The summer of 2017—season five of The Curse of Oak Island—would yield discoveries that rivaled any made during the previous century. Many of these were pulled from a shaft dug in the east drumlin that had been designated as “H8.” Marty Lagina believed that H8 was centered on the original Money Pit. His brother Rick wasn’t “quite there,” but considered it entirely possible.
Whether Marty was right or not, he and Rick and their fellow treasure hunters had brought up “an extraordinary amount of stuff” out of H8, as the executive producer of The Curse of Oak Island,” Kevin Burns, put it. Easily the most startling of that “stuff”—found at a depth of one hundred ninety feet under ground—were the bones of two separate human beings, one of European origin and the other Middle Eastern, according to DNA testing. In his opinion, these fragments of human skeletons were “the best finds ever” made on Oak Island, Marty told me from the island’s “War Room” when I spoke to him and Rick on a conference call in June of 2018. “Even for a skeptic like me it’s hard to find a plausible reason for them being so deep underground,” he explained.
Carbon dating, as always, could only answer the question of when these two people had lived with what Marty called “a probability window.” The fact that this window was centered in the late seventeenth century offered more support for some theories than for others, however fragile it might be. It comported quite well, for example, with the theory of Francis Bacon’s involvement in the works on Oak Island. So did the scraps of what appeared to be leather bookbinding material brought up out of H8. Rick described the pieces of leather and the apparent specks of parchment attached to them that had been found in H8 as the most “scary discovery” he and his brother had made on Oak Island, because it suggested that their excavation might have destroyed centuries-old volumes of incalculable value.
At the same time, Rick was circumspect in his assessment of the leather scraps and the parchment flakes found with them, acknowledging the possibility that these had “migrated in” to H8. “We know how highly disruptive the Money Pit area is,” he explained. Also, unlike his brother, he continued to harbor doubts about whether they had hit the heart of the Money Pit with H8, Rick added. “The question for me is, ‘Where’s the wood?’” Records indicated that 10,000 board feet of timber had dropped into the ground during the 1861 collapse of the Money Pit, Rick pointed out. “Where is it?”
“I thought we pulled a lot of wood out of there,” Marty said. Not enough to be convincing, Rick countered, “but that could be addressed again by the idea of migration in and out of the area.” Records indicated that the cribbing in the Money Pit had fallen in a southwesterly direction, and that it most of it might have come to rest some distance from the center of the shaft.
The Laginas acknowledged being almost as fascinated by an object Gary Drayton had found at Smith’s Cove with his metal detector as he was by the bones brought to the surface in the Money Pit area. This was a “very strange medieval cross,” as Kevin Burns described it, that Drayton had discovered only about six inches under the rock on the beach at Smith’s Cove. Made of hand wrought lead with details that suggested a human body—legs, toes, fingers—the cross had been dated to somewhere between 900 and 1300 A.D. by antiquities experts and forensic testing.
What made the discovery of the cross “extraordinarily weird,” Kevin Burns told me, was that Rick’s immediate response when he was first shown it had been to say, “I’ve seen this recently.” The producers looked through all the photos of the crosses Rick might have observed during trips to England and France that summer and “nothing matched,” Burns recalled. “We thought Rick wasn’t remembering properly.”
On his European trip, Rick had examined a purported “underground Templar cave” in the north of England and the prison at Domme in the French department of Dordogne where the Knights Templar had been locked up by King Philip in 1307. Rick had been guided at Domme by a descendant of the Rochefort family, who showed him the prison walls that the Templars had covered with a graffiti of geometric figures they used as a coded language: An octagon represented the Holy Grail; a square represented Solomon’s Temple; a triangle with a cross planted in it stood for Golgotha, the Jerusalem hill where Jesus had been crucified. Only in a close examination of their footage of the graffiti at Domme had the producers of The Curse of Oak Island discovered a cross carved in a wall of the prison that was a near perfect match for the cross found at Smith’s Cove, with the same esoteric details that suggested a rood formed from a human body.
