Real-Life X-Files

by Joe Nickell

  At length, I persuaded the priest, the Reverend Ieronimos Katseas, to provide a better view—at least for the photographer. Katseas pulled the lamp away with one hand while holding a candle close to the Madonna’s face with the other. Photographer Robertson clicked away, producing the accompanying photograph.

  In the subsequent article by Magnish and two colleagues, I was quoted as saying that the phenomenon was “more carnival sideshow than miracle” and that I was troubled by the withdrawal of the promise to allow the icon to be examined. “It would seem to me a miracle could withstand a little skepticism,” I stated, complaining further about being kept at a distance and being refused a sample of the “tears” (Magnish et al. 1996).

  In the meantime, reporters learned that Katseas had been embroiled in considerable earlier controversy. It turns out that he had also preached at a Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Queens, New York, when an icon there—that of a mid-nineteenth nun, St. Irene—began crying and drawing hundreds of thousands of pilgrims, some as far away as India and Japan. More than a year later, after I had investigated that icon with New York Area Skeptics and concluded that the phenomenon was bogus (Nickell 1993), the icon was stolen at gunpoint. Supposedly, Katseas refused to cooperate in producing the key to the Plexiglas case that housed it and was pistol-whipped, after which the bandits broke the lock and made off with the “miraculous” icon. It was subsequently returned—minus $800,000 in gems and golden jewelry that decorated it—under conditions that still remain controversial (Christopoulos 1996).

  Katseas was also defrocked in 1993 when it was learned he had previously worked in a brothel in Athens. A church document on the priest’s excommunication states that a New York ecclesiastical court found him guilty of slander, perjury, and defamation, as well as being “in the employ of a house of prostitution” (Goldhar 1996). In fact, in 1987 sworn testimony before a Greek judge, Katseas admitted he had been so employed (Magnish et al. 1996).

  Figure 36.2. On a later occasion, author collects samples of oil from icon under media scrutiny.

  A rumor I heard from neighborhood residents was soon confirmed by a newspaper report, namely that the Toronto icon began weeping after the East York church found itself financially strapped with an accumulated debt from mortgages of almost $271,000. In the interim, in June, the church dispatched Father Archimandrite Gregory from Colorado with instructions to evict Katseas from the church, but the matter became mired in the courts. After the icon began “weeping,” Gregory cast doubt on the phenomenon, stating in a letter, “It would not be surprising if this were a hoax, in order to attract people to spend money” (Goldhar 1996). Such revelations and opinions, however, had no effect on some pilgrims. Said one woman: “I don’t care if there’s a pipe and a hose behind that picture. I don’t care if the Virgin Mary jumps right out of the painting. You either believe in miracles or you don’t. I believe” (DiManno 1996). On the other hand, a woman living in the neighborhood stated, “We all need something to believe in, but this is preying on those who really need a miracle” (Goldhar 1996).

  On August 27,1997,1 was invited back to the church—this time by attorneys for the parent church authority. With a police guard and under scrutiny from the Canadian news media (figure 36.2), I examined the icon (which was dismantled from the frame it had acquired by a carpenter hired for the purpose) and took samples of the oil for the Metropolitan Toronto Police Fraud Squad for testing (Kudrez 1997). Some time later, at a forensic conference in Nova Scotia, I learned that the oil had indeed been found to be a nondrying oil, but that—of course—no one could say who put it on the icon, so the case fizzled.

  References

  Christopoulos, George. 1996. Priest’s 2nd “miracle” $800GS from “crying” N.Y. icon stolen. Toronto Sun, Sept. 8.

  DiManno, Rosie. 1996. Moolah everywhere as the pious mob weeping Madonna. Toronto Star, Sept. 4.

  Goldhar, Kathleen. 1996. Church of “weeping” Virgin headed by defrocked priest. Toronto Star, Sept. 4.

  Kudrez, Anastasia. 1997. Crying foul. Buffalo News, Aug. 29.

  Magnish, Scot, Philip Lee-Shanok, and Robert Benzie. 1996. Expert unmoved by crying icon’s ”tears.” Toronto Sun, Sept. 4.

  Nickell, Joe. 1993. Looking for a Miracle. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus, 54-55.

