Dave’s Oak Island page

2/07/26: For the second time, my Oak Island page grew very long. I shortened it once back in 2019 by cutting a bunch of the "fat." This time, I decided to simply archive the page, so to speak, and start anew, with the initial focus being on my most relevant contributions. The original page is now here: Oak Island - theory.

So from the start of the show, "The Curse of Oak Island," back in 2013, I attempted to satisfy my curiosity as to what the subsurface topography actually looked like under the Money Pit. This was back before any seismic study or muon tomography, of course, when all one had to go on were books, a few internet articles, old Oak Island documents, and the drilling operation on the show.

The end result was the diagram below. Even today, I don't think I could improve on it much, and I have a lot of confidence in its accuracy, in general.

Last spring (2025), I got the idea that the money pit might have been marked by a stone, discovered by Fred Nolan I believe, known as "gray drilled rock." My theory did not pan out, though, as I came to the conclusion that the Garden Shaft (upper right of the diagram) and a shaft located off its southwest corner were most likely two shafts sunk by the Oak Island Treasure Company in the 1890s.

The gray drilled rock would be the same area where the drill hit an air pocket that sent a blast of air and water up and out of the drill pipe in borehole AB-13 in S9, E10 of "Curse." The reason I am including the following diagram is that later on, I discovered a drill pipe, A.5N-11.5, that deviated in such a way as to mimic my hypothetical money pit. It could very well be a coincidence, of course, but it is unusual, I think, for a drill to deviate with such a constant curve.

It should be noted that my position for the gray drilled rock was based on the Restall map. Steve Guptill has placed the rock 6' west of where the Restall map suggests it was, close to the surface position of the previously mentioned borehole, A.5N-11.5, with about a 3' margin for error, and it stands to reason that Fred Nolan probably surveyed it at some point, so maybe there is another map I am not aware of.

I created the following diagram last fall to fill an "information gap" regarding some of the things that have been discovered recently and in the past that might point to the Money Pit, that is - the classic location of the Money Pit. Bear in mind that there are a couple shafts that have been discovered near the Money Pit, one to the south and one to the west, that are not depicted. And the show keeps altering the orientation of that shaft north of the Hedden Shaft (the one labeled "C" on my diagram).

As you can see, there seems to be two locations that everything points to, one about 6' 6" or so from the other. I have come up with a theory about all this since drawing the diagram, which is: The Money Pit was originally centered around the same point as the center point, labeled "4" in the diagram, for the semi-circular tunnel discovered by the Hedden Shaft; and then 45 years after the Onslow Company ceased their operation, when the Truro Company began their operation, the Money Pit was shifted about 6' 6" north. One can only speculate how this happened. In any event, the shift did not stop John Pitbladdo from finding a silver coin, if there is truth to that whole story.

It wasn't until 1863, then, that the Oak Island Association finally rediscovered the exact centerpoint of the Money Pit,, by which time most of the shafts in the immediate vicinity had already been sunk. The circular tunnel was then dug around the Money Pit's perimeter by the OIA, or perhaps a few years later by the Halifax Company.