Shortly after Frederick Blair’s death, Mel Chappell, who had bought out the fed-up John Whitney Lewis, acquired Blair’s treasure trove license. This meant that for the first time ever, both the license and the land belonged to a single person. Chappell would hold on to both and maintain control of the treasure hunt for nearly thirty years.
Towering, long-jawed, and bespectacled, Chappell had been present as a boy on Oak Island in 1897 when his father, William, brought up that fabled scrap of parchment from the Money Pit, and he had followed events on the island closely since his young adulthood. He was a former grand master Mason of all Nova Scotia whose engineering background and proclivity for technical language made him seem to some the epitome of pragmatism. Even Chappell, though—a man who had looked askance as Gilbert Hedden indulged the inventors of the gold finder and the money-finding camera—would demonstrate how tempting the difficulties of the Oak Island problem made it to take a flier on the wackiest proposals. Months before Blair’s passing, in late 1950, Chappell had become intrigued by reports of successful metal detection being achieved by the photographic technology of the Parker Contract Company based in Belleville, Ontario. In December 1950, Chappell invited the inventor Parker to bring his Mineral Wave Ray machine to Oak Island. The fellow showed up with a black box about 2 feet long that was filled with radio tubes, wires, batteries, and resistors, with a lens attached to the front of it. A sample of the treasure being sought after (a gold coin, in this case) was placed inside the box, then the lens was scanned across much of the east end of the island. About 150 feet from the Money Pit, Parker declared he had located a deposit of gold that lay 20 feet below the surface. Chappell was so excited that he barged a steam shovel out to the island that dug a hole 30 feet wide and 50 feet deep. Nothing was found. Still, Chappell drilled in four locations located by the Mineral Wave Ray, but found no sign of treasure in any of them. By that point he had invested $35,000, a loss that seems to have injured him far more deeply than the humiliation.
As a result, Chappell decided that moving forward he would invest only other people’s money in the Oak Island treasure hunt, which would require partners. Chappell’s refusal to personally finance any operations on the island seems to have been the main basis for his refusal to consider teaming up with perhaps the best-known treasure hunter in the Western Hemisphere, Edward Rowe Snow.
Snow was a Harvard College graduate who had served with the air force’s XII Bomber Command during World War II, then returned to Massachusetts to work as a columnist for the Quincy Patriot Ledger. While holding down his newspaper job, Snow wrote dozens of books and articles about New England maritime history, with a special emphasis on the age of piracy. He also began to host a radio show for youth called Six Bells that each week chronicled the adventures of some buccaneer and was perhaps best known as the “Flying Santa” each year at Christmastime, hiring a small plane to drop wrapped gifts for each of the lighthouse keepers along the New England Coast.
Snow’s 1951 book True Tales of Buried Treasure had spread the legend of Oak Island across the United States. He had first visited the island two years before that, and immediately afterward issued a pronouncement that startled many, given his reputation as a chronicler of buccaneers: “Although there have been many theories and explanations regarding the Oak Island treasure, I personally like to think that it is an immense hoard brought to Oak Island from a South American country at the time the Spaniards threatened that part of the world. The average pirate or freebooter had neither the inclination, the patience, nor the engineering ability to bury a treasure by such elaborate methods.”
Though neither Blair nor Chappell seemed ready to welcome Snow to join their efforts on Oak Island, the man had made big news in Nova Scotia and beyond in the summer of 1952, when he announced that based on a map he had obtained in 1947—one that he believed had belonged to the pirate Edward Low—he intended to search for a cache of buried treasure on Isle Haute, just off the mainland in the Bay of Fundy. Snow had already garnered headlines as a treasure hunter, beginning in 1945, when, based on documents containing “secret codes,” he recovered a copper chest in Chatham, Massachusetts, filled with gold and silver coins that had been minted in eight different countries between 1694 and 1854. As a result, his trip to Isle Haute “armed with a metal detector and a mysterious old map” as one reporter put it, was considered newsworthy—especially after Snow unearthed not only a stash of eighteenth-century Spanish and Portuguese doubloons, but also a skeleton that was “clutching the coins” as one breathless newspaper account had it.
In spite of Snow’s renown, though, Mel Chappell was not interested in going into business with him—unless Snow was ready to sink his own money into the enterprise. Another three years would pass before Chappell finally found a partner who was well funded enough to be considered “suitable.” That man was George Greene of Corpus Christi, Texas, a petroleum engineer who claimed the backing of five large oil companies willing to spend “any amount of money,” as Greene put it, to solve the mystery of Oak Island.
