Disturbing History - DH Ep:65 The Curse Of Oak Island

Episode Date: February 11, 2026

In this episode, we travel to a tiny, hundred-and-forty-acre island off the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada, where a mystery first uncovered by three teenagers in 1795 has consumed fortunes, destroyed lives, and killed six men over the course of more than two hundred and thirty years.We start with sixteen-year-old Daniel McGinnis and his discovery of a mysterious depression on Oak Island, complete with oak log platforms buried every ten feet underground.From there, we trace the full history of the Money Pit — the Onslow Company's excavation and the catastrophic flooding at ninety feet, the Truro Company's discovery of the ingenious flood tunnel system at Smith's Cove, and the parade of treasure hunters who followed, from Frederick Blair's sixty-year obsession to a young Franklin Delano Roosevelt's involvement as an investor in 1909.We cover the darkest chapter in Oak Island's history — the Restall Tragedy of August 17, 1965, when former daredevil Robert Restall, his twenty-four-year-old son Bobby, and two coworkers were killed by toxic gas in a shaft on the island. We talk about Robert Dunfield's destructive brute-force excavation, Dan Blankenship's fifty-year obsession and his terrifying near-death experience inside Borehole 10-X, and the decades of legal battles that nearly killed the treasure hunt entirely.Then we bring it into the modern era with Rick and Marty Lagina, two brothers from Michigan who purchased most of the island in 2006 and turned the search into a global phenomenon through the History Channel's The Curse of Oak Island, now in its thirteenth season.We examine the key artifacts recovered over the years — a medieval lead cross, human bones with Middle Eastern DNA, a five-hundred-year-old gemstone, coconut fiber that has no business being in Canada, and stone pathways in the swamp dating back centuries. We also break down the major theories about what's buried on the island, from pirate treasure and the French Crown Jewels to Knights Templar relics and the skeptic's argument that the whole thing is a natural sinkhole. And we talk about the curse — the legend that seven men must die before the treasure can be found. Six have. The seventh hasn't. Yet. As of February 2026, the treasure has not been found. The digging continues.This is Disturbing History.

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This is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian, investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corners of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew. And here's the twist. Sometimes, the history is disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself just to get to the truth. If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull at threads, others leave alone.

You're in the right place. History isn't just written by the victors. Sometimes it's rewritten by the disturbed. You know, every now and then, I come across a story that doesn't just fit this show. It practically demands to be told here. And the story I've got for you today, it's one of those. Here on disturbing history, we don't just talk about events that are dark, or violent. Although, trust me, this one's got its share of both. We talk about the stories that burrow

under your skin, the ones that make you sit back and say, how is that even possible? The ones where the deeper you dig, and I do mean that literally this time, the stranger everything gets. Today we're going to Nova Scotia, Canada, a little island sitting in Mahone Bay, about an hour's drive southwest of Halifax. It's called Oak Island, and at just 140 acres, it's not much bigger than a decent-sized farm. From the water, it looks like every other island dotting that stretch of coastline. Rocky shores, thick forest, the kind of quiet, unassuming place you'd sail right past without a second glance.

The island sits among roughly 360 other islands in Mahone Bay, and there's genuinely nothing about its exterior appearance that would make you stop and say, there, that's the one. Rocks and sand skirt the perimeter. Red Oaks, which gave the island its name, along with spruce and other native trees, cover much of the interior. It's connected to the mainland today by a causeway, built in the 1960s, but for most of its history, the only way on or off was by boat. The nearest community is the small rural hamlet of western shore, and the nearest actual village is Chester. But beneath the surface of this tiny, otherwise forgettable

piece of land lies what might be the greatest unsolved mystery in the Western Hemisphere. And I'm not being dramatic. I don't do that. This is a story that's been unfolding for over 230 years. It's consumed the lives and fortunes of countless men and women. It's killed six people. And to this day, in the year 2026, nobody, not one single person on this planet can tell you with certainty what's buried down there, or if anything's buried down there at all. This is the story of the Oak Island Money Pit, and it belongs on this show for one simple reason. This isn't just a treasure hunt. This is a case study in human obsession. It's a story about what happens when people become so convinced that something extraordinary is just out of reach,

just a few more feet down, just beyond that next flood of water, that they'll sacrifice everything to get to it. Their money, their marriages, their sanity, their lives. That's what makes this disturbing, not necessarily what's in the pit. It's what the pit has done to the people who've gone looking. So settle in. This one's going to take a while, and I promise you, by the end of it, you're going to understand why generation after generation keeps going back to that island, even when every rational bone in their body is telling them to stop. To understand how this all kicked off you've got to understand what Nova Scotia was like in the late 1700s this wasn't some sleepy peaceful corner of the British Empire not even close for the better part of a century

before our story begins the waters off Nova Scotia had been a playground for pirates the maritime museum of the Atlantic describes the period between 1690 and 1730 as the golden age of piracy and the remote bays and inlets of the Nova Scotia coastline were tailored made for men living outside the law. With only a few scattered European settlements in the region, and just over 200 nautical miles separating those waters from the bustling commercial hub of colonial Boston, pirates had everything they needed, isolation, natural resources to repair their ships, and thousands of uninhabited islands where they could stash whatever they didn't want to carry, and stash things they did. Or at least, that's what everyone believed.

Captain William Kidd, one of the most notorious pirates in history, actually admitted before his execution in 1701 that he'd buried treasure somewhere in the area. He never said exactly where, and it's never been found. But the legend was enough. In the communities around Mahone Bay, stories of buried pirate gold weren't campfire tales. They were practically accepted fact. Every kid who grew up on those shores knew the stories. Every fisherman who worked those waters had a theory about which island might be hiding something.

Now, it's worth noting that the earliest documented human activity on Oak Island dates to the 1750s, when French fishermen were known to have visited the area. The island was initially called Smith's Island, after an early settler named Edward Smith, and was renamed Gloucester Isle in 1778, before acquiring the name Oak Island, a reference to the red oak trees that blanketed the island at the time. By the 1790s, a few families had settled on the island and the surrounding mainland, but it remained sparsely populated and largely wild. So when a 16-year-old kid named Daniel McGuinness paddled over to Oak Island one day in the summer of 1795,

he already had treasure on the brain. The air in Nova Scotia practically smelled of pirate gold, and what he was about to discover would validate every legend he'd ever heard. Or at least, it would seem to. Now, here's where I should mention something. The earliest accounts of what happened that summer are secondhand at best. The first published account of the Oak Island story didn't appear until 1857, more than 60 years after it supposedly happened. And even that was based on information passed down through the families involved.

So we're dealing with oral history here, and oral history has a way of getting dressed up over time. I'm going to tell you the story as it's traditionally been told, but I want you to keep that caveat in mind. Some of these early details, like the block and tackle, for instance, are disputed by researchers. Others aren't. I'll do my best to flag what's solid and what's shaky as we go. All right, so, Daniel McGuinness.

By most accounts, the young man noticed something unusual while exploring the island. Some versions say he saw strange lights on the island from the mainland, which drew him over. Others say he was just out hunting or exploring. Regardless of what brought him there, what he found when he arrived was interesting enough to change his life, and the lives of a lot of other people after him.

