SYSK Selects: Is there treasure on Oak Island?

Off Nova Scotia, the tiny spit of land called Oak Island has been host to waves of treasure hunters for more than 200 years. Some of them lost their lives in the search for a treasure reputedly buried in a deep pit. But is anything really there?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
M. Hey everybody, it's me Josh and for this week's
s Y s K Select, I've chosen the Oak Island Mystery.
It's one we've gotten requests to do for a long time,
and even after we did it, we've still gotten requests
to do it. So here it is again. It's a
good one from two thousand fifteen. And as an added bonus,
keep an ear out for a surprise cameo by a

(00:22):
Globo de la muerte before we knew what it was
called Enjoy. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from house
Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

(00:45):
I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and Jerry
So this is stuff you should know. UD say, you're
no Scotia accent? Uh no, no, sir? Well was that
not just a howdy? It did some funny though. That
was my Heath Hall version. We've talked about. You love

(01:07):
that show, didn't you know? I never really watched it.
I don't. Thinking of my other podcast Ghost, I didn't
watch Haul much. Yeah, that's I did. I was from
the South though, you know Toledo. The you all thought
that was like yokol stuff. No, I mean like it
was on every once in a while. I just passed by,
you know what wasn't Mini Pearl. She had the hat
with the price tag on. Still started and then there

(01:31):
was like some guy with the banjo. I think, I
think this is one of the most off requested shows
Oak Island. Yeah, I've had a lot heard. I didn't
really know much about it, but it seems like every
other week someone saying, Oaka Island, guys, do Oak Island.
We're gonna do Oka Island. We want everybody to be quiet,

(01:53):
that's right, So that's what we're doing. Did you know
much about this ahead of time? No, not at all.
I did. It's one of those things like you hear
about and you hear a little more and you don't
really dig in. But so the whole thing is just
kind of this neat legend that's kind of out there. Yeah,
I don't know how I missed it. And then once
you start digging in, you're like, yeah, I understand you

(02:16):
say that with the skeptical tone. Well, I think this
is one of those cases where there's no treasure. I
don't know, there's some weirdness. There's some things that make
me say this is very odd. But I also understand
the skeptical point of view. So well, what I've just
kind of demonstrated is a little bit of the middle

(02:38):
of the road approach to Oak Island, which is unusual.
Most people approach Oke Island either as true believe or
treasure hunters or total skeptics. Like, there's not a lot
of middle of the road. It's a divisive island as
far as islands go. It's only like a hundred and
something acres. It's not a big island. It's off the

(02:59):
coast of Novas Gootia a hundred forty acres. Yeah that's
not that's not big. Yeah, but for as small as
it is, you know, it's pretty divisive. Yeah. I don't think. Uh,
I don't see what the big deal about being skeptical
about the I mean, a buried treasure. I mean, who cares. Oh,
if you're a skeptic, you have to pooh pooh everything. Absolutely,

(03:19):
anything that's even remotely frivolous has to be squashed. But
this isn't even like supernatural or anything. It's just I mean,
I guess there's the curse thing. Yeah, that's that's all.
That's all TV. That's not even lower from what I
understand that new it's like literally just a media creation,
like strictly from the TV show that before that. I mean,

(03:39):
like people didn't really see it as a curse. There's
just buried treasure on Oak Island. Yeah, and if it's
the eighteen hundreds and you're digging for things, there's a
good chance he might die. Yeah, it's dangerous, it is mean,
it's cursed. I read this really great article written in
nineteen sixty five by Mildred rest All, Yeah, from the
New York Times. No, this was in like Ottawa magazine

(04:03):
and it was written by her. Yeah, I read one.
It might have been the same one. I wonder it
was like within a very short time of her husband
and sun dying. I thought, wow, these ladies really composed.
But then I read a little further and found out
that Mildred rest All and her husband, Robert, who moved
their family to Oak Island so Robert could hunt for
the treasure in nineteen fifty nine. I think um started out.

