SYSK Selects: Is there treasure on Oak Island? - podcast episode cover

SYSK Selects: Is there treasure on Oak Island?

Mar 03, 201837 min
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Episode description

Off Nova Scotia, the tiny spit of land called Oak Island has been host to waves of treasure hunters for more than 200 years. Some of them lost their lives in the search for a treasure reputedly buried in a deep pit. But is anything really there?

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Transcript

Speaker 1

M. Hey everybody, it's me Josh and for this week's s Y s K Select, I've chosen the Oak Island Mystery. It's one we've gotten requests to do for a long time, and even after we did it, we've still gotten requests to do it. So here it is again. It's a good one from two thousand fifteen. And as an added bonus, keep an ear out for a surprise cameo by a Globo de la muerte before we knew what it was called Enjoy. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from house

Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and Jerry So this is stuff you should know. UD say, you're no Scotia accent? Uh no, no, sir? Well was that not just a howdy? It did some funny though. That was my Heath Hall version. We've talked about. You love that show, didn't you know? I never really watched it. I don't. Thinking of my other podcast Ghost, I didn't watch Haul much. Yeah, that's I did. I was from

the South though, you know Toledo. The you all thought that was like yokol stuff. No, I mean like it was on every once in a while. I just passed by, you know what wasn't Mini Pearl. She had the hat with the price tag on. Still started and then there was like some guy with the banjo. I think, I think this is one of the most off requested shows

Oak Island. Yeah, I've had a lot heard. I didn't really know much about it, but it seems like every other week someone saying, Oaka Island, guys, do Oak Island. We're gonna do Oka Island. We want everybody to be quiet, that's right, So that's what we're doing. Did you know much about this ahead of time? No, not at all. I did. It's one of those things like you hear about and you hear a little more and you don't really dig in. But so the whole thing is just

kind of this neat legend that's kind of out there. Yeah, I don't know how I missed it. And then once you start digging in, you're like, yeah, I understand you say that with the skeptical tone. Well, I think this is one of those cases where there's no treasure. I don't know, there's some weirdness. There's some things that make me say this is very odd. But I also understand

the skeptical point of view. So well, what I've just kind of demonstrated is a little bit of the middle of the road approach to Oak Island, which is unusual. Most people approach Oke Island either as true believe or treasure hunters or total skeptics. Like, there's not a lot of middle of the road. It's a divisive island as far as islands go. It's only like a hundred and something acres. It's not a big island. It's off the coast of Novas Gootia a hundred forty acres. Yeah that's

not that's not big. Yeah, but for as small as it is, you know, it's pretty divisive. Yeah. I don't think. Uh, I don't see what the big deal about being skeptical about the I mean, a buried treasure. I mean, who cares. Oh, if you're a skeptic, you have to pooh pooh everything. Absolutely, anything that's even remotely frivolous has to be squashed. But this isn't even like supernatural or anything. It's just I mean, I guess there's the curse thing. Yeah, that's that's all.

That's all TV. That's not even lower from what I understand that new it's like literally just a media creation, like strictly from the TV show that before that. I mean, like people didn't really see it as a curse. There's just buried treasure on Oak Island. Yeah, and if it's the eighteen hundreds and you're digging for things, there's a good chance he might die. Yeah, it's dangerous, it is mean,

it's cursed. I read this really great article written in nineteen sixty five by Mildred rest All, Yeah, from the New York Times. No, this was in like Ottawa magazine and it was written by her. Yeah, I read one. It might have been the same one. I wonder it was like within a very short time of her husband and sun dying. I thought, wow, these ladies really composed.