  Chapter 37

  The Secrets of Oak Island

  It has been the focus of “the world’s longest and most expensive treasure hunt” and “one of the world’s deepest and most costly archaeological digs” (O’Connor 1988,1,4), as well as being “Canada’s best-known mystery” (Colombo 1988, 33) and indeed one of “the great mysteries of the world.” It may even “represent an ancient artifact created by a past civilization of advanced capability” (Crooker 1978, 7, 190). The subject of these superlatives is a mysterious shaft on Oak Island in Nova Scotia’s Mahone Bay. For some two centuries, greed, folly, and even death have attended the supposed “Money Pit” enigma.

  The Saga

  Briefly, the story is that in 1795 a young man named Daniel Mclnnis (or McGinnis) was roaming Oak Island when he came upon a shallow depression in the ground. Above it, hanging from the limb of a large oak was an old tackle block. Mclnnis returned the next day with two friends who—steeped in the local lore of pirates and treasure troves—set to work to excavate the site. They soon uncovered a layer of flagstones and, ten feet deeper, a tier of rotten oak logs. They proceeded another fifteen feet into what they were sure was a man-made shaft, but tired from their efforts, they decided to cease work until they could obtain assistance. However, between the skepticism and superstition of the people who lived on the mainland, they were unsuccessful.

  The imagined cache continued to lie dormant until early in the next century, when the trio joined with a businessman named Simeon Lynds from the town of Onslow to form a treasure-hunting consortium called the Onslow Company. Beginning work about 1803 or 1804 (one source says 1810), they found oak platforms “at exact intervals of ten feet” (O’Connor 1978, 10), along with layers of clay, charcoal, and a fibrous material identified as coconut husks. Then, at ninety feet (or eighty feet, according to one alleged participant) they supposedly found a flat stone bearing an indecipherable inscription. (Seefigure 37.1). Soon after, probing with a crowbar, they struck something hard—possibly a wooden chest!—but discontinued for the evening. Alas, the next morning the shaft was found flooded with sixty feet of water. Attempting to bail out the pit with buckets, they found the water level remained the same, and they were forced to discontinue the search. The following year, the men attempted to bypass the water by means of a parallel shaft from which they hoped to tunnel to the supposed treasure. But this shaft suffered the same fate, and the Onslow Company’s expedition ended (O’Connor 1978, 9-16; Crooker 1993,14; Harris 1958,12-22).

  Figure 37.1. Oak Island “treasure map.” (Illustration by Joe Nickell)

  Again the supposed cache lay dormant until in 1849 another group, the Truro Company, reexcavated the original shaft. Encountering water, the workers then set up a platform in the pit and used a hand-operated auger to drill and remove cores of material. They found clay, bits of wood, and three links of gold chain—supposed evidence of buried treasure. The Truro Company sank additional nearby shafts, but these too were inundated with water, and work ceased in the fall of 1850. Other operations continued from 1858 to 1862, during which time one workman was scalded to death by a ruptured boiler (O’Connor 1988,17-31).

  The Oak Island Association followed and attempted to intersect the “tunnel” that presumably fed water to the pit. When that 120-foot shaft missed, another was sunk and, reportedly, a three-by-four-foot tunnel was extended about eighteen feet to the “Money Pit” (as it was then known). However, water began coming in again. A massive bailing operation was then set up to drain the pits, when suddenly there was a loud crash as the Money Pit collapsed. It was later theorized that the imagined chests had fallen into a deep void and that the pit may have been boobytrapped to protect the treasure (O’Con
nor 1988, 29). The Association’s work was followed in 1866 by the Oak Island Eldorado Company but without significant results (Harris 1958,203).

  Decades elapsed and in 1897 the Oak Island Treasure Company (incorporated four years earlier) apparently located the long-sought “pirate tunnel” that led from Smith’s Cove to the Money Pit. They drilled and dynamited to close off the tunnel. Subsequent borings were highlighted by the discovery of a fragment of parchment upon which was penned portions of two letters (possibly “ri”). They also found traces of a chalklike stone or “cement” (Harris 1958, 91-98). In this same year, Oak Island’s second tragedy struck when a worker was being hoisted from one of the pits and the rope slipped from its pulley, plunging him to his death.

