The Curse of Oak Island

by Randall Sullivan

  And I believed he really did know things. Back in 2003, Dan told me that he had never stopped believing Oak Island was haunted by the souls of those who died there. “Something about that place makes everything go wrong that can go wrong,” he had said.

  Not a single person who has worked on The Curse of Oak Island would disagree with that statement. Inexplicable equipment failures have become one of the show’s recurring themes. “You may not be used to this, but we are,” Craig Tester would tell the young man whose inflatable dam burst at Smith’s Cove. Many others have happened off camera. Rick Lagina told me about a geophysicist who had come to the island with an apparatus he had used all over the world, most recently in a search for mineral deposits in Zaire. As soon as he attempted to use the machine on Oak Island, though, it failed. He had listened when the geophysicist, very upset, called the manufacturer in France and was told that the machine was incapable of malfunctioning because of the number of redundancies that had been built into it as default systems. “The geophysicist said, ‘Maybe it can’t fail, but it has,’” Rick recalled with a laugh. Tony Sampson described a man who nearly broke down into tears when a machine that provided underwater propulsion broke down just off the south shore of Oak Island. “He kept saying, ‘This has never happened before, anywhere, ever,’” Tony recalled. “We tried to tell him how many times we’ve heard people speak exactly those words on Oak Island, but the poor bloke was inconsolable.”

  More interesting to me were the stories I head from the television crew about the failures of their own equipment. The soundmen in particular said their microphones cut out and in and back out again constantly in certain places on the island, mainly the eastern corner of the swamp and in the vicinity of 10X. They and the rest of the crew seemed to have become almost inured to such experiences. Every time something broke down or got lost, they would simply look at one another and say with a shrug: “Oak Island.” Marty Lagina, a confirmed skeptic on the subjects of the supernatural or the paranormal, told me he had no explanation for the number of equipment malfunctions and electrical failures he’s witnessed on Oak Island. “It happens so much more often here than anyplace else I’ve ever been that it’s not even close,” he admitted. When I tried to keep him on the subject, Marty said that maybe we should perform a “magnetic survey” of the island that summer. It never happened.

  Like Marty, the crew were reluctant to talk about the spooky things they’d experienced on Oak Island. It was as if they believed giving the subject any air would increase the likelihood of it happening again or draw the darkness to them. Marty, though, did tell me about the first time he was alone at the Money Pit area after the sun had set. “First, I don’t believe in any of this stuff,” he said. “But I was there not even ten minutes when I heard this blood-curdling shriek, and I admit it, I was terrified. I got out of there as fast as I could.” Had he ever gone back alone after dark? I asked. “Never have,” Marty told me.

  I became a good deal more interested in Oak Island’s scary stories after I talked to Jim Kaizer’s grandson Tim. Countless people had claimed to have seen ghosts or specters on the island. The most often reported of the latter was a big black dog with fiery-red eyes, though there were a good number who claimed that they had encountered the spirits of dead men who appeared as crows or ravens. Anthony Graves’s son, William, claimed on his deathbed in the 1850s that while he was out in his boat spearing lobster one evening, a man with a long white beard had called to him from the shoreline: “Come here and I will give you all the gold you can carry.” He had been so frightened, William Graves declared with some of his last breaths, that he had immediately started rowing for home. In 1868, E. H. Owen had written an essay for a Lunenburg newspaper about the legend that the treasure could be found by anyone willing to throw a baby into the Money Pit. Jack and Charlotte Adams, who were working as caretakers for Edwin Hamilton in the 1940s, said they were haunted by the story their four-year-old daughter had told of coming upon a group of men wearing red jackets and pants with broad yellow stripes sitting on the timbers of the old wharf at Smith’s Cove.

  Probably the last person I expected to tell me a spooky story was Dave Blankenship, but out of nowhere one afternoon Dan’s son began to describe the day he and a couple of men who were visiting the island had seen flames rising over the treetops on the east end of the island. They had hurried over, afraid the blaze might be already out of control, Dave said, but when they got to where they had seen the fire, there was nothing. “I saw a fire!” Dave told me. “Nobody can tell me I didn’t. But there was no fire. Damnedest thing.”