But then I read a little further and found out that Mildred rest All and her husband, Robert, who moved their family to Oak Island so Robert could hunt for the treasure in nineteen fifty nine. I think um started out. They met because they were both circus performers with nerves of steel who rode motorcycles in a huge globe sphere. Well, he would go like upside down and she would go side to side and they would miss each other hundreds of times in an act. And now after that, I

was like, oh, yeah, this lady, she's tough as nails. Yeah, you never seen one of those acts. I just didn't realize that that's what they did, got you, Yeah, and that it seems kind of odd to have that. I thought it was a newer act from No, it's totally fifties. Screams fifties really, Yeah, see I thought it screened seventies. Oh it does too, Yeah, you're right, sure, Yeah, evil kine, Evil is why that screams that? All right, So let's

dive in here. Ah well, yeah, the rest dolls. When they moved to nineteen fifty nine, they were hardly the first people that moved to Oak Island and set up residents there in order to find the treasure. But prior to seventeen um, Oak Island was just another island. Yeah, it's still just another island. Well, just because of all of the attention that's been paid to it. It's not

it's no longer. It's been changed forever. Prior to sev though, it was just like whatever, there's Oak Island until a local kid from Nova Scotia named Robert McGinnis Daniel McGinnis sorry, um, decided to go explore. Yeah, and this, Um, you won't find any two people that agree on these uh legend stories, even with Daniel McKennis, because it's you know, none of the stuff was really written down until much later. Nothing was written down in seving was documented until like the

nineteen hundred well Sir Star Trek came along. Certainly things like this weren't documented, um because he was just a boy. He was sixteen years old. Uh, he was on a fishing expedition. And as the story goes, and we'll just use the most commonly agreed upon story here, he was, Um, he was just kind of traps around the island and found uh, like a block from a pulley attached to a tree, an oak tree, and then a big sort of cleared out area underneath it where it looked like, uh,

you know, someone had maybe been digging and rebar ing something. Yeah, there's like a depression under this block tackle block from a pulley. Yeah, it was just cleared out. And he was like, huh but jennything, there's a pirates As you're down there. Yeah, I mean, being a teenager, he was like, there's yeah, pirates all are are all over the place. Yeah, and it's entirely possible. We're talking the eighteenth century. We're talking a time when piracy was still very much in

the public imagination. Bury treasure was a hot thing. Yeah, I mean, there is such a thing. And at the very least if no one, if no single pirate ever buried his treasure, there is a lot of rumor about buried treasure of pirates. I think it makes total sense. You know that you can't carry that stuff around all the time because you get robbed and looted. So you,

you know, bury that junk, come back for it later. Right, make a weird, funny looking map that looks like a sweaty pillow case, and um, put a big X in the middle of it. So and then put that in a coffee can and then bury that in your backyard. That's right, you got to bury twice because it's so nice. That's the pirates. Can you say it like a pirate? No, I didn't not need he would do that. Um, all right, So he starts digging. He's his interest is peaked. He

gets a couple of friends comes back the next day. Uh, Anthony Vaughan and John Smith and um, it's a pseudonym, you think. Uh. And so they start digging, reportedly go down about ten feet and found a layer of like a platform of oak logs. Yeah, which is you're not supposed to find that when you dig into a hole under a pulley. No, you're not supposed to it's no worthy.

First they found a stone that they took to be man made, like two ft down, and then ten feet down they found an oak platform, and then supposedly every ten feet after that, Uh, they kept finding these platforms. Um, and we'll just go ahead and call this the money pit. What's what everyone calls it? Yeah, this main location is the money pit because just the first oak platform alone

says there's treasure buried here. That's right. Uh. So basically they they got down as far as they could for three teenage boys with picks and shovels, and said, uh, this this isn't We're not finding anything, and where we need help? Basically, Yeah, we need to bring in some old timey equipment. Yeah, Bigger tools, gets some old timey funding and maybe get some old timey other people involved and they did, but it took like nine years before

they came back I think yeah. And they filled it back in because they didn't just want to leave a big empty hole there. It's an obvious sign that there's a treasure there. So, like you said, nine hours later, they did come back, um with investors. Nine years later. What say ours? No? I said years. I will bet you all the money on Oak Island that you said ours? Uh. At any rate, it was nine years and they came back and formed with some funding from the Onslow Company. Um,