  After that company ran out of funds, most of the moveable assets were sold at a sheriff’s sale in 1900. The new century brought continued searches, with the digging of innumerable drill holes, shafts, and tunnels—so many that “The entire Money Pit area has been topographically demolished, changing completely its original appearance and rendering old maps and charts useless” (Crooker 1978, 190). In 1965, there came yet another tragedy when four men died in a shaft after being overcome either by swamp gas (methane) or by carbon monoxide fumes from the pump’s engine (O’Connor 1988,143-45).

  In 1966, a Florida building contractor named Dan Blankenship teamed up with Montreal businessman David Tobias to continue the quest. The partners began an extensive drilling operation, sinking some sixty boreholes the following year alone, and in 1968 enlisted a number of investors in what they named Triton Alliance. Unfortunately, mechanical problems, land disputes, the stock market crash of 1987, and other troubles, including the eventual falling out of the two partners, stopped their projected $10 million “big dig” (Randle 1995). Once open to tourists, the site sank into neglect.

  Over the years, the fabled treasure has been the target of dowsers, automatic writers, clairvoyants, channelers, tarot-card readers, dream interpreters, psychic archaeologists, and assorted other visionaries and soothsayers, as well as crank inventors of devices like a “Mineral Wave Ray” and an airplane-borne “treasure smelling” machine—not one having been successful (Preston 1988, 62; O’Connor 1988, 121-36; Finnan 1997,166-70).

  An Investigative Approach

  The more elusive the treasure has proved, the more speculation it has engendered. Given the “immense amount of labor” presumably required to construct the pit and the accompanying “flooding tunnel” that served as a “booby trap,” presumption of a pirates’ hoard has begun to be supplanted by such imagined prizes as the French crown jewels, Shakespeare’s manuscripts, the “lost treasure” of the Knights Templar, even the Holy Grail and the imagined secrets of the “lost continent” of Atlantis (Sora 1999, 7-38,101; Crooker 1978,153).

  But is there a treasure at the bottom of the “Money Pit?” My research into the mystery of Oak Island dates back many years, and I opened a file on the case in 1982. However, except for periodic updates, I put it on hold, largely because the solution seemed to lie in the same direction as those of some other mysteries (Nickell 1980; 1982a; 1982b). However, my interest was revived in 1998 when I was invited to give a presentation at a forensic conference in Nova Scotia. And the following year, when I was asked to address another such conference in nearby New Brunswick, I resolved to place Oak Island on my itinerary (Nickell 1999).

  In planning my trip, I attempted to contact Triton’s David Tobias, who did not return my call, but I did reach Jim Harvey at the Oak Island Inn and Marina on the nearby mainland. A retired Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer and licensed private investigator, Harvey is in charge of security for Oak Island, and he was adamant that it is no longer open to visitors. Making not-so-veiled references to the legendary temper of Dan Blankenship, the other Triton partner who still lives on the island, Harvey suggested it would not be safe for me to trespass on the island, although he offered for hire his cabin cruiser for a guided circumnavigation.

  Harvey may have had in mind an incident of many years ago involving an altercation between Blankenship and another island resident, Frederick Nolan. According to one source: “One day Blankenship had approached with a rifle in hand and an ugly situation had begun to develop. Eventually the police were called in to calm everybody down and confiscate the gun” (Finnan 1997,93).

  So it was with some trepidation that on the afternoon of July 1,1999, after arriving at the village of Western Shore and checking in at the Oak Island Inn, I drove to the causeway leading to Oak Island. This land bridge connecting the island to the mainland was constructed in 1965 so that a great excavating machine could be transported to the “treasure” area. Today it is chained off and marked “PRIVATE / NO HUNTING OR TRESPASSING / DANGER”

