What started as a routine Oak Island tour ended with a warning Charles Barkhouse says may have saved his life.

Barkhouse, known from The Curse of Oak Island, told CTV News Atlantic the moment came after he finished leading a tour in September 2025. As visitors were finishing their questions, a woman approached him, introduced herself as a doctor and asked, “Can I examine your neck?”

After feeling his neck, she told him, “You need to call your doctor immediately.”

Barkhouse followed that advice. After several medical tests, doctors found he had medullary thyroid cancer, which CTV News described as a rare and aggressive form of cancer.

He underwent surgery on New Year’s Eve. Doctors removed the cancer and more than 40 lymph nodes. Twenty-three of those lymph nodes were cancerous.

“If left undetected and untreated, it will affect your liver, your lungs, and is fatal,” Barkhouse told CTV News.

Now recovering, Barkhouse said he often thinks about the woman he never got the name of.

“I refer to her as my guardian angel,” he said.

Looking back, he said the timing still feels hard to believe.

“Everything lined up. It was like a perfect storm that day. She was in the right place at the right time.”