  When I kept asking questions about these sorts of occurrences, members of the crew started telling me: “You should talk to Becky.”

  Becky Parsons was an Englishwoman who had worked as a camera operator on the show for two summers before I arrived. When I finally got hold of her, she told me that she had grown up hearing about Oak Island, because her father was fascinated by the place. He was a student of history with a special interest in the age of piracy. She hadn’t heard much if anything about the purported paranormal activity on the island, but she considered herself sensitive to such things. “And when I first came to the island, I got very strong feelings about one of the places there, a spot just past 10X on the edge of the wooded area.”

  One afternoon she was shooting B-roll—the visual filler that all nonfiction television shows use—Becky said, “and I just sort of started exploring in that area, just looking through the camera and kind of letting the camera system lead me toward that wooded area on the left of 10X. All of a sudden I had a strong sensation that there was someone behind me. I thought it was my assistant. I put the camera down and turned around to talk to him but … there was no one there. But there was this depression in the ground right at that spot, one I hadn’t seen before. And, I don’t know, I just felt very strongly as though I had encountered something.”

  Some weeks later, a psychic visited the island and stayed late into the evening. After dark, the woman invited her to go on what Becky called “a ghost walk.” She was carrying a psychometry instrument the psychic had brought, Becky said, a device that was supposed to measure “energy.” “I sort of made a beeline for that spot by 10X, because I was very curious about it. I walked into the woods and all of a sudden the energy on this instrument goes off the charts. I stepped onto the pathway there and I felt this flush of energy. It was a sensation, like something is entering my body. It happened very, very strongly, and I’m looking at the needle and it’s still off the charts. I just sort of pushed it away, the energy that was trying to enter me. I didn’t feel the presence of evil, didn’t feel any danger, I just didn’t want it to come any closer to me.” Then she heard the psychic screaming from the clearing behind her and came back out toward 10X, Becky said, “and she was really freaked out. She said she had seen what she called ‘a black mass’ follow me into the woods. And I felt like I knew what she was talking about.”

  Later that same night, the psychic had held what Becky called a sort of séance. “She tried to call up some energy and I experienced this manifestation right in front of me. Of a man. But I only saw his legs, like he was being built in front of me, in this transparent light kind of way.” Somehow, she had known this was the spirit of someone who had been “killed there and left to guard the place,” Becky said. I brought up the legend of the slave who had supposedly been killed and thrown into the Money Pit so his spirit would guard the treasure, and Becky swore she had never heard about it before. By the excitement in her voice I believed her. Later during the séance, a date had come to her, and she knew it was connected to the spirit that had tried to “enter her” earlier, Becky said. She couldn’t remember the date exactly, other than that it was in the 1700s. “I wrote it down and put it in a teacup in a cupboard in the Blankenships’ kitchen,” Becky said. I later asked Dan Henskee to look for that note in Dan Blankenship’s kitchen cupboard; he couldn’t find it.

  WHEN I RETURNED TO OAK ISLA
ND in 2016, I had to consider the possibility that my view of the island as a place steeped in darkness was based mostly on atmospherics. Could my perceptions have been shaped by something as obvious as the weather? I wondered.

  Most of the clothes and gear I’d packed were for the sort of cool, damp climate I’d experienced back in 2003. But Nova Scotia was in the middle of the warmest summer anyone could remember, day after day of sunny skies and temperatures in the upper seventies and eighties that felt a lot hotter than that in the high humidity of Canada’s Atlantic coast. And the island was far from the lonely place I’d first visited thirteen years earlier, when the only people on it beside myself were Dan and Jane Blankenship. The success of The Curse of Oak Island had resulted in by far the largest crew I’d ever seen working on a reality show, and the island buzzed with activity as big trucks came and went across the causeway constantly. It was no longer a scary place, at least in daylight hours. Only when I walked off to explore alone or stayed on the island after dark did that sensation of free-floating dread come back to me.