and that'll be a common refrain here. Uh. And apparently I did some writing on modern treasure hunting and it's all about the funding you. Oh, it's it's just like any business. You. These dudes have boats and equipment, but they're like, if you want a piece of this action, we need some dough out there and find the stuff. It's like selling future contracts. Yeah, yeah, a potential treasure exactly. And it's not just treasure hunting that does that. Like

lots of archaeological expeditions are funded like that. If if your local universities, like we got enough problems as it is, we can't find your dig, you can go to private investors, who ultimately it's still treasure hunting, it's just churched up church Don called archaeological things. So they come back as the on Slough Company and dig down deeper this time, and they did find some interesting things, notably h things that shouldn't be there, like coconut fiber and charcoal and

putty and coconuts obviously not native to Nova Scotia. So they're like, someone has put something down here. Well yeah, also at the time, um, coconut fiber was used as a packing material though, so clearly somebody was using it as as some sort of construction material. Wasn't accidentally dropped there there? Yeah, that's right. Um, So a legend has it they dug down until they hit ninety ft and then found a flat stone with a coded inscription that

they could not make sense of. Uh. Since then, other people have supposedly translated it to read forty ft below two million pounds are buried. Um, there's no stone today, there's no rubbing, there is no photograph. No, it's called the famous Cipher Stone. Yeah, and it was supposedly lost in like but yeah, there's no evidence. Yeah, and so anything you run across like in a book or on

the web or something is conjecture. No, there's no document of this cipher stone, but they do think that something that accounts for the cipherstone did exist at point, but no one knows for certain exactly what it said. And if you're wondering two million pounds of what I assumed that they made British currency, Yeah, that would be funny though it was just like two million pounds of pirates

scat coconut husks. Uh. So they get down to about close to a hundred feet and then go home for the day and and drink rum, I would imagine, and then come back and it's full of water. And they tried to bail it out, but they were basically like, this is you know seven, well, I guess this point it was the eighteen hundreds or eighteen hundreds, but we're

still screwed, right. So the Robert McGinnis and what was the name of the company came back with a company company what what you just described as the process that people have followed in the troubles that people have run into in the every every ever since. And we'll talk

about some of the following expeditions because mcguinness's troubles. Didn't put anybody else off after this, Okay, so Chuck, something really weird happened to the McGinnis expedition, the second one, when he grew up became a man, came back with the Onslow company and dug down became a man. They went to bed after drinking a bunch of them, like you said, and then they woke up and the pit had filled with water. And it's basically been filled with

water ever since. Yeah, which is a problem if you're a treasure hunter. You want dry conditions as much as possible to get to the treacher. Water is an impediment, um. And it became such an impediment that ultimately McGinnis and on the Onslow company just kind of gave up. I guess they ran out of funding, right, Yeah, which has also been a refrain over the years. You can only dig so long until the person eventually who's funding he says, I'm gonna pull the plug. But years later, Um, a

question was raised about that flooding. People started to wonder was that actually an engineered booby trap? Right? And that's become a question among treasure hunters for centuries on. Yeah. Of course the skeptics will say, no, it is just uh seawater, because later they found out that it was actually saltwater UH. And there are other similar underground water tunnels on the island. So they're like, no, this is

just going on on this island. And and the believers will say no, it was a booby trap set by the pirates. But the believers in this case have a kind of strange evidence UM to back up their ideas. So in eighteen forty nine, after the mcguinnis expedition, the second one left many years after UM, the Truro company, which is and it's tough to say, they showed up to the island to look for the money pit, and they started digging again, right And when they started digging,

they ran into the same problem. There the shaft that they dug filled with water. So they started to think, we'll wait a minute, maybe this is purposeful at the very least, maybe there's some sort of sea caves. And if there's sea caves that are filling this thing up, potentially we could stop up the sea caves and then

we can avoid the water problem and keep digging. So they sent people from the expedition to look all over the shoreline of the island and they found something really astounding that, from what I understand still to this day, is the one thing that confounds all skeptics when it comes to Oak Island. They found what can really only be described as a man made drainage system that basically accepts the incoming tide and potentially funnels the tied to