“How likely is it that someone in the 1600s would be wearing a cross from the 1300s or earlier?” asked Burns, who was delighted by Marty’s reaction when he saw the image of the cross carved into the wall at Domme. “It energized Marty’s interest like nothing ever has,” Burns said. “He’s always been the toughest nut to crack, but the discovery of the cross at Smith’s Cove and of its match at Domme Prison convinced him that there is a treasure on Oak Island, not necessarily gold or silver, but a historical treasure at the very least.”
He wasn’t making any connection between the bones pulled from H8 and the medieval cross found at Smith’s Cove, Marty told me from the War Room, but in combination the two discoveries had led him to “the conclusion that something extraordinary happened here.”
An event from season five of The Curse of Oak Island that had fascinated me involved a pair of cameras lost in the T1 shaft. The cameras had been sent down in an attempt to examine the “shiny gold object” that Charles Barkhouse had first observed the previous summer. After the cameras slipped loose from their tethers and fell into the hole, a diver with a metal detector was sent down to locate them, but found no trace. The show’s producers and crew had been suitably impressed by the vanishing cameras, as was I, but Rick and Marty more or less shrugged it off as one more inexplicable phenomenon of the island. “Sloughing currents” might have explained the disappearance of the cameras, Marty suggested. “Or it could just be a technically challenging dive and we just didn’t know where to point the detector,” Rick added, then chuckled. “Or maybe leprechauns.”
“It might have just been equipment failure,” Marty said then. “As you know, Randall, it happens all the time out here.” I asked about the “magnetic survey” Marty and I had talked about in the summer of 2016. “As a matter of fact, we discussed doing that just today,” Marty told me.
The Laginas’ schedule for the summer of 2018 was already packed, Kevin Burns advised me. Smith’s Cove would be their main focus. A “massive” excavation was planned, Burns said. Its main goal would be to locate and explore the manmade “U-shaped structure” that Dan Blankenship had discovered decades earlier, but the brothers and their cohort would also be searching for the two “round mineshafts” described in the Robert Restall records. They had “some plans for the swamp” as well, Burns said, and would be exploring the Money Pit area with the particle physics theories and technology that had resulted in the discovery of a hidden chamber inside Egypt’s Giza Pyramid during October of 2017. At Giza, scientists had tracked subatomic particles known as muons as they descended from space into the earth to locate and explore a hall nearly a hundred feet long and seventy feet wide. “We really want to see what the same technology might find on Oak Island,” Burns told me.
There would be a further exploration of the C1 shaft as well, said the show’s creator, who admitted being continually surprised by viewers’ obsessive fascination with Oak Island. It had even infected the show’s crew, Burns said: “I have to actually admonish them not to get involved in trying to solve the mystery. That’s how invested they get just by being on the island.”
Through season four, The Curse of Oak Island had continued to be the most popular reality show on cable television, and often the most popular cable show of any kind on the Tuesday nights when its episodes aired. “The possibility of an extraordinary find” was what kept viewers coming back, Burns said.
When the Laginas asked me about the theories I “embraced” or had ruled out, I admitted that the most perplexing thing about Oak Island was how difficult it was to either hold close or outright dismiss any one of the dozens of propositions I had heard or read about. I recalled the old television show Columbo, in which the detective played by Peter Falk, in episode after episode, would conclude his questioning of a suspect, begin to step away, then turn back to say, “One more thing.” On Oak Island there was always one more thing.
“It’s maddening,” Marty agreed. “Like the story of the five men and the elephant. You only get bits and pieces.”
Rick’s view was predictably more romantic: “An Island of what if’s and possibilities,” he called Oak Island, and sounded as if that was what he most loved about the place.
Kevin Burns compared Oak Island to a slot machine in Las Vegas. “You get just enough to keep you coming back. You want to walk away, but you’re afraid the next person’s going to pull the lever and hit the jackpot.”
Certainly, the Laginas said, they had collected enough in the summer of 2017 to support an enthusiastic search in 2018. After that, well, he wasn’t sure, Marty said. His brother Rick, though, was never going to let the treasure hunt go, and Marty knew it. So did Burns: “For Rick, it’s a quest, a mission, a tribute to the dreams of those who came before.” And in spite of the demurrals he offered, Marty had been ineluctably drawn into that quest. “He’s hooked,” Burns said, “even if he doesn’t want to admit it.”