Could Oak Island’s Mysterious Finds Be More Than Just Legend?

I don’t know why I torture myself with The Curse of Oak Island. It is an objectively bad show. Insultingly bad. And yet, here we are, coming up on the 12 November airing of season twelve, and I know that I will watch it anyway.

I had a childhood love of unsolved mysteries, ghost stories, monsters and UFOs. I was always drawn to books with titles like “Amazing Mysteries,” and instead of superhero comics (which I also enjoyed now and then) I’d often buy things like Weird Mystery Tales or other collections of science-fiction and horror — some of which ended up stashed at the bottom of a drawer after giving me nightmares.

It was in one of these books of Sasquatch sightings and haunted houses that I first read about Oak Island and its hidden treasure — a treasure that still hasn’t been found, and may have (let’s face it) never existed.

Ifyou’ve never heard of it, Oak Island is a relatively small island in Nova Scotia, not far from Halifax. Local legend says that in 1795, a teenager named Daniel McGinnis and two of his friends found an unusual depression in the ground. Spurred on by a story that Captain Kidd had buried a treasure on the island, they decided to start digging. At each ten-foot interval, they found a layer of oak logs, but only more dirt beneath. They dug until they could dig no further.

More treasure hunters arrived, and they continued to dig until they hit 90 feet, at which point they found a stone with strange markings on it — a code using symbols instead of letters. Then, upon the stone’s removal, the shaft flooded with water and digging had to stop.

This part of the story is apocryphal, but it fascinated me. Here was a real Canadian mystery, unsolved even today — a possible pirate’s treasure. And with full faith in our improved technology, I waited for it to be solved.

I am still waiting.

Cue the arrival of The Curse of Oak Island — in theory, a documentary of the attempts by Michigan-born treasure hunters Rick and Marty Lagina to find the treasure, or at least solve the mystery of what, if anything, happened there.

The Curse of Oak Island is brought to us by the History Channel — which these days is less about history and more about mystery, conspiracy and the paranormal.

Oak Island is right in the middle of this oeuvre of awful.

The titular ‘curse’ appears to date back about 100 years, although its source is murky. It states that seven people must die in the search, before the treasure can be found.

Prior to the production, six had already died, and clearly, the show hoped to reap the benefits of this curse angle — which, when you really think about it, reads like a sick expectation that someone will die during filming. (Ironically, at least three parties involved in the search have died since the show started, but this doesn’t seem to matter. The unspoken corollary is that someone needs to die in some kind of gruesome accident, rather than from disease or natural causes.)

Whether the ‘treasure,’ if there ever was one, is Spanish silver hidden away by William Phips, the lost Ark of the Covenant, the folios of William Shakespeare, or treasures looted from the Holy Land by the Knights Templar, no substatial trace of it has been found.

But other things have.

In the process of all this digging, a lot of mystifying history has been unearthed on the island. Enough to make even a hardened sceptic believe that something fairly major (or several things) happened there prior to any recorded habitation. And, over time, the show has begun to do some genuine archaeology. And that’s what keeps me watching, treasure or no treasure.

If you wade through the insulting idiocy of the show’s production, an interesting story is being relegated to the background simply because the producers, after 224 episodes, are still trying to make a tense, supernatural thriller out of a methodical, archaeological investigation.

I’m going to proceed under the assumption that the show is not a complete fabrication. If one day, everything is revealed to have been a fiction, then I will admit that I was hoodwinked. But sourcing and planting the kind of artefacts that the team continues to discover would, I imagine, be beyond the budget of the show itself. And some artefacts and locations — such as the buried stone road, and the many piers and other wooden structures found near the beach — would be nearly impossible to fake.

Explain it to me again like I’m five
First and foremost, the very structure of the show is ridiculous. Many fans have commented on it — the fact that if you were to cut away the never-ending recaps of what happened two years ago, one week ago, or even ten minutes ago, you would be left with about fifteen minutes of actual new material.

I quite literally watch with one finger on the fast-forward button just to skip through hearing about the Templars for the twenty-seventh time, skip through the recap of what happened ten minutes before the ad, and skip through the flashbacks from last week’s episode which I saw, well, last week. It is the only sane way to watch.

Second, the narration is among the most mind-numbing nonsense that you will ever have to listen to. At times — most times — the narrator repeats exactly what you have just seen, adding, ‘Could it be that the team have discovered an important connection to Europe, and thus to the Knights Templar and the treasure they carried to North America?’ It is always in the form of a question. And the answer is always, ‘I don’t know, why don’t you shut your cakehole and let them carry on?’

When I first moved to London, and watched the show on Sky, I was overjoyed to find they had replaced the show’s stultifying American narrator with a British one. The British narrator has a subtle West-country accent (because, you know — treasure and pirates and all that) and for the first few episodes he seemed much less irritating. But sometimes a change is as good as a rest, and after a few episodes, it was clear that the repetition and bizarre conjectures of the original narrator had simply been given to a less grating personality.

Some people suggest that, due to the lack of actual discovery, the show uses the narration to to fill out the hour. I think it’s worse than that. I believe that the show thinks so little of its audience that when a scientist explains a concept to the team, the producers bring in the narrator to repeat it and dumb it down.

Sometimes the narrator comes in to tell us things that are patently obvious: ‘Finding the swamp full of water after the storm is a frustrating setback for the team.’

The audience, in the producers’ opinion, is too thick to understand anything above a middle-school level of reading, too stupid to draw conclusions that have been made clear through camerawork and editing, and even unable to comprehend what was literally explained to them onscreen five seconds earlier. The audience must also be reminded regularly of what happened just five minutes ago. And last week.

Oak Island’s target audience is, for all intents and purposes, a tank full of goldfish.