The Real Story of Oak Island’s Legendary Money Pit

he Oak Island curse says seven men must die before the island reveals its legendary treasure. Six have perished in the search for billions in gold, but the danger has only fueled exploration and speculation.

“Frustrating, fascinating, enticing—you put any adjective you want in front of Oak Island and that’s what it is,” says Charles Barkhouse, historian for the History Channel show The Curse of Oak Island, which has chronicled an ongoing search for the treasure for eight seasons (with few results). “If you’re not prepared for the emotional ride, you can pack up your toys and go.” Hunts for the Oak Island Money Pit, a 100-foot hole on an island in Nova Scotia, allegedly containing anything from pirate treasure to the Ark of the Covenant, date back to 1795. While no treasure has been found, peripheral discoveries—apparent clues, possible traps, and geological curiosities—have compelled searchers onward, even as historians dispute the more sensational claims surrounding the treasure. Was Oak Island a trove for the Knights Templar, a secret British industrial center, or an ill-fated natural sinkhole? The answer, of course, takes some digging.

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The Search Begins
Oak Island first garnered intrigue soon after the “Golden Age of Piracy” (roughly 1650–1730), when Edward Low and Bartholo mew Roberts patrolled the seas northeast of the Americas. In 1795, a Nova Scotia teenager reportedly saw strange lights hovering over the island from his home on the mainland. He heralded two friends and rowed over to investigate. In a copse of trees on the southeastern side of the island, the boys found a 13-foot-wide depression surrounded by loose soil and young trees—signs the ground had been disturbed.

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The boys began to dig out what would be known as the Money Pit. Two feet down, they found a circle of stones bordering the circumference of the pit, and at 10 feet, they found a platform of cut timbers fit into the sides of the pit. A second platform lay 20 feet down, but that’s where the account of the first search ends. The story resumes in the early 1800s, when the Onslow Company embarked on the first official expedition to excavate the discovery. They picked up where the first dig left off, finding more platforms every 10 feet, sometimes with layers of putty, charcoal, or coconut fibers on top. Coconuts don’t grow within 900 miles of Nova Scotia, but the story alleges the crew made a more monumental discovery at 90 feet: a rectangular stone inscribed with strange markings.

Researchers and treasure hunters dismissed the markings as being made by the excavator’s tools by mistake, but others were certain they were a secret code leading to buried treasure. In the 1860s, a professor of languages from Nova Scotia’s Dalhousie University examined the stone and determined the code was a substitution cipher saying: “Forty Feet Below Two Million Pounds Are Buried.” But another attempted translation in the 1970s interpreted the code as a Coptic Christian warning not to forget your duty to the Lord.

The Onslow Company kept digging, and at 98 feet they hit what sounded like a hollow container—assumed to be a treasure vault. The crew stopped work for the evening, but when they returned the next morning, they found the pit filled with 60 feet of water. It was thought their digging had triggered a booby trap. The flooding seems to have ended Onslow’s efforts; the company dissolved in 1805.

The Curse Strikes
Another expedition to Oak Island launched from the nearby town of Truro in 1849. That crew was reportedly able to bail out the water in the pit and reinforce its walls before drilling into the “vault.” The drill penetrated successive layers of wood and loose metal, suggesting a treasure chest, and according to a newspaper account published years later, surfaced three small links of gold chain. But before the crew could access the vault, the bottom of the Money Pit collapsed and flooded again, taking the presumed treasure with it.

Undeterred, the crew believed they had found a flood tunnel that channeled water to the pit from the man-made Smith’s Cove approximately 500 feet east of the dig site. Digging at Smith’s Cove revealed five rock-lined sluices extending away from the beach and coalescing into a single drain that appeared to lead to the Money Pit. The Truro group dug shafts to intercept this drain, with no success. Around this time, the first reports of the Oak Island curse appear. The origins of the curse are muddled—the decades between the search’s beginning and the curse’s first mention confuse the story—but the first recorded fatality tied to the Oak Island treasure is dated to the early 1860s, when a steam-powered pump used to drain the Money Pit exploded, killing one man.