LAST ASSAULT ON OAK ISLAND 22

Chapter 22

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Lauren took the Sunday newspaper and a glass of iced tea out onto the porch for company later that day. She sat on the steps and flipped past supermarket ads and furniture fliers. Everyone was touting the Money Pit Sale on everything from toys, groceries, and cars to carpet and appliances.

Leo Mason had taken Newport's job as resident Money Pit rumormonger. For 200 years, the mainlanders had watched fortune hunters, treasure companies, spiritualists, and channelers arrive brimming with hope and confidence, only to leave disillusioned, and often, broke.

Opinion around the bay area was not collective; some believed a variation of the Captain Kidd or Blackbeard stories, others that the Money Pit was the work of Spaniards burying Inca gold. An outspoken lot, including a relative of one of the original three discoverers, doubted it was engineered by mankind at all. He had been making the rounds on local radio stations lately.

One article advanced a theory of the pit being a natural phenomenon—a simple arrangement of periodic blow-downs in a natural sinkhole. It even cited a similar 'money pit' found fifty years ago on the mainland.

A landowner had commissioned workers to dig a well. The chosen site was slightly depressed and the earth soft. Two feet down, they encountered a layer of flagstones. Thereafter logs of spruce and oak were uncovered, albeit at irregular intervals. Some of the wood had even been charred.

The discovery attracted the attention of well-known university heads in Halifax. The hole was excavated, the materials closely examined by experts. At eighty-five feet freshwater seeped in. At this point, the owner called off the operation, dubbing it a sinkhole.

The article insisted the Money Pit was just such a sinkhole. The log platforms were natural blow-downs, perhaps even the result of lightning, which would explain the charcoal found at forty feet. The flood tunnel was not a trap; merely a natural watercourse. Cave-In Pit, famous since its occurrence in 1880, was the latent result of a Halifax company's trenching of the original pit in the 1860s. Natural anhydrate and limestone fissures had been found 140 to 200 feet below the Money Pit, and the whole area was part of the unremarkable Windsor Formation that serviced Nova Scotia.

The article was challenged by a professor from a leading Dartmouth university. He opened his argument questioning 'nature's uncanny brilliance'.