Greene came on like a caricature of Texan bravado, invariably described in contemporaneous accounts as a blustering, burly, cigar-chomping character perpetually outfitted in a wide-brimmed Stetson hat and hand-tooled cowboy boots. He’d made international headlines a few years earlier when, conducting a geological survey in Turkey, he claimed to have photographed the remnants of Noah’s Ark during a flyover of Mount Ararat. It was enough to launch an expedition to the site, but nothing was found and some who had joined the effort later accused Greene of hoaxing them.
Loud and flamboyant as he may have been, the Texan’s personal interest in Oak Island actually could be traced back to that paragon of northeastern gentility, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Greene’s uncle, John Shields, had worked with FDR on Oak Island in the summer of 1909, and as a boy Greene had marveled at his uncle John’s stories of that great adventure.
“My principals have sent me up here to prove or disprove the legend, and if there’s anything there we are going to find it,” Greene told the first Nova Scotia newspaper reporter who interviewed him. His plan, basically, was to apply oil-finding methods to the search for gold by doing core drilling all over the Money Pit site. “If we don’t hit a concrete vault with this drilling, we’ll pack up and I’ll head for South America.” Even if his operation failed, Greene added, he believed he could recoup his investors’ money by selling the movie rights.
Chappell and Greene signed their agreement in September 1955, under which Greene would receive a free lease on Chappell’s Oak Island properties in exchange for the promise to pay for all operations out of his own pocket and to split the take equally. The two began with a review of drilling records on the island that went back to 1897, in an attempt to locate the Money Pit. Greene and his crew then used a 4-inch core drill to bore four holes on a line 2, 6, 10, and 14 feet on the north side of the Chappell Shaft. In the first three holes, layers of oak timber were struck at 10-foot intervals, and voids were encountered below that. In the fourth hole, oak timber 8 inches thick was struck at 100 feet. Below was a void 10 feet deep. The drill then bored through another 8 inches of oak before entering a large cavity that was 45 feet deep, after which it reentered clay at 190 feet. Greene and his men poured 100,000 gallons of water into the void the fourth borehole had passed through, but it all ran out through a tunnel Greene could never locate.
Greene told Chappell he needed bigger equipment and would return in the spring of 1956 with 30-inch drills. In early 1956, though, Greene wrote that he had important business elsewhere and his return to Oak Island would be delayed. He never made it back to the island and was murdered during a 1962 expedition in the jungles of British Guiana not far from where cult leader Jim Jones would set up the Jonestown colony a few years later. Nevertheless, the Texan did enter the annals of Oak Island as the first to prove conclusively that there was a cavern beneath the Money Pit.
After Greene’s departure, Canada’s national engineering journal ran an editorial in which it described the failure to solve the problem of Oak Island as “a national embarrassment.” It’s unclear whether this assessment spurred two Ontario brothers, William and Victor Harman, to join the fray, but in April 1958 the Harmans entered into a one-year agreement with Mel Chappell to fund a new round of operations on Oak Island and to split what they believed to be $200 million in Spanish gold that was buried at the bottom of the Money Pit.
The Harman brothers hired professional drillers who in May 1958 began a probe of the Money Pit area that brought up fragments of oak and spruce, along with bits of coconut fiber and ships’ caulking from depths below 150 feet. Within two months, though, their private funds were exhausted. The Harmans attempted to raise more money by forming Oak Island Exploration Co. Ltd. and offering 1 million shares at twenty-five cents apiece. The Ontario Securities Commission refused to license their company, however, before the brothers had secured a five-year lease on Oak Island. Unconvinced that they would be able to raise the capital needed, Chappell refused to renew the Harmans’ lease and, like so many before them, the brothers quit the island without having produced anything more than those tantalizing but minor discoveries.
MY FAVORITE OF ALBERT EINSTEIN’S MANY APHORISMS is the one about how there are really only two ways of looking at existence: either everything’s a coincidence or nothing is. I like to think of myself as standing on the “nothing is” side of that argument, but even if it was merely a fortuitous coincidence, my encounter with Lee Lamb and Rick Restall during my first visit to Oak Island in 2003 was the most moving part of that trip. It was probably the most memorable, too, even if I was at moments tempted to try to forget about it.
Lee and Rick were the oldest and youngest children of Robert and Mildred Restall, the couple who had been the leading players in Oak Island’s great tragedy, a calamity that seems to haunt the island even now, more than fifty years later. It certainly haunted Rick. A small dark-haired man in his early fifties when I met him, Rick looked younger but for his eyes, which were filled with so much pain that it hurt to hold his gaze. He was just eight years old when his parents brought him to Mahone Bay in 1959 and so could claim literally to have grown up on the island. Almost forty years after leaving, he still knew nearly every inch of it. Not that this did him much good, because Rick hated the place. Rick paid his first visit to Oak Island since the 1960s the day before our interview and the experience had stirred up memories of what the island had taken from him all those years earlier. I’d like to think he was happier on other occasions.
