Oak Island's Money Pit: 230 Years of Digging, Six Deaths, and No Treasure

About 4 min read

Oak Island is a small, tree-covered island of about 140 acres in Mahone Bay, off the south shore of Nova Scotia, Canada. It is unremarkable in every way except one: beneath its eastern end lies a shaft known as the Money Pit, and for more than 230 years people have been digging into it, convinced that a great treasure waits at the bottom. They have spent millions of dollars, sunk shafts more than 30 metres deep, and lost six lives. What they have found is old wood, a few coins, some metal fragments — and no treasure at all.

Table of Contents

The summer of 1795

The story, as it is usually told, begins in the summer of 1795. A teenager named Daniel McGinnis was rowing around Oak Island looking for a place to build a farm when he noticed a circular depression beneath an old oak tree, with a ship’s tackle block hanging from one of its branches. Convinced he had found buried pirate treasure, he returned with two friends, John Smith and Anthony Vaughan, and the three began to dig.

About two feet down they struck a layer of flagstones. Below that, they found a shaft with platforms of oak logs spaced roughly every ten feet — at ten, twenty and thirty feet down. Spooked and short of money and equipment, the three young men stopped digging and went home.

Here is the problem: no document from the 1790s mentions any of this. The earliest known printed account appeared in the Liverpool Transcript in 1857, more than sixty years after the alleged discovery, and the fuller version — a letter from J. B. McCully, published in 1862 — drew on the memories of Anthony Vaughan, one of the original diggers, decades after the event. Everything we know about the first dig comes from accounts written long afterwards.

The pit that floods

The next chapter belongs to the Onslow Company, which took up the dig around 1803–1804. Its workers pushed the shaft down to about ninety feet, finding layers of logs, charcoal, putty and coconut fibre as they went. Then, according to the accounts, the pit flooded with seawater overnight, and the work was abandoned.

The flooding became the heart of the legend. Later expeditions, above all the Truro Company, formed in 1849, concluded that the pit was protected by flood tunnels: five stone-lined box drains, they said, ran from Smith’s Cove beach into a sump, feeding seawater into the shaft at high tide. In 1898 investigators poured red dye into the flooded pit and reported it appearing at three points around the shoreline.

If the flood tunnels are real, they represent remarkable engineering for the eighteenth century. But they have never been conclusively demonstrated. A 1995 survey by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution used dye tests of its own and concluded that the flooding could be explained naturally: Oak Island sits on limestone and anhydrite bedrock, the kind of geology that produces sinkholes and natural cavities. The survey rejected the man-made tunnel hypothesis.

The stone that vanished

The most famous object in the story is one that no longer exists. At about eighty or ninety feet down, the Onslow diggers reportedly recovered a large flat stone bearing an inscription of strange symbols. McCully’s 1862 letter describes it — “a stone cut square, two feet long and about a foot thick, with several characters on it” — but he offers no translation and no drawing.

The translation came later, and it changed over time. An 1893 prospectus read the symbols as “Ten feet below are two million pounds buried.” A version published in 1949 gave the now-famous reading: “Forty feet below, two million pounds lie buried.” The symbols as printed in most books first appeared in Edward Rowe Snow’s True Tales of Buried Treasure in 1951 — Snow said he received them from a Reverend A. T. Kempton of Cambridge, Massachusetts. No photograph or drawing of the stone is known to have been made before its claimed disappearance around 1912.

The modern hunt

The hunt has drawn some famous names. A young Franklin D. Roosevelt invested in one expedition in 1909 and visited the island. In 1965 four men died in a shaft — the worst single day in the hunt’s history — bringing the commonly cited death toll to six. In the same decade a causeway was built to bring a 70-tonne crane onto the island, and the pit was excavated to 134 feet deep and 100 feet wide. Still nothing.

Since 2006 the hunt has belonged to brothers Rick and Marty Lagina, who bought a majority stake in the island and turned the search into the History Channel series The Curse of Oak Island, which premiered in 2014. Working under a Nova Scotia treasure-trove licence, they have used sonar, magnetometers and drilling rigs. They have recovered genuine artefacts: old wood, pieces of wrought iron, coins, a lead cross, a Roman-era coin of debated authenticity. None of it amounts to a treasure.

Theories have multiplied: pirate gold, the lost treasure of the Knights Templar, the Ark of the Covenant. None has produced a single confirmed artefact from the bottom of the pit.

What the evidence says

Documented: Oak Island is a 140-acre island in Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia. A shaft known as the Money Pit has been excavated there repeatedly since the nineteenth century.
Documented: The earliest printed account dates to 1857, and the fullest early account is J. B. McCully’s letter of 1862, based on the memories of Anthony Vaughan. No document from the 1790s records the discovery.
Documented: The Onslow Company dug to about ninety feet around 1803–1804 and the shaft flooded; the Truro Company reported stone-lined drains at Smith’s Cove.
Documented: Six deaths are commonly attributed to the treasure hunt, including four men killed in a shaft in 1965. The Lagina brothers have led the search since 2006, televised as The Curse of Oak Island.
Claimed, not proven: That the pit is protected by an engineered flood-tunnel system. A 1995 Woods Hole survey attributed the flooding to natural geology and rejected the man-made tunnel hypothesis.
Unverified: The inscribed stone and its translation — “Forty feet below, two million pounds lie buried.” No photograph or drawing of it exists, and the symbols as commonly printed date to 1951, not to the excavation.
Documented: No treasure has ever been confirmed. The artefacts recovered — wood, coins, iron fragments, a lead cross — are real, but none proves a hoard.

What remains unknown

The honest summary: something was dug on the island, or something natural looks as though it was dug, and two centuries of digging have not settled which. The early accounts are secondhand, the famous stone is gone, the flood tunnels are disputed, and the treasure — if it ever existed — has never been found. A hole in the ground on a small Canadian island has absorbed fortunes, taken lives, and become one of the most durable legends in the world. The pit may be empty. The story, evidently, is not.

Oak Island’s Money Pit: 230 Years of Digging, Six Deaths, and No Treasure