DYBBUK BOX

Opening

In 2003 a Portland, Oregon furniture refinisher and writer named Kevin Mannis put a small wooden cabinet up for auction on eBay. The listing told a story: he had bought it at a yard sale, it had belonged to an elderly Polish Holocaust survivor who said it held a malicious spirit, and since he had opened it his family had suffered nightmares and a run of bad luck.

Inside, according to the listing, were two old pennies, locks of hair, a small granite block carved with a Hebrew word, a dried rosebud and a candle holder. The box, he said, held a dybbuk. It became the most famous haunted object of the internet age. It inspired a Hollywood film, passed through several owners, each of whom added stories of their own, and ended up in a haunted museum in Las Vegas. In 2021 Mannis told a journalist that he had made the whole thing up.

Timeline

2003Mannis buys the cabinet at a yard sale in Portland. He later says he carved parts of it himself.

2003He sells it on eBay with the dybbuk story attached. It changes hands, and later buyers post their own accounts of illness, smells and bad dreams.

2004Jason Haxton, director of the Museum of Osteopathic Medicine in Kirksville, Missouri, buys it. His website about the box reportedly draws hundreds of thousands of visits, and he sells the story rights to a Hollywood production company.

2012The Possession, produced by Sam Raimi, is released, "based on a true story".

2015Mannis posts on Facebook offering $100,000 and a tattoo to anyone who can find a reference to a dybbuk box from before 2003.

Mid 2010sHaxton passes the box to TV ghost-hunter Zak Bagans, who displays it at his Haunted Museum in Las Vegas.

2018Fans blame a run of bad luck for the musician Post Malone, including an emergency landing, on his having been near the box at Bagans's museum.

2019Sceptical investigator Kenny Biddle examines the cabinet in Las Vegas and concludes it is a minibar made in New York, not an old Jewish wine cabinet from Spain, and that the story was made up from whole cloth.

July 2021Mannis tells the writer Charles Moss, for Input magazine, that the story was fiction. He says it was meant to become an interactive horror story in real time, and that he kept adding to it to keep it relevant and interesting.

Key figures

Kevin Mannis wrote the story and started the legend. Jason Haxton built it into a popular website and a film deal, and still believes the box is cursed. Zak Bagans made it a museum exhibit. Kenny Biddle and the writer Brian Dunning looked at its history and found the gaps. The folklorist Elliott Oring and the psychologist Chris French have written about why the story worked.

Physical and documentary trail

The record: the cabinet itself, which still exists; the original eBay listing and the later ones; Haxton's website and writing; the film; Mannis's 2015 challenge; Biddle's examination; and Mannis's own admission in 2021. What has never appeared is any trace of the previous owner as described, any record of her family, or anything showing the cabinet has a Jewish or European origin. On Biddle's reading, its construction points to a later American piece.

Nowhere in the folkloric literature is there precedent for a dybbuk inhabiting a box or other inanimate object.

Things you might not know

• Dybbuks don't live in boxes. In Jewish folklore a dybbuk is a wandering spirit that possesses a living person, not an object.
• Some of the carving is his. Mannis has said the carving on the back of the cabinet is his own work.
• He bet on his own invention. His 2015 offer of $100,000 for an earlier "dybbuk box" was, in hindsight, a safe bet.
• A medical museum director owned it. Jason Haxton ran the Museum of Osteopathic Medicine in Kirksville.
• It has its own film genre. Besides The Possession, dybbuk-box films include Ezra (2017), Dybbuk Box: The Story of Chris Chambers (2019) and Dybbuk (2021).
• The film changed the details. The Possession moved the story to an American family and a young girl.

Competing explanations

A story that got loose. Mannis's own account in 2021: he wrote it as a piece of real-time horror, and other people kept it going because it was a good story and, for some, a good business. Chris French has pointed out that each new owner was already primed to look for bad luck, and found it.

A cursed object. The view of Haxton, some later owners and the museum, which still exhibits it. Their reports of illness and misfortune are personal accounts that can't be tested, and the backstory they rest on has been withdrawn by its author.

Later life of the case

The Dybbuk Box sits in a line of haunted objects whose stories outgrew their evidence, alongside Annabelle and Robert the Doll.

Finding

The man who started the Dybbuk Box legend has said he made it up, the cabinet's construction does not match his story, and the folklore it borrows from has no such thing as a haunted box. That is as close to settled as a haunted object gets.

What still will not resolve: where the cabinet actually came from before the yard sale, since the person in the story never existed in the record.