the money pit. Yeah. So you know, they continue to dig and drill because they were encouraged by finding like things they said were metal or maybe even gold on the Augur's um and even more coconut husk. Yeah, so they were like, there's something down there, but they, like you said, it kept flooding and that this is when they realized it was seawater and they noticed, hey, it's actually filling up and and falling back down with along

with the tides. So that's when they built a temporary Coffer dam to kind of see what was going on. And that's when they found this five finger drain and uh, which yeah, there's really no explanation that didn't just accidentally happen. No, And what gives it away is it's um. It's a hundred and forty five ft wide, and it's about the height of high the difference between high tide and low tide, so it's clearly meant to funnel the tied into this drain. Yeah,

there's five drains. They're obviously finger drains. Finger drains are like French drains basically, and they all connect into one larger drain. But the real dead giveaway was the appearance again of coconut fiber. Coconut fiber was used to keep the sand out of the stone drain um, and a layer of coconut fiber on an island off of the coast of Nova Scotia suggests man's intervention. That's right, but

what that means who knows. Again, treasure seekers will say that they put this to uh keep you from finding that treasure. Right, it was evidence in favor of the

idea that the money pit is booby trapped. Yeah, and I think skeptics will say that the I think there was a theory that there was a lot of weird freemason uh rituals going on, and maybe they buried some stuff there and not treasure necessarily, but um, maybe they built this drain to keep people from digging into their Yeah, modern treasure hunters are like great, let me find whatever the Mason's buried. Yeah, you know, even if it's not gold ingots could be like, you know, the Secrets of

the Freemasons, or yeah, the Ark of the Covenant. Yeah right, they said that could be down there, or the Holy Grail. You want to talk about some of the legends of what's down there as well? Okay, So, um, the the the predominant one that Robert McGinnis initially thought of was that it was pirate treasure because he was a teenager

in the seventeen nineties, right. Um. Successive people have come to see the money pit if it is sabotaged like it is, and the the construction that went into it is something that would have had to have been carried out by a group more sophisticated and better funded and better organized than Captain Kidd's crew, more sober at the

very least. Yeah, exactly. So one of the rumors of what treasure is buried down there is that the Freemasons buried something, or the Knights Templar buried something, because the Knights Templar, you know, they were like the militant arm of fundamental Christianity in like the the tenth century during pilgrim images a k. The Crusades to the Middle East, right, Yeah, so that means they got a lot of dough over the years they accumulated great wealth, had a big um

falling out with the Catholic Church of course. Yes, supposedly they were found worshiping Baffa met the goat headed yeah, breasted Satan and that that's sort of like the statue, right, and it's exactly like the statue Oklahoma. Yeah, the one that's being constructed by the Satanic Temple right now. Yeah, I put that on our Facebook page. It was very divisive. I can imagine, no surprise. Um, I thought it was just a nice, cool looking piece of art. I mean, man,

it's pretty well done. Yeah, it looks look nice. Um. So yeah, so the Knights Templer has all this dough. They have a falling out with the Catholic Church for obvious reasons that you just pointed out, and then they buried their treasure, so I guess the Catholic Church wouldn't

get their hands on it, right. But among that treasures supposedly is the Holy Grail, which is what um the night we're looking for in Monty Python and the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant, which is what Indiana Jones is looking for in Indiana Jones and and uh, no raiders have lost ark um. And so some people have said, this is where the Knights Templar buried their treasure, this is where the Ark of the Covenant is. And then other people have said, whatever, the Knights Templar never

made it to Nova Scotia. But the Freemasons obviously took over the secrets and protections of the Knights Templar. They're like the modern day Knights Templar society. And uh, they probably buried the arc and or the Holy Grail. Duh. Yeah. And apparently a lot of um Masons have been on these excavation teams over the years, which of course is evidence that they're looking for their their old stuff, right or I mean, it also is entirely possible that there

is a rumor among Masons that this is true. Whether it's true or not, that could have gotten some Masonic adventures to go. Look. You know, another theory um that's been thrown out there is that um Marie Antoinette uh, during the French Revolution said got all her jewelry together and gave it to a woman and said flee, and she fled to Nova Scotia, and then the French navy came along and constructed this elaborate system to bury her jewels.