On a knoll at the southeastern end of the island, McGinnis came across a circular depression in the forest floor, roughly 13 feet in diameter. The ground had clearly been disturbed at some point. Trees around the depression had been cleared, and an old oak tree stood nearby with one of its limbs sawed off. According to the traditional account, a ship's block and tackle was still hanging from that severed limb, directly over the depression. Now some researchers dispute the block and tackle detail.

It might have been added later to make the story more compelling. But the depression itself, that's generally accepted as fact. Something had been dug there, and whatever it was, it had settled over time, leaving a visible bowl, in the earth. McGinnis knew exactly what this looked like. It looked like someone had dug a deep hole, buried something, and filled it back in. In pirate country, on an uninhabited island. He went home, and the next day he came back with two friends, John Smith and Anthony Vaughn. The three teenagers started digging, and what they found only deepened the mystery. Two feet down, they hit a layer of flagstone. Flat stones, deliberately laid across the diameter of the whole, and the whole.

hole. That's not natural. Somebody put those there. Excited, the boys pulled the stones out and kept digging. The pit narrowed slightly, from about 13 feet to around 7 feet in diameter, and they could see pick marks in the clay walls. This wasn't a sinkhole. This was a shaft. Somebody had excavated this with hand tools, and they'd done it a long time ago. At 10 feet down, the boys struck a platform of aged oak logs laid horizontally across the shaft like a floor. They pried the logs out and kept going. At 20 feet, another platform of oak logs. At 30 feet, the same thing. Oak log platforms spaced exactly 10 feet apart, like some kind of bizarre underground layer cake. Now let me just pause here and point something out. Whatever you believe about what's buried on Oak Island, or whether anything's

buried there at all. The fact that three teenagers in 1795 encountered this kind of deliberate engineered construction. Deep underground is remarkable. This wasn't random. Somebody went to an enormous amount of effort to build this shaft, and they did it in a systematic, organized way. The 10-foot intervals, the oak platforms, the flagstone cap, that's planning, that's labor, that's purpose. But the boys were teenagers with shovels, not minors, with heavy equipment. After reaching the 30-foot level, the work became too much for them. They couldn't go any deeper on their own. So they marked the spot and left, intending to come back with help. What they didn't know, what they couldn't have known, is that they just set in motion a chain

of events that would span centuries, consume fortunes, and end lives. The money pit had been opened, and it was never going to let go. It took a few years, but word of the boy's discovery eventually reached the right ears. Around 1802, some sources say 1803, the exact date is fuzzy. A group of businessmen from the town of Onslow and central Nova Scotia organized an expedition to the island. They're known to history as the Onslow Company, and they were the first organized group to tackle the money pit. One of the local men connected to the effort was a wealthy resident named Simeon Lens, who helped bankroll the operation. They brought a proper crew of laborers to Oak Island, relocated the McGinnis Boys dig and got to work. And what they found as they

went deeper was even more tantalizing than what the boys had encountered. Every 10 feet, like clockwork, they hit another platform of oak logs. But between the log layers, they started encountering other materials, layers of charcoal, layers of putty, and layers of what appeared to be coconut fiber. Now that last one is important, so let me underscore it. Coconut fiber. On a an island in Nova Scotia. Coconuts don't grow anywhere near Canada. They're tropical. The presence of coconut fiber,

sometimes called coconut quhar, in a shaft on an island in the North Atlantic, is genuinely anomalous. It was commonly used as packing material on sailing ships during the age of exploration, so it's not impossible for it to end up in Nova Scotia, but finding it deliberately packed into an underground shaft is something else entirely.

It suggests contact with the tropics or at least with ships that had been to the tropics and that detail has never been satisfactorily explained away by skeptics it's one of the most stubborn pieces of evidence that something genuinely unusual is going on here at around 90 feet deep the onsla company reportedly made their most famous discovery a large flat stone with strange symbols carved into its surface the so-called inscribed stone would become one of the most debated artifacts in the entire Oak Island saga. According to the traditional account, the stone bore symbols that no one on

the crew could decipher. It was eventually examined by various people over the following decades, and a translation allegedly emerged claiming the symbols read, 40 feet below, two million pounds lie buried. Now, before you get too excited, there are problems with this, significant problems. The translation didn't appear in print until 1949 in a book called, True Tales of Buried Treasure by Edward Rowe Snow. Snow said he received the set of symbols from a Reverend A.T. Kempton of Cambridge, Massachusetts. But Kempton's only explanation for his source was that he'd gotten the information from a school teacher long since dead. That's not what you'd call a rock-solid chain of custody.

The stone itself has an even murkier history. After being recovered from the pit, it was reportedly built into the fireplace of John Smith's house on the island. Smith being one of the original three boys, who'd since purchased the lot. Years later, it was removed and taken to Halifax, where local scholars couldn't translate the inscription. It eventually ended up in the possession of a bookbinder, who used it as a flat surface for beating leather.

By the time anyone thought to preserve it properly, the inscription was nearly worn away. The stone then passed through a bookstore in Halifax, and after that, disappeared entirely. It's never been found. In 1909, Captain Henry Bowden examined what was claimed to be the stone in Halifax and described it as a piece of basalt with no visible symbols at all. He was skeptical that any inscription could have worn off, given the stone's hardness.

So we're left with an artifact that might have been incredibly significant or might have been nothing at all, and we'll probably never know for sure. But back to the Onslow Company at the bottom of their 90-foot shaft. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. be back after these messages. Whatever that stone said or didn't say, what happened next was the event that would define the money pit for the next two centuries. They kept digging past the stone and at around 93 to 98 feet, depending on which account you read. They went home for the night. When they came back the next morning, the pit was flooded. 60 feet of seawater had rushed in

overnight, filling the shaft almost to the brim. They bailed. Good Lord did they bay. They bailed water out of that pit for weeks, around the clock, and they couldn't make a dent. The water level stayed right where it was, rising and falling slightly with the ocean tides. This wasn't groundwater seeping in from the surrounding soil. This was the Atlantic Ocean, pouring into the shaft from somewhere, through some kind of channel. They tried sinking a second shaft nearby, 110 feet deep, and then tunneling laterally toward the money pit to access it from the side. hopefully below the water level. As the tunnel neared the original shaft, the wall between them collapsed. Sea water came roaring through, filling the new shaft to the same depth as the first.

The workers barely escaped with their lives. Simeon Lenz was bankrupt. Daniel McGinnis, who'd been involved from the beginning, reportedly died without ever seeing the bottom of his discovery. The Onslow Company folded, and the money pit sat abandoned for nearly half a century. But the mystery wasn't dead, not even close. In 1849, a new group of investors formed what became known as the Truro Company. They'd heard the stories. They believed there was treasure down there, and they were convinced they could succeed where the Onslow Company had failed. They re-excavated the money pit down to about 86 feet, at which point it flooded again. Same story. Same relentless wall of seawater. But the Truro Company did something the previous group hadn't.

They started drilling core samples from a platform built inside the flooded shaft, using a pod auger, basically a large drill that could bring up material from below the water. And what they brought up was tantalizing. According to their reports, the drill passed through a spruce platform at 98 feet, then a 12-inch gap, then 4 inches of oak, then 22 inches of what they described as metal in pieces. Below that, they reportedly hit 8 inches of oak, another layer of metal pieces, then another spruce layer.

