Rick Lagina: “This Is The Most Mysterious Ancient Structure We’ve Ever Found!”

13 ft. That is the exact same dimension as the money pit.

Believe in Zena Halpern’s work. I believe that the map represents some features on the island.

Um, is it possible that this might be the hatch? There are a lot of possibilities on this island.

For over 200 years, Oak Island’s mystery focused on the money pit. But Rick Lagina’s team just uncovered something that changes everything.

A bizarre shaft with ancient wood, strange dimensions, and traces of gold. Rick calls it their most mysterious find yet. And just beyond that gold-laced timber could be the answer to who built it and why.

The garden shaft’s golden secret.

The story of the garden shaft began not with a bang, but with a tribute. When the team first uncovered the 82 ft deep shaft, it was assumed to be just another hole dug by long-gone searchers.

In a heartfelt gesture, Rick Lagina and his right-hand man Billy Ghart built a beautiful rock garden around it. A memorial to the women connected to the 228-year long quest.

For a time, that’s all it was, a quiet spot on a mysterious island. But truth be told, Oak Island never lets things stay quiet for long.

The first clue that something was deeply wrong with the official story came from geoscientist Dr. Ian Spooner. His water test from bore holes near the shaft came back with a bombshell discovery.

Traces of gold samples of the water from the well. And uh it was one of our only silver hits outside of the money pit and not just trace amounts. These were significant hits.

Suddenly the forgotten garden shaft was the number one priority.

Rick, his brother Marty, and their partner Craig Tester made a bold decision. They commissioned Dumach Contracting, a heavy-duty professional mining company, to completely rebuild and secure the shaft so they could explore it safely.

It was a massive undertaking, a multi-million dollar gamble on a hunch.

As the miners descended, the team sent wood samples from the shaft’s original structure for testing. The results were mind-blowing.

Archometallurgist Emma Culligan ran a scan on a piece of wood from 50 ft down and found what they were all hoping for. More gold embedded right in the timber itself.

And from this one, I detected gold. Wow.

This proved that a massive amount of gold had been moved through this shaft at some point, but the biggest shock was yet to come.

Carbon dating on the wood placed the shaft’s construction to a time before 1795, the year the money pit was first discovered. This was no searcher shaft. This was an original depositor-built structure.

The team realized they might be in a part of the original money pit works or even more incredibly, a separate secret vault.

The tension was palpable.

With the shaft secured, metal detection expert Gary Drayton was lowered to the bottom. Below 82 ft of earth, his detector didn’t just beep, it screamed.

Oak Island is an island of what-ifs and possibilities. But I want more than that. We all want more than that.

He pinpointed a massive non-ferrous target. Gold or silver buried just a few feet deeper. They had boxed in the treasure.

But as they prepared for the final push, another discovery on the other side of the island revealed a structure with an even more bizarre and direct connection to the money pit’s original design.

While the garden shaft was yielding its golden secrets, the team turned their attention to Lot 5, a mysterious plot of land on the western side of the island.

This property had once belonged to a fellow treasure hunter, the late Robert Young, who had always insisted the lot held its own unique secrets.

When the Lagginas purchased it, they did so to honor his legacy and continue his work.

And believe it or not, they almost immediately found things that would have made Robert Young proud:

A 2,000-year-old Roman coin, a strange lead token possibly linked to the Knight’s Templar, and the stone foundations of a very old building.

But the real mystery was a strange circular stone depression that nobody could explain. At first glance, it looked like the cellar of an old barn, crudely made and filled with dirt.

But as archaeologist Larard Nvin and the team began to clear it, they noticed it was almost perfectly circular. It was clearly man-made and constructed with a purpose.

“Sounds to me like the top feature is not just an apron. It’s the limits of quite a massive structure.”

Yes. Rick, always driven by curiosity, suggested they measure it just to see if the dimensions meant anything.

What they found sent a shock wave through the entire fellowship.

The diameter of the circular stone feature was exactly 13 ft.

“All right, so you’re lined up with the edge.”
“Yeah. Here we’re at 13 ft.”

