The Curse of Oak Island

by Randall Sullivan

  After Chatterton came up, his partner, Mike Huntley, went down, armed with a metal detector that immediately began to deliver hits. He was fairly certain he had found a “block” of metal embedded in the wall of the void, something that felt smooth and wavy, Huntley reported, but he was unable to pry it loose. He had gotten two more “hard hits” with the metal detector as he probed the clay floor, Huntley said after he returned to the surface. Chatterton himself went down only a short time later with the metal detector and got exactly no hits in either the wall or the floor of C1. The people on the surface looked at one another and said, “Oak Island,” in unison.

  After some debate about whether to continue exploring C1 or to turn to the third and last planned shaft that was to be put down that season, it was agreed to do the latter. There was considerable disagreement, though, about where to sink it. Gathered in Dan Blankenship’s basement around a drawing that had been made by Mel Chappell of where he believed the Money Pit could be found, Marty voted for digging there. Rick, though, wanted to try the northeast corner of the broader target area, while mild-mannered Craig was surprisingly insistent that they should try the southeast. In the end it was decided that Craig should choose the spot for the third shaft. T1, it would be called, T being for Tester.

  The probe of T1 looked promising almost immediately. For one thing, they were going much deeper than usual without finding water. Almost always, the seawater in the Money Pit area was reached at a depth of 40 feet or so. The shaft known as Valley3 was just feet away and it was full of water, but T1 stayed dry. Then, when the hammer grab was sent down to a depth of just 102 feet, it came back with a large vertical piece of wood that was clearly hand-sawn; it was the first time that summer that hand-sawn wood had been brought up from underground in the Money Pit area. Craig’s speculation that they had probably hit a tunnel dug by the Truro Company rang true, given the depth.

  Even more exciting was the 3-inch-diameter round piece of wood that was brought up from 122 feet. It was utterly black and to Craig looked “old-old.” Dan Blankenship took a whiff of the round piece and said the odor was the foulest he had ever breathed on Oak Island. This was original work, Dan declared, and carbon-dating seemed to confirm it. The piece from 102 feet was dated to between 1670 and 1780, while the pieces brought up from below 120 feet were dated to between 1655 and 1695. What they had held in their hands, all agreed, were pieces from the original construction of the Money Pit. The hammer grab was sent down again, and the excitement was palpable as it was raised—its jaws holding nothing but chunks of anhydrite floating in clay. The hammer grab went down again and again, with the same result; not even a splinter of wood. At 156 feet they finally hit water, and bedrock was reached soon after. They were done with T1, Marty declared, and no one disagreed.

  Rick, though, was not ready to quit for the season. They should try one more shaft he said, at the spot he had suggested. His logic seemed sound to me. A few weeks earlier, he had told me that he was concerned the calculations that had been done as to the exact location of the Money Pit weren’t taking into account the 1861 collapse of the Pit, when the bottom hadn’t just fallen out, but most likely tumbled in the direction of the tunneling that had caused the collapse, which he believed had come from the southwest. Specifically, he wanted to try 7 feet south and 4 feet west of the spot where Chappell had said the center of the Money Pit would be found.

  On camera, Marty made a speech about how Rick deserved to get his wish, because nobody had sacrificed more or been less self-aggrandizing. I had the feeling I believed it more than Rick did. Marty, though, looked genuinely moved when Rick said he wanted to call this last shaft GAL1, for George and Anne Lagina, their parents. Both brothers made regular references to their mother, who sounded like a paragon of pluck, quoting her various maxims: “Forward, always forward” and that sort of thing. I asked Rick once about George and he said his father had been an almost impossibly good man. When I asked him for an example, Rick told me he had once asked his father what his greatest regret might be. George thought about it for a while, then said that he had skipped Mass a couple of times while serving in the army during World War II.