Even though it was a September afternoon at the tail end of summer, the weather was as dank and gloomy as it had been from the moment I arrived in Nova Scotia about a week earlier. When I think of the two hours I spent with the surviving children of Robert and Mildred Restall, at a table in a restaurant that had bad food but a good view of Oak Island, the first image that comes to mind is the way Lee sat between her younger brother and me, as if even at this stage of life she felt obliged to protect him. Lee was in her early sixties, wore thick glasses, and had gray hair that she wore shorter than mine. She had long since raised her children and seemed to have achieved some sort of contentment as she settled in for the transit to old age. She also seemed much cheerier than her brother, perhaps because she had paid only a couple of brief previous visits to Oak Island and never lived there. I directed most of my questions to her, both because it made me feel vaguely guilty to interrogate Rick and because Lee was a marvelous source of information about the people her parents had been before they came to Oak Island.
Mildred was a seventeen-year-old British ballerina in 1931 when she met Bob, who was twenty-five, from Toronto, and working as a daredevil motorcyclist with a circus that was touring Europe that summer. Within a year the two were not only married, but partners in one of the most famous and heart-stopping carnival acts on the planet. The Restalls’ Globe of Death was a steel mesh sphere 20 feet in diameter within which Rob and Mildred rode a pair of motorcycles at sixty-five miles an hour—she horizontally, he vertically. “It was all about split-second timing and perfect trust,” Lee Lamb told me. The couple did it for years and suffered only one serious accident, in Germany, in which Mildred broke her jaw and Bob broke an arm.
By the 1950s, though, the advent of television had decimated the carnival circuit. Bob brought Mildred and their three young children back to Canada, where they settled in Hamilton, Ontario. Bob was soon working as a pipe fitter but he never got comfortable with domestic life. In 1954 he read an article about Oak Island and one year later arranged a trip to Mahone Bay. “Dad came home from his first visit to the island absolutely enchanted,” Lee recalled. “It was all he could talk about. He thought it was the most fascinating puzzle on Earth.” Four years passed, though, before he could persuade Mildred to join the adventure. When the Harman brothers quit Oak Island in late 1958, Bob saw his chance and began to hector Mel Chappell to give him a chance to take over the treasure hunt. With no better offer on hand at that moment, Chappell in the spring of 1959 signed a one-year agreement with Restall, who agreed to pay the government its 5 percent of any treasure recovered, then to split what was left equally.
Bob and his eighteen-year-old son, Robert Restall Jr.—Bobbie—arrived in October of that year to set up their camp on Oak Island. Mildred and nine-year-old Rick (Ricky back then) followed in the summer of 1960. Lee had just married and was living in Oakville, Ontario. “So I was spared,” she told me.
The family’s life savings of $8,500 was mostly gone within months of Mildred’s arrival on Oak Island. Lacking the money to hire men or lease heavy machinery, the Restalls worked the ground on Oak Island with picks and shovels, the same way it had been done back in the eighteenth century. Bob had come to Nova Scotia determined to make up for what he lacked in resources with energy and applied knowledge. For most of the previous three years he had not only pored over the records of every Oak Island expedition between 1850 and 1900, but he also studied dozens of charts of Mahone Bay, looking for whatever might have been overlooked by previous treasure hunters. By the time he arrived on Oak Island, Bob knew the details of the 1937 Roper survey commissioned by Gilbert Hedden backward and forward, and he had made exhaustive comparisons of notes and journals that had been created not only by Hedden, Blair, and Hamilton, but also by McCully, McNutt, and Adams Tupper, among other searchers from the nineteenth century.
Based on what he had learned, Bob announced that he would devote his energies first to exploring the drains at Smith’s Cove in an attempt to solve the riddle of the flood system. With Bobbie working alongside him, Bob concentrated his efforts on the span of the shoreline between the old cofferdam and the high tide mark. According to the journals they both kept, the two dug sixty-five holes, all between 2 and 6 feet deep, and uncovered multiple sections of the five finger drains, along with thick mats of eel grass and coconut fiber under the man-made beach. In the progress report he submitted to Mel Chappell in 1961, Bob Restall wrote: “We now have a complete picture of the beach work, and it is incredible.” Though a good bit of it had been torn up by the Truro Company crews that first found it in 1850, this work stretched for 243 feet along the inner edge of the cofferdam, according to Bob’s report, composed entirely of “paving stones” overlaid with eel grass, coconut fiber, sand, and rocks. While he had determined that the five finger drains all converged at one point just above the low tide mark, he had not been able to locate the main channel, Bob wrote to Chappell. There were two possibilities: either the drains were no longer connected to that channel, or it was much deeper underground than he could reach by hand digging.