  As the days passed, I began to understand better that when I’d written about the “curse” of Oak Island it wasn’t based mainly on stories of ghost sightings or diabolical possessions. The largest part of the island’s haunted aspect, in my eyes, was the way it swallowed up people’s lives. That included the six who had died, of course, but to their number I added the dozens of others who had sunk their time, their money, and their dreams into Oak Island. Fred Nolan’s death brought it home. I’d only read about the obsessions of Frederick Blair and Gilbert Hedden, of the bankruptcies of T. Perley Putnam and Captain John Welling. But I had met Nolan, spoken with him, listened to the voice of a man whose compulsion had consumed six decades of his life. Dan Blankenship, who was approaching his midnineties, had been on the island for more than five decades.

  The passage of time had changed Blankenship, but so, I believed, had Fred Nolan’s death. There was a deeper melancholy about the man. Dan had admitted to me even thirteen years earlier that he brooded over the possibility that death would find him before he found the Oak Island treasure. “What I find most frightening is the thought that what I know might die with me,” he said. The arrival of the Laginas on the island had provided Dan with a repository for his knowledge, but he seemed to be finding very little consolation in the process of sharing it. I could see in his eyes and hear in his voice that Dan was now certain he would be gone before the treasure hunt was finished. I think he had begun to wonder, finally, if the treasure hunt on Oak Island ever would be finished. Every time I saw him, I would recall what Dan told me in 2003 about the many hours he had invested in contemplating the mind, or minds, that directed the work on Oak Island. He wondered if they had any idea that the riddle they created would rob so many men of their lives, their wealth, and their sanity.

  “Sometimes,” he told me, “you begin to believe that they understood exactly what they were doing to us, and you start to despise the sons of bitches.”

  Postscript

  The summer of 2017—season five of The Curse of Oak Island—would yield discoveries that rivaled any made during the previous century. Many of these were pulled from a shaft dug in the east drumlin that had been designated as “H8.” Marty Lagina believed that H8 was centered on the original Money Pit. His brother Rick wasn’t “quite there,” but considered it entirely possible.

  Whether Marty was right or not, he and Rick and their fellow treasure hunters had brought up “an extraordinary amount of stuff” out of H8, as the executive producer of The Curse of Oak Island,” Kevin Burns, put it. Easily the most startling of that “stuff”—found at a depth of one hundred ninety feet under ground—were the bones of two separate human beings, one of European origin and the other Middle Eastern, according to DNA testing. In his opinion, these fragments of human skeletons were “the best finds ever” made on Oak Island, Marty told me from the island’s “War Room” when I spoke to him and Rick on a conference call in June of 2018. “Even for a skeptic like me it’s hard to find a plausible reason for them being so deep underground,” he explained.

  Carbon dating, as always, could only answer the question of when these two people had lived with what Marty called “a probability window.” The fact that this window was centered in the late seventeenth century offered more support for some theories than for others, however fragile it might be. It comported quite well, for example, with the theory of Francis Bacon’s involvement in the works on Oak Island. So did the scraps of what appeared to be leather bookbinding material brought up out of H8. Rick described the pieces of leather and the apparent specks of parchment attached to them that had been found in H8 as the most “scary discovery” he and his brother had made on Oak Island, because it suggested that their excavation might have destroyed centuries-old volumes of incalculable value.

  At the same time, Rick was circumspect in his assessment of the leather scraps and the parchment flakes found with them, acknowledging the possibility that these had “migrated in” to H8. “We know how highly disruptive the Money Pit area is,” he explained. Also, unlike his brother, he continued to harbor doubts about whether they had hit the heart of the Money Pit with H8, Rick added. “The question for me is, ‘Where’s the wood?’” Records indicated that 10,000 board feet of timber had dropped into the ground during the 1861 collapse of the Money Pit, Rick pointed out. “Where is it?”

  “I thought we pulled a lot of wood out of there,” Marty said. Not enough to be convincing, Rick countered, “but that could be addressed again by the idea of migration in and out of the area.” Records indicated that the cribbing in the Money Pit had fallen in a southwesterly direction, and that it most of it might have come to rest some distance from the center of the shaft.

