It could have been carried by a swallow.
African or European?
Yeah, it sucks that we developed the need to feed and shelter ourselves these last few centuries.
I found that treasure in 1968. Turns out everyone was holding the map upside down, the treasure was actually buried about 50 feet away, only about 10 feet down.
Sorry, I thought I told someone. Oh well, you can stop digging now.
Why, yes, I am . . .
I was just reading Edward Rowe Snow’s account of the Oak island tale…and it seems to me that perhaps there was a treasure buried there-but it was removed before the boys started digging in 1795.
Reports from the local people say that local fishermen noticed starnge lights on the uninhabited island, in the early 1720’s-two locals went out to investigate and were never seen again.
So perhaps it was a Spanish silver repository-and the owners collected it-leaving a hole in the ground-which the local kids started digging in.
What? I don’t know that!
Aiyaaaaaaaaaaaa!
Regarding the coconuts fibers (if that’s what they were), Nova Scotia sailors made frequent trips to the Carribean to trade things like manufactured goods and cloths for food and spices. My great-great-great-great-grandfather’s brother was a NS sailing captain in the 1760s and made regular trips to Puerto Rico and the other islands. It would not have been rare to find coconuts (albeit not buried 100 feet under the beach).
…except it was not a “hole in the ground”, it was filled in.
Who would fill in a 100 foot deep hole AFTER you take out the treasure?
Also, back in 1795, most people did not have too much extra time to go around and construct elaborate hoaxes, and people were more sensible back then nobody back then tried to act crazy to get on the Jerry Springer show.
The first people to discover it had to be convinced it was real in order for them to buy up the land and then spend the rest of their lives digging.
First, ralph124c didn’t say it was a 100 foot deep hole that was filled in. If someone actually buried treasure, how deep would they really go? Five feet, maybe?
Second, no one needs to fill it in. A good rain storm will fill it in.
The earliest account, to quote Wikipedia, is “In 1795, 16-year-old Daniel McGinnis discovered a circular depression”. That’s entirely consistent with a reasonably deep hole in sand, following a good rainstorm or two.
Originally Posted by Susanann
…except it was not a “hole in the ground”, it was filled in.
Who would fill in a 100 foot deep hole AFTER you take out the treasure?
No. It was not just “a circular depression”.
If you cared to investigate further beyond Wikipedia, it was at least a 120 foot deep hole that was recently freshly filled in when it was first discovered, and no, a good rainstorm would not fill it in. There have been plenty of books about this treasure.
Nor would the people who found it buy the island and then spend the rest of their lives digging it out if the fill-in was only a few feet deep when they found the hole. Even President Frankin D. Roosevelt personally worked on the island trying to dig up the treasure. If the hole was originally only a few feet, we would not have had many companies spending tens of millions of dollars trying to dig it up over the past 200 years.
If you haven’t read the Joe Nickell article (post #5), you should. It suggests that the original hole was a natural formation – many sinkholes have been found in the area, and this was just another. It was embellished by hoaxes, fantasies, wishful thinking, and misinterpretation – a lot of things can fall into sinkholes over time; an old log can become a “platform” if that’s what you are hoping to find.
In short, the tale grew with the telling, each development more fantastic than the last, and most impossible to verify. A lot like UFO or Bigfoot reports.
I don’t believe this for a minute.
I remember seeing an In Search Of special about Oak Island in the 70s and have been interested ever since. I haven’t read any of the links, but it seems that there is some information missing which may be causing some confusion.
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the original spot was discovered by some friends when they were exploring the island one afternoon. They noticed a depression in the ground, and a groove worn into the tree limb above the depression, exciting the boy’s imagination about pirate treasure or something like that being buried below.
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as the boys dug, at 3 feet they discovered their first obstacle. (I don’t remember if it was just stones). At 10 feet and every 10 feet after, there was a specific pattern of planks, stones, etc that were placed by whoever created this hole. I believe they dug down 80 or 90 feet (my apologies, this is all from memory).
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when they returned the next day, the hole had about 40-50 feet of water in it. This water was found to be fed into the hole by two feeder systems that were on opposite sides of the island. These systems had the fibrous material mentioned above. The dye poured into the hole confirmed the locations of the feeder systems which began in the ocean over 100 feet away from the hole.
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I don’t remember when the kids were out of the loop, but it was fairly soon after the water filled up the hole. The dye was not poured in by the original discoverers
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a stone with strange marks came out of the hole. I saw a picture of it, but not sure it still exists. It was a simple substitution code (assuming that’s what it was, in english, also an assumption) that worked out to something like “100 feet below this stone 2 million dollars are buried”.
Someone put an drill bit into the hole and came up with a link of a gold chain and some bits of paper. That’s it. That’s all that’s been extracted from the hole as far as I know. The story is that the bit hit a bunch of things on the way down, including wood (a treasure chest, perhaps?) and then went into a void. open space, where whatever was there possibly fell in another 40 feet below where it was.
The hole has changed hands a bunch of times over the years, a number of lives have been lost, and millions have been spent.
As mentioned, the original location of the hole is unknown. Someone came up with digging a parallel hole, but it collapsed and flooded like the original hole. Subsequent holes have been dug over the past 200 years, obliterating the original site.
This was also written up in The Smithsonian sometime in the 1990’s.
I personally think that something is buried there, or was at one time, but whatever was there has been ruined by time and the elements. The question of how whoever buried it there ever planned on retrieving it has never been answered, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a way. If the original story is supposed to be believed (the flagstone level every 10 feet), someone went to a lot of trouble to create the hole. For what reason would they create the hole? This was done before the days of heavy machinery, so this was a major project, even if it was a prank.
I also find it hard to believe folks have been pouring millions into this pit if there wasn’t some indication that something is down there. Wherever “down there” may be.