He had enjoyed that first summer on Oak Island, Rick Restall remembered. His parents let him explore the island from end to end, accompanied by the family’s Belgian sheepdog, Carnie, who was utterly devoted to the nine-year-old. He fished, swam, and hiked through the woods. In the evenings the family entertained one another by dreaming out loud about how they would spend their future wealth—$30 million by Bob’s estimate. Bob wanted a yacht and talked about sailing around the world. Older brother Bobbie wanted a sports car, a new make and model each week. His mom just wanted a snug home on the mainland with flowers in the yard and neighbors nearby.
Then winter came. They were living in two 16-by-10-foot shacks without plumbing, running water, or electricity. One doubled as Bob and Mildred’s sleeping quarters and as the kitchen where Mildred cooked their meals on a propane stove. The other was a combination tool-shed and bedroom for the boys. The interiors grew colder, darker, and danker as the rain that fell day after day turned gradually to sleet and snow. There was a tiny oil heater in the main cabin that put out a small amount of heat, but the boys’ bedroom—”if you could call it that,” Rick said—was always freezing. He and Bobbie slept in socks and knit caps, but still shivered in their sleeping bags some nights. “I guess the only blessing for me was that I was so young and didn’t have much to compare it to,” Rick told me.
Mildred, though, could remember what her life had been like before Oak Island. She became increasingly miserable, exhausted by the continual talk of the search that was the only conversation that Bob and Bobbie seemed interested in. For entertainment, they had not even a radio, only a kerosene lamp to read by and a chessboard. Mildred spent hours every day helping Ricky with his homeschooling courses, but her evenings were becoming long and empty. Bob regularly regaled the family with his theory that Oak Island had been used as a “sort of Ft. Knox” built by forced labor over a period of twenty years under the supervision of the privateers headquartered at LaHave, who needed a place to store the booty they seized in raids on Spanish ships and settlements. Bob thought some of it was the loot that Henry Morgan had carried away from his sacking of Panama City back in 1671. He pointed to the tunnel systems that had been created by pirates in the West Indies, “which could be flooded at will by sea-water” as he put it to a reporter for the Hamilton (Ontario) Spectator. Mildred became convinced that the work on the island had been done by the Acadians shortly before their expulsion from Nova Scotia in 1755, and that they had long since come back to retrieve it, meaning there was no longer any treasure to recover.
“We were poor and lonely,” Rick told me. “And my mom suffered for it the worst.”
“I remember watching my mom cut out the rips and tears in one of Dad’s old shirts to make a shirt for herself,” said his sister, Lee, recalling the trip she made to see her family while the rest of them were living on Oak Island. “And I thought, ‘This is insane!’”
Rick didn’t realize the effects of their deprivation on him until he was much older. “I have splayed feet because rubber boots were the only shoes I owned,” he said.
By the end of their second winter on Oak Island, Rick said, “My mom went from being a pretty sunny person to a very unhappy one. She became bitter.”
“Bitter because she couldn’t understand Dad’s obsession,” Lee added. “The mystery of Oak Island was all that mattered to him.”
Bob was tireless. You had to give him that. And he had drawn his oldest son almost as deeply into the adventure as he was willing to go. The two of them worked seven days a week, literally from dawn to dusk, and then spent hours each evening writing in their journals and discussing what they had learned. Mostly the two of them dug, but they also explored the island and made discoveries that have become part of Oak Island’s lore. There were the three huge piles of stones that formed a triangle on the slope of the east-end drumlin, just below the Money Pit on the northwest side, also. Bob described them as “the ruins of early sentry stations.” He and Bobbie also measured the key distances in what would have been the standard unit of measure for seventeenth-century Englishmen, rods, determining that the distance between the base of the stone triangle and the center of the Money Pit was precisely 18 rods, that it was 2 rods exactly on a true northeast course from the Money Pit to the nearest drilled rocks, and 25 rods from the other drilled stone. Restall was also the first to decide that the Oak Island swamp might be the key to solving the mystery of place. His son Bobbie’s journal is filled with descriptions of their search for the metal “mystery box” that Edwin Hamilton’s caretaker Jack Adams had claimed was buried in a corner of the swamp.