  While GAL1 was being put down, there was a return to 10X, where it had been decided to try an “airlift” in which an immense compression system combined with pumps to lower the water level might bring up objects from below. At 235 feet, 10X was still the deepest hole on Oak Island and bringing up hundreds of pounds of sediment from the bottom of the borehole sounded nearly impossible to me, but in fact the operation yielded not one but two moments of suspense that would, at a minimum, carry over into the next season of the show. One of those items brought up out of the borehole offered at least the possibility of confirmation for Dan Blankenship’s indefatigable conviction that there was a wealth of information at the bottom of 10X.

  Jack Begley and Craig Tester had found that item while washing down the spoils sucked up from the bottom of the borehole. It was a large piece of wood that appeared to be coated with pitchblende, which would have dated it to no later than the mid-eighteenth century. When Dan gave it the smell test, he said it was very old and that he could see it had been cut with a handsaw. It was the first piece of wood cut by men that had ever come out of 10X, said Dan, who was demanding to know how it could possibly be at the bottom of the borehole if there was no tunnel connecting 10X to the Money Pit.

  When the long hose connected to the equipment that was essentially vacuuming the bottom of 10X had first been dropped into the shaft, Dan called out to the operator: “Watch out for bones!” The old man was spending as much time as he could watching the airlift operation at 10X, fretting over the possibility that the activity down below could cause a collapse of the fissure in the shaft at a depth of 222 feet. If that happened, Dan knew it would mean that the hole in the ground that had consumed so many years of his life would be closed forever. The collapse never occurred but there was a moment of real drama when the airlift was stopped by an obstruction that had blocked the hose. The bangs and rattles that sounded each time the machine was restarted in an attempt to draw the obstruction through indicated it was a solid object. That was confirmed when the pipe finally cleared and a search of the spoils resulted in the discovery of a bone, whether animal or human I wasn’t told.

  Though not so obviously exciting, the carbon dating of the hand-sawn wood that had come out of 10X was truly significant. When those dates were reported, I felt fairly confident the search for the tunnel at the bottom of the borehole would continue.

  By then the caissons in GAL1 had been driven down to 151 feet, deep enough to start sending the hammer grab into the shaft. Buckets of what appeared to be pieces of primitive cement came up first, then fragments of wood in 6-inch-by-6-inch chunks. When Gary Drayton went over the spoils from GAL1 with his metal detector, he found a piece of hammered iron with a square hole. It was for a square nail, Drayton said, the kind that were used until the end of the 1700s, hand forged with tapering square shafts. The fact that the piece of iron had been pounded flat by hand also suggested a date no later than the eighteenth century.

  Larger pieces of wood, square-shaped and hand-cut timbers, began coming up next. Dave Blankenship, who knew construction, said the notches suggested to him they were roof pieces. Craig Tester thought they might be on top of the vault. Then the hammer grab brought up bigger sheets of hammered metal that weren’t iron and might have been tin, but felt too heavy for that. There was speculation that they might be from a furnace that had been lowered into the shaft to draw down air.

  The anticipation grew every time the hammer grab was lowered another foot, but then suddenly, at 154 feet, the drilling caisson stopped. Whatever it had hit created such friction that the oscillator couldn’t turn even slightly. A chisel bit was sent down to act as a battering ram in the hopes the object could be broken or pushed aside. It made only a slight penetration, but it was enough to send down a smaller hammer grab to collect whatever had been loosened. What it came
back up with was remarkable, a piece of heavy, rectangular, hand-hammered steel with holes in it that also appeared to have been cut by hand. Craig Tester at once called it a corner piece, which of course raised the possibility that it was from the corner of a chest. Marty would observe only that there was “no modern look to it,” nor to the large, thick washer and nut that the smaller hammer grab also brought up from a depth of about 160 feet.

  The exploration of GAL1 was brought to a halt when the hammer grab snagged on something so heavy it couldn’t be pulled past it. After being lowered and raised repeatedly, the hammer grab finally came loose and was winched to the surface, but the operator and the company he worked for didn’t want to send it down again, for fear of losing it. The Laginas and Craig Tester were fearful of destroying whatever it was the hammer grab had been stopped by. And now it was late October; the weather was wetter and cooler each day. Nova Scotia winters begin, for all practical purposes, in November.