  The Laginas acknowledged being almost as fascinated by an object Gary Drayton had found at Smith’s Cove with his metal detector as he was by the bones brought to the surface in the Money Pit area. This was a “very strange medieval cross,” as Kevin Burns described it, that Drayton had discovered only about six inches under the rock on the beach at Smith’s Cove. Made of hand wrought lead with details that suggested a human body—legs, toes, fingers—the cross had been dated to somewhere between 900 and 1300 A.D. by antiquities experts and forensic testing.

  What made the discovery of the cross “extraordinarily weird,” Kevin Burns told me, was that Rick’s immediate response when he was first shown it had been to say, “I’ve seen this recently.” The producers looked through all the photos of the crosses Rick might have observed during trips to England and France that summer and “nothing matched,” Burns recalled. “We thought Rick wasn’t remembering properly.”

  On his European trip, Rick had examined a purported “underground Templar cave” in the north of England and the prison at Domme in the French department of Dordogne where the Knights Templar had been locked up by King Philip in 1307. Rick had been guided at Domme by a descendant of the Rochefort family, who showed him the prison walls that the Templars had covered with a graffiti of geometric figures they used as a coded language: An octagon represented the Holy Grail; a square represented Solomon’s Temple; a triangle with a cross planted in it stood for Golgotha, the Jerusalem hill where Jesus had been crucified. Only in a close examination of their footage of the graffiti at Domme had the producers of The Curse of Oak Island discovered a cross carved in a wall of the prison that was a near perfect match for the cross found at Smith’s Cove, with the same esoteric details that suggested a rood formed from a human body.

  “How likely is it that someone in the 1600s would be wearing a cross from the 1300s or earlier?” asked Burns, who was delighted by Marty’s reaction when he saw the image of the cross carved into the wall at Domme. “It energized Marty’s interest like nothing ever has,” Burns said. “He’s always been the toughest nut to crack, but the discovery of the cross at Smith’s Cove and of its match at Domme Prison convinced him that there is a treasure on Oak Island, not necessarily gold or silv
er, but a historical treasure at the very least.”

  He wasn’t making any connection between the bones pulled from H8 and the medieval cross found at Smith’s Cove, Marty told me from the War Room, but in combination the two discoveries had led him to “the conclusion that something extraordinary happened here.”

  An event from season five of The Curse of Oak Island that had fascinated me involved a pair of cameras lost in the T1 shaft. The cameras had been sent down in an attempt to examine the “shiny gold object” that Charles Barkhouse had first observed the previous summer. After the cameras slipped loose from their tethers and fell into the hole, a diver with a metal detector was sent down to locate them, but found no trace. The show’s producers and crew had been suitably impressed by the vanishing cameras, as was I, but Rick and Marty more or less shrugged it off as one more inexplicable phenomenon of the island. “Sloughing currents” might have explained the disappearance of the cameras, Marty suggested. “Or it could just be a technically challenging dive and we just didn’t know where to point the detector,” Rick added, then chuckled. “Or maybe leprechauns.”

  “It might have just been equipment failure,” Marty said then. “As you know, Randall, it happens all the time out here.” I asked about the “magnetic survey” Marty and I had talked about in the summer of 2016. “As a matter of fact, we discussed doing that just today,” Marty told me.

  The Laginas’ schedule for the summer of 2018 was already packed, Kevin Burns advised me. Smith’s Cove would be their main focus. A “massive” excavation was planned, Burns said. Its main goal would be to locate and explore the manmade “U-shaped structure” that Dan Blankenship had discovered decades earlier, but the brothers and their cohort would also be searching for the two “round mineshafts” described in the Robert Restall records. They had “some plans for the swamp” as well, Burns said, and would be exploring the Money Pit area with the particle physics theories and technology that had resulted in the discovery of a hidden chamber inside Egypt’s Giza Pyramid during October of 2017. At Giza, scientists had tracked subatomic particles known as muons as they descended from space into the earth to locate and explore a hall nearly a hundred feet long and seventy feet wide. “We really want to see what the same technology might find on Oak Island,” Burns told me.