Bob believed his family’s most important discovery was what became known as the “1704 stone.” Some would later accuse Restall of planting the stone, but when I asked Rick Restall about that he was indignant. “My dad and brother were digging up one of the areas that covered the five finger drains, dumping the stones off to one side with a bucket and trolley line. My mother and I were wandering on the beach through the stones when one of us turned over a stone by stepping on it, and we saw the date carved into its center: 1704.”
The stone may have been—probably was, R. V. Harris thought—one found by Edwin Hamilton in 1939, the practical joke of a workman who later admitted to carving the stone. Bob Restall thought the stone was critically important, though, because the date—1704—was when Jacques de Broullain, the French governor at LaHave, had welcomed the pirates of the North Atlantic to rid him of the raiders from Massachusetts.
Be that as it may, it was on the basis of his discovery of the 1704 stone, along with the 1961 report that he had submitted to Chappell, that Bob Restall was able to raise $11,000 from an assortment of Ontario friends and investors who had been promised half of his share of the treasure. Restall spent most of that money to purchase the very same 1,000-gallon-per-minute electric pump that both Hedden and Hamilton had used to drain the shafts surrounding the Money Pit. Bob set the pump up over the Hedden shaft, recribbing sections of it down to 155 feet, then went to work on the Chappell shaft, using both of these pits to explore the old searcher tunnels that had been dug by the Oak Island Association back in the 1860s. Connected to the surface only by a rope that extended between him and his teenage son, Bob found that many of these tunnels were still in good shape and drove several new stubs off in various directions, but still couldn’t locate the main flood tunnel.
Restall’s enthusiasm for the search seems never to have waned, even slightly, but by 1964 he was beginning to feel the pressure, not only because of the unhappiness his wife was finding it more and more difficult to conceal, but also because of the fear that Mel Chappell was going snatch his dream from him. Chappell refused to sign more than a one-year agreement with Restall, so each spring Bob endured a period of nearly unbearable tension as the previous year’s contract came up for renewal. Chappell made no secret of the fact that he was looking for a “big fish” with the wherewithal to conduct the treasure hunt on the scale he believed was required, and he brought a steady stream of potential partners to the island, all of them introduced to the Restalls and encouraged to describe their grand schemes. In the summer months, Bob constantly worried about whether this or that group of campers were tourists or potential rivals.
The worst part for Restall was that the stress of his situation was being aggravated by one of his own investors, a petroleum engineer from California named Robert Dunfield. Restall had invited Dunfield to Oak Island to take a look at his operation, but shortly after the California man arrived Chappell met him and decided that Dunfield might very well be the big fish he had been trolling for. Dunfield’s Beverly Hills business address impressed Chappell mightily, as did the engineer’s analysis of the situation. Oak Island was “a problem in open-pit mining,” Dunfield had declared, one that could only be solved with a combination of high explosives and heavy machinery “on a scale never before tried.” Dunfield admitted it would be expensive, but the California man claimed to have backers who were willing to foot the bill. By the summer of 1965, Dunfield was negotiating his own deal with Chappell, one that would cut out Robert Restall.
Restall found his way to a wealthy Montreal businessman named David Tobias, who gave him $20,000 for a percentage of the treasure, if one was ever recovered. A mineralogist and marina operator from Massapequa, Long Island, named Karl Graeser also invested in Restall. Bob approached Chappell with an offer to purchase his Oak Island property but was shocked to learn that the price was now $100,000. He had no choice, Bob told his family, but to deliver results to his investors before his latest agreement with Chappell expired in the spring of 1966.
In June, Restall used some of the money he had received from Tobias and Graeser to hire three men from the mainland to work with him and Bobbie. They were a Mi’kmaq Indian from Robinsons Corner named Jim Kaizer, who was hired as his foreman, and two teenagers from Martin’s Point, seventeen-year-old Andy DeMont and sixteen-year-old Cyril Hiltz. They would concentrate entirely on locating and stopping the flood trap, Bob told his crew of four, concentrating their efforts on the Hedden shaft, but also working in a shaft he and Bobbie had dug previously, 10 feet by 6 feet wide and 26 feet deep, on the line between the finger drains at Smith’s Cove and the Cave-in Pit.
Bob, Bobbie, DeMont, and Hiltz were working in the Hedden shaft for the first half of the day on August 17, 1965. Jim Kaizer was not present. The air was sticky that day, heavy and still, without even the faintest breath of a breeze, Rick Restall would remember: “The kind of day when the only place you wanted to be was the water.”
