It always starts the same way. Do >> you know where that is?
>> A shovel hits the ground. The music swells. The narrator lowers his voice like he’s about to reveal a state secret. Could it be the clue that finally unlocks the greatest mystery in North America? Spoiler [music] alert, it isn’t. Cut to two middle-aged brothers squinting at a map that looks like it was photocopied at Kinko’s in 1994.
One’s wearing a hard hat, the other’s holding a stick like it’s an ancient artifact. This is the curse of Oak Island, or by season 12, what it probably should have been called, whose origin may stretch back to the days of the [music] Knights Templar.
>> The curse of weekly cliffhers. Once upon a time, Oak Island was pure television gold. A legendary mystery wrapped in a centuries old curse sprinkled with just enough history and paranoia to make your uncle start ranting about the Freemasons at Thanksgiving dinner. It had everything. Sunken treasure, death lore, Templar fanfiction, and most importantly, hope.
>> Excavating the massive shaft known as DMT has proven to be more difficult and frustrating.
>> Hope that this time they’d find something, anything that wasn’t wood.
And for a while, we were hooked. The thrill of discovery, the dramatic music, the slowly rotating 3D graphics, the fantasy that maybe, just maybe, two charming brothers from Michigan could outsmart a 230-year-old booby trapped money pit and strike historical gold.
But somewhere along the way, the pit got deeper and the show got dumber.
>> It’s strong enough to slow that thing down on a pre-ball. That’s crazy. Now, more than a decade later, we’re left with a question far more mysterious than any buried treasure. What the hell happened to Oak Island? Before Oak Island became a meme, before the gloves mysteriously changed positions between cuts, and before the phrase we have wood, became a running gag, it was just that, a hole in the ground.
Specifically, the money pit discovered in 1795 by teenagers who apparently thought, “Yes, this suspicious depression in the dirt is definitely pirate related.” Thus began North America’s longest running case of collective delusion. Over the next 200 years, hundreds of men with too much time and not enough engineering knowledge would nearly die digging around in mud, convinced there was treasure just 10 ft lower. Spoiler, there wasn’t.
>> As to where to put that, you think we’re on to a target.
>> But hey, at least six people died trying, which according to local legend means one more has to die before the treasure can be found. And nothing says great television like light murder prophecy. Enter the Lagginina brothers.
[music] Rick Lagginina, a postal worker with a dream. Marty Lagginina, an energy magnate with the budget to indulge it.
Together, they weren’t just hunting treasure. They were living the American dream.
>> Marty and the team were convinced they had located the vault at a depth of some 170 ft.
>> Turning childhood obsession into multi-season content. Their entry point, a dusty 1965 Reader Digest article claiming, “There is something down there, but for 170 years, no one has been able to solve the riddle of how to get at it.” In normal people, that sparks curiosity. In Rick Lagginina, it sparked a borderline lifelong fixation.
The Oak Island team will next pump water and sludge out of the DMT shaft >> and the purchase of part of a cursed Canadian island. And then came the golden ticket, History Channel, also known as the place where real history goes to die and is reborn as speculative documentainment with dramatic CGI reenactments and spooky voiceovers >> as if it had been pushed out of the way and sent even further below ground.
>> In 2014, The Curse of Oak Island premiered and almost instantly it worked. America was hooked. By season 4, it was beating WWE Smackdown in ratings.
Think about that. Two guys talking about mud outperformed professional wrestling.
It was Indiana Jones for suburban dads.
Da Vinci Code for people who still burn CDs. And for a while, it was beautiful.
>> This is This would have been the main part of the castle. It’s been rebuilt since the Cathers were here.
>> But Treasure TV, like most treasure hunts, comes with a catch. Eventually, you have to find something. Or do you?
At first, the cracks were easy to ignore. a rusted nail here, a weathered plank there, a dramatic close-up of something that looked important until it turned out to be another piece of wood.
Again, the narration insisted this could be the most significant discovery yet.
While viewers at home quietly muttered, “Haven’t we done this already?” Because slowly, unmistakably, a pattern emerged.