There's another little, uh possible theory, and supposedly evidence that backs that up is that the woman who was given the jewels, who was entrusted with the jewels, was spotted in Nova Scotia some time after that. What was she doing there burying jewels? Another unusual Nova Scotia link is um that of Francis Bacon. Yeah, I like this one. So remember Francis Bacon from the scientific Method. He was the guy that really first put that down in written form.

Brilliant man. Possibly Shakespeare. That's one of the theories is that he was the real Shakespeare. And the idea is that that he hid his manuscripts in the money pit on Oak Island. And that seems kind of far fetched, but apparently Francis Bacon owned land in Nova Scotia. Yeah, and um, he was a preserver of things in mercury

and supposedly they found flasks of mercury on the island. Um. I don't buy that one because I've always believed that Shakespeare was Shakespeare and not Francis Bacon or his sister or in the other various uh crack pot theories about who really wrote that stuff. I like Francis Bacon and Shakespeare, you know, yeah, yeah, just the thought of it, or like, do you think the evidence is Uh, I don't know about the evidence. I don't know enough about it, but I like the thought of it. He seems like a

pretty cool dude. Uh. So some of the other um treasure hunters started flocking there in the mid to late eighteen hundreds because that was just a big time for treasure hunting. Yeah. Well, the California gold Rush was going on in eighte This is why the forty Niners are called that. That's right, And uh, I think there's kind of a treasure fever, yeah, going through the land. That's

a good way to say it. So, um, the Eldorado Company in eighteen sixty six went out there, and they there were various methods over the years to try and block off the flow of water. They tried digging shafts and tunnels, They tried to divert it, they tried to intercept it um and basically all that ended up doing was causing a nightmare for future expeditions, to the point where people had had had a hard time even finding

the original money bit to begin with. Right, A lot of the um, A lot of the landmarks, I guess you'd call them, we're just utterly destroyed. Yeah, supposedly. In that article I read from um Mrs Restall, she said that there's no there weren't any more oaks on Oak Island any longer. Oh, no more coak trees, yeah, which

because of excavation just tore them all down. Yeah, So it would be very tough to find your way around if whatever directions were written at a time when there were plenty of oak trees and used oak trees as guides, you know, like go to this oak tree and turn left. Yeah yeah yeah. So um yeah, the excavation has definitely changed the face of that island tremendously. Uh. One thing we do have that is tangible, um as far as I don't know if you call it evidence or not,

because it really doesn't say much. But Frederick Blair in eight nine, in the eighteen nineties came with the Oak Island Treasure Company and he actually found something that still exists. It's a little bitty tiny piece of parchment paper and it looks like a curse of letters. V I are on it, but I mean it's small, and it really leads to nothing other than something man made, is there? V I? You know, I don't think anyone's any conjecture about what that means. Six maybe six billion pounds buried,

set down right, Um. And then the twentieth century has seen, or saw since we're in the twenty first century now, successive waves, pretty constant waves of people coming looking for the Oak Island treasure. UM. One of them was a young Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who also was a mason. H He came along as an investor, and apparently UM always pine to go back to Oak Island to search for the treasure, like it got in his blood. All right.