  The final congregation of the season in the War Room featured a Skype conference with Dr. Lori Verderame, who had analyzed the items recovered from GAL1. One was yet another gold-plated dandy button, dated to between 1775 and 1815, which almost certainly meant it had been on the cuff of either the first or second team of searchers. It was what Craig had called a corner brace, though, that was of most interest. Dr. Verderame described it as a decorative bracket “used to actually attach the metal or wooden sides of treasure chests.” She dated it and the other metal pieces brought up out of GAL1 to between 1650 and 1800, which meant they were almost certainly part of the original work. It was arguably, along with the piece of parchment, the most significant artifact ever brought up from underground on Oak Island. And, of course, a good cliffhanger.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Just inside the entrance to the Oak Island Museum, the main display greets visitors with a blowup of my 2003 article, printed on both sides of a framed 8-foot-wide panel. The cast and crew of the show shooting on the island are in and out of the museum daily, and whenever one of them would ask a question or make a remark about the article it was almost always about the title: “Do you really believe Oak Island’s cursed?” I do, I’d say. Well, if not cursed, at least haunted.

  I had found Oak Island to be a spooky place almost from the moment I’d seen it. In those dreary, sodden days of my 2003 visit, I would stand on the mainland shore and watch the island filter through mists and loom out of fogs in a perpetually fluctuant gloom. The voice of Edgar Allan Poe whispered to me from somewhere deep in adolescent memory, as if I were looking at the remains of a world that had fallen alongside the House of Usher. When I crossed the causeway, there was the sense that time was a wheel spinning me through decades and past centuries. The depredations of Robert Dunfield and the others who had attempted to plunder Oak Island were at once visible and concealed, ugly scars softened by the mosses and vines that flourish in this dank climate. Driving alone or with Dan Blankenship along the broken road that led to the Money Pit, I passed the panorama of what seemed an epic battle of man and nature, most visible in the broken equipment and failed machine parts that lay in the weeds, covered with rust and lichen.

  The overwhelmingly eerie sensation of being watched by ghosts and evil spirits had deepened after my meeting with Dan Henskee. In the course of describing what he alternately referred to as “my two nervous breakdowns” and “my spiritual experiences,” Henskee had occasionally looked imploringly into my eyes, as if he hoped I would tell him which were the right words. All I knew is that he was talking about the same two incidents, no matter how he categorized them, and that when I listened to Dan’s story “spiritual experience” and “nervous breakdown” sounded to me like “cause” and “effect.”

  Henskee said his troubles had begun in 1973, after Dan Blankenship persuaded him to try dowsing in the vicinity of 10X. Blankenship had told him repeatedly that dowsing worked, even if he didn’t know how it worked, and within moments of taking the divining rod in his hands he was convinced his mentor had been right. He had “felt an energy” coming up through the ground and entering him. It was an overwhelming experience and not in any way a good one, Dan said. He was so shaken that he handed the rod back to Blankenship, wondering what was happening to him.

  The only time I ever saw Dan Blankenship show anything like fear—or at least trepidation—along with what seemed true remorse, was when he described to me what happened after he took Henskee back to his house. “Dan was in my kitchen when he lost it,” Blankenship recalled. “All of a sudden it was like something took him over. He said, ‘I had to kill you! I had to kill you!’ I said, ‘Who? What?’ He said, ‘You lost a chest in the water. I had to kill you.’”

  He felt himself being “possessed” by the spirit of a slave who had worked underground on Oak Island. Henskee told me: “One of the other slaves had lost a chest in the water, so they chained him to a post. I knew they were going to torture him to death, so I cut his throat, to let him die quickly. I saw and felt it all with perfect clarity, then I blacked out.”