It’s a bizarre measurement. That is the exact same dimension as the original money pit as described by its discoverers back in 1795.

A circular depression lined with stones 13 ft across. It was a mirror image.

The question was immediate and staggering. What were they looking at? Was this a decoy money pit? A practice run? Or was it something else? Something connected to the hole under the hatch mentioned on Zena Halpern’s mysterious Templar map.

The map, which Zena believed was a 14th century guide to the island secrets, clearly marks a hatch in the area of Lot 5.

The team had been searching for it for years, and now they were standing in a structure that could very well be it.

The find was so strange and out of place that it defied easy explanation. The pottery found within dated to the mid-700s, proving the structure predated the main treasure hunt.

But the deeper they dug, the more complex it became, revealing layers of construction that suggested it was a truly ancient feature that had been rebuilt over time.

It was an incredible find, but an even older structure on another part of the island would soon push the timeline back to a point that seemed utterly impossible.

13 ft.
That is the exact same dimension as the money pit.

Believe in Zena Halpern’s work.
I believe that the map represents some features on the island.
Um, is it possible that this might be the hatch?
There are a lot of possibilities on this island.

For over 200 years, Oak Island’s mystery focused on the money pit.
But Rick Lagina’s team just uncovered something that changes everything.
A bizarre shaft with ancient wood, strange dimensions, and traces of gold.
Rick calls it their most mysterious find yet.
And just beyond that gold lace timber could be the answer to who built it and why.

The garden shaft’s golden secret.

The story of the garden shaft began not with a bang, but with a tribute.
When the team first uncovered the 82 ft deep shaft, it was assumed to be just another hole dug by long-gone searchers.
In a heartfelt gesture, Rick Lagina and his right-hand man Billy Ghart built a beautiful rock garden around it.
A memorial to the women connected to the 228-year long quest.
For a time, that’s all it was, a quiet spot on a mysterious island.
But truth be told, Oak Island never lets things stay quiet for long.

The first clue that something was deeply wrong with the official story came from geoscientist Dr. Ian Spooner.
His water test from bore holes near the shaft came back with a bombshell discovery.
Traces of gold samples of the water from the well.
And uh it was one of our only silver hits outside of the money pit and not just trace amounts.
These were significant hits.
Suddenly the forgotten garden shaft was the number one priority.

Rick, his brother Marty, and their partner Craig Tester made a bold decision.
They commissioned Dumach Contracting, a heavy-duty professional mining company, to completely rebuild and secure the shaft so they could explore it safely.
It was a massive undertaking, a multi-million dollar gamble on a hunch.

As the miners descended, the team sent wood samples from the shaft’s original structure for testing.
The results were mind-blowing.
Archaeometallurgist Emma Culligan ran a scan on a piece of wood from 50 ft down and found what they were all hoping for.
More gold embedded right in the timber itself.
And from this one, I detected gold.
Wow.
This proved that a massive amount of gold had been moved through this shaft at some point, but the biggest shock was yet to come.

Carbon dating on the wood placed the shaft’s construction to a time before 1795, the year the money pit was first discovered.
This was no searcher shaft.
This was an original depositor-built structure.
The team realized they might be in a part of the original money pit works or even more incredibly a separate secret vault.

The tension was palpable.
With the shaft secured, metal detection expert Gary Drayton was lowered to the bottom.
Below 82 ft of earth, his detector didn’t just beep, it screamed.
Oak Island is an island of what-ifs and possibilities.
But I want more than that.
We all want more than that.
He pinpointed a massive non-ferris target.
Gold or silver buried just a few feet deeper.
They had boxed in the treasure.

But as they prepared for the final push, another discovery on the other side of the island revealed a structure with an even more bizarre and direct connection to the money pit’s original design.

While the garden shaft was yielding its golden secrets, the team turned their attention to Lot 5, a mysterious plot of land on the western side of the island.
This property had once belonged to a fellow treasure hunter, the late Robert Young, who had always insisted the lot held its own unique secrets.
When the Lagginas purchased it, they did so to honor his legacy and continue his work.