  Apparently this posting did not apply to two local men who were fishing off the causeway. One came over and spoke to me at some length, saying of my proposal to walk across and talk to Mr. Blankenship, “He won’t shoot you, but he will probably turn you back.” Grabbing my camera I started across, only to be confronted by a barking dog. Soon, how-ever, I was petting the creature when its owner arrived. Blankenship was at first standoffish, having read a Canadian Press article about the “professional skeptic” who was heading to Oak Island (see Nickell 2000). I soon mollified him, and he graciously invited me to his home (much to the later surprise of several locals). I was there until nearly 11:00 p.m., being shown artifacts, photos, papers, and a video made by a camera lowered into a borehole—the fruits of almost thirty-five years of treasure hunting that had earned Blankenship the title of “Oak Island’s most obsessive searcher” (O’Connor 1988,145). The video reveals the interior of a “tunnel,” graced with an apparent upright timber and what some imagine to be “chests,” a “scoop,” and other supposedly man-made artifacts. Blankenship (1999) told me he had located the site of the borehole by dowsing. He spoke of his falling out with Tobias, saying that his former partner dismissed the video and even cast doubt on its authenticity. Dan Blankenship struck me as a sincere man, and he certainly treated me in a gentlemanly fashion, even sparing me a walk back across the causeway in the dark, insisting on driving me instead. The next day, Jim Harvey took me on our prearranged boat trip, permitting me to view the remainder of the island. (See figure 37.2).

  Figure 37.2. Offshore view of Oak Island showing site of Borehole 10X. The “Money Pit” lies just beyond.

  The more I investigated the Oak Island enigma, the more skeptical I became. Others had preceded me in supplying what I came to regard as the two main pieces of the puzzle, although apparently no one had successfully fitted the pieces together. One concerned the nature of the “money pit” itself, the other the source of certain elements in the treasure saga, such as the reputed cryptogram-bearing stone.

  Manmade or Natural?

  Doubts begin with the reported discovery in 1795 of the treasure shaft itself. While some accounts say that the trio of youths spied an old ship s pulley hanging from a branch over a depression in the ground (Harris 1958,6-8), that is “likely an apocryphal detail added to the story later” and based on the assumption that some sort of lowering device would have been necessary in depositing the treasure (O’Connor 1988,4). Nevertheless, some authors are remarkably specific about the features, one noting that the “old tackle block” was attached to “a large forked branch” of an oak “by means of a treenail connecting the fork in a small triangle” (Crooker 1978,17). Another account (cited in Finnan 1997,28) further claims there were “strange markings” carved on the tree. On the other hand, perhaps realizing that pirates or other treasure hoarders would have been unlikely to betray their secret work by leaving such an obvious indicator in place, some versions of the tale agree that the limb “had been sawed off” but that “the stump showed evidence of ropes and tackle” (Randle 1995, 75).

  Similarly, the notion that there was a log platform at each ten-foot interval of the pit for a total of nine platforms, is only supported by later accounts, and those appear t
o have been derived by picking and choosing from earlier ones so as to create a composite version of the layers. For example, the account in the Colonist (1864) mentions that the original treasure hunters found only flagstones at two feet (“evidently not formed there by nature”) and “a tier of oak logs” located “ten feet lower down” (i.e., at twelve feet). They continued some “fifteen feet farther down,” whereupon—with no mention of anything further of note—they decided to stop until they could obtain assistance. James McNutt, who was a member of a group of treasure hunters working on Oak Island in 1863, described a different arrangement of layers and was the only one to claim that at fifty feet was “a tier of smooth stones … with figures and letters cut on them” (quoted in Crooker 1978, 24).

  In 1911 an engineer, Captain Henry L. Bowdoin, who had done extensive borings on the island, concluded that the treasure was imaginary. He questioned the authenticity of various alleged findings (such as the cipher stone and piece of gold chain), and attributed the rest to natural phenomena (Bowdoin 1911). Subsequent skeptics have proposed that the legendary Money Pit was nothing more than a sinkhole caused by the ground settling over a void in the underlying rock (Atlantic 1965). The strata beneath Oak Island are basically limestone and anhydrite (Crooker 1978,85; Blankenship 1999), which are associated with the formation of solution caverns and salt domes (Cavern 1960; Salt Dome 1960). The surface above caverns, as well as over faults and fissures, may be characterized by sinkholes.

  Indeed, a sinkhole actually appeared on Oak Island in 1878. A woman named Sophia Sellers was plowing when the earth suddenly sank beneath her team of oxen, forming a hole about eight feet across and more than ten feet deep. Ever afterward known as the “Cave-in Pit,” it was located just over a hundred yards east of the Money Pit and directly above the “flood tunnel” (O’Connor 1988,51). “Today,” states D’Arcy O’Connor (1988, 52), “the Cave-in Pit is a gaping circular crater one hundred feet deep and almost as many feet across. And the water in it still rises and falls with the tide.”