  Henskee had been removed from Blankenship’s home in a strait-jacket and spent the next two weeks in a Halifax psychiatric ward. He returned to Oak Island to work once more alongside Blankenship, but struggled constantly with the fear that something truly dark lay buried beneath the ground he was digging in. Dan told me the entire time he was haunted by things that had been said to him in separate conversations by Fred Nolan and Fred’s former associate Ray Nutt. First, Fred had told him that when he let Blankenship talk him into dowsing, what he had taken into his hands was not a “divining rod” but “the Devil’s stick,” Henskee recalled. Later, Fred advised him that “there are good spirits and there are evil spirits” and that both might be found on Oak Island. Dan sounded as if he had been as surprised as I was to hear of such words coming out of Fred Nolan’s mouth; neither of us had imagined that Fred held even the slightest belief in the supernatural. Henskee said not long after that Ray Nutt described experiencing the “presentation of messages or information” on Oak Island. The suggestion was that these had been dark in nature.

  Something I didn’t tell Dan at the time—or tell anyone else, either—was the mad thought that had come into my own mind the first time I’d gone to the Money Pit area alone. I was standing above 10X, looking down on the ladder whose rungs descended into that black hole, when out of nowhere it struck me that what had been done on Oak Island wasn’t designed to keep men out, but to keep something else, something terrifying, in. I shook the idea out of my head, but it returned when Dan Henskee told me about his second nervous breakdown.

  Dan said a thought had come to him soon after his return to Oak Island from the psychiatric ward, but he “tried not to think it” and to carry on, and this had worked, sort of, for almost a quarter century. In February 1998, though, his strategy of suppression was overwhelmed by a growing conviction that the Money Pit was the entrance to hell.

  “I was raised in an almost completely ‘Christian’ small town and rural culture in which almost everyone truly believed in the existence of angels, at least one Deity and perhaps also in the existence of ‘ghosts’ of dead humans,” Dan would explain to me by email in the spring of 2017, after I had asked him to reflect on what happened to him on Oak Island in 1998. As a boy, he had heard sermons on and even read passages from the Bible’s book of Revelations and he knew that there were at least four references in it to “the bottomless pit…. I have checked a couple of dictionaries for definitions of ‘metaphysics’ and ‘metaphysical,’” Dan wrote to me, “and the meanings are not exactly clear. It appears that most people are using these words to refer to vague and perhaps mysterious entities.” To him it had seemed obvious back then and still did “that Oak Island is the sort of place where such ‘entities’ would gather in large numbers.” So that was perhaps a sort of explanation for why, in February 1998, he had become convinced that Oak Island was one of several places referred to by the word “Armageddon.”

  “I fe
lt that ‘the final battle’ would be a battle for people’s minds rather than a physical battle, and that Oak Island might be a sort of focal point,” Dan explained in his 2017 email. Back in 2003, though, all Dan had told me was that one frigid February day at dusk he had been stricken with the absolute certainty that evil spirits were about to erupt into the world out of the ground on Oak Island. He tried to escape by stripping off all his clothes and diving into the icy waters of Mahone Bay, then swimming to the shore wearing only a yellow hardhat. He was discovered the next day curled up naked on the floor of a mainland house, and once again he was removed to the psychiatric ward.

  One of the ways Dan Henskee had coped—stayed sane, it might be said—was by becoming increasingly religious, although Dan’s religion was definitely idiosyncratic rather than doctrinaire. “I decided that the best choice for me was to become a conduit for ‘the Holy Spirit,’” he explained in his 2017 email. “As such, my means of ‘praying’ would be to set aside other things in order to merge my individual spirit with the Holy Spirit.” However it had happened, his practice had made Henskee into an extraordinarily kind, humble, and generous person. He had lived meagerly his entire adult life (often aided by Nova Scotia’s generous social welfare system), and yet regularly he gave money to an assortment of acquaintances who were worse off than he was. “Some of these people really depend on me,” Dan told me on the August day in 2016 when we were watching them sink the first caisson at the Money Pit. People could call Henskee crazy if they wanted to, but what I knew for certain was that he was a good man.