Bob and Bobbie and the two teenagers had gone to work at six that morning, just as they did every other day, though. Bob was excited by what he described as a “corkscrew tunnel” he had found near the Money Pit, and in his journal the night before had written that he believed he was “within a few feet” of discovering the treasure and that only four or five more days of work would be required. At 2 p.m. he came up out of the Hedden shaft to remind Mildred he had a meeting in town later that afternoon and would be at the cabin in about an hour to wash up and change his clothes.
It was about 2:45 p.m. when Bob walked down toward Smith’s Cove to check on the other shaft, where the pump had been running all day. No one actually saw him fall. He was perhaps climbing into the shaft or simply leaning over to look into it when he went in. He must have made some sort of sound, though, because Bobbie told DeMont and Hiltz something was wrong, then ran from the Hedden shaft toward the cove. When he reached the shaft where the pump was running, Bobbie saw his father lying in the black water at the bottom of the shaft, shouted for help, then climbed onto the ladder to go after his father.
The Restall investor Karl Graeser, visiting from Long Island, made it to the shaft just seconds before DeMont and Hiltz did. The three of them stood on the lip and looked down to see the Restalls, father and son, lying side by side in the stagnant water, unconscious. They shouted for help also, attracting a crowd of tourists and some teenagers who were camping on the island. All three climbed onto the ladder to go down after the Restalls, with Graeser in the lead. Not one of them made it to the bottom before they fell from the ladder and lay in what was now a pile of unconscious people at the bottom of the shaft. DeMont, the only one to make it out alive, said the last thing he remembered was seeing Bobbie in the water, his hand on his father’s shoulder.
It was fortunate for DeMont, if no one else, that one of the tourists on Oak Island that day was fire captain Edward White from Buffalo, New York, who had been camping near the shore with his family. Recognizing that there must be some sort of deadly gas in the shaft, White tied a rope around both thighs and his waist, then had the other tourists lower him into the shaft. Captain White had managed to lash a second line around the body of the unconscious DeMont before he, too, passed out. Moments later, he and DeMont were pulled out of the shaft by tourists tugging on the ropes and then revived by two men named Richard Barber and Peter Beamish. Robert Restall, Robert Restall Jr., Karl Graeser, and Cyril Hiltz, however, were all dead. Beamish, a teacher at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, had talked to Bob just the night before, listening with fascination as Restall described how he had found the key to the network of tunnels between Smith’s Cove and the Money Pit. “He was really excited,” Beamish told the Ogdensburg (NY) Journal, two days later. “He was sure he had it this time.”
It had to have been a ghastly scene on Smith’s Cove that day, but all I know about it is what I heard from Faron and Tim Kaizer, the son and grandson of Jim Kaizer, whom I interviewed one afternoon fifty-one years later at the Fo’c’sle Pub in Chester. According to Faron (who was ten years old back then), by August 1965, Jim had been working with the Restalls for months and had become close to Bob. “He and Mr. Restall were two peas in a pod, both tough and hardworking,” Faron said. “They were the type of men who didn’t have a lot of education, but just knew how to do things.” Jim was a short, stocky, swarthy man with a broad forehead and a heavily muscled physique. He had inherited those characteristics from his four-feet, seven-inch mother, a full-blooded Mi’kmaq, and he got her ferocity as well. “Dad was a hard man,” recalled Faron. “We didn’t cross his words, put it that way.” But his father seemed to have become “calmer” since he started working with the Restalls on Oak Island, Faron said. “Dad really enjoyed goin’ over there. He rarely missed a day, because it was exciting for him.” On August 17, though, Jim had stayed home. Their water pump was busted and Jim’s wife, Beulah, demanded that he repair it; the couple had eight children, all sons, and the laundry was piled to her shoulders. “I remember every time Dad would think he was done, he’d start to go out to his truck and Mom would come out after him and say, ‘It’s not fixed yet,’” Faron told me. “So he’d have to go back inside. Then when he came out the third time, his truck wouldn’t start.” It would haunt Jim later that all these delays had probably saved his life. “Dad was outside workin’ on his truck when my Uncle Maynard drove up with Melbourne Chappell. And Maynard said, ‘Jim, somethin’ happened over at the island.’”
When he arrived at the shaft near Smith’s Cove that he had helped the Restalls dig, Kaizer saw a crowd gathered around it. Those closest to the edge were the young volunteers of the Chester Fire Department, red faced and sweaty in their black coats, helmets, and rubber boots, all wearing frightened expressions. They had agreed among themselves by then that the people at the bottom of the shaft were dead, and all that was left to be done was retrieve the bodies. None of the firemen was willing to be lowered into the shaft; they had decided that the only feasible plan was to lower a three-pronged gaff called a treble hook into the pit and pull the bodies up one at a time with that. The firemen were saying to themselves and to onlookers that it would be a bloody mess, but what else could they do. “My dad said, ‘No way, you’re not doing that,’” Faron remembered. “He said, “I’ll go down.’”