One account claims they also brought up three small lengths of a gold chain on the tip of the auger. If these accounts are accurate, and that's a big if, since we're relying on the testimony of men who had a vested financial interest in the pit containing treasure, then the drill had passed through what sounded like two chests, possibly stacked one on top of the other, encased in wood, sitting at around 100 feet below the surface. Now, I want you to think about what they were describing. At roughly 100 feet below the surface of an island in the North Atlantic, a pod auger, a crude drilling tool by modern standards,

was reportedly punching through layers of wood, metal, and wood again, in a pattern consistent with the construction of large storage containers. This was the first physical evidence, however circumstantial, that something of substance was actually down there. The previous searchers had found platforms, and exotic material, sure. But this was different. This sounded like containers.

Specifically, it sounded like treasure chests. Were the drill operators telling the truth? Did they embellish? Did they interpret ambiguous drill returns in the most exciting way possible? Because they were investors who needed the treasure to be real? We'll never know for certain. But the Truro Company's drilling results are among the most frequently cited pieces of evidence by believers. and they've never been definitively debunked.

The Truro Company also made a discovery that fundamentally changed the way people thought about the money pit. When they dug a separate shaft about 109 feet deep to the northwest and tunneled toward the original pit, seawater once again flooded everything. But this time, they noticed something critical. The water in all of the shafts rose and fell with the ocean tides. It was unambiguously salty, and the flow rate was enormous. One later estimate put it at around 600 gallons per minute. Somebody put two and two together, and the realization was both brilliant and horrifying.

The water wasn't just seeping in from the surrounding ground through natural geological pathways. It was being actively fed into the pit through an artificial tunnel, or multiple tunnels, deliberately engineered to connect the shaft to the ocean. The pit wasn't just a hole with treasure in it. It was a vault with a built-in security system. To test this theory, the Truro Company shifted their attention to a nearby cove on the east side of the island, known as Smith's Cove. And what they found there might be the single most compelling piece of evidence that the money pit is not a natural formation. It's the thing that keeps the skeptics up at night, because it's very, very hard to explain a way.

Beneath the sand of the beach, they uncovered an elaborate system of box drains, stone-line channels, carefully constructed with flat rock, laid in a converging fan pattern, all angled to funnel seawater from the cove directly into the underground network connected to the money pit. There were five of these drains spread across a wide section of the beach, and they all converged into a single main tunnel that ran inland toward the pit. But it gets more impressive. The entire beach in the area appeared to be artificial. The natural shoreline had been modified with layers of carefully placed material. First a layer of coconut fiber, then a layer of eel grass, then a layer of sand and stone. The coconut fiber acted as a filter, preventing silt and debris from clogging the drains

while allowing seawater to pass through freely. The eelgrass served a similar purpose. Together these layers essentially turned the beach into a giant filtration system, a massive sponge that collected seawater across a huge surface area and channeled it cleanly into the underground tunnel network. Let me put this in perspective. Whoever built this system didn't just dig a tunnel from the ocean to the pit. That would have been impressive enough. They engineered an entire artificial beach, complete with a multi-layer filtration system

designed to keep the flood tunnels functioning indefinitely. They used tropical materials, coconut fiber, that had to be imported from thousands of miles away. And they did all of this, presumably, before 1795. Because when Daniel McGinnis found the pit that year, the flood system was already fully operational. This is by any measure an extraordinary feat of engineering for any era, let alone one that predates the industrial revolution. We're talking about hundreds, maybe thousands of man-hours of labor by people who clearly had sophisticated knowledge of hydraulics, construction, and material science. Professor Edwin Hamilton, who studied the pit in the late 1930s, measured the flood rate at roughly 800 gallons.

gallons per minute and stated unequivocally that the money pit was a man-made engineering marvel and he was a professor of engineering at new york university not exactly a guy prone to wild claims the truro company tried to block the flood tunnels by building a coffer dam in smith's cove essentially a wall to hold back the ocean while they sealed the drain inlets it didn't work the atlantic ocean had other ideas the coffer dam was washed away by the tides they made one last attempt a shaft a hundred and eighteen feet deep with a tunnel running underneath the original pit but during the excavation the bottom of the original money pit collapsed the oak platforms whatever lay on top of them and roughly 10,000 board feet of

lumber all dropped into the void below if there had been treasure sitting at the hundred foot level it had just fallen to a hundred and nineteen feet or deeper buried under tons of debris and a flooded collapsing death trap The Truro Company ran out of money and dissolved around 1851. The 1860s brought a new wave of treasure hunters, and with them, the first death. In 1861, a group called the Oak Island Association took up the challenge. They re-excavated the original pit to 88 feet and dug two additional shafts, attempting once again to intersect the money pit from the side and block the flood tunnels.

Once again, both new shafts flooded. Once again, the ocean won. But the real tragedy came not from water, but from fire. During the pumping operations, a steam-powered pump engine that was being used to try to drain the shafts suffered a catastrophic boiler explosion. One worker was killed. It was the first life claimed by the money pit, and it wouldn't be the last. The first mention of this explosion actually appeared in an 1863 novel called Rambles Among the Blue Noses, while mention of a fatality came five years later.

Either way, the money pit had drawn blood, and a grim pattern was beginning to emerge. The Oak Island Association kept at it. In early 1862, they dug yet another shaft, 107 feet deep, parallel to the original and connected to it, using it as a pumping station. They managed to get the water level down to about 103 feet before the pumps were overwhelmed. But they did recover something of interest, old tools that had been left behind by the Onslow and Truro companies, confirming that they were in the right area. They also did some work at Smith's Cove, drilling several shafts in an attempt to locate and seal the flood tunnels. All of these efforts failed, as the tides eventually breached whatever barriers they put in place.

A final attempt to intersect the money pit in 1864 resulted in, you guessed it. More flood tunnels being breached and more seawater pouring in. The Oak Island Association was followed by the Eldorado Company in 1866. Same story. More shafts, more tunnels, more flooding, more failure. By this point, the Money Pit area was a Swiss cheese of intersecting shafts and collapsed tunnels, making future excavations exponentially more difficult. Every group that came to the island didn't just fail to find the treasure. They made it harder for the next group to try.

And yet, nobody was willing to say the words. Maybe there's nothing down there. The second death came in 1897, when a worker named Maynard Kaiser fell to his death in one of the shafts. Two men dead. The island was keeping score. If there's one name that dominates the late 19th and early 20th century history of Oak Island, it's Frederick Blair.

Born in 1867, Blair first arrived on the island in 18th. 1993 as part of the newly formed Oak Island Treasure Company, serving as its treasurer. He was 25 years old. He would remain involved with the Oak Island treasure hunt for the rest of his life, nearly 60 years. Blair's initial efforts with the treasure company followed the familiar pattern. They couldn't find the flood tunnel, so they drilled into the money pit instead. What they reportedly found through core drilling was remarkable. At about 153 feet depth, the drill passed through layers of cement, oak, soft metal, what was described as 32 inches of loose metal,

which some interpreted as coins, more soft metal, more oak, and more cement. It sounded like they drilled through a large vault or chest, encased in primitive concrete, sitting far deeper than anything previously encountered. At around 155 feet, the drill reportedly brought up something incredible, a tiny fragment of sheepskin parchment about the size of a dime with two letters written on it in India, Inc.

