Just inside the entrance to the Oak Island Museum, the main display greets visitors with a blowup of my 2003 article, printed on both sides of a framed 8-foot-wide panel. The cast and crew of the show shooting on the island are in and out of the museum daily, and whenever one of them would ask a question or make a remark about the article it was almost always about the title: “Do you really believe Oak Island’s cursed?” I do, I’d say. Well, if not cursed, at least haunted.
I had found Oak Island to be a spooky place almost from the moment I’d seen it. In those dreary, sodden days of my 2003 visit, I would stand on the mainland shore and watch the island filter through mists and loom out of fogs in a perpetually fluctuant gloom. The voice of Edgar Allan Poe whispered to me from somewhere deep in adolescent memory, as if I were looking at the remains of a world that had fallen alongside the House of Usher. When I crossed the causeway, there was the sense that time was a wheel spinning me through decades and past centuries. The depredations of Robert Dunfield and the others who had attempted to plunder Oak Island were at once visible and concealed, ugly scars softened by the mosses and vines that flourish in this dank climate. Driving alone or with Dan Blankenship along the broken road that led to the Money Pit, I passed the panorama of what seemed an epic battle of man and nature, most visible in the broken equipment and failed machine parts that lay in the weeds, covered with rust and lichen.
The overwhelmingly eerie sensation of being watched by ghosts and evil spirits had deepened after my meeting with Dan Henskee. In the course of describing what he alternately referred to as “my two nervous breakdowns” and “my spiritual experiences,” Henskee had occasionally looked imploringly into my eyes, as if he hoped I would tell him which were the right words. All I knew is that he was talking about the same two incidents, no matter how he categorized them, and that when I listened to Dan’s story “spiritual experience” and “nervous breakdown” sounded to me like “cause” and “effect.”
Henskee said his troubles had begun in 1973, after Dan Blankenship persuaded him to try dowsing in the vicinity of 10X. Blankenship had told him repeatedly that dowsing worked, even if he didn’t know how it worked, and within moments of taking the divining rod in his hands he was convinced his mentor had been right. He had “felt an energy” coming up through the ground and entering him. It was an overwhelming experience and not in any way a good one, Dan said. He was so shaken that he handed the rod back to Blankenship, wondering what was happening to him.
The only time I ever saw Dan Blankenship show anything like fear—or at least trepidation—along with what seemed true remorse, was when he described to me what happened after he took Henskee back to his house. “Dan was in my kitchen when he lost it,” Blankenship recalled. “All of a sudden it was like something took him over. He said, ‘I had to kill you! I had to kill you!’ I said, ‘Who? What?’ He said, ‘You lost a chest in the water. I had to kill you.’”
He felt himself being “possessed” by the spirit of a slave who had worked underground on Oak Island. Henskee told me: “One of the other slaves had lost a chest in the water, so they chained him to a post. I knew they were going to torture him to death, so I cut his throat, to let him die quickly. I saw and felt it all with perfect clarity, then I blacked out.”
Henskee had been removed from Blankenship’s home in a strait-jacket and spent the next two weeks in a Halifax psychiatric ward. He returned to Oak Island to work once more alongside Blankenship, but struggled constantly with the fear that something truly dark lay buried beneath the ground he was digging in. Dan told me the entire time he was haunted by things that had been said to him in separate conversations by Fred Nolan and Fred’s former associate Ray Nutt. First, Fred had told him that when he let Blankenship talk him into dowsing, what he had taken into his hands was not a “divining rod” but “the Devil’s stick,” Henskee recalled. Later, Fred advised him that “there are good spirits and there are evil spirits” and that both might be found on Oak Island. Dan sounded as if he had been as surprised as I was to hear of such words coming out of Fred Nolan’s mouth; neither of us had imagined that Fred held even the slightest belief in the supernatural. Henskee said not long after that Ray Nutt described experiencing the “presentation of messages or information” on Oak Island. The suggestion was that these had been dark in nature.
Something I didn’t tell Dan at the time—or tell anyone else, either—was the mad thought that had come into my own mind the first time I’d gone to the Money Pit area alone. I was standing above 10X, looking down on the ladder whose rungs descended into that black hole, when out of nowhere it struck me that what had been done on Oak Island wasn’t designed to keep men out, but to keep something else, something terrifying, in. I shook the idea out of my head, but it returned when Dan Henskee told me about his second nervous breakdown.