One of the firemen had an old World War II gas mask and Jim put that on, along with a pair of coveralls, then soaked some rags in water and wrapped them around the mask to help keep it sealed. He tied a rope around both thighs and his waist and told the firemen to lower him into the shaft. He went down four separate times, bringing up the bodies one at a time.
“After that, Dad wasn’t the same,” Faron told me.
“My grandmother said it changed him,” Tim agreed, “but that it might have been more what happened after. It was hard to know, because Jim wasn’t one to talk about his feelings.”
RICK RESTALL AND HIS MOTHER were too numbed by shock to say much to each other or anyone else in the days that followed. “We could barely function and my mother had no idea what to do or where to go,” Rick said. Robert Dunfield, the petroleum engineer from California, and Mel Chappell moved in quickly, ostensibly to offer their help and support. “Dunfield had this aura that was very charming, especially to women,” recalled Lee Lamb. “He seemed like some sort of movie star and people trusted him.” It was Chappell, though, who “before my husband and son were even buried,” as Mildred Restall would put it, urged her to come with him to Halifax to sign a legal transfer of the search rights to Dunfield.
Within a week of Bob and Bobbie’s deaths, Dunfield had persuaded Mildred to move with Ricky off the island to a house on the mainland, promising to pay the rent for the rest of her life. He kept that promise for a few months, Ricky remembered bitterly, then “just stopped paying.” His mother was most devastated, though, by the disappearance of every chart, map, and document she and her husband had collected before and during their six years on Oak Island, her surviving son said. “Dunfield and Chappell even took our photo albums,” Rick remembered. “My mother never got over it.”
Bob and Bobbie were buried in the Western Shore Cemetery, where Mildred herself would eventually be interred. The grave of Cyril Hiltz was nearby. Though just sixteen, Cyril was supporting himself by his labor and taking care of his pregnant girlfriend. Before being employed by the Restalls, he had worked as a scallop dragger on a boat based out of Lunenburg. It was lucrative work, but it was also dangerous. Cyril had given it up after a few months because, as he confided to his girlfriend, he was afraid of drowning at sea. Drowning was the official cause of his death on Oak Island just a few months later. The coroner’s verdict was that all four of those who died in the shaft at Smith’s Cove on August 17, 1965, had drowned in the water at the bottom after being overcome by “toxic marsh gas.” Methane, though, is colorless and odorless, and all of the witnesses at the scene had described a rotten egg smell coming from the shaft that day. “My grandmother told me that when my grandfather came home that day she hung his overalls out back,” Tim Kaizer remembered. “But she said they stank even after a week.” And his grandmother agreed it had been a rotten egg smell. “Eventually the overalls got hung up in our mudroom,” Faron recalled. “But my dad never wore them again. He said he could still smell the gas on them.”
Carbon dioxide, the kind of gas that would have been produced by the fumes of the pump running that day in the shaft at Smith’s Cove, is notable for the rotten egg smell it produces when it collects in an enclosed space.
“I say Oak Island killed my parents,” Lee Lamb would declare when I interviewed her in 2003 (Mildred Restall, who had never recovered from her heartbreak, had died just a few years earlier). While Rick listened somberly, nodding once or twice, she and I talked about the eerie feel of the island. A gloom created by fog and drizzle had shrouded the island since my arrival in Mahone Bay, but the chills I had experienced on the one visit I made to the island after dark were accompanied by a distinct sense that it was more than the weather that made Oak Island such a spooky place. “There’s a darkness to the place, even when the sun shines,” Lee said. Ten years later, in an appearance on The Curse of Oak Island, she would repeat the sentiment to the Lagina brothers in even stronger language: “I certainly believe there’s a malevolent spirit of some kind on Oak Island.”
The Kaizer family—Jim Kaizer in particular—would live with that belief. About two weeks after that terrible day, Robert Dunfield offered Jim a job as his night watchman on Oak Island. It was good money for not doing a whole lot, so Kaizer accepted. He didn’t hold it for long, however. Early that autumn, Jim came home in the middle of the night badly shaken. “What I remember most is the way my dad swore,” Faron recalled. “He was just swearing up and down, not like he was angry, but like it was just comin’ out of him. It really scared us. Because we seen him when he would get mad. But he wasn’t violent this time. I realize now he was scared. But he was a man who never got scared so he didn’t know how to express it except by swearing. It went on for about a week and then he sort of settled down. And I remember Mom sayin’, ‘Thank God it’s over.’ Because even she was scared. But Dad still wouldn’t go back to Oak Island. He never went back on the island again, not once after that night.”