The letters appeared to be either V-I, U-I, or W-I. That little scrap of parchment, which, unlike the inscribed stone, actually still exists, is one of the most genuinely intriguing artifacts ever recovered from the money pit. Somebody wrote on that parchment, and somebody buried it over 150 feet underground, inside what appears to be an engineered vault on a tiny island in the North Atlantic. Why? Blair also discovered a triangle formation made of carefully arranged beech stones on the shore south of the Money Pit in 1897. The significance of this formation wouldn't become clear for decades,

but it would eventually factor into some of the more elaborate theories about the pit's origins. Perhaps most fascinatingly, in 1898, Blair's team conducted an experiment that still talked about today. They poured red paint into the flooded money pit to see where it would come out. According to their report, the dye emerged at three separate exit points around the island shoreline.

If accurate, this meant the flood tunnel system wasn't a single pipe from Smith's Cove to the pit. It was a network, with multiple inlets or outlets, potentially feeding seawater from different directions. That's an even more sophisticated engineering design than a single flood tunnel, and it would explain why every attempt to block the water from one direction had failed.

You'd seal one tunnel, and the water would just come from another. Now some researchers have questioned the reliability of this test. Dye tests in subterranean water systems are tricky even with modern techniques, and the methods available in the 1890s were crude. But Blair documented the results, and they've never been conclusively debunked. When the Oak Island Treasure Company eventually went under, Blair didn't leave. He secured the treasure trove rights to the island for 40 years

and essentially became the gatekeeper of Oak Island. If you wanted to dig, you dealt with Frederick Blair. And over the next several decades, a parade of treasure hunters did exactly that. In 1909, an engineer named Captain Henry Boduin arrived on Oak Island representing a group called the Old Gold Salvage and Wrecking Company. Among the investors backing Bodewan's expedition was a young law clerk from New York named Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The man who would become the 32nd President of the United States

had a deep personal connection to Oak Island. His grandfather, Warren Delano Jr., had been a shareholder in the Truro Company back in the 1850s, so stories of the island's mystery had been passed down through the Roosevelt family for generations. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. The future president visited Oak Island in the summer of 1909, and spent time at the site.

Bodouin's expedition wasn't particularly successful. They cleared the pit area to about 113 feet and sent divers down to investigate, but found nothing definitive. Core samples taken in and around the pit revealed nothing of particular interest. Bodowen also examined the supposed inscribed stone in Halifax and found it to be a piece of basalt with no visible symbols.

After his agreement to dig on the site expired, Bode Owen actually wrote a magazine article for Colliers declaring that there had never been any treasure on Oak Island at all. You'd think that might have settled things. It didn't. Roosevelt, for his part, never lost interest. Throughout his political career, through the Great Depression, through World War II, he continued to monitor developments on Oak Island. According to documents uncovered at the FDR Presidential Library,

he followed every new expedition, every new theory. As late as 1939, he considered returning to the island during a trip to Canada, but poor weather and the deteriorating international situation prevented it. He died in 1945, still fascinated by the mystery, still wondering what was down there. And Roosevelt wasn't the only famous name associated with the island. Movie stars, Errol Flynn, and John Wayne would each become involved in organizing or funding treasure hunting operations on Oak Island at various points. Admiral Richard Bird, the famous polar explorer, was a passive investor and even advised Roosevelt about the island. The money pit

was pulling in not just dreamers and adventurers, but some of the most prominent people of the 20th century. The decades between the two world wars saw a revolving door of treasure hunters, each convinced they had the angle their predecessors had missed. In 1931, William Chappelle, a wealthy contractor from Sydney, Nova Scotia, who'd been part of Blair's earlier treasure company, sank $30,000 into the pit. Before the Depression forced him to quit in 1932, he managed to dig a shaft 163 feet deep southwest of the original money pit. At 127 feet, he brought up some intriguing artifacts, an old axe, an anchor fluke,

a pick identified as a Cornish miners' pole pick, and the remnants of an oil lamp containing seal oil. These were clearly man-made objects, found deep underground, but they weren't treasure. They might have been tools left behind by earlier searchers, or they might have been something older. Nobody could say for certain. Gilbert Hedden followed in 1935, a New Jersey millionaire who ran a steel fabricating company. Hedden had become fascinated by the engineering challenge after reading a 1928 newspaper feature about Oak Island. He purchased the southeastern end of the island and began working in conjunction with Frederick Blair. Hedon ran submarine power lines from the mainland to drive high-speed pumps,

hired a Pennsylvania mining firm, and spent $100,000 on the effort, a staggering sum for the mid-1930s. Hedden also had an interesting obsession with a possible connection between Oak Island and a map in Harold T. Wilkins' book, Captain Kidd and his Skeleton Island. He traveled to England to consult with Wilkins about it. On the island, he rediscovered the stone triangle that Blair had found in 1897, and noticed that it appeared to match directions on a mysterious treasure map. He also found two large drilled rocks, 415 feet apart, that appeared to be original survey markers from whoever had built the pit. But he didn't find the treasure.

He ran into financial difficulties and turned the operation over to Professor Edwin Hamilton of New York University in 1938. Hamilton measured the flood rate at an incredible 800 gallons per minute and concluded that the money pit was definitively a man-made engineering marvel, not a natural formation. He continued through 1939, finding rocks and gravel at 190 feet that he believed were non-indigenous to the island, placed there deliberately by someone. Then World War II interrupted everything,

and the search went dormant. The post-war years brought more searchers. M. R. Chappelle, William's son, worked with the aging Frederick Blair in 1951, using electronic metal detecting equipment. George Green of Texas, representing five major oil companies, signed a contract with Mel Chappelle in 1955. Green drilled to over 180 feet and reportedly found a 40-foot void between 140 and 182 feet, a 40-foot cavity, deep underground. But he left after one season, called away by other business. Frederick Blair died in 1951. He'd spent nearly 60 years of his life consumed by the Oak Island mystery. He never found the treasure,

but he left behind an extraordinary archive of documents, correspondence, and research that would guide future searchers for decades. There are dark chapters in the Oak Island story, and then there's the rest-all tragedy. This is the one that still haunts people. This is the one that made the whole world sit up and pay attention. Not because of what was found, but because of what was lost. Robert Restall was not your typical treasure hunter. Before Oak Island consumed his life, he and his wife Mildred had lived one of the most extraordinary existences imaginable. They were daredevils, motorcycle stunt performers who traveled through Europe, the United States, and Canada, performing an act called the Globe of Death, where they

raced motorcycles around the inside of a metal sphere. Think about that for a moment. This was a man who'd spent his career cheating death for a living. But somewhere along the way, Restall became obsessed with Oak Island. He gathered every piece of information he could find about the legend and the previous excavations, and by 1959 he'd convinced himself that he could crack the mystery. He signed a contract with Mel Chappelle, the island's owner at the time, and moved his entire family to Oak Island, himself, his wife Mildred, and their children, including their

eldest son, Robert Jr., known as Bobby. For six years, the restalls lived on the island in conditions that most people today would find unthinkable. No running water, no electricity, no modern conveniences of any kind. They lived in a small cabin and later in an old building on the island that they fixed up as best they could. They ate simply, worked from dawn to dusk, and spent their evenings by lamplight, pouring over old documents and maps related to the pit. Mildred, who'd been every bit the daredevil her husband was during their motorcycle days, became the de facto record keeper, photographer, and operations manager for the dig.