(04:26):
They met because they were both circus performers with nerves
of steel who rode motorcycles in a huge globe sphere. Well,
he would go like upside down and she would go
side to side and they would miss each other hundreds
of times in an act. And now after that, I
was like, oh, yeah, this lady, she's tough as nails. Yeah,

(04:48):
you never seen one of those acts. I just didn't
realize that that's what they did, got you, Yeah, and
that it seems kind of odd to have that. I
thought it was a newer act from No, it's totally fifties.
Screams fifties really, Yeah, see I thought it screened seventies.
Oh it does too, Yeah, you're right, sure, Yeah, evil kine,

(05:10):
Evil is why that screams that? All right, So let's
dive in here. Ah well, yeah, the rest dolls. When
they moved to nineteen fifty nine, they were hardly the
first people that moved to Oak Island and set up
residents there in order to find the treasure. But prior
to seventeen um, Oak Island was just another island. Yeah,

(05:33):
it's still just another island. Well, just because of all
of the attention that's been paid to it. It's not
it's no longer. It's been changed forever. Prior to sev though,
it was just like whatever, there's Oak Island until a
local kid from Nova Scotia named Robert McGinnis Daniel McGinnis sorry, um,

(05:54):
decided to go explore. Yeah, and this, Um, you won't
find any two people that agree on these uh legend stories,
even with Daniel McKennis, because it's you know, none of
the stuff was really written down until much later. Nothing
was written down in seving was documented until like the
nineteen hundred well Sir Star Trek came along. Certainly things

(06:18):
like this weren't documented, um because he was just a boy.
He was sixteen years old. Uh, he was on a
fishing expedition. And as the story goes, and we'll just
use the most commonly agreed upon story here, he was, Um,
he was just kind of traps around the island and
found uh, like a block from a pulley attached to

(06:39):
a tree, an oak tree, and then a big sort
of cleared out area underneath it where it looked like, uh,
you know, someone had maybe been digging and rebar ing something. Yeah,
there's like a depression under this block tackle block from
a pulley. Yeah, it was just cleared out. And he
was like, huh but jennything, there's a pirates As you're

(07:00):
down there. Yeah, I mean, being a teenager, he was like,
there's yeah, pirates all are are all over the place. Yeah,
and it's entirely possible. We're talking the eighteenth century. We're
talking a time when piracy was still very much in
the public imagination. Bury treasure was a hot thing. Yeah,
I mean, there is such a thing. And at the

(07:21):
very least if no one, if no single pirate ever
buried his treasure, there is a lot of rumor about
buried treasure of pirates. I think it makes total sense.
You know that you can't carry that stuff around all
the time because you get robbed and looted. So you,
you know, bury that junk, come back for it later. Right,

(07:41):
make a weird, funny looking map that looks like a
sweaty pillow case, and um, put a big X in
the middle of it. So and then put that in
a coffee can and then bury that in your backyard.
That's right, you got to bury twice because it's so nice.
That's the pirates. Can you say it like a pirate? No,

(08:02):
I didn't not need he would do that. Um, all right,
So he starts digging. He's his interest is peaked. He
gets a couple of friends comes back the next day. Uh,
Anthony Vaughan and John Smith and um, it's a pseudonym,
you think. Uh. And so they start digging, reportedly go
down about ten feet and found a layer of like

(08:23):
a platform of oak logs. Yeah, which is you're not
supposed to find that when you dig into a hole
under a pulley. No, you're not supposed to it's no worthy.
First they found a stone that they took to be
man made, like two ft down, and then ten feet
down they found an oak platform, and then supposedly every
ten feet after that, Uh, they kept finding these platforms. Um,

(08:46):
and we'll just go ahead and call this the money pit.
What's what everyone calls it? Yeah, this main location is
the money pit because just the first oak platform alone
says there's treasure buried here. That's right. Uh. So basically
they they got down as far as they could for
three teenage boys with picks and shovels, and said, uh,

(09:07):
this this isn't We're not finding anything, and where we
need help? Basically, Yeah, we need to bring in some
old timey equipment. Yeah, Bigger tools, gets some old timey
funding and maybe get some old timey other people involved
and they did, but it took like nine years before
they came back I think yeah. And they filled it
back in because they didn't just want to leave a
big empty hole there. It's an obvious sign that there's

(09:28):
a treasure there. So, like you said, nine hours later,
they did come back, um with investors. Nine years later.
What say ours? No? I said years. I will bet
you all the money on Oak Island that you said ours? Uh.
At any rate, it was nine years and they came
back and formed with some funding from the Onslow Company. Um,

(09:51):
and that'll be a common refrain here. Uh. And apparently
I did some writing on modern treasure hunting and it's
all about the funding you. Oh, it's it's just like
any business. You. These dudes have boats and equipment, but
they're like, if you want a piece of this action,
we need some dough out there and find the stuff.