Gradually Jim revealed to his family what had happened, telling Beulah first, letting her tell their sons whatever she saw fit, then eventually confiding in the boys himself. “He told me I wouldn’t believe him, but he was tellin’ me anyway,” Faron remembered. He was in the Restall’s old cabin, Jim said, where he had spent most of his nights on Oak Island. “Dad said it was about eleven or twelve o’clock. He said, ‘I had a little fire goin’. I put some wood on the fire and then I lay down on the cot and closed my eyes.’ And apparently he fell asleep. And he said, ‘I woke up and I couldn’t breathe.’ And he said there was two of the biggest red eyes you would ever want to see looking right into his. And the whole body was covered with hair, tight and curly black hair. He said that was all he could see, because the … whatever it was, was holdin’ him down by his arms and had him pinned so tight that he couldn’t move. But then it smiled at him and said, ‘Don’t ever come back.’ My dad said when it let him go and disappeared the whole building shook. He said it was just unreal. There was no wind, nothin’. And he got in his truck and drove back across the causeway. And he wouldn’t ever go back on the island again after that. He told me, ‘It was the only thing that’s ever scared me.’”
Even after Jim Kaizer “settled down,” as his son put it, he was different. He drank more heavily and was silent for days at a time, but also erupted regularly into frightening rages. “My brothers and me, when we saw him comin’ back home, we’d all scatter from the house,” Faron remembered. Jim still worked on and off for a local cement contractor and had his own beer bottle recycling business, but he became an increasingly sporadic earner and was in trouble often with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
His anguish only increased when he tried to confide in others. “People would ask him if he was drinking that night or maybe was overtired,” Tim Kaizer said. “When he realized people didn’t believe him, he stopped talking and just bottled it up inside.”
“I remember Dad tellin’ Mom certain things,” Faron recalled. “And she would just shake her head and walk away. But he wanted to tell somebody that it was on his mind.”
He should have seen what was coming, Faron said, when “my dad took me aside to apologize for the way he had treated me and my mother.”
That was 1976. Just a few weeks later, not long before he would turn fifty, Jim Kaizer shot himself in the head with a rifle outside a bar in Western Shore.
“What I pick up is that there was a group of people and one of them had a gun,” Faron said. “Dad took it, but it had no bullets. But there was a woman, and she gave him a bullet. And he walked away, and he told everybody to stay away from him. And then he done it.”
When I asked him about it, Dave Blankenship, son of the old Oak Island hand Dan Blankenship and now part of the Lagina brothers’ treasure hunt, said that Jim was remembered more locally for “playin’ Russian Roulette with a single shot twenty-two” than for going down into the shaft at Smith’s Cove on that August day in 1965 to bring up four bodies. The fireman from Buffalo, Edward White, had been honored with Canada’s Medal of Bravery for going down once into that poison gas, Jim had reflected on more than one occasion. But the four times he had gone down were completely forgotten.
Beulah’s own pain increased considerably after the company that issued Jim’s life insurance policy refused to pay out because the cause of death had been suicide. “Mom had no money, so she went to work in the fish plant,” Faron said. “Her life had been hard and it got a lot harder.” Beulah and Mildred Restall would become close friends. They had both lost their men in tragic circumstances, they both felt cheated and betrayed by people and institutions they had trusted, and they both were forced to work menial jobs to make ends meet.
Tim Kaizer had grown up hearing about what had happened to Grampa Jim on Oak Island, he told me. “I thought it was a cool story, because when you’re a kid, it’s mythical. But as I’ve understood more about who Jim was, it’s made it seem more and more real. Because for someone like him who was so fearless to be so scared by something that he would never go back to the island, you know it had to be something remarkable.”
Tim admitted that he had never set foot on Oak Island. A short, thick power lifter who looked like he could have been carved out of a boulder, Tim worked as a paramedic aboard a medevac helicopter and was conditioned to remain calm in traumatic and often frightening situations. “But Oak Island scares me,” he said. “I believe there’s a bad spirit on the island. I believe my grandfather encountered it.”
Some of that may have to do with what Beulah Kaizer told him when he asked her about that night, Tim said, whether or not she had believed Jim’s story. “My grandmother looked at me, and then she told me that when he came home that night Jim had showed her his arms. And they had huge bruises on them that had been made by handprints.”