Bobby, their oldest son, worked alongside his father as a full partner in the excavation. The younger children, Lee and Rick, grew up on the island, playing among the shafts and spoil piles like other kids played in backyards. And the restalls actually made progress. Robert Sr. was methodical and intelligent. He didn't just dig blindly. He studied the island, its geography, its hydrology. He found an old stone with the date 1704 carved into it.

He discovered several previously unknown features of the island's underground network. He was focused primarily on trying to locate and seal the flood tunnels at Smith's Cove, believing that if he could stop the water, he could reach the treasure. He invested roughly $200,000 of his own money and backers' funds into the search, and he was, by all accounts, getting closer to understanding the island's secrets than many who came before him. Then came August 17, 1965. It was a hot, muggy, windless day. Shortly after 1 o'clock in the afternoon, Robert Restall Sr., 59 years old, was checking on a shaft near the beach area where he and Bobby had been working.

The shaft was about 27 feet deep. Without warning, he was overcome by a toxic gas that suddenly filled the shaft. He lost consciousness and fell into the dark water at the bottom. Bobby saw his father collapse. He didn't hesitate. He jumped into the shaft after him. Bobby was also overcome by the gas. He collapsed into the water beside his father.

Carl Grazer, a mineralogist from New York who had been working with the restalls, saw what was happening and went in after them. He was overcome too. Cyril Hiltz, a 22-year-old local worker from Martin's Point, Nova Scotia, followed. He was overcome as well. A fifth man, Andy DeMont, also descended and was overcome. At this point, a visitor to the island, Edward White, a New York City firefighter who happened to be there that day, realized what was happening. He had himself lowered into the shaft on a rope and managed to pull DeMond out, but he couldn't reach the others in time. Robert Restall Sr. Robert Restall Jr., just 24 years old. Carl Grazer, about 40. Cyril Hilts, 22. Four men died that afternoon, drowned in the black

water at the bottom of a 27-foot shaft on a tiny island in Nova Scotia, killed by a gas that was never definitively identified. The nature of the gas has been debated for decades. Some of the rescuers on scene believed it was swamp gas, hydrogen sulfide, bubbling up from the marshy ground. Others theorized that a gasoline-powered pump engine running near the mouth of the shaft had filled it with carbon monoxide on a still windless day when the heavier than air fumes couldn't disperse. The coroner's office suggested carbon monoxide as a possibility, but never made a definitive determination. Mildred Restall was on the island that day. She lost her husband and her firstborn son in a matter of minutes. She and her two surviving children, daughter Lee Lamb and son Rick Restall,

left Oak Island and never returned to live there. Years later, Lee Lamb and Rick Restall would visit the island to meet with Rick and Marty Lagina, the current treasure hunters, in a deeply emotional moment captured by television cameras. The pain of that day, more than half a century later, was still raw. The Restall tragedy brought the total death toll on Oak Island to six, and it gave new power to a legend that had been circulating for years, the curse. The story goes that seven men must die before the treasure of Oak Island can be found. Nobody knows where this curse originated. There's no verified written record of it from before the mid-20th century. The first references to the specific seven-must-die formulation

appear to date from 1970s treasure-hunting literature, and the idea was later cemented in the public imagination by television. It may have been invented wholesale by magazine writers looking to add drama to the story, but the fact remains. As of 2026, six men have died on Oak Island. The curse says one more must follow. Whether you believe in curses or not, that's an uncomfortable number to sit with. You might think the rest all tragedy would have given people pause, that after watching four men drown in a 27-foot shaft, the world would have collectively said, said, you know what, maybe let's leave that island alone. It didn't. Not for long anyway. In fact, the rest all tragedy had the opposite effect for some people. It was proof in their

minds that the island was guarding something important. Nothing just kills people for no reason, they figured. There must be something down there worth protecting. Just months after the tragedy, a geologist named Robert Dunfield took over the rest all contract and launched what can only be described as a full-scale assault on Oak Island. Dunfield was not a man of subtlety. He was an engineer who believed that the problem with every previous excavation was simply one of scale. Previous searchers had used hand tools, then steam pumps, then small engines. Dunfield was going to use raw, overwhelming industrial power. He built a causeway from the mainland to the island, the first permanent land connection Oak Island had ever had, specifically so he could truck heavy

machinery onto the site. We're not talking about shovels and hand drills anymore. Dunfield brought in a 70-ton crane with a clam bucket, along with bulldozers and other earth-moving equipment. He essentially stripped mine the money pit area, digging the pit out to a depth of 134 feet and widening it to a staggering hundred feet across. Where previous searchers had tried to outsmart the flood tunnels through clever engineering, Dunfield's approach was essentially, rip everything out of the ground until there's nothing left to hide. It didn't work. The pit flooded as relentlessly as it always had,

and all Dunfield accomplished was destroying whatever remained of the original shaft structure. He turned the entire area into a muddy cratered moonscape that obliterated the archaeological context that future researchers desperately needed. The stratigraphy, the careful layering of soil, artifacts, and structures that tells the story of what happened and when, was bulldozed into oblivion. Researchers and archaeologists would curse Dunfield's name for decades. Whatever clues might have remained in the physical structure of the pit, many of them were

lost forever in the 1965-66 campaign of mechanized destruction. Dunfield left Oak Island in 1966, having spent enormous sums and found nothing of consequence. But is Causeway that stayed? And it would prove essential for every future operation on the island, including the massive drilling rigs and heavy equipment that the Leginas bring in today. So even Dunfield for all the damage he did left behind something useful. A road to the mystery, even if he couldn't solve it. The next chapter of the Oak Island story belongs to two men, Dan Blankenship and David Tobias. Blankenship's obsession with Oak Island began exactly the way Rick Legina's would, decades later, with a magazine article. In January of 1965, Reader's Digest published a feature story about the money pit that

landed like a bomb in the imagination of anyone who read it. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. Blankenship, then living in Miami, handed the article to his wife and said, read that. She did, and when so many words said, so what? But for Dan, there was no going back. By 1967, Blankenship had formed a syndicate dedicated to exploring the island. In 1969, he partnered with David Tobias, a Montreal businessman, and together they formed Triton Alliance and purchased most of Oak Island. Blankenship moved his family to the island in the early 1970s and lived there for the rest of his life.

For the next 50 years, Oak Island was his home, his obsession, and his reason for being. Blankenship's approach was different from those who came before him. Rather than attacking the Money Pit directly, which by this point was a collapsed, flooded, honeycomb disaster zone. He believed there was a back entrance to whatever lay below. He identified a spot about 180 feet northeast of the Money Pit, where he detected geological anomalies and strange magnetic readings, and he began drilling what would become the most famous borehole in treasure hunting history.

