Thirteen years ago, I began an article for Rolling Stone magazine with these lines:
Can what’s buried beneath the ground on Oak Island possibly be worth what the search for it has already cost? Six lives, scores of personal fortunes, piles of wrecked equipment, and tens of thousands of man-hours have been spent so far, and that’s not to mention the blown minds and broken spirits that lie in the wake of what is at once the world’s most famous and frustrating treasure hunt.
Still a pretty strong opening, I’d say, and the question remains a valid one. The article was published in the magazine’s January 22, 2004, edition, and every comment I heard about it was positive. I was not entirely satisfied with the piece, however, especially as time passed. I knew I’d left things out; magazine deadlines force one to work fast and the limited space in the pages of any periodical compels writers to make tough choices and sharp cuts—or to let editors make those choices and those cuts for them. It was the nagging thought that I’d accepted the semiofficial legend of Oak Island without sufficient examination, though, that truly bothered me.
In the summer of 2010, I was working as the host of a show being produced for the Oprah Winfrey Network. Early on, Joe Nickell of the Skeptical Inquirer, perhaps the best known naysayer in the country, was brought in to be my on-camera adversary. Nickell had written an article that attempted to debunk certain “myths” surrounding Oak Island, and when we spoke briefly about this off camera, I was acutely aware that I wasn’t confident enough in what I knew about the historical record to refute some of what he was saying. That troubled me.
It also troubled me that I might have given some preposterous theories about what had taken place on Oak Island more than their fair due, while dismissing as outlandish at least one hypothesis that I had come to believe deserved serious consideration.
Oak Island had long been a Rorschach test for dozens of historical loose ends and broken threads, most of the major conspiracy theories and a good many of the minor ones, and just about every tale of lost treasure out there. The island drew obsessive-compulsives, crackpots, and the sincerely curious to it like no place on Earth. None of this changed the fact, though, that Oak Island was a genuine enigma and quite arguably the most mysterious spot on the planet. I wanted another shot at the place.
I got one in the late spring of 2016 when I received a telephone call from the producers of the astonishingly successful cable television series The Curse of Oak Island, inviting me to spend a month or so on the island while the show was shooting its fourth season in Nova Scotia that summer.
It wasn’t getting back on television that I looked forward to as much as getting back on Oak Island. That tiny dot of land off the coast of Nova Scotia haunted my imagination like no other place I’ve been. That July I headed back there for the first time since the autumn of 2003. I didn’t delude myself into believing I was about to solve the mystery. All I aimed for was to tell the island’s story in a more comprehensive and entertaining way than any who had gone before me. But of course, I told myself, one never knew what one might find when one started looking.