The Money Pit: 230 Years of Digging on Oak Island

2026-07-15 · Enigmatic Places · 8 min read

In the summer of 1795 a teenager named Daniel McGinnis rowed out to a small wooded island in Mahone Bay, off the coast of Nova Scotia in Canada. In a clearing he found an old oak and, directly beneath one of its limbs, a shallow saucer shaped depression in the ground, as though something heavy had once been lowered there. Accounts written decades later add a ship's tackle block hanging from the limb. McGinnis rowed back with two friends, John Smith and Anthony Vaughan, and the three began to dig.

A few feet down they struck a layer of flagstones that did not belong in that soil. Below it the walls of the shaft carried the marks of old picks, and at about ten feet they reached a platform of oak logs set into the clay, their ends notched into the sides of the pit. At roughly twenty feet there was a second platform, and a third at thirty. The boys stopped at about thirty feet, out of strength and daylight. Whatever the shaft was, someone had dug it before them and filled it back in.

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