[Sethomas]

I used to study this at length when I was in my Templars craze, and today on History International I caught some of a new special on it.

Basically, in Nova Scotia there's a hole upon which happened a young lad about two hundred years ago. It was clearly man-made, so he figured he'd dig it deeper to see where it went. As it turns out, the deeper he dug the more quickly it would fill with ocean water. When some heavily financed engineers came in to dig it up, they discovered that it was being filled from the ocean by a system of underground channels. Probing it with a drill, some people discovered gold filaments, 17th century parchment, and tons of mercury. So, everybody assumed that someone--who cares who--buried a shitload of treasure under the hole and set up a remarkably elaborate system to insure that it would never be dug up. Millions of dollars and half a dozen lives have been wasted trying to figure out what's in the pit, and to date nobody's succeeded.

There's a story linking the money pit to the Templars, which I love since they were badass. However, there's also stories claiming its creation to be the doing of Captain Kidd, or even Francis Bacon. Modern Baconians, in fact, think that his followers hid in the pit evidence that he wrote Shakespeare's works.

So yeah, tons of conspiracy theories, mostly BS of course. But still lots of fun.