The Oak Island Money Pit
A mysterious shaft dug into a Canadian island in the 1700s. Six men have died trying to reach the bottom. No one has.
- Category
- buried
- Status
- lost
- Region
- Nova Scotia, Canada
- Country
- Canada
The dossier
In 1795, a teenager named Daniel McGinnis noticed a circular depression in the ground on Oak Island, a small island off the coast of Nova Scotia. Nearby, a ship's tackle block hung from a tree branch over the depression. He gathered two friends and began digging. At two feet: flagstones. At ten feet: a wooden platform. At twenty: another platform. At thirty: another. The platforms continued at regular ten-foot intervals, each one suggesting deliberate, engineered construction. They ran out of resources and stopped at thirty feet. What followed is the world's most infamous unsolved excavation mystery. Multiple companies have dug the 'Money Pit' over the following 225 years, each meeting disaster. The shaft is booby-trapped: a horizontal tunnel connects to the ocean at a beach called Smith's Cove, timed so that when digging reaches a certain depth, the ocean floods in. Every shaft has flooded. Six people have died in accidents during excavation attempts. Theories about what's at the bottom range from Francis Bacon's original Shakespeare manuscripts to the Ark of the Covenant to Spanish treasure to Marie Antoinette's jewels to nothing at all—a natural phenomenon misread as human engineering. A History Channel show has been excavating the island since 2014, spending tens of millions and finding coins, links of chain, and traces of mercury—all intriguing, none conclusive.
Legal status
Island owned by Oak Island Tours Inc. (Lagina brothers). Active excavation under Nova Scotia Special Places Protection Act. Visitor access by tour only.