell, who accused local fishermen bent on punishing Dunfield for the causeway of being the saboteurs.