In 2003, a haunted wine cabinet was put up for auction on eBay by Kevin Mannis, along with a description of horrific events caused by the cabinet’s presence, and whatever entity lay inside it. But what exactly is a dybbuk, and how much of the story was real?
Way back in the mists of time (erm, 2001), a writer and furniture refinishing businessman named Kevin Mannis bought an old wine cabinet from a garden sale. The garden sale was that of an attorney in Portland, Oregon.
Kevin Mannis placed the (sadly wineless) cabinet for auction on eBay, although the item description he penned for it was rather unusual and disturbing. He said the cabinet was once the possession of a Holocaust survivor in Poland, a woman who died aged 103, and that this survivor claimed the cabinet contained an evil spirit known as a dybbuk. The elderly woman had acquired the cabinet in Spain after escaping there from a concentration camp, then brought it with her when she emigrated to America – along with a steamer trunk and a sewing box.
Kevin also wrote that after he bought the cabinet, he was approached by the woman’s granddaughter, who said her grandmother had always kept the cabinet closed, in her sewing room, in a place well out of reach, and that she always called it the “dibbuk box.” When the granddaughter asked her what was in it, the woman would spit through her fingers three times and say “a dibbuk” and “keselim” and that it must never, ever be opened.
The grandmother had expressed a wish for the cabinet to be buried with her. On hearing this, Kevin said he could let the young woman keep the cabinet without refunding him, but she became distraught and insisted that he take it away.
Kevin Mannis then wrote that the box had weird powers and was responsible for a series of nightmares and bad luck affecting his life. He took the cