The Curse of Oak Island

by Randall Sullivan

  People had been searching for the “walk-in tunnel,” as R. V. Harris had described it, since the nineteenth century. Fred Nolan and Dan Blankenship had between the two of them stepped across just about every inch of ground on Oak Island without ever finding this entrance to the treasure chamber, but both men had continued to believe it existed. I also believed it likely existed, though I had a feeling it might now be underwater. For those who didn’t hold Zena Halpern’s involvement in the Burrows Cave theory against her, the possibility was tantalizing that the map could show them the way into the Oak Island treasure vault.

  I have to admit my heart skipped a beat when Jack Begley pointed out that the location of the Hatch on Halpern’s 1347 map was on the west side of Oak Island near where the Blankenships lived, and then Dave Blankenship said he had stumbled into a “depression” in the ground right near there while out trailing a deer one day. Dave showed the others that depression, which Marty characterized as “a square hole chiseled into bedrock by humans,” because there was no geological explanation for it. Laird Niven was summoned and agreed with Marty that it was “strange” and “odd,” not a natural formation. Jack Begley probed the bottom and sides with a shovel, striking only rock under the soil, but suggested the wooden door to the Hatch might have rotted away. It was Jack who had made an overlay of the 1347 map on a current map of Oak Island and determined that the depression near the Blankenships’ homes was almost exactly where the 1347 map placed the Hatch. Despite what I suspected about the map, I was rooting for Jack and Rick as they dug and chiseled in the depression to see if it contained an opening that led someplace. It didn’t.

  Kevin Knight, a professor of computer science at the University of Southern California, was contacted to test Halpern’s claims. Knight’s reputation as perhaps the leading authority in the world on “machine translation and decipherment,” as a Los Angeles Times article put it, had been cemented by what was widely viewed as a successful translation of the famous Copiale Cipher, a 105-page, 75,000-character cipher that the professor’s computer program had proved to be the work of a secret society from the 1730s called the High Enlightened Occultist Order. The producers of The Curse of Oak Island had given Knight the La Formule cipher provided by Zena Halpern, written on a Page that had been torn away at the edges, so that pieces of it were missing. When Knight reported back, he said his computer program had determined that French was the main language behind the cipher, which it had translated to read as follows (with some words missing at the ends or beginnings of lines):

  Halt. Do not burrow/dig to

  Forty foot with an angle of forty

  five degree the shaft of five hundred

  twenty two foot you enter the

  corridor of one thousand sixty-five foot

  reach the chamber

  Knight’s critics said his computer program was capable of finding meaning where there was none. Still, I felt that speck of doubt inside me become a drop of wonder.

  When the production made a quick pivot to follow the Templar trail from Zena Halpern to the village of New Ross in the rugged northeast corner of Lunenburg County, about twenty-two miles inland from the Atlantic Ocean on the banks of the Gold River, however, it was further than I could go. How the remains of a nineteenth-century blacksmith shop have been transformed into the ruins of the castle that Henry Sinclair/Glooskap built nearly five hundred years earlier is one of more bizarre skeins that runs through the Oak Island story. It goes back to the 1970s and a woman named Joan Harris who married delusions of grandeur to extreme gullibility and gave birth to the whole idea.

  Not long after Joan Harris and her husband, Ron, bought their property on high ground just outside New Ross in 1972, the couple began to landscape their yard and discovered the relatively modest remains of stone walls along with artifacts that she decided were evidence that the property had been home to first a Viking castle with seven towers, and second a Scottish mansion with twelve marble pillars and a golden dome. Her most sensational find, Harris would maintain, was an iron implement that was described as the tip of an ancient Viking sword that had been made with a “blood channel.”

  Eventually Joan Harris would author and self-publish A Castle in Nova Scotia, in which ghosts and aliens in UFOs are added to the story as guardians of a property where “Phoenicians, Celts, Mi’kmaqs, Norsemen and other Europeans” had lived and practiced various religions over the years. Harris, who claimed to regularly commune with the ghosts who haunted her property, said that some of them were members of a cult of phallic worship.

  Before the book, Harris had written letters, dozens and dozens of them, many directed to Canada’s national Minister of Environment, who eventually dispatched an archeologist from Parks Canada, Charles Lindsay, to investigate. Lindsay visited the property, interviewed Harris, and examined the artifacts and other evidence on display. In his subsequent report to Parks Canada, Lindsay wrote that nothing he had been shown predated the nineteenth century, and that the walls of foundations of the supposed castle and mansion were mostly just linear piles of stones from field clearing, plus some rough stone foundations of modest outbuildings that had been constructed later. The supposed Viking sword was actually the blade of a scythe, Lindsay wrote, and probably dated to the twentieth century.

  Lindsay had actually tried to be nice about it, at least publicly. Interviewed by a local newspaper called the Lighthouse, the archeologist diplomatically described Harris’s claims as “wild and wonderful,” but added that neither he nor the colleague who had accompanied him to the property, Birgitta Wallace, believed they “have any credibility at all.” Harris described Lindsay’s remarks as “offensive and derogatory,” and filed a lawsuit that was eventually thrown out of court. The uproar she created, however, attracted the attention of author Michael Bradley, who interviewed Joan Harris, then made use of her claims for his own purposes in Holy Grail across the Atlantic. Bradley not only made New Ross famous, but he also cast Joan Harris (whom he called Jeanne MacKay in his book) as the heroic victim of a vast government conspiracy to suppress what she had discovered. In spite of this, Harris came to despise Bradley, mainly because he had discarded most of her theories about the New Ross property in order to turn it into the place where Henry Sinclair had lived as Glooskap when he came to Nova Scotia in the late fourteenth century, as described in the Zeno narrative.

  In the years since, various sane and earnest scholars had attempted to set the record straight, pointing out, for example, that the British documents that Judge Mather DesBrisay had relied on in History of Lunenburg County establish that New Ross had first been settled in 1816 by Captain William Ross and a company of 172 soldiers recently discharged from the Nova Scotia Fencibles regiment to clear the forest and prepare it for habitation. British surveys as far back as 1815 made no mention of any sign that nonnative people had ever lived there. Finally, historian Brian Culbertson had found an 1817 letter from the surveyor general of Nova Scotia, Charles Morris, suggesting that Captain Ross should find a suitable location for the blacksmith shop of a Mr. Daniel McKay. Culbertson then produced an 1860 survey map that showed a property allotted to McKay in the same location later occupied by the Harrises. What Joan Harris had found, obviously, was what was left of McKay’s old blacksmith works.

  Harris never accepted that, nor did the tens of thousands who read Michael Bradley’s book as a work of history. When the Harrises left their New Ross property in 1990 it was swiftly purchased by Alva and Rose Pye, who had continued to perpetuate—for fun and profit, apparently—the majority of Joan Harris’s claims. Now a new couple, researcher and author Alessandra Nadudvari and her partner, Tim Loncarich, had purchased the property and were invited to discuss its “amazing story” on The Curse of Oak Island.

  Nadudvari and Loncarich were an amiable pair who quite possibly believed their claims about New Ross. Nadudvari was convinced she had seen the Templar cross carved onto what Jean Harris had claimed was a “burial stone,” while Loncarich directed the g
roup to the stone well that Harris had imagined was built centuries before it actually was. Loncarich called it the holy well, saying it was known to possess curative powers. The well was beautifully made, with four-foot-thick walls of fitted stones from the shores of the Gold River and a level flagstone floor. Tony Sampson was sent down first in a bosun’s chair rigged to a pulley that allowed him to rotate 360 degrees. He became excited by a rock that appeared to have a triangle carved on it, with what might be an eye in the center. Later, when he went down in a dive helmet and wet suit, Tony discovered a “broad arrow” carved onto another rock. His claim these were Masonic symbols could have been correct; the well was probably built by stonemasons, after all. But none of it meant that New Ross had been a Templar outpost.

  Far more compelling to me than the visit to New Ross was the trip to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York. Doug Crowell’s friend Paul Troutman led the expedition and had combed through FDR’s personal letter collection, tedious and difficult work that had turned up at least a couple of items I was unaware of. One was a letter to Roosevelt from his former classmate Duncan Harris, who had joined him on those trips to Oak Island in the summer of 1909. The Harris letter didn’t say much, but it provided an opportunity for the show’s narrator to remind people that FDR had been a Mason and that “many” had suggested a Masonic/Knights Templar connection. The other thing Troutman turned up was a fact of which I had been completely unaware, which was that Henry Bowdoin’s notion that the crown jewels of France that were buried on Oak Island had come from FDR, who got them from his maternal grandfather, Warren Delano, a wealthy maritime trader who had invested in the Truro Company back in the middle of the nineteenth century. That nugget of new knowledge, though, did nothing to legitimate the story that the crown jewels had disappeared after Marie Antoinette’s lady-in-waiting had been assigned to smuggle them out of France, nor that she had emigrated to Canada, as one account had it, and in the last years of her life told people the crown jewels were buried in Mahone Bay.

  Weeks earlier, I had made a point of telling Marty Lagina that the story of the crown jewels being smuggled out of Paris by the servants of the king and queen had been thoroughly discredited long ago, that a mob had stolen them from the Royal Storehouse at the height of the revolution in 1792 and that afterward every single piece of the collection had been recovered, except for the Blue Diamond of Louis XIV, which almost certainly had been split in two to create the Hope Diamond. “Almost certainly” was not the same as “certainly,” Marty eventually got me to admit, and yes, it was true that there were credible people who disputed that the Hope Diamond had been cut from the Blue Diamond.

  One more time, I reminded myself that I would accomplish more on Oak Island by listening than I would by sharing my opinions.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The summer I returned to Nova Scotia, I anticipated that the exploration of the two shafts that were being driven down in the Money Pit area was going to be the most interesting thing I would see on Oak Island. What I didn’t imagine was that the Laginas and company would be going back to 10X that summer as well.

  Marty was against it, of course, but his brother, Rick, remained adamant that the borehole had not been fully explored. It was agreed that the underwater sonar detection expert Brian Abbott should be brought back to the island to try to reconcile his description of the images he had seen in the cavity at the bottom of 10X with what diver John Chatterton had reported. The focus was on what Abbott had described as a “chest” but that Chatterton said was a large rectangular rock. While inside the cavity at the bottom of 10X, Chatterton had moved the rock to a different position on the floor, so if Abbott could find his “chest” in the same spot it had been when he looked before, that would mean Chatterton hadn’t actually found it. The object had moved, though, Abbott found, meaning that Chatterton was right: it was a rock, not a chest.

  This gave Marty more ammunition for the argument that it was time to abandon 10X. Rick was still not willing to do that, however, and neither was Dave Blankenship, who rarely inserted himself into the decision-making process on Oak Island but did this time. He had promised his mother, Jane, that they’d make a thorough search of 10X and he intended to keep that promise, Dave said. Charles Barkhouse interjected that the items Dan Blankenship believed he saw in 10X might be entirely covered with silt, not easy for a diver, even Chatterton, to detect in what was basically a zero-visibility environment. Dan Blankenship offered the closing argument. Rick finally made it into Dan’s basement, along with his brother and the others, where Blankenship put on the same show-and-tell he had done for me thirteen years earlier, laying out the materials that had come out of 10X back in the early 1970s. What they were looking at was more than anyone had ever brought up out of the Money Pit, Dan stated.

  Marty remained reluctant. Their budget was already strained and going back into 10X would limit their operations in the Money Pit area. When Craig Tester agreed with his partner Marty, Rick said he and Dave Blankenship would do the work in 10X themselves. That put Marty on the spot and in the end he announced that he owed it to Dan to do as the old man asked and take another look at 10X. He wouldn’t accept any cutback in the work at the Money Pit site, though, so that meant going deeper into his pocket.

  THE CAISSONS WERE ALMOST IN PLACE at the first shaft being dug at the Money Pit site by then. The enormity of the three-hundred-ton crane used to lift the caissons was astounding. When work had paused for the weekend, I had Jack Begley take a photo of me standing on the base of that gargantuan rig and could barely make myself out as a tiny dot on the giant object when I brought the picture up on my iPhone.