Boorhole 10X 10X was a steel-cased shaft, 27 inches wide, drilled to a staggering depth of 235 feet. At the bottom, Blankenship encountered what appeared to be a natural cavern or void. This was deeper than anyone had ever gone on Oak Island. In the early 1970s,

they lowered a camera into the borehole, down into the murky, silt-filled water at the bottom. The footage was grainy and nearly impossible to interpret. The water was so thick with sediment that visibility was almost non-existent. But Blankenship and his team believed they could make out shapes in the murk. What appeared to be hewn tunnel walls, squared off and artificially shaped. What looked like chest-shaped objects, partially buried in silt, and something that chilled everyone who saw it, what appeared to be a human figure, motionless, hunched in the corner of the chamber. Now I need to be,

honest here. The camera footage from Borehole 10x is some of the most debated evidence in the entire Oak Island saga. Skeptics point out that the images are so unclear that the human mind, which is wired to see patterns and familiar shapes in random noise, a phenomenon called peridolia, could interpret almost anything in that murk. The footage was being viewed on a monitor in real time and was not recorded during the most dramatic moments, because in the 1970s, video recording equipment was expensive and specialized. So the most startling images, including what appeared to be a human hand, were seen by witnesses but never captured on tape. Blankenship, however, was certain about what he'd seen. He went down himself. Dan Blankenship personally descended

into borehole 10x, and he stated that he saw a human hand in the water below. In 1976, Blankenship attempted a full descent into the borehole via the steel casing, trying to to reach the mysterious chamber at the bottom. It was an act of extraordinary courage, or extraordinary recklessness, depending on your perspective. He was lowered down the narrow shaft on a bosun's chair, inch by inch, into the suffocating darkness. The steel casing groaned around him. The water below was black and steel. And then, midway down, the casing twisted and the shaft began to collapse inward around him. Steel buckled. Earth pressed. in. He was trapped, suspended between mud, metal, and the crushing weight of the earth above,

in a space barely wider than his own body. For what must have felt like an eternity, Dan Blankenship was entombed alive in the bowels of Oak Island. He was finally pulled out by his crew, shaken, but alive. He nearly died. The island had very nearly claimed victim number seven. Dan Blankenship would later say that the experience didn't deter him. It convinced that he him, even more, that whatever was at the bottom of 10x was worth finding. That's the kind of man he was. That's the kind of hold this island has on people. The years that followed were dominated not by digging, but by fighting. And this is one of the most frustrating chapters in the Oak Island story, because it demonstrates how something as mundane as property law can bring a two-century treasure

hunt to its knees. A series of costly legal battles erupted between the various stakeholders of Oak Island. Blankenship and his partner Tobias had a falling out over strategy and finances. Tobias, the businessman, was increasingly skeptical that the treasure would ever be found and was tired of pouring money into what he saw as a bottomless pit, pun intended. Blankenship, the true believer, couldn't fathom giving up. Their partnership, which had once been built on shared excitement, deteriorated into mutual resentment and courtroom drama. Meanwhile, Frederick Nolan, a professional surveyor and treasure hunter who'd independently purchased several lots on the island from the heirs of Sophia Sellers for $2,500 back in 1962, became embroiled in a feud

with Blankenship that is legendary in Oak Island circles. The two men despised each other. At one point, Nolan blocked the road that Blankenship needed to access the money pit area, essentially holding the treasure hunt hostage. Blankenship, not to be outdone in stubbornness, responded. in kind. The feud lasted over 40 years, four decades of two old men, both living on the same tiny island, both convinced that untold riches lay beneath their feet, and both too proud and too angry to work together. The infighting drained finances, crippled exploration, and turned Oak Island into a case study in how human pettiness can defeat even the most extraordinary shared ambition. It wouldn't be until the Ligina brothers arrived that the Nolan Blankenship

feud would finally be brokered to a piece in 2015. Nolan did make one notable contribution during this period. In 1981, he revealed that he discovered five large cone-shaped boulders that when viewed from above, formed a giant cross on the island's landscape, across roughly 720 feet long. This formation, which became known as Nolan's cross, intersected. at a point where Nolan claimed he'd found a buried stone carved in the shape of a human head. The cross, measured precisely, appeared to be placed with deliberate geometric precision. It was too regular to be random, too large to be practical, and too mysterious to ignore. Supporters of the Knights Templar theory seized on it immediately,

a massive stone cross on an island suspected of being a Templar repository, while skeptics argued it was simply a coincidental arrangement of glacial or erratics. Boulders deposited randomly by Ice Age glaciers. Like everything else on Oak Island, it was intriguing, mysterious, and utterly inconclusive. David Tobias eventually grew tired of the endless expenditures and legal battles. He wanted out. In 2006, he sold his 50% stake in Oak Island Tours Incorporated to two brothers from Kingsford, Michigan, who had been dreaming about Oak Island since they were kids. Their names were Rick and Marty Legina. Rick was 11 years old when he found the January 1965 issue of Reader's Digest at his local library.

The same issue that had ignited Dan Blankenship's obsession. Rick read the article about the Oak Island Money Pit, and from that moment, the island became his lifelong dream. He shared the article with his younger brother Marty, who found it interesting but was more of a skeptic. The brothers took very different paths in life. Rick became a postal worker. a quiet, steady career that left him plenty of time to research and dream about Oak Island. Marty, on the other hand, became an extraordinarily successful businessman. He studied mechanical engineering and law,

founded a natural gas company called Terra Energy Limited, that became one of Michigan's biggest shale gas operators, and sold it in 1995 for around $60 million. He went on to own a vineyard in Traverse City, Michigan. Marty had the money. Rick had the dream. In 2006, they put them together and purchased their stake in Oak Island. For the first few years, they worked relatively quietly.

In July of 2010, Blankenship and the other stakeholders announced they'd received a new treasure trove license from the Nova Scotia government, allowing them to resume operations. The Liginas began their search in earnest, and then television came calling. In January of 2014, the History Channel premiered The Curse of Oak Island, and Everything changed. The show brought millions of viewers into the hunt, turned the brothers into household names, and, perhaps most importantly, provided a massive influx of funding. With production budgets reportedly running into the hundreds of thousands per episode and 20 plus episodes per season, the financial resources available for exploration

dwarfed anything in Oak Island's history. Over 13 seasons and counting, the brothers and their expanding team, which includes heavy equipment options, operator Billy Gerhardt. Metal detecting expert Gary Drayton, geologist Terry Matheson, archaeologist Laird Niven, and many others have deployed technology that previous searchers couldn't have imagined. Ground penetrating radar, lidar scanning, sonar imaging,

advanced chemical analysis, carbon dating, massive caseon driving equipment capable of sinking enormous steel tubes deep into the earth. And they found things, but not Not the treasure, mind you. As of 2026, nobody has found the treasure, whatever that might be. But the Laginas have uncovered a steady stream of artifacts that, taken together, paint a picture of an island with a far more complex history

than anyone previously imagined. Among the more significant finds over the years, and I want to spend some time on these because each one tells a piece of the story. Found during season five of the show by metal detecting expert Gary Drayton. this medieval era lead cross was recovered near Smith's Cove. Testing suggested it was made sometime between 1,200 and 1600 AD, potentially placing it in the era of the Knights Templar. The style of the cross was consistent with Templar-era religious artifacts,

and chemical analysis suggested it may have originated in southern France, which was Templar territory. If the dating is accurate, this cross is evidence of a European presence on Oak Island, centuries before Daniel McGuinness ever picked up a shovel. That's not nothing. That's potentially history-changing. Deep within the Money Pit area, the team recovered two fragments of human bone. DNA sequencing revealed that one belonged to a person of European descent, while the other came from someone with Middle Eastern ancestry.