Dan said a thought had come to him soon after his return to Oak Island from the psychiatric ward, but he “tried not to think it” and to carry on, and this had worked, sort of, for almost a quarter century. In February 1998, though, his strategy of suppression was overwhelmed by a growing conviction that the Money Pit was the entrance to hell.
“I was raised in an almost completely ‘Christian’ small town and rural culture in which almost everyone truly believed in the existence of angels, at least one Deity and perhaps also in the existence of ‘ghosts’ of dead humans,” Dan would explain to me by email in the spring of 2017, after I had asked him to reflect on what happened to him on Oak Island in 1998. As a boy, he had heard sermons on and even read passages from the Bible’s book of Revelations and he knew that there were at least four references in it to “the bottomless pit…. I have checked a couple of dictionaries for definitions of ‘metaphysics’ and ‘metaphysical,’” Dan wrote to me, “and the meanings are not exactly clear. It appears that most people are using these words to refer to vague and perhaps mysterious entities.” To him it had seemed obvious back then and still did “that Oak Island is the sort of place where such ‘entities’ would gather in large numbers.” So that was perhaps a sort of explanation for why, in February 1998, he had become convinced that Oak Island was one of several places referred to by the word “Armageddon.”
“I felt that ‘the final battle’ would be a battle for people’s minds rather than a physical battle, and that Oak Island might be a sort of focal point,” Dan explained in his 2017 email. Back in 2003, though, all Dan had told me was that one frigid February day at dusk he had been stricken with the absolute certainty that evil spirits were about to erupt into the world out of the ground on Oak Island. He tried to escape by stripping off all his clothes and diving into the icy waters of Mahone Bay, then swimming to the shore wearing only a yellow hardhat. He was discovered the next day curled up naked on the floor of a mainland house, and once again he was removed to the psychiatric ward.
One of the ways Dan Henskee had coped—stayed sane, it might be said—was by becoming increasingly religious, although Dan’s religion was definitely idiosyncratic rather than doctrinaire. “I decided that the best choice for me was to become a conduit for ‘the Holy Spirit,’” he explained in his 2017 email. “As such, my means of ‘praying’ would be to set aside other things in order to merge my individual spirit with the Holy Spirit.” However it had happened, his practice had made Henskee into an extraordinarily kind, humble, and generous person. He had lived meagerly his entire adult life (often aided by Nova Scotia’s generous social welfare system), and yet regularly he gave money to an assortment of acquaintances who were worse off than he was. “Some of these people really depend on me,” Dan told me on the August day in 2016 when we were watching them sink the first caisson at the Money Pit. People could call Henskee crazy if they wanted to, but what I knew for certain was that he was a good man.
And I believed he really did know things. Back in 2003, Dan told me that he had never stopped believing Oak Island was haunted by the souls of those who died there. “Something about that place makes everything go wrong that can go wrong,” he had said.
Not a single person who has worked on The Curse of Oak Island would disagree with that statement. Inexplicable equipment failures have become one of the show’s recurring themes. “You may not be used to this, but we are,” Craig Tester would tell the young man whose inflatable dam burst at Smith’s Cove. Many others have happened off camera. Rick Lagina told me about a geophysicist who had come to the island with an apparatus he had used all over the world, most recently in a search for mineral deposits in Zaire. As soon as he attempted to use the machine on Oak Island, though, it failed. He had listened when the geophysicist, very upset, called the manufacturer in France and was told that the machine was incapable of malfunctioning because of the number of redundancies that had been built into it as default systems. “The geophysicist said, ‘Maybe it can’t fail, but it has,’” Rick recalled with a laugh. Tony Sampson described a man who nearly broke down into tears when a machine that provided underwater propulsion broke down just off the south shore of Oak Island. “He kept saying, ‘This has never happened before, anywhere, ever,’” Tony recalled. “We tried to tell him how many times we’ve heard people speak exactly those words on Oak Island, but the poor bloke was inconsolable.”