And believe it or not, they almost immediately found things that would have made Robert Young proud.
A 2,000-year-old Roman coin, a strange lead token possibly linked to the Knights Templar, and the stone foundations of a very old building.

But the real mystery was a strange circular stone depression that nobody could explain.
At first glance, it looked like the cellar of an old barn, crudely made and filled with dirt.
But as archaeologist Larard Nvin and the team began to clear it, they noticed it was almost perfectly circular.
It was clearly man-made and constructed with a purpose.

Sounds to me like the top feature is not just an apron.
It’s the limits of quite a massive structure.
Yes.
Rick, always driven by curiosity, suggested they measure it just to see if the dimensions meant anything.
What they found sent a shock wave through the entire fellowship.

The diameter of the circular stone feature was exactly 13 ft.
All right, so you’re lined up with the edge.
Yeah.
Here we’re at 13 ft.
It’s a bizarre measurement.
That is the exact same dimension as the original money pit as described by its discoverers back in 1795.
A circular depression lined with stones 13 ft across.
It was a mirror image.

The question was immediate and staggering.
What were they looking at?
Was this a decoy money pit?
A practice run or was it something else?
Something connected to the hole under the hatch mentioned on Zena Halpern’s mysterious Templar map.

The map, which Zena believed was a 14th century guide to the island secrets, clearly marks a hatch in the area of Lot 5.
The team had been searching for it for years, and now they were standing in a structure that could very well be it.
The find was so strange and out of place that it defied easy explanation.

The pottery found within dated to the mid-700s, proving the structure predated the main treasure hunt.
But the deeper they dug, the more complex it became, revealing layers of construction that suggested it was a truly ancient feature that had been rebuilt over time.
It was an incredible find, but an even older structure on another part of the island would soon push the timeline back to a point that seemed utterly impossible.

The well that rewrites history.

For years, a strange crude looking well on Lot 26 had been a minor curiosity.
Located less than 100 ft from a mysterious stone wall believed to date to the 1600s, it had one very odd property that always bugged Rick Lagina.
It never froze in the winter.
From the moment I saw the well in the wintertime years ago, this simple fact suggested something was unusual about its water source.

This nagging detail led Rick to ask Dr. Spooner to run a full analysis of the water from the well.
And uh it was one of our only silver hits outside of the money pit.
The first results were once again stunning.
The water in this unassuming well contained one of the only silver hits ever found on the island outside of the money pit area itself.
The connection was undeniable.
Something of value had been in or near this well.

Driven by this new data, the team began a full excavation, revealing a well that was much larger and more professionally built than it first appeared.
But as with everything on Oak Island, the real secret was buried at the bottom.

Dr. Spooner took core samples from the deepest point, pulling up organic material like twigs that had been trapped in the sediment for centuries.
When the carbon dating results came back from the lab, they weren’t just surprising, they were history shattering.

The material at the bottom of the well dated to a period between 1028 and 1172 AD.
The date I got on the twig at the bottom was um 1028 to 1172.
Let that sink in.

This wasn’t just pre-795.
This was pre-Columbus.
This was the Viking age.
It was hundreds of years before the Knights Templar were even thought to have been on the island.

The discovery blew everyone away.
What was a European style well doing on Oak Island nearly a thousand years ago?
It completely upended every known theory.

The well on Lot 26, the circular depression on Lot 5, and the garden shaft in the money pit area suddenly looked less like separate mysteries and more like pieces of the same impossibly ancient puzzle.
These weren’t just structures.
They were proof of a massive long-term operation on Oak Island that began a thousand years ago.

Perhaps the most famous of these is the Knights Templar theory, a fan favorite that has gained significant traction on The Curse of Oak Island.
This theory posits that the fabled Christian military order, which was disbanded and brutally persecuted in the early 14th century, used Oak Island as a secret refuge to bury their immense treasure.
This horde is believed to be nothing less than the sacred relics of Christianity itself, including the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant, along with countless chests of gold and silver.