(10:11):
It's like selling future contracts. Yeah, yeah, a potential treasure exactly.
And it's not just treasure hunting that does that. Like
lots of archaeological expeditions are funded like that. If if
your local universities, like we got enough problems as it is,
we can't find your dig, you can go to private investors,
who ultimately it's still treasure hunting, it's just churched up

(10:34):
church Don called archaeological things. So they come back as
the on Slough Company and dig down deeper this time,
and they did find some interesting things, notably h things
that shouldn't be there, like coconut fiber and charcoal and
putty and coconuts obviously not native to Nova Scotia. So

(10:55):
they're like, someone has put something down here. Well yeah,
also at the time, um, coconut fiber was used as
a packing material though, so clearly somebody was using it
as as some sort of construction material. Wasn't accidentally dropped
there there? Yeah, that's right. Um, So a legend has

(11:16):
it they dug down until they hit ninety ft and
then found a flat stone with a coded inscription that
they could not make sense of. Uh. Since then, other
people have supposedly translated it to read forty ft below
two million pounds are buried. Um, there's no stone today,
there's no rubbing, there is no photograph. No, it's called

(11:39):
the famous Cipher Stone. Yeah, and it was supposedly lost
in like but yeah, there's no evidence. Yeah, and so
anything you run across like in a book or on
the web or something is conjecture. No, there's no document
of this cipher stone, but they do think that something
that accounts for the cipherstone did exist at point, but

(12:00):
no one knows for certain exactly what it said. And
if you're wondering two million pounds of what I assumed
that they made British currency, Yeah, that would be funny
though it was just like two million pounds of pirates
scat coconut husks. Uh. So they get down to about
close to a hundred feet and then go home for

(12:21):
the day and and drink rum, I would imagine, and
then come back and it's full of water. And they
tried to bail it out, but they were basically like,
this is you know seven, well, I guess this point
it was the eighteen hundreds or eighteen hundreds, but we're
still screwed, right. So the Robert McGinnis and what was
the name of the company came back with a company

(12:41):
company what what you just described as the process that
people have followed in the troubles that people have run
into in the every every ever since. And we'll talk
about some of the following expeditions because mcguinness's troubles. Didn't
put anybody else off after this, Okay, so Chuck, something

(13:17):
really weird happened to the McGinnis expedition, the second one,
when he grew up became a man, came back with
the Onslow company and dug down became a man. They
went to bed after drinking a bunch of them, like
you said, and then they woke up and the pit
had filled with water. And it's basically been filled with
water ever since. Yeah, which is a problem if you're

(13:40):
a treasure hunter. You want dry conditions as much as
possible to get to the treacher. Water is an impediment, um.
And it became such an impediment that ultimately McGinnis and
on the Onslow company just kind of gave up. I
guess they ran out of funding, right, Yeah, which has
also been a refrain over the years. You can only
dig so long until the person eventually who's funding he says,

(14:03):
I'm gonna pull the plug. But years later, Um, a
question was raised about that flooding. People started to wonder
was that actually an engineered booby trap? Right? And that's
become a question among treasure hunters for centuries on. Yeah.
Of course the skeptics will say, no, it is just

(14:25):
uh seawater, because later they found out that it was
actually saltwater UH. And there are other similar underground water
tunnels on the island. So they're like, no, this is
just going on on this island. And and the believers
will say no, it was a booby trap set by
the pirates. But the believers in this case have a

(14:47):
kind of strange evidence UM to back up their ideas.
So in eighteen forty nine, after the mcguinnis expedition, the
second one left many years after UM, the Truro company,
which is and it's tough to say, they showed up
to the island to look for the money pit, and
they started digging again, right And when they started digging,

(15:08):
they ran into the same problem. There the shaft that
they dug filled with water. So they started to think,
we'll wait a minute, maybe this is purposeful at the
very least, maybe there's some sort of sea caves. And
if there's sea caves that are filling this thing up,
potentially we could stop up the sea caves and then
we can avoid the water problem and keep digging. So
they sent people from the expedition to look all over

(15:30):
the shoreline of the island and they found something really
astounding that, from what I understand still to this day,
is the one thing that confounds all skeptics when it
comes to Oak Island. They found what can really only
be described as a man made drainage system that basically
accepts the incoming tide and potentially funnels the tied to