More interesting to me were the stories I head from the television crew about the failures of their own equipment. The soundmen in particular said their microphones cut out and in and back out again constantly in certain places on the island, mainly the eastern corner of the swamp and in the vicinity of 10X. They and the rest of the crew seemed to have become almost inured to such experiences. Every time something broke down or got lost, they would simply look at one another and say with a shrug: “Oak Island.” Marty Lagina, a confirmed skeptic on the subjects of the supernatural or the paranormal, told me he had no explanation for the number of equipment malfunctions and electrical failures he’s witnessed on Oak Island. “It happens so much more often here than anyplace else I’ve ever been that it’s not even close,” he admitted. When I tried to keep him on the subject, Marty said that maybe we should perform a “magnetic survey” of the island that summer. It never happened.
Like Marty, the crew were reluctant to talk about the spooky things they’d experienced on Oak Island. It was as if they believed giving the subject any air would increase the likelihood of it happening again or draw the darkness to them. Marty, though, did tell me about the first time he was alone at the Money Pit area after the sun had set. “First, I don’t believe in any of this stuff,” he said. “But I was there not even ten minutes when I heard this blood-curdling shriek, and I admit it, I was terrified. I got out of there as fast as I could.” Had he ever gone back alone after dark? I asked. “Never have,” Marty told me.
I became a good deal more interested in Oak Island’s scary stories after I talked to Jim Kaizer’s grandson Tim. Countless people had claimed to have seen ghosts or specters on the island. The most often reported of the latter was a big black dog with fiery-red eyes, though there were a good number who claimed that they had encountered the spirits of dead men who appeared as crows or ravens. Anthony Graves’s son, William, claimed on his deathbed in the 1850s that while he was out in his boat spearing lobster one evening, a man with a long white beard had called to him from the shoreline: “Come here and I will give you all the gold you can carry.” He had been so frightened, William Graves declared with some of his last breaths, that he had immediately started rowing for home. In 1868, E. H. Owen had written an essay for a Lunenburg newspaper about the legend that the treasure could be found by anyone willing to throw a baby into the Money Pit. Jack and Charlotte Adams, who were working as caretakers for Edwin Hamilton in the 1940s, said they were haunted by the story their four-year-old daughter had told of coming upon a group of men wearing red jackets and pants with broad yellow stripes sitting on the timbers of the old wharf at Smith’s Cove.
Probably the last person I expected to tell me a spooky story was Dave Blankenship, but out of nowhere one afternoon Dan’s son began to describe the day he and a couple of men who were visiting the island had seen flames rising over the treetops on the east end of the island. They had hurried over, afraid the blaze might be already out of control, Dave said, but when they got to where they had seen the fire, there was nothing. “I saw a fire!” Dave told me. “Nobody can tell me I didn’t. But there was no fire. Damnedest thing.”
When I kept asking questions about these sorts of occurrences, members of the crew started telling me: “You should talk to Becky.”
Becky Parsons was an Englishwoman who had worked as a camera operator on the show for two summers before I arrived. When I finally got hold of her, she told me that she had grown up hearing about Oak Island, because her father was fascinated by the place. He was a student of history with a special interest in the age of piracy. She hadn’t heard much if anything about the purported paranormal activity on the island, but she considered herself sensitive to such things. “And when I first came to the island, I got very strong feelings about one of the places there, a spot just past 10X on the edge of the wooded area.”
One afternoon she was shooting B-roll—the visual filler that all nonfiction television shows use—Becky said, “and I just sort of started exploring in that area, just looking through the camera and kind of letting the camera system lead me toward that wooded area on the left of 10X. All of a sudden I had a strong sensation that there was someone behind me. I thought it was my assistant. I put the camera down and turned around to talk to him but … there was no one there. But there was this depression in the ground right at that spot, one I hadn’t seen before. And, I don’t know, I just felt very strongly as though I had encountered something.”