The Middle Eastern connection sent the Templar theorists into overdrive. The Templars, after all, spent decades in the Holy Land during the Crusades, and maintained close ties with the Middle East. Finding a bone from a person with Middle Eastern ancestry, buried deep underground on a Nova Scotia island, is genuinely difficult to explain through conventional historical narratives. An eight Moravetti copper coin, believed to date to the 17th century,

was found in the triangular swamp, supporting the theory that Spanish ships and personnel had some connection to the island. Dan Blankenship had long believed that rogue Spaniards had hidden treasurer, treasure on Oak Island, and this coin, while not proof of his theory, was at least consistent with it. A fragment of antique jewelry containing a 500-year-old rotolite garnet gemstone was found by Gary Drayton's metal detector. Jimstones like this would have been worn by someone of

significant wealth and status. Its presence on the island suggests that someone of means, not just common laborers or fishermen, had been there at some point in the distant past. Various finds over the years have included fragments that appear to be from old documents or book bindings. These have fueled the theory that whatever's buried on Oak Island might include manuscripts or documents, not just gold and jewels. It keeps coming up, literally and figuratively. Every major excavation on Oak Island has encountered coconut fiber, in the money pit, at Smith's Cove, and elsewhere. Carbon dating has placed some of this material to the 1300s or 1400s. Coconut fiber doesn't grow anywhere near Nova Scotia.

Its persistent presence, at multiple locations and depths across the island, is one of the strongest arguments that the site was deliberately engineered by people with connections to tropical or subtropical regions. Found during the excavation of the triangular swamp, which sediment analysis suggests was once an open cove that was artificially filled in. These pathways appear to be a deliberate construction designed to facilitate the transport of heavy, materials from the waterline inland. Dr. Ian Spooner, a geologist who has studied the swamp's sediments, concluded that the swamp was artificially modified centuries ago. In season 12, the team uncovered not just one, but a network of these pathways,

suggesting a transport infrastructure far more complex than a single treasure burial would require. Taken individually any one of these artifacts could probably be explained away. A single coin could have been dropped by a passing fishermen. A lone brooch could have washed ashore. But taken together, the medieval cross, the ancient coconut fiber, the artificial beach engineering, the stone pathways, the human bones with unexpected DNA profiles, the worked wood, the iron artifacts, the fragments of parchment. They paint a picture of an island with a far more complex and mysterious history than anyone in 1795 could have imagined. Dan Blankenship lived to see the

the beginning of the Lagina era. The old treasure hunter became a father figure and mentor to the brothers, sharing his decades of knowledge about the island. He was a familiar presence on the show for its first six seasons. Still sharp, still passionate, still convinced, the treasure was there. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. On March 17, 2019, Dan Blankenship passed away peacefully at the age of 95. He'd spent more than 50 years. He'd spent more than 50 years, years on Oak Island, longer than any other treasure hunter in history. He never found the treasure, but he died believing it was there, and his legacy lives on and every shaft sunk, and every artifact recovered by the team that followed him. Over 230 years, the theories about what's

buried on Oak Island have ranged from the plausible to the absolutely bonkers. Let's run through the major ones, because they're part of the story, and some of them are more interesting than you might expect. This is the original theory and in many ways, still the simplest. Captain Kidd admitted to burying treasure in the region before his execution. Blackbeard, Henry Morgan, and other notorious pirates operated in these waters. The engineering of the money pit could conceivably be the work of pirates who had access to skilled labor. Many pirate crews included carpenters, engineers, and other tradesmen from captured vessels. The Spanish coins found on the island, could support this theory. The problem is that the engineering of the money pit seems almost

too sophisticated for a pirate crew. The flood tunnel system alone would have required months of work by a large organized labor force. This theory holds that during the chaos of the French revolution, loyalists smuggled the crown jewels of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette out of France, and they eventually made their way to Nova Scotia via a lady in waiting who escaped Versailles. Franklin Roosevelt's group reportedly favored this theory. The discovery of the antique brooch on the island has been cited as potential evidence, though it's far from conclusive. This is probably the most popular theory among modern Oak Island enthusiasts,

and it's the one the television show leans into most heavily. The theory holds that when the Templar order was suppressed by the Pope and the King of France in 1307, fleeing Templars carried sacred relics, possibly including the Holy Grail, or the Ark of the Covenant, across the Atlantic and buried them on Oak Island. The medieval lead cross found by the Laginas, the human bone with Middle Eastern DNA, the potential stone pathways in the swamp dating to the 13 or 1400s, and other artifacts have all been cited as supporting evidence.

Critics point out that the Templars are the Swiss Army knife of conspiracy theories. They get credited with everything, and that the evidence is suggestive at best. theory that Francis Bacon, who some believe was the true author of Shakespeare's plays, buried original manuscripts on Oak Island, has a small but devoted following. It's based largely on the parchment fragments recovered from the pit, which could conceivably be from old documents. It's creative, I'll give it that. On the skeptics side, and in fairness we've got to give the skeptics their due, there's a legitimate geological argument to be made. Joe Nickel, a prominent investigator of unusual claims, and others have argued that the money pit is a natural phenomenon,

a sinkhole connected to the island's underlying limestone and in hydrite formations. Nova Scotia's geology is riddled with sinkholes and underground water channels. The flooding, they argue, is simply seawater, percolating through natural underground passages and cavities in the island's bedrock, not engineered tunnels. The oak platforms every 10 feet. those could be naturally deposited wood, fallen trees, debris from the surface, that settled into a sinkhole over time, creating what looks like deliberate layering but is actually just nature doing its thing. The sinkhole theory has been around since at least 1911, and it has some genuine geological support. The island does sit on top of limestone and gypsum formations that are prone to dissolution and collapse.

Natural sinkholes in these formations can create shafts that look man-made to the untrained eye. Water flowing through natural underground channels can appear to be coming from engineered tunnels. But here's where the skeptics run into trouble. The sinkhole theory struggles, badly, with several key facts, the coconut fiber. There's no natural process that deposits tropical plant material 100 feet underground on a Canadian island. The box drains at Smith's Cove, which were clearly and unmistakably man-made. Flat stones deliberately laid in convergent patterns. The layers of putty and charcoal in the pit, which don't occur naturally in sinkholes.

The worked wood and iron artifacts found at depth, and the sheer regularity of the 10-foot platform intervals, which strains the coincidence explanation past the breaking point. You could maybe get one natural log layer in a sinkhole, maybe two. but a log platform every 10 feet for 90 feet straight down. That's asking a lot of coincidence. The honest assessment is that neither the treasure theory nor the sinkhole theory explains everything. The truth, whatever it is, probably involves elements that no one has fully thought through yet. The honest answer is that nobody knows.