>> Vast accumulations of golden jewels were buried on Oak Island for safekeeping.
>> Every episode began to feel familiar in a way that wasn’t comforting. It was alarming. The formula revealed itself, and once you saw it, you couldn’t unsee it. The narrator would ask a breathless question. Could this be the clue that finally explains the mystery? The team would rush in. Excitement, serious faces, big music, then the reveal, a fragment of wood, or a nail or a rock, cut to a glossy 3D animation showing how this object might somehow connect to the Knights Templar, ancient Rome, Freemasons, pirates, or why not all of them at once. Commercial break. Author and Templar researcher Kathleen McGawan Coppins has come to Oak Island.
>> And repeat, this wasn’t mystery anymore.
It was ritual. By season 5, longtime viewers weren’t just skeptical, they were confused. People started noticing that new discoveries looked suspiciously similar to things found years earlier.
Reddit threads popped up asking uncomfortable questions like, “Didn’t they already pull this exact thing out in season 2?” Watching the show became less about discovery and more about memory tests.
By the 1700s, fueled by the spread of the fur trade, >> and that’s when the audience shifted.
Oak Island stopped being watched earnestly and started being watched ironically. Online, fans began turning frustration into humor. Subreddits with names like we have wood again and top pocket lies became gathering places for viewers processing the same shared experience. Hope followed by disappointment followed by laughter.
Memes exploded. Drinking games formed.
The phrase, “We have wood,” transformed from dramatic declaration into punchline. Gary Drayton, the British metal detecting enthusiast, became the unexpected star. Not because he found treasure, but because his catchphrases became internet folklore. Top pocket find. Bobby Dazzler. It didn’t even matter what they meant anymore. They became symbols of a show that now felt self-aware, or worse, willfully oblivious. But jokes turned into suspicion when viewers began scrutinizing the editing itself.
>> Can see some sort of figure.
>> Yeah. But I tell you what, mate. Rick and Gary shake and bait.
>> Fans started pointing out continuity errors. Small at first, gloves changing between cuts, hand positions shifting, objects appearing cleaner than expected.
Individually, these moments were easy to dismiss. Reality TV is messy. Editing happens. But then came what many fans now point to as the breaking point.
During season 12, episode 11, a team member uncovered a chunk of lead from a swampy area. The moment was treated like a revelation. The music swelled. The narration framed it as potentially historic. But viewers noticed something else. Between shots, the object appeared to move. Gloves changed. The positioning didn’t match. Screenshots circulated.
Sidebyside comparisons went viral. No one officially accused the show of outright fraud. But the implication was unavoidable. If you were going to look for the treasure of the Knights Temple right [music] now today, you would look on Oak Island.
>> At best, the editing was sloppy. At worst, it looked staged and perception matters. The reaction online was immediate and intense. Reddit threads exploded. Comment sections filled with disbelief. Some viewers shrugged it off as standard reality TV manipulation.
Others felt betrayed. One comment summed up the mood perfectly. The only thing cursed is the continuity editing. What followed was silence. No clarification, no behind-the-scenes explanation, no attempt to reassure viewers who felt like the illusion had cracked. And that silence did more damage than any editing error ever could. Because from that moment on, every discovery became suspect. Every artifact raised an eyebrow. Every dramatic pause felt calculated. [music] The benefit of the doubt, the thing the show had survived on for years, was gone. Even longtime cast absences went unexplained. Dave Blankenship’s quiet disappearance after season 7 left fans confused and frustrated. The show moved on without acknowledgement, reinforcing the growing sense that storytelling now mattered more than truth. One first given to the region by members of the Knights Templar >> and optics more than people. Academics and historians had been skeptical for years, but now their criticism gained traction. The show wasn’t just being mocked online. It was being openly labeled as pseudo history. Entertainment dressed up as archaeology. Mystery stretched so thin it became parody. By the time the Nova Scotia government formally restricted digging and required certified archaeological oversight, it felt less like regulation and more like intervention. A reminder that this wasn’t just a TV set. It was a real place being treated like a content mine.