It could ultimately be an elaborate hoax, but one I cannot for the life of me understand. The perpetrators of the hoax are long gone, and never shared their story. What purpose would that hold?
Aye, Matey, there’s the rub. Do you think that every detail you mentioned is unquestionably the truth? Is it possible that some items were made up and others were exaggerated? Considering that most diggers were excitedly expecting to get rich, is it possible that someone salted the dig with a piece of gold chain to encourage more digging? That a rotten log might morph into a rotten plank? That a stone that fell into a sinkhole was credited to pirates, especially since pirates were suspected of creating the hole in the first place? Could there be any self-deception at work here?
Of course. Self-deception along with actual deception is possible. Perhaps probable. The one thing that always made me think that there may be some truth to this tale was that the first discovery was in 1795. Which doesn’t exactly prove anything except that this seems like such an elaborate story to create a hoax with. If I were one of the kids creating the hoax, I’d have to tell SOMEONE the truth before dying, or before any major cash was lost by honest investors. Except, of course, if the plan was to screw people out of money for 200 years. I’m not even sure if the original guys made a dime off the dig.
The article printed in The Smithsonian was an excellent history of the story. It went into some detail as to what each layer was made out of, dismissing your “rotten log” theory, and random sinkhole deposits. However, again, we must always go back to the original account, since no pictures were taken, and there was no way to document the dig and finds, except for the word of the folks that dug down the pit that first time.
To me, the boys would have to have been lying from the very beginning for the hoax to make sense. This is entirely possible, of course. I do agree with you that the salting of the hole was very possible, especially when investors were needed to keep the dig alive. But a few links of a gold chain and some bits of paper are not much. I’d say that whoever salted that hole got some serious return on their investment if that was their plan. It’s been a target of investors and treasure hunters for 200+ years now. That’s amazing, considering the lack of physical evidence found.
Maybe I’d just like to think that there is something down there (or was down there at one point). What a great story it would be if a treasure were actually found. What a letdown it would be to have the story confirmed as a hoax.
Just curious… is this a tourist attraction of any kind, or does it generate any revenue for the current landowners? If so, keeping the story alive would certainly make sense.
I got scrod just the other day. Very tender and juicy.
What gets me is that no-one, seemingly, every asks why some pirates or others would elaborately bury a load of treasure 100 feet down a hole, create a seemingly impregnible series of drains as an elaborate defense, and deliberately leave tantalizing clues to its location such as the stone with a message on it.
There are in fact real stories of “buried treasure”, but generally is is “buried” to hide it from others, and those who bury it want it back again.
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why elaborately hide it, then leave in plain sight obvious clues that you were burying stuff- in the story, the clues that interest the discoverers into digging in the first place?
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if you hide it, why hide it in a way that you can’t easily recover it? Ten feet of sand makes sense, 100 feet is just silly - never mind creating elaborate dranage systems etc. And if the point was to hide something permanently - they made a whole infrastructure to hide the treasure - but did not bother to avoid leaving clues like an obvious depression in the ground/block & tackle (or worn groove) above it?
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if you hide it, why leave clues part way down the hole seemingly to encourage people to dig deeper, like the carved stone? What’s the point of having multiple platforms in the hole?
Nothing in this story makes any sense, as a real plan. It makes lots of sense as an ever-evolving “urban legend” type of thing.
A few facts:
Although it’s true the kids claimed they discovered the hole in 1795, we don’t know exactly what they found, as it wasn’t written up until 1856. In fact, the second dig (Onslow) occured about 1803 or so, and that was also included in the 1856 articles, along with the best documented of the early digs (Truro) , which occured in 1849. So, the tales of the discovery and the earlier digs are based upon only oral testimony, from one person (Vaughan) who apparently had some sort of monetary interest in the dig. So, the “layers every 10 feet” may or may not have been there as such. Maybe his memory was playing tricks or he was lying.
http://www.csicop.org/si/show/secrets_of_oak_island
"Similarly, the notion that there was a log platform at each ten-foot interval of the pit for a total of nine or eleven platforms, is only supported by later accounts, and those appear to have been derived by picking and choosing from earlier ones so as to create a composite version of the layers. For example the account in the Colonist (1864) mentions that the original treasure hunters found only flagstones at two feet (“evidently not formed there by nature”) and “a tier of oak logs” located “ten feet lower down” (i.e., at twelve feet). They continued some “fifteen feet farther down,” whereupon-with no mention of anything further of note-they decided to stop until they could obtain assistance. James McNutt, who was a member of a group of treasure hunters working on Oak Island in 1863, described a different arrangement of layers (Crooker 1978, 24). "
Thye also claimed to have found a inscribed stone, but (wiki) "No photographs, drawings, or other images of the stone are known to have been produced prior to its disappearance circa 1912" and the incription/code is suspicously close to that found in a book entitled "True Tales of Buried Treasure, written by explorer and historian Edward Rowe Snow in 1951."
It is claimed a small piece of gold chain was found during the 1849 dig period, but remember, by that time people had been messing with the Pit for over 50 years, it’s not impossible someone lost their watch chain while digging. Or, perhaps it was planted.
Here’s what the CSICOP artile ended with "In summary, therefore, I suggest first that the “Money Pit” and “pirate tunnels” are nothing of the sort but are instead natural formations. Secondly, I suggest that much of the Oak Island saga-certain reported actions and alleged discoveries-can best be understood in light of Freemasonry’s Secret Vault allegory. Although it is difficult to know at this juncture whether the Masonic elements were opportunistically added to an existing treasure quest or whether the entire affair was a Masonic creation from the outset, I believe the mystery has been solved. The solution is perhaps an unusual one but no more so than the saga of Oak Island itself. "