So after this message break, we are going to look at a few more of the things that have been discovered there over the years and what this all means. So Chuck I was saying, the twentieth century saw a wave after a wave of treasure hunter come dig and then leave penniless. One of those people though that, and we also talked about how Oak Island has been utterly changed. Probably nobody changed the topography and geography of Oak Island more than a guy named Robert Dunfield, who was an

engineer I believe, or no a geologist. In in in nine he built a bridge a highway, yeah, from the mainland to Oak Island. And right after he did that, right after it was completed, he started moving heavy equipment in and just started digging like crazy. Yeah. He got down a hundred feet I'm sorry, a hundred and forty ft down a hundred feet wide. And uh kept everything a secret until two thousand three, and didn't They didn't find a lot. They found some porcelain dishware from the six undreds,

which is you know, what was that doing? There could find for sure the early UM. But he of course didn't find a lot either, ultimately in the way of riches because UM, he kept having problems despite his machinery with collapsing UH, caves, heavy rains, more tide, water and um. But he did say there was a cavern under some limestone. He did confirm one of these underwater caverns, supposedly, Yeah,

which accounts for potentially a natural formation. If you're a skeptic, if you're a believer, then it just confirms the booby trap thing. Um. He uh finally left after basically he was the guy who demolished the most landmarks. Um. But shortly after he left, a pair of guys who formed what's called the Triton Alliance. Uh, David Tobias and Dan blanket Ship. Uh. They started working and they actually brought along some high tech stuff in nineteen seventy, which was

like underwater camera, video camera. It's probably the size of a small car, right, that they lowered down there, and uh, they well, they drilled the hole and they called it bore Hole ten X, and they it was filled with water, of course, as all holes in Oak Island do. But they lowered this underwater camera down there, and they swore to God that they saw evidence of human remains and

treasure tests. That's what they said. They whether you're convinced or not, Um, Tobias and Blanketship were convinced enough that to no, Blanketship still lives on Oak Island. Yeah, he he became sort of the uh, the main guy that remains today as the main guy. And this is n seventy when they showed up. He's still on that island and he's supposedly he's oh yeah, yeah, he's pretty easy old. No, but it was the nineteen seventies when they showed up

and he still lives there. Now, that's what I'm saying he is. He's an old feller. We hammered that out. He's apparently an ordinary feller. Two because there was another guy named Fred Nolan, who is a famous Oak Island explorer. Um who Well, they ran a foul of one another, apparently, Um. Blanketship had a rifle obviously in his hand during the argument, and the cops had to come out and take the

rifle away. Really yeah, and supposedly now nobody is allowed on Oak Island, although I guess there you can if you're filming a TV show. Um, except for Dan Blanketship, who's the only resident. Well he's a part of the TV show. Okay, So he was like, come on, um, yeah, what's that history channel? I think I don't know. Yeah, there's a couple of the people that he's working with today, uh Rick and Marty Lagina. Um I think are brothers from Michigan, and they are the subject to the TV show,

which you'll have to check out at some point. Um. But that's supposedly where the curse came from. Is that show? Oh where had that? Really? Yeah? I did not know that, So it's it's been a present since last year, right um. Frederick Nolan also is the one who discovered um five large cone shaped boulders that when you look at it above, looks like a cross, and it's forever known as Nolan's Cross.

What does it mean? Who knows? Maybe the boulders were just sort of a in the shape of a cross by accident, but well, Fred Nolan bought five plots of land bottom, so he was a resident there, an inhabitant there too. I'm not sure what happened Old Fred Nolan though, Yeah, I'm not sure. It's a good point. He may have been lost to the curse of Oak Island. So we we keep using like present tense, like it's a it's entirely true. Does anyone with History Channel knows there's still

people who are looking actively for the treasure of Oak Island? Right? Yeah? Like they believe that if you put all the evidence together, no one's crossed coconut fibers, the finger drains, um, the evidence from Blanketship and Tobias, their video of stuff like if you put all this together, there is evidence that there is treasure down there. Somebody just needs to dig deep enough in the right place and then bam, they're gonna find it. Right Yeah, I mean, man, it's they've

dug so deep though, and so wide. How how much deeper could they have gone back in the pirate days? You know, I don't know. It just seems very unlikely to me there's any treasure there. Well, then you would be in the skeptics camp, and you would definitely not be alone. Uh yeah, but skeptic thinking there may have been something buried or some weird thing going on there, But I don't know about treasure. Who knows though. Uh. Skeptics will also say these are natural sinkholes, uh, instead