Some weeks later, a psychic visited the island and stayed late into the evening. After dark, the woman invited her to go on what Becky called “a ghost walk.” She was carrying a psychometry instrument the psychic had brought, Becky said, a device that was supposed to measure “energy.” “I sort of made a beeline for that spot by 10X, because I was very curious about it. I walked into the woods and all of a sudden the energy on this instrument goes off the charts. I stepped onto the pathway there and I felt this flush of energy. It was a sensation, like something is entering my body. It happened very, very strongly, and I’m looking at the needle and it’s still off the charts. I just sort of pushed it away, the energy that was trying to enter me. I didn’t feel the presence of evil, didn’t feel any danger, I just didn’t want it to come any closer to me.” Then she heard the psychic screaming from the clearing behind her and came back out toward 10X, Becky said, “and she was really freaked out. She said she had seen what she called ‘a black mass’ follow me into the woods. And I felt like I knew what she was talking about.”
Later that same night, the psychic had held what Becky called a sort of séance. “She tried to call up some energy and I experienced this manifestation right in front of me. Of a man. But I only saw his legs, like he was being built in front of me, in this transparent light kind of way.” Somehow, she had known this was the spirit of someone who had been “killed there and left to guard the place,” Becky said. I brought up the legend of the slave who had supposedly been killed and thrown into the Money Pit so his spirit would guard the treasure, and Becky swore she had never heard about it before. By the excitement in her voice I believed her. Later during the séance, a date had come to her, and she knew it was connected to the spirit that had tried to “enter her” earlier, Becky said. She couldn’t remember the date exactly, other than that it was in the 1700s. “I wrote it down and put it in a teacup in a cupboard in the Blankenships’ kitchen,” Becky said. I later asked Dan Henskee to look for that note in Dan Blankenship’s kitchen cupboard; he couldn’t find it.
WHEN I RETURNED TO OAK ISLAND in 2016, I had to consider the possibility that my view of the island as a place steeped in darkness was based mostly on atmospherics. Could my perceptions have been shaped by something as obvious as the weather? I wondered.
Most of the clothes and gear I’d packed were for the sort of cool, damp climate I’d experienced back in 2003. But Nova Scotia was in the middle of the warmest summer anyone could remember, day after day of sunny skies and temperatures in the upper seventies and eighties that felt a lot hotter than that in the high humidity of Canada’s Atlantic coast. And the island was far from the lonely place I’d first visited thirteen years earlier, when the only people on it beside myself were Dan and Jane Blankenship. The success of The Curse of Oak Island had resulted in by far the largest crew I’d ever seen working on a reality show, and the island buzzed with activity as big trucks came and went across the causeway constantly. It was no longer a scary place, at least in daylight hours. Only when I walked off to explore alone or stayed on the island after dark did that sensation of free-floating dread come back to me.
As the days passed, I began to understand better that when I’d written about the “curse” of Oak Island it wasn’t based mainly on stories of ghost sightings or diabolical possessions. The largest part of the island’s haunted aspect, in my eyes, was the way it swallowed up people’s lives. That included the six who had died, of course, but to their number I added the dozens of others who had sunk their time, their money, and their dreams into Oak Island. Fred Nolan’s death brought it home. I’d only read about the obsessions of Frederick Blair and Gilbert Hedden, of the bankruptcies of T. Perley Putnam and Captain John Welling. But I had met Nolan, spoken with him, listened to the voice of a man whose compulsion had consumed six decades of his life. Dan Blankenship, who was approaching his midnineties, had been on the island for more than five decades.
The passage of time had changed Blankenship, but so, I believed, had Fred Nolan’s death. There was a deeper melancholy about the man. Dan had admitted to me even thirteen years earlier that he brooded over the possibility that death would find him before he found the Oak Island treasure. “What I find most frightening is the thought that what I know might die with me,” he said. The arrival of the Laginas on the island had provided Dan with a repository for his knowledge, but he seemed to be finding very little consolation in the process of sharing it. I could see in his eyes and hear in his voice that Dan was now certain he would be gone before the treasure hunt was finished. I think he had begun to wonder, finally, if the treasure hunt on Oak Island ever would be finished. Every time I saw him, I would recall what Dan told me in 2003 about the many hours he had invested in contemplating the mind, or minds, that directed the work on Oak Island. He wondered if they had any idea that the riddle they created would rob so many men of their lives, their wealth, and their sanity.
“Sometimes,” he told me, “you begin to believe that they understood exactly what they were doing to us, and you start to despise the sons of bitches.”