(15:56):
the money pit. Yeah. So you know, they continue to
dig and drill because they were encouraged by finding like
things they said were metal or maybe even gold on
the Augur's um and even more coconut husk. Yeah, so
they were like, there's something down there, but they, like
you said, it kept flooding and that this is when
they realized it was seawater and they noticed, hey, it's

(16:19):
actually filling up and and falling back down with along
with the tides. So that's when they built a temporary
Coffer dam to kind of see what was going on.
And that's when they found this five finger drain and uh,
which yeah, there's really no explanation that didn't just accidentally happen. No,
And what gives it away is it's um. It's a

(16:39):
hundred and forty five ft wide, and it's about the
height of high the difference between high tide and low tide,
so it's clearly meant to funnel the tied into this drain. Yeah,
there's five drains. They're obviously finger drains. Finger drains are
like French drains basically, and they all connect into one
larger drain. But the real dead giveaway was the appearance

(17:00):
again of coconut fiber. Coconut fiber was used to keep
the sand out of the stone drain um, and a
layer of coconut fiber on an island off of the
coast of Nova Scotia suggests man's intervention. That's right, but
what that means who knows. Again, treasure seekers will say

(17:21):
that they put this to uh keep you from finding
that treasure. Right, it was evidence in favor of the
idea that the money pit is booby trapped. Yeah, and
I think skeptics will say that the I think there
was a theory that there was a lot of weird
freemason uh rituals going on, and maybe they buried some
stuff there and not treasure necessarily, but um, maybe they

(17:44):
built this drain to keep people from digging into their Yeah,
modern treasure hunters are like great, let me find whatever
the Mason's buried. Yeah, you know, even if it's not
gold ingots could be like, you know, the Secrets of
the Freemasons, or yeah, the Ark of the Covenant. Yeah right,
they said that could be down there, or the Holy Grail.

(18:05):
You want to talk about some of the legends of
what's down there as well? Okay, So, um, the the
the predominant one that Robert McGinnis initially thought of was
that it was pirate treasure because he was a teenager
in the seventeen nineties, right. Um. Successive people have come
to see the money pit if it is sabotaged like

(18:26):
it is, and the the construction that went into it
is something that would have had to have been carried
out by a group more sophisticated and better funded and
better organized than Captain Kidd's crew, more sober at the
very least. Yeah, exactly. So one of the rumors of
what treasure is buried down there is that the Freemasons
buried something, or the Knights Templar buried something, because the

(18:49):
Knights Templar, you know, they were like the militant arm
of fundamental Christianity in like the the tenth century during
pilgrim images a k. The Crusades to the Middle East, right, Yeah,
so that means they got a lot of dough over
the years they accumulated great wealth, had a big um

(19:10):
falling out with the Catholic Church of course. Yes, supposedly
they were found worshiping Baffa met the goat headed yeah,
breasted Satan and that that's sort of like the statue, right,
and it's exactly like the statue Oklahoma. Yeah, the one
that's being constructed by the Satanic Temple right now. Yeah,
I put that on our Facebook page. It was very divisive.

(19:30):
I can imagine, no surprise. Um, I thought it was
just a nice, cool looking piece of art. I mean, man,
it's pretty well done. Yeah, it looks look nice. Um.
So yeah, so the Knights Templer has all this dough.
They have a falling out with the Catholic Church for
obvious reasons that you just pointed out, and then they
buried their treasure, so I guess the Catholic Church wouldn't

(19:52):
get their hands on it, right. But among that treasures
supposedly is the Holy Grail, which is what um the
night we're looking for in Monty Python and the Holy
Grail and the Ark of the Covenant, which is what
Indiana Jones is looking for in Indiana Jones and and uh,
no raiders have lost ark um. And so some people
have said, this is where the Knights Templar buried their treasure,

(20:16):
this is where the Ark of the Covenant is. And
then other people have said, whatever, the Knights Templar never
made it to Nova Scotia. But the Freemasons obviously took
over the secrets and protections of the Knights Templar. They're
like the modern day Knights Templar society. And uh, they
probably buried the arc and or the Holy Grail. Duh. Yeah.

