The Curse of Oak Island: STUNNING DISCOVERY LINKED TO MONEY PIT (Season 4) | History

CRAIG TESTER: Left hand chop.
NARRATOR: Rick Lagina and Craig Tester have arrived just in time to witness a potentially momentous discovery.

CRAIG TESTER: I’m going to go look at that bucket drop. Different type of wood now. So that almost looks like it was a vertical timber by the way it came up.

CRAIG TESTER: What depth do you have us at?
NARRATOR: 102 feet.
CRAIG TESTER: 102? Could be a tunnel. Lot of people when they went down next to the original money pit, the money pit’s here, they came down next to it then they tunneled over to it.

CRAIG TESTER: Oh, I see.
NARRATOR: Yeah. Maybe we’re hitting parts of that tunnel.

NARRATOR: Nearly five decades before the reported discovery of the Chappell Vault in 1897, members of the Truro company drilled through what they believed to be two stacked wooden chests at a depth of 96 feet.

NARRATOR: According to reports, each were full of what was described as 22 inches of metal pieces or possibly gold coins.

NARRATOR: In an attempt to retrieve the chest and avoid the booby trapped flood tunnels, the searchers dug an adjacent shaft 10 feet from the money pit and began constructing a lateral tunnel toward it.

NARRATOR: Their hopes of solving the Oak Island mystery were quickly dashed, however, as the tunnel collapsed from flooding just before they reached the mysterious chests.

CRAIG TESTER: We’re hoping at this point in time, maybe, we’ll find the shallow supposed treasure from this vault area.

CRAIG TESTER: Wow.

CRAIG TESTER: Oh. There you go. We just brought up a whole bunch more wood. What the hell is that?

CRAIG TESTER: That is odd. [inaudible] this is part of the money pit, original money pit.

NARRATOR: A round piece of wood located at a depth of approximately 105 feet beneath the surface of the money pit site?

NARRATOR: When the money pit was first excavated more than two centuries ago, searchers reported finding nine wooden platforms made of rounded oak timbers located at 10-foot intervals.

NARRATOR: At which point, massive flooding halted further exploration.

NARRATOR: Could the Oak Island team have just discovered evidence not only of the original money pit, but of a previously unknown 10th platform? 10 feet deeper than where the 90-foot stone was discovered in 1804.

RICK LAGINA: If you read the records of them originally finding the money pit, you know, every 10 feet or so they’d hit a platform. They thought the vault was sitting on a platform.

RICK LAGINA: And this 3-inch diameter piece of wood, to me, could definitely have been one of those pieces of wood from the platform.

CRAIG TESTER: You know, can we date this? I mean, it seems much blacker to me than this. This is a very dark gray, but this seems black. And if this comes back, you know, in the 1500s or something, then–

RICK LAGINA: It’s heavy.

CRAIG TESTER: Yeah, it is heavy.

RICK LAGINA: You wanna just take a section of it?

CRAIG TESTER: Yeah, we’ll cut a little piece off and it will tell you what time did this log get cut down.

RICK LAGINA: All right. Let’s get this off. See what it comes back. I don’t know what to hope for, more wood, less wood, no wood.

CRAIG TESTER: Wood that’s in the form of a chest. [chuckles]