For hundreds of years, treasure hunters have ventured to Nova Scotia, Canada and tried to recover the treasure lies in the Money Pit, protected by a series of ingenious traps. As treasure hunters have attempted to recover the bounty from the Money Pit, cleverly engineered flood tunnels flood the shaft with sea water.
Strange man made artifacts have been recovered from the pit over the years, but to this day, the treasure still remains buried. Pirates, the Knights Templar or Francis Bacon - no one is sure exactly who created this mysterious Money Pit or why. With excavations now taking place, discover the World's greatest treasure hunt for yourself.
Oak Island
Lets go back to the beginning and retell the whole story.
The year is 1795 and a young Canadian called Daniel McGinnis has been seeing strange lights coming from nearby Oak Island, a few days after the event he travels to the island and after a bit of exploring he finds an impression in the ground, with a tackle block rigged to a tree branch above it. Daniel returns to the island a few days later with 2 friends (Anthony Vaughan and John Smith) to begin digging for what has been disturbed in the ground. On the pit walls there were visible markings from a pick. As they dug down they discovered layers of logs at about every 10 feet (3.0 m). They abandoned the excavation at 30 feet (9.1 m) as they did not have the equipment or man power to continue.
Roughly eight years after the 1795 excavation, according to the original articles and the memories of Vaughan, another company examined what was to become known as the "Money Pit." The Onslow Company sailed 300 nautical miles (560 km) from central Nova Scotia near Truro to Oak Island with the goal of recovering what they believed to be secret treasure. They continued the excavation down to approximately 90 feet (27.43 m) and found layers of logs or "marks" about every ten feet (3 m) and layers of charcoal, putty and coconut fibre at 40, 50 and 60 feet.
According to one of the earliest written accounts, at 80–90 feet (24–27 m), they recovered a large stone bearing an inscription of symbols. Several researchers apparently attempted to decipher the symbols. One translated them as saying: "forty feet below, two million pounds lie buried." The symbols currently associated with the "forty feet down..." At 93 feet deep, the floor of the pit began to turn into soft mud. Before the end of that day the crew probed the bottom of the shaft with a crowbar hoping to find something. They hit a barrier as wide and as long as the shaft. The group speculated that they'd finally reached the treasure vault and went to bed with the expectations that tomorrow a fortune would be theirs.
Returning the next day, the crew was shocked to find that overnight the pit had filled with 60 feet of water. Bailing was useless. As soon as water was removed from the pit, more flowed in to take its place. An attempt was made to dig another shaft nearby and get at the treasure by running a tunnel underneath the pit, but the new shaft flooded as soon as the tunnel got close to its objective.