And that’s when it became clear the collapse didn’t happen because they failed to find treasure. It happened because viewers realized the show no longer needed to. Oak Island had crossed a line from mystery to mechanism, from belief to brand, from treasure hunt to content loop. And once you see that, there’s no going back. At this point, watching the curse of Oak Island is less like following an epic treasure hunt, and more like doing jury duty for a crime that never happened. We’ve entered the Groundhog Day phase. Every episode is the same. The same questions, the same dramatic zooms, the same discovery of a nail that is potentially medieval, but looks like it came from your uncle’s toolbox. subsurface treasure had been recovered. What else might be out there?
>> It’s no longer a mystery show. It’s a procedural about disappointment. Let’s talk structure. Every single episode now follows this rigid, unholy rhythm. One, open with a recap of the last three seasons. Two, show a team member pulling out a stick from a swamp. Three, cut to 3D animation suggesting this stick could have belonged to the Knights Templar, a pirate, or Jesus himself. Four, end with a cliffhanger. Could this be the proof we’ve been searching for? Five. Spoiler.
It’s not. Repeat. Every week. It’s the fast and furious of treasure shows.
>> Got about four more feet of water in here. We’re going to try to [music] try to get out.
>> Except instead of cars, we get planks.
Instead of explosions, we get sonar scans of rocks. And instead of Vin Diesel talking about family, we get Gary Drayton yelling, “It’s a Bobby Dazzler over a bent nail.” And look, the internet has noticed. Reddit is full of memes like we have wood the documentary Oak Island season 12 episode 4 plank watch 2025. Gary finds a rusty spoon and the narrator asks if it’s part of the Ark of the Covenant. Tik Tok edits parody the show’s narration cutting clips together where every scene ends in could it be? Followed by no, it’s a twig. Even the official social media accounts get roasted in the replies every time they tease a game-changing discovery. replies range from sure Jan to you found Jesus’s iPhone yet? The tragic part, people aren’t [music] mad anymore. They’re just numb. We’ve gone from emotional investment to emotional resignation. Nobody expects gold. Nobody expects a real breakthrough.
>> A chest?
Could this lock plate have [music] come from one of the three missing chest?
>> Hell, nobody even expects new footage.
They just want something, anything, [music] to justify their 12 season relationship with a muddy hole in the ground. Meanwhile, the producers are still pretending this is a highstakes mystery instead of a highly polished waiting room magazine. And yet, History Channel won’t let it die. Why? Because even now, with ratings dropping, the show still pulls in millions. Because disappointment sells as long as it’s delivered with enough dramatic music and slow zooms. Because maybe, just maybe, this is the real treasure. Not gold, not relics, but viewer loyalty. The kind you can mine forever. Like a cursed island that gives just enough to keep you coming back. but never enough to let you leave. In the end, The Curse of Oak Island wasn’t about treasure. It was about the dream of treasure. About two brothers chasing a childhood obsession across 230 years of speculation, drowning in mud, mystery, and mediocre Neielson ratings. And for a while, that dream almost worked. We wanted to believe. We needed to believe because deep down we all have that irrational hope that X really does mark the spot.
That the past left us something shiny.
that just beneath the surface lies a truth worth digging for. But here’s the problem.
>> All designed to protect [music] whatever lies at the bottom of the pit.
>> If you dig long enough without finding anything, you don’t just hit rock bottom, you become the bottom. And that’s exactly what happened. What started as an adventure became a treadmill. What began with heart became a format. And what could have ended with dignity became season 12, episode 11, the one with the planted lead chunk, the real curse of Oak Island. It was never the booby traps or the flood tunnels or the ancient death prophecy. It was believing that History Channel wouldn’t screw it up. Because if there’s one thing this show taught us, it’s this.
Sometimes the real treasure was the marketing budget we lost along the way.
>> If true, it could mean the object was placed there deliberately and hundreds of years ago.
>> So, can the curse of Oak Island be saved? Maybe. But only if they finally find something, something real, something big, something that isn’t wood. Until then, like, subscribe, and
tell us in the comments what you think is more buried, the treasure, or this shows integrity.