The theory hinges on several key pieces of evidence found on the island, such as the mysterious stone cross discovered at Smith’s Cove and the so-called Templar map from Zena Halpern, which allegedly shows an underground vault.
Proponents of this theory point to the advanced engineering of the flood tunnels and the money pit itself as evidence that a highly organized and technologically sophisticated group like the Templars was behind the construction.

However, skeptics argue that these associations are tenuous at best and that the finds are simply the result of wishful thinking and creative interpretation.

Another theory, equally sensational, involves the legendary pirate Captain William Kidd.
This is one of the oldest theories about the island, dating back to the late 1700s when Daniel McGinness first discovered the money pit.
According to this narrative, Kidd, who was executed for piracy in 1701, buried his massive treasure on the island, creating a complex series of booby traps to protect it.

While the theory has been largely debunked by modern historians who argue that Kidd’s treasure was never that significant, it has continued to fuel the imagination of searchers for over two centuries.
The story of Captain Kidd is interwoven with tales of a curse that states, “Seven men must die before the treasure is found.”
To date, six men have lost their lives in the pursuit of the treasure.
A chilling fact that adds a supernatural layer to the island’s lore and makes every new discovery all the more dramatic.

The Bacon-Shakespeare authorship theory, while less popular today, once held significant sway.
This theory suggests that the Elizabethan philosopher and statesman Sir Francis Bacon, a presumed member of the Rosicrucian or Freemasons, was the true author of Shakespeare’s plays.
The idea is that Bacon hid the original manuscripts and other historical documents on Oak Island to keep them safe from his political enemies.

This theory, championed by the likes of Franklin D. Roosevelt, suggests that the treasure is not gold or jewels, but a literary and historical secret that would rewrite the history books.
Proponents point to the mysterious 1701 stone, which was allegedly found in the money pit and said to contain a cipher that points to the buried treasure.
While the stone itself has been lost, the theory persists as one of the most eccentric in the island’s long history.

But for every wild theory, there’s a corresponding scandal or controversy.
One of the biggest centers around the very existence of the money pit itself.
Skeptics argue that the money pit is nothing more than a natural sinkhole or a series of old abandoned wells from a long-lost fishing or whaling operation.
They claim that the so-called treasure is simply a collection of debris left by early searchers and that the flood tunnels are nothing more than natural water channels that have been misinterpreted.

This theory is bolstered by the fact that many of the original artifacts, such as the inscribed stone tablet with the cryptic message about 2 million pounds, have been lost to history, with some critics suggesting they were fabricated to attract more funding for the hunts.
The most damning evidence for the hoax theory is the discovery in the 1940s of a second money pit on the island.
It was reportedly a sinkhole with logs at regular intervals, but the hunt there was abandoned, further fueling suspicions that the stories were a self-perpetuating myth.

The controversies extend to the present day.
Critics of The Curse of Oak Island often accuse the show of stretching the truth and sensationalizing minor finds to maintain viewer interest.
They point to the constant cycle of new discoveries that lead to dead ends, arguing that the show is more about creating drama than it is about solving the mystery.

Some historians and archaeologists have also voiced concerns about the environmental impact of the large-scale digging operations, arguing that the search for treasure is destroying invaluable archaeological evidence that could tell a different, more grounded story about the island’s history.
Perhaps as a colonial era military outpost or a ship-building hub.

The Pineetar kills and other finds in the swamp area, some argue, point to this more plausible history rather than a hidden treasure vault.

The scandals and theories of Oak Island are as much a part of its identity as the treasure hunt itself.
They are the whispers in the wind that keep searchers coming back year after year and the reason that the island’s mystery endures.
They highlight the enduring human desire to believe in the impossible, to chase a ghost, and to uncover a secret that could change everything we think we know about history.

The Lagginas may have uncovered ancient structures, but the ghosts of these past scandals and theories are what truly give Oak Island its undying life.
These incredible structures prove the Oak Island mystery is far older and more complex than anyone ever dreamed.
What ancient group had the power and resources to build these things a thousand years ago?

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