(20:37):
And apparently a lot of um Masons have been on
these excavation teams over the years, which of course is
evidence that they're looking for their their old stuff, right
or I mean, it also is entirely possible that there
is a rumor among Masons that this is true. Whether
it's true or not, that could have gotten some Masonic

(20:59):
adventures to go. Look. You know, another theory um that's
been thrown out there is that um Marie Antoinette uh,
during the French Revolution said got all her jewelry together
and gave it to a woman and said flee, and
she fled to Nova Scotia, and then the French navy
came along and constructed this elaborate system to bury her jewels.

(21:24):
There's another little, uh possible theory, and supposedly evidence that
backs that up is that the woman who was given
the jewels, who was entrusted with the jewels, was spotted
in Nova Scotia some time after that. What was she
doing there burying jewels? Another unusual Nova Scotia link is
um that of Francis Bacon. Yeah, I like this one.

(21:46):
So remember Francis Bacon from the scientific Method. He was
the guy that really first put that down in written form.
Brilliant man. Possibly Shakespeare. That's one of the theories is
that he was the real Shakespeare. And the idea is
that that he hid his manuscripts in the money pit
on Oak Island. And that seems kind of far fetched,

(22:08):
but apparently Francis Bacon owned land in Nova Scotia. Yeah,
and um, he was a preserver of things in mercury
and supposedly they found flasks of mercury on the island. Um.
I don't buy that one because I've always believed that
Shakespeare was Shakespeare and not Francis Bacon or his sister

(22:31):
or in the other various uh crack pot theories about
who really wrote that stuff. I like Francis Bacon and Shakespeare,
you know, yeah, yeah, just the thought of it, or like,
do you think the evidence is Uh, I don't know
about the evidence. I don't know enough about it, but
I like the thought of it. He seems like a
pretty cool dude. Uh. So some of the other um

(22:53):
treasure hunters started flocking there in the mid to late
eighteen hundreds because that was just a big time for
treasure hunting. Yeah. Well, the California gold Rush was going
on in eighte This is why the forty Niners are
called that. That's right, And uh, I think there's kind
of a treasure fever, yeah, going through the land. That's

(23:15):
a good way to say it. So, um, the Eldorado
Company in eighteen sixty six went out there, and they
there were various methods over the years to try and
block off the flow of water. They tried digging shafts
and tunnels, They tried to divert it, they tried to
intercept it um and basically all that ended up doing
was causing a nightmare for future expeditions, to the point

(23:40):
where people had had had a hard time even finding
the original money bit to begin with. Right, A lot
of the um, A lot of the landmarks, I guess
you'd call them, we're just utterly destroyed. Yeah, supposedly. In
that article I read from um Mrs Restall, she said
that there's no there weren't any more oaks on Oak

(24:01):
Island any longer. Oh, no more coak trees, yeah, which
because of excavation just tore them all down. Yeah, So
it would be very tough to find your way around
if whatever directions were written at a time when there
were plenty of oak trees and used oak trees as guides,
you know, like go to this oak tree and turn left.
Yeah yeah yeah. So um yeah, the excavation has definitely

(24:24):
changed the face of that island tremendously. Uh. One thing
we do have that is tangible, um as far as
I don't know if you call it evidence or not,
because it really doesn't say much. But Frederick Blair in
eight nine, in the eighteen nineties came with the Oak
Island Treasure Company and he actually found something that still exists.
It's a little bitty tiny piece of parchment paper and

(24:47):
it looks like a curse of letters. V I are
on it, but I mean it's small, and it really
leads to nothing other than something man made, is there?
V I? You know, I don't think anyone's any conjecture
about what that means. Six maybe six billion pounds buried,

(25:08):
set down right, Um. And then the twentieth century has seen,
or saw since we're in the twenty first century now,
successive waves, pretty constant waves of people coming looking for
the Oak Island treasure. UM. One of them was a
young Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who also was a mason. H

(25:29):
He came along as an investor, and apparently UM always
pine to go back to Oak Island to search for
the treasure, like it got in his blood. All right.
So after this message break, we are going to look
at a few more of the things that have been
discovered there over the years and what this all means.