  Both the Lagina brothers believed—or at least hoped—that this first shaft was more or less directly above the Chappell vault. But almost immediately a new dispute arose between Rick and Marty about the pace of the operation. Marty wanted to dig as fast and as deep as possible, because this was their one and only chance at an excavation of the Money Pit and he wanted to accomplish as much as he could, while Rick insisted that they proceed cautiously, for fear of damaging the precious artifacts he believed might be inside the vault. The vault had been breached more than a century earlier, and whatever was in there was long-since soaked with saltwater, Marty pointed out. Rick argued that it might be wet but also intact; he wasn’t going to agree to anything potentially destructive. Matters came to a head when the ribbed teeth on the bottom of the caisson began to scrape against what the operator said were horizontal pieces of wood.

  Things didn’t really begin to get interesting until the crew was ready to send the “hammer grab” down the shaft. This was a long cylinder with what looked like metal jaws at the bottom. After Rick convinced Marty they should lower the hammer grab just 2 inches at a time once they made contact with the wood in the shaft, the apparatus was lifted out, its jaws clutching a large chunk of wood. “We bingoed it!” Marty exulted. Rick was slightly despondent at the amount of damage they might be doing to the vault. More timbers were lifted out of the shaft, but the excitement onsite was soon quieted by the discovery that the wood had been cut with a circular saw, a tool that wasn’t used in North America until the late nineteenth century. This certainly wasn’t part of the original work. Dan Blankenship was of the opinion they had brought up part of the Chappell shaft, most likely timbers that had shored up the 10-foot stub of a lateral tunnel that had been abandoned because of the cave-ins caused by flooding.

  The decision was made to move to the second “target site,” C1, the spot chosen by Charles Barkhouse. C1 was where Charles had seen a “shiny gold object” when a camera was sent down the narrow tube of the initial borehole. Much drama was made of sending down a camera to take a look. The pictures that came back seemed to confirm that there was a 21-foot-wide cavity at the bottom of C1, and some of those aboveground thought they saw an opening at a 90-degree angle to the floor of the cavity that could be a tunnel. There was also a moment when the camera seemed
to catch sight of something shiny. Craig said it was almost certainly the camera’s light reflecting off anhydrite.

  It was decided to send the hammer grab down C1. What it brought up, mostly, was big rocks. There were a few splinters of wood, and some of them had come from deep underground, more than 10 feet below the bottom of the stacked caissons, where the void under the bedrock lay below 160 feet. When Charles showed Dan Blankenship one of those splinters, the old man held it to his nose. Dan claimed to be able to tell the age of wood by smelling it and carbon-dating had proven him right about that more than once. This was very old, he told Charles, but most likely not enough to be original work.

  JOHN CHATTERTON WAS BACK on the island, preparing for a dive down C1. Before he went into the shaft, though, a new team of sonar experts were going to use equipment from BlueView Technologies to make certain the void at the bottom of the shaft was stable enough for Chatterton to enter and explore the opening “leading off your void,” as the chief technician, Blaine Carr, put it. His scans had showed, Carr would explain later, “what looks to be a corridor” opening in the wall about 10 feet from the outer edge of the caisson, about 7 feet high and 10 feet across. The reason he believed it was man-made, Carr said, was that it went at an almost perfectly perpendicular 90-degree angle to the shaft. And the void did seem safe for a diver.

  Chatterton again went down wearing a helmet fed by umbilicals. After being lowered through the pipe to the water level, Chatterton quickly descended through the rest of the caisson and within seconds was standing on the bottom of the void at a depth of slightly more than 170 feet. Predictably, visibility was terrible. Chatterton churned silt up from the floor of the void with every move. Going almost entirely by feel, the diver described soft clay beneath his feet, very little water movement, and walls that were extremely irregular. When Chatterton had groped his way to what he thought was the entrance to the corridor, he reported that the roughness of the interior walls suggested to him that it was a man-made feature, something that had been chipped out, because walls worn away by water would have been much smoother.