Is This Island's Treasure Protected By A Curse? | Unveiled

Is This Island’s Treasure Protected by a Curse?

Becoming a treasure hunter sounds like it would be one of the most exciting and adventurous careers on the planet… where any day you could find a chest filled with gold or rubies and strike it seriously rich! But treasure hunting is also hard work, demanding long hours and often without ever finding anything in return. And then there are the various dangers involved, too… especially if what you’re searching for is thought to be cursed.

This is Unveiled and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; Is the Oak Island treasure really protected by a curse?

Supposedly cursed islands are actually quite a common phenomenon around the world, with mysteries and myths surrounding various (usually quite isolated) corners of the planet. Gaiola Island in Italy, for example, is said to be cursed due to a series of strange deaths that the many owners of the island have suffered over the years… Lokrum Island in Croatia is also said to be cursed, this time by ancient monks blamed for the disappearances of boats and people… and even for the death of an Emperor of Mexico in the nineteenth century. One cursed island, however, has garnered more intrigue than probably anywhere else.

Oak Island is a 140-acre wedge of land off the coast of Canada. Today, it hosts little by way of permanent, established villages or communities… but, thanks to various stories and theories suggesting that there’s treasure hidden there, ownership of it has passed between a number treasure hunters for at least the last two hundred years. The origins of the Oak Island legend are sketchy, but today there are multiple suggestions as to what could be hidden in this remote land; ranging from William Shakespeare’s lost manuscripts, to Marie Antoinette’s prize Jewels, to (most popular of all) the pirate Captain Kidd’s buried riches. What sets this potentially priceless haul apart from most others, though, is that it’s also thought to be protected by a strong and deadly curse; a curse which states that seven people will die before the treasure (whatever it is) is found. Talk of the curse can be traced back only about a century or so, but various people have already perished on an Oak Island quest. In fact, over the years, Oak Island has hosted more than its fair share of some seriously strange goings on!

One of the earliest starting points for the Oak Island story is the late-1600s, when legend has it that a dying sailor revealed that he had previously served in a crew under the infamous Captain Kidd - a Scottish pirate. The sailor reportedly told of a large treasure buried somewhere on an island east of Boston… a somewhat vague description, but one that Oak Island does fit within. And, while tales of buried riches are ten-a-penny throughout maritime history (and are often incredibly unreliable), Captain Kidd did have previous here - he’s known to have buried treasure on Gardiners Island in New York, for example, so perpetuating pirate stereotypes really was something that he did.

The dying sailor’s story became even more intriguing, though, when (during an early exploration of Oak Island around the year 1795) the Money Pit was discovered - a man-made shaft eventually found to stretch more than 100 feet below the ground. The Onslow Company were the first to seriously investigate the site, but when they tried to dig deeper and deeper in search of the legendary loot, they activated an apparent booby trap and the tunnel they were digging was flooded with seawater. When they hired a pump to remove the water, it malfunctioned… and when they tried to dig a separate access tunnel alongside the pit, it also flooded. So, their finances drained, the Onslow Company were eventually forced to admit defeat and disband.

Meanwhile, though, in the early 1800s, a mysterious stone tablet was also found, marked with strange cyphers and buried around 90 feet deep in the pit. There followed decades of attempted codebreaking to understand the tablet, with the most popular translations claiming that it read; “Ten” or; “Forty Feet Below, Two Million Pounds Are Buried”. By now, we’re in the 1840s and ‘50s and victory seemed close. The shaft appeared to have been custom-built to hide treasure, and the tablet seemed to light the way to its discovery… but misfortune continued to strike.

The next serious attempt to crack Oak Island (after the Onslow Company) came via the Truro Company, which used a mechanical drill to access the pit and, on one of its first attempts, recovered links of a gold chain. Encouraged by these shiny breadcrumbs of possibility, they too tried various methods to remove the water at the bottom of the shaft, or to work around it… but were again unable to solve the puzzle and were also forced to eventually disband. It’s a similar story for most other groups trying their luck on the island. The Oak Island Association and The Oak Island Treasure Company, for example, both ploughed thousands of dollars into what were ultimately unsuccessful endeavours in the nineteenth century… while the likes of William Chappell, Gilbert Hedden, Robert Dunfield, Daniel Blankenship, and David Tobias are all remembered as treasure hunters who spent big to search Oak Island… but were left with nothing to show for it. In fact, Oak Island has often been labelled the costliest treasure hunt in the world, so expensive and ineffective have almost all of the hunts there been so far. Some have lost more than simply their money, however.

The curse of Oak Island supposedly states that seven people shall die before the treasure reveals itself. And, unfortunately, there have already been a number of deaths… potentially six, altogether. The first death came during an excavation in 1861, when an on-site explosion killed an unknown worker. The next was in 1897, when Maynard Kaiser lost his balance while digging out the Money Pit, fell a great distance and died. The most high-profile loss of life so far came in 1965, though, in an event which has since been called the Restall Tragedy. It started when Robert Restall Sr. fell into a shaft after being exposed to a strange gas. Restall’s son then went to try and save him, and two more workers followed, concerned for both of their colleagues… ultimately, though, all four of them died in the shaft, as a result of the toxic gas which had first caused Restall to fall.

In total, that makes six deaths that have occurred while searching for the Oak Island treasure, and many believe that, disturbingly, one more has to follow before anything can be found… The number of Oak Island deaths isn’t universally agreed upon, however. The Oak Island Monument, a memorial erected in 1995 to honour the fallen treasure hunters, does list six people… but some sources insist that more have already died there - including a 2016 report by the Blockhouse Blog, which claimed that fourteen people have died on Oak Island, at least seven of which were actively searching for treasure. If that’s true, then the curse could well have lifted already… but, regardless, it’s clear that the Oak Island treasure really has claimed multiple lives to this point.

Rick and Marty Lagina are current co-owners of Oak Island, and the latest in a long line of hopeful treasure hunters to pit their wits against this centuries-old mystery. They’ve detailed their own searches in the History Channel series, “The Curse of Oak Island”, bringing more attention than ever to their part of the world. Yet, so far, they too have spent millions of dollars without much of a return yield. The treasure hunting reality for Rick and Marty is much changed compared to those who came before them, though. On the one hand, many of the Oak Island details have been lost to history; on the other, they now have more technology than ever to get to the bottom of it. And, today’s explorers have unearthed various items of potential significance on the island - including a cross possibly belonging to the Knights Templar, a brooch that could relate to Marie Antoinette’s lost jewels, and some iron spikes which date back to the 1700s, when the Oak Island story was just beginning.

Time will tell whether or not they’ll succeed in finding anything more… But, for now, we can only hope that the seeming curse surrounding their quest doesn’t really exist, or that it has at least been fulfilled already, so that no more lives are lost while attempting to solve one of the world’s longest-running treasure hunts.