(26:03):
So Chuck I was saying, the twentieth century saw a
wave after a wave of treasure hunter come dig and
then leave penniless. One of those people though that, and
we also talked about how Oak Island has been utterly changed.
Probably nobody changed the topography and geography of Oak Island
more than a guy named Robert Dunfield, who was an

(26:25):
engineer I believe, or no a geologist. In in in nine
he built a bridge a highway, yeah, from the mainland
to Oak Island. And right after he did that, right
after it was completed, he started moving heavy equipment in
and just started digging like crazy. Yeah. He got down

(26:46):
a hundred feet I'm sorry, a hundred and forty ft
down a hundred feet wide. And uh kept everything a
secret until two thousand three, and didn't They didn't find
a lot. They found some porcelain dishware from the six undreds,
which is you know, what was that doing? There could
find for sure the early UM. But he of course

(27:08):
didn't find a lot either, ultimately in the way of
riches because UM, he kept having problems despite his machinery
with collapsing UH, caves, heavy rains, more tide, water and um.
But he did say there was a cavern under some limestone.
He did confirm one of these underwater caverns, supposedly, Yeah,

(27:30):
which accounts for potentially a natural formation. If you're a skeptic,
if you're a believer, then it just confirms the booby
trap thing. Um. He uh finally left after basically he
was the guy who demolished the most landmarks. Um. But

(27:50):
shortly after he left, a pair of guys who formed
what's called the Triton Alliance. Uh, David Tobias and Dan
blanket Ship. Uh. They started working and they actually brought
along some high tech stuff in nineteen seventy, which was
like underwater camera, video camera. It's probably the size of
a small car, right, that they lowered down there, and uh,

(28:12):
they well, they drilled the hole and they called it
bore Hole ten X, and they it was filled with water,
of course, as all holes in Oak Island do. But
they lowered this underwater camera down there, and they swore
to God that they saw evidence of human remains and
treasure tests. That's what they said. They whether you're convinced

(28:33):
or not, Um, Tobias and Blanketship were convinced enough that
to no, Blanketship still lives on Oak Island. Yeah, he
he became sort of the uh, the main guy that
remains today as the main guy. And this is n
seventy when they showed up. He's still on that island
and he's supposedly he's oh yeah, yeah, he's pretty easy old. No,

(28:56):
but it was the nineteen seventies when they showed up
and he still lives there. Now, that's what I'm saying
he is. He's an old feller. We hammered that out.
He's apparently an ordinary feller. Two because there was another
guy named Fred Nolan, who is a famous Oak Island explorer.
Um who Well, they ran a foul of one another, apparently, Um.

(29:18):
Blanketship had a rifle obviously in his hand during the argument,
and the cops had to come out and take the
rifle away. Really yeah, and supposedly now nobody is allowed
on Oak Island, although I guess there you can if
you're filming a TV show. Um, except for Dan Blanketship,
who's the only resident. Well he's a part of the

(29:41):
TV show. Okay, So he was like, come on, um, yeah,
what's that history channel? I think I don't know. Yeah,
there's a couple of the people that he's working with today,
uh Rick and Marty Lagina. Um I think are brothers
from Michigan, and they are the subject to the TV show,

(30:02):
which you'll have to check out at some point. Um.
But that's supposedly where the curse came from. Is that show?
Oh where had that? Really? Yeah? I did not know that,
So it's it's been a present since last year, right um.
Frederick Nolan also is the one who discovered um five
large cone shaped boulders that when you look at it above,

(30:25):
looks like a cross, and it's forever known as Nolan's Cross.
What does it mean? Who knows? Maybe the boulders were
just sort of a in the shape of a cross
by accident, but well, Fred Nolan bought five plots of
land bottom, so he was a resident there, an inhabitant
there too. I'm not sure what happened Old Fred Nolan though, Yeah,

(30:45):
I'm not sure. It's a good point. He may have
been lost to the curse of Oak Island. So we
we keep using like present tense, like it's a it's
entirely true. Does anyone with History Channel knows there's still
people who are looking actively for the treasure of Oak Island? Right? Yeah?
Like they believe that if you put all the evidence together,

(31:07):
no one's crossed coconut fibers, the finger drains, um, the
evidence from Blanketship and Tobias, their video of stuff like
if you put all this together, there is evidence that
there is treasure down there. Somebody just needs to dig
deep enough in the right place and then bam, they're

(31:28):
gonna find it. Right Yeah, I mean, man, it's they've
dug so deep though, and so wide. How how much
deeper could they have gone back in the pirate days?
You know, I don't know. It just seems very unlikely
to me there's any treasure there. Well, then you would
be in the skeptics camp, and you would definitely not
be alone. Uh yeah, but skeptic thinking there may have