And after 231 years of searching, that's either the most frustrating thing in the world or the most tantalizing. As I record this, the curse of Oak Island is in the middle of its 13th season on the History Channel, which premiered on November 4th, 2025. As of February 26, the show is currently on a brief hiatus, with new episodes set to resume later in the month. The Luginas and their team are still very much active on the island. This season has been particularly eventful, even by Oak Island standards. The team has expanded their focus well beyond the triunees. traditional money pit area, investigating Lot 5, Lot 8, and continuing their work in the swamp.

On Lot 5, they unearthed a high-quality, professionally cut gemstone, and what was verified as a sacred religious artifact, finds that have pushed the timeline of documented activity on the island further back than many researchers had previously accepted. On Lot 8, investigation beneath a massive Boulder has produced evidence that some researchers believe could indicate the existence of a second money pit, a discovery that, if confirmed, would fundamentally reshape everything we think we know about what happened on Oak Island. The swamp continues to be one of the most productive areas on the island. Remember, Dan Blankenship always insisted the swamp was man-made, and mounting evidence supports that claim. In the most recent seasons, the team has uncovered networks of stone-line pathways,

wooden structures, and artifacts dating back at least 500 years. Core samples from the swamp indicate saltwater flooding in the 13 or 1400s, which aligns with theories of medieval era activity on the island. A 15th century wooden barrel fragment with stress marks and burned scars was found, hinting at ship's cargo being hidden or possibly destroyed on the island. The team has also been exploring a potential Knights of Malta connection, investigating whether a night from that, order may have visited or had connections to Oak Island. This is relatively new territory in

the Oak Island theorizing, and it's too early to know whether it will lead anywhere substantive. As of this moment, the treasure, whatever it is, has not been found. The definitive answer has not been reached. The mystery endures. The show has aired over 230 episodes across 13 seasons, and there's no indication that the Laginas are planning to stop anytime soon. The estimated total spent on Oak Island treasure hunting since 1795 ranges from $20 million to $50 million or more, when you factor in the production costs of the television show. Some estimates run even higher.

The Logina brothers alone are estimated to have invested somewhere between $10 and $20 million through Oak Island Tours Incorporated, though the exact figures have never been publiced, disclosed. Marty Legina, with a net worth estimated at around $100 million thanks to his energy business, has been the primary financial engine behind the modern search. His brother Rick, a former postal worker, has been the heart and soul. Marty has the checkbook. Rick has the passion. Together they've kept the hunt alive longer than anyone except Frederick Blair and Dan Blankenship. The show itself has

generated millions in advertising revenue, streaming deals, and merchandise, and it spawned several spin-offs. Tourism on Oak Island has become a legitimate industry, with Oak Island Tours Incorporated offering guided visits to the island that draw thousands of visitors annually. The Little Island in Mahone Bay has become an international destination, and the local economy in the Western Shore area has benefited enormously.

Say what you will about whether the treasure exists. The treasure hunt itself has become its own kind of economic engine. And that brings up an uncomfortable question that skeptics love to ask. If the Liginas ever did find the treasure, or definitively proved there was nothing to find, would it actually be in their financial interest? The show would end. The tourism would dry up. The merchandise would stop selling. The cynics view is that the treasure hunt is more valuable as a perpetual mystery than it ever could be as a solved one. I'll leave that one for you to decide. Before, we close, I want to come back to the curse, because it hovers over this entire story like a fog

over Mahone Bay. The legend says that seven men must die before the treasure of Oak Island can be found. It's a powerful, eerie statement, and it's been the thematic spine of the television show since its first episode. But where did it come from? Here's the honest answer. Nobody knows. And the more you dig into it, sorry, I keep doing that. The more it looks like, the curse might be a relatively modern invention. There's no verified written record of the seven must die prophecy from the 1800s. The earliest references to it appear in 1970s treasure hunting literature, and it was popularized, some would say manufactured, by documentaries and eventually by the History Channel show itself. That said, six men have verifiably died in the pursuit

of Oak Island's treasure, one in the 1861 boiler explosion. Maynard Kaiser, who fell to his death in 1897. And then the four souls lost in the Restall tragedy of 1965, Robert Restall Sr., Robert Restall Jr., Carl Grazer, and Cyril Hiltz. That's six. The curse says seven. Whether the curse is real or not, it has shaped the Oak Island story in ways that are impossible to separate from the facts. It adds a layer of menace to every shovel of dirt,

every descent into a dark shaft. It makes people wonder every time a new searcher straps on a hard hat and climbs into the pit, whether they might be number seven. And it gives the whole enterprise a gravity that a mere treasure hunt,

however elaborate, wouldn't otherwise possess. The most disturbing thing about the Oak Island curse isn't whether it's supernatural. It's whether it even matters. Because the island has proven, time and time again, that it doesn't need a magical,

Hex to be deadly. It's got toxic gas. It's got flooding. It's got collapsing shafts. It's got the kind of obsession that makes smart people do dangerous things. The island doesn't need a curse. The island is the curse. And here's the thing that keeps me up at night when I think about this story. It's easy to look at Oak Island and see a 200-year-old fool's errand. It's easy to say these people are chasing shadows, throwing good money after bad into a bottomless hole. Literally. And maybe they are. But then you think about the coconut fiber, a hundred feet underground on an island in Nova Scotia. You think about the flood tunnels at Smith's Cove, an engineering feat that required planning, labor, and expertise. You think about the parchment

fragment with letters written in India, Inc., recovered from 150 feet below the surface. You think about the medieval lead cross, the human bone with Middle Eastern DNA. The stone line path, the stone line pathways in the swamp, dating back centuries. Something happened on that island. Somebody went there, a very long time ago, and did something extraordinary, whether what they left behind is a chest of pirate gold, the lost jewels of Marie Antoinette, sacred Templar relics, or something nobody has even thought of yet. Something is going on at Oak Island that defies easy explanation. And that ultimately is why the story won't die. It's why Daniel McGinnis dug that first hole in 1795.

It's why Simeon Lens went bankrupt. It's why Frederick Blair spent 60 years on the island. It's why Franklin Roosevelt monitored the search from the White House. It's why Robert Restall moved his family to a tiny island and died there. It's why Dan Blankenship spent 50 years staring down into the darkness of borehole 10x. And it's why Rick and Marty Legina, two brothers from Michigan, are still digging today. The money pit doesn't give up its secrets easily. It floods when you get close.

It collapses when you push too hard. It kills when you're not careful. But it always, always, gives you just enough to keep you coming back. A scrap of parchment. A fragment of gold chain. A coin from another century. A glimpse of something in the murky water that might be a chest or might be nothing at all. That's the real curse of Oak Island.

not some supernatural hex that requires seven deaths. The real curse is hope. The unshakable, irrational, magnificent human belief that the answer is just a few more feet down. Six men have died chasing that belief. Millions of dollars have vanished into the earth. Lifetimes have been consumed. And still, as we sit here in 2026, the digging continues.