of traps like we said earlier. Um. They will also say things like, you know, there's all kinds of underground caverns around here, there's nothing special. I don't know what they say about finding things like porcelain plates. I didn't see anything like that. But you know, when he when the stone has lost this inscripted stone. Um, when there's no evidence really to point to except this tiny piece

of parchment paper, Like I don't know, it's pretty flimsy. Well, none of the excavations started to be documented until the nineteenth century, So all of mcguinness's early work is all based on hearsaying conjecture. It's all up for debate. Whether he was a teenager. Um was the block the tackle block for the pulley? Yea, was that added to the story later on? Um? If so, then all of a sudden that that depression under the tree branch just becomes

a depression under a tree branch. You know. The pulley was the thing. It's it's excuse my physics joke, but the full crumb of this whole thing, you know. Yeah, so um, if you if you start to look at it on its face, all of this legend, you realize that most of it is just legend, and that the only real physical evidence is that scrap of parchment paper

that no one even knows whether that was planted or not. Well, yeah, that's That's one of the things skeptics often say, is that anything you found there is could have been planted just to get money to fund the digs. Like look, we found this, uh, this parchment and this porcelain plate, and there's some gold dust on our auger did we

mention the coconut fiber and the coconut fiber again? Right, so send us another like I don't know, tin mill, Yeah, and we'll keep digging, right, So, uh, there you have it again. Though, those those finger trains are just weird. Yeah, that's weird for sure. It's cool. What who did what they're Yeah? Basically they just need to like strip mine the entire island all the way down there. You know.

I don't know why anyone. I haven't thought of that yet. Yeah, just completely strip it of all its natural beauty until it's nothing left and to destrug your shoulders afterwards, say there's nothing here, right, Yeah? Go man. If you want to know more about Oak Island, apparently you can watch a weekly television show on it. You can also type oak Island into the search part how stuff works. And since I said search parts, time for listener mail. I'm

gonna call this poison ivy follow up from JB. Guys have an interesting story about how you can get poison ivy from more than just touching it. When I was eight or so, we lived in California, had a big fireplace. One day we decided to get our own firewood from outside and got a couple of big logs my sister. We were both about seven at the time. Uh we She and I used the fire to rose marshmallows and

mixed mors. Great night. Right an hour or so later, one of my sisters came into my parents room saying she couldn't breathe. Her face had swollen to twice its normal size, and her eyes were shut. Her throat was barely able to pass air through it. An emergency room trip and a shot or to the steroids later, she was okay, but it took a while to find out

what happened. Apparently the poison ivy had been removed from the logs we got, but the SAP was stole in the wood, and when we burned them, the SAP was present in the smoke, and my sister was highly allergic and hailed it, got it in her throat and lungs, and it blew up her face like a red balloon. Best side note of this, we had passport photos. The next day we were moving to Germany, so her passport pick was a giant, red swollen balloon face and that is JB and Fort So, Oklahoma. Way to go. JB.

That was a good story. You get the blue ribbon for it. And I guess she had that passport photo for a full decade unless you just had it retaken. Would you would you live with that passport photo? I totally what. I think it would be funny except for the whole You know, this doesn't look like you think that'd be a drag. It would be a huge drag. T s A like the hassle. Yeah, but I'm I'm well known in my family for making funny faces. Anytime I have a photo idea of any kind taken just

for fun, I've always done it. That is so fun. Family likes it. Ah, you got anything else? Nope? Okay, Well thanks again for the awesome story, JB. If you have a great story, you can tweet to us at s Y s K Podcast. You can post it on our Facebook page at Facebook dot com, slash stuff you Should Know. You can put it in an email and send it to Stuff Podcast at how stuff works dot com.

And in the meantime, while you're waiting around thinking of what to say, go hang out at our home on the web Stuff you Should Know dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics is it, how stuff works? Dot com

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