(31:49):
been something buried or some weird thing going on there,
But I don't know about treasure. Who knows though. Uh.
Skeptics will also say these are natural sinkholes, uh, instead
of traps like we said earlier. Um. They will also
say things like, you know, there's all kinds of underground
caverns around here, there's nothing special. I don't know what

(32:12):
they say about finding things like porcelain plates. I didn't
see anything like that. But you know, when he when
the stone has lost this inscripted stone. Um, when there's
no evidence really to point to except this tiny piece
of parchment paper, Like I don't know, it's pretty flimsy. Well,
none of the excavations started to be documented until the

(32:34):
nineteenth century, So all of mcguinness's early work is all
based on hearsaying conjecture. It's all up for debate. Whether
he was a teenager. Um was the block the tackle
block for the pulley? Yea, was that added to the
story later on? Um? If so, then all of a
sudden that that depression under the tree branch just becomes

(32:57):
a depression under a tree branch. You know. The pulley
was the thing. It's it's excuse my physics joke, but
the full crumb of this whole thing, you know. Yeah,
so um, if you if you start to look at
it on its face, all of this legend, you realize
that most of it is just legend, and that the

(33:18):
only real physical evidence is that scrap of parchment paper
that no one even knows whether that was planted or not. Well, yeah,
that's That's one of the things skeptics often say, is
that anything you found there is could have been planted
just to get money to fund the digs. Like look,
we found this, uh, this parchment and this porcelain plate,

(33:38):
and there's some gold dust on our auger did we
mention the coconut fiber and the coconut fiber again? Right,
so send us another like I don't know, tin mill, Yeah,
and we'll keep digging, right, So, uh, there you have
it again. Though, those those finger trains are just weird. Yeah,
that's weird for sure. It's cool. What who did what

(34:01):
they're Yeah? Basically they just need to like strip mine
the entire island all the way down there. You know.
I don't know why anyone. I haven't thought of that yet. Yeah,
just completely strip it of all its natural beauty until
it's nothing left and to destrug your shoulders afterwards, say
there's nothing here, right, Yeah? Go man. If you want

(34:24):
to know more about Oak Island, apparently you can watch
a weekly television show on it. You can also type
oak Island into the search part how stuff works. And
since I said search parts, time for listener mail. I'm
gonna call this poison ivy follow up from JB. Guys
have an interesting story about how you can get poison
ivy from more than just touching it. When I was

(34:47):
eight or so, we lived in California, had a big fireplace.
One day we decided to get our own firewood from
outside and got a couple of big logs my sister.
We were both about seven at the time. Uh we
She and I used the fire to rose marshmallows and
mixed mors. Great night. Right an hour or so later,
one of my sisters came into my parents room saying

(35:07):
she couldn't breathe. Her face had swollen to twice its
normal size, and her eyes were shut. Her throat was
barely able to pass air through it. An emergency room
trip and a shot or to the steroids later, she
was okay, but it took a while to find out
what happened. Apparently the poison ivy had been removed from
the logs we got, but the SAP was stole in
the wood, and when we burned them, the SAP was
present in the smoke, and my sister was highly allergic

(35:29):
and hailed it, got it in her throat and lungs,
and it blew up her face like a red balloon.
Best side note of this, we had passport photos. The
next day we were moving to Germany, so her passport
pick was a giant, red swollen balloon face and that
is JB and Fort So, Oklahoma. Way to go. JB.
That was a good story. You get the blue ribbon

(35:50):
for it. And I guess she had that passport photo
for a full decade unless you just had it retaken.
Would you would you live with that passport photo? I
totally what. I think it would be funny except for
the whole You know, this doesn't look like you think
that'd be a drag. It would be a huge drag.
T s A like the hassle. Yeah, but I'm I'm
well known in my family for making funny faces. Anytime

(36:13):
I have a photo idea of any kind taken just
for fun, I've always done it. That is so fun.
Family likes it. Ah, you got anything else? Nope? Okay,
Well thanks again for the awesome story, JB. If you
have a great story, you can tweet to us at
s Y s K Podcast. You can post it on

(36:34):
our Facebook page at Facebook dot com, slash stuff you
Should Know. You can put it in an email and
send it to Stuff Podcast at how stuff works dot com.
And in the meantime, while you're waiting around thinking of
what to say, go hang out at our home on
the web Stuff you Should Know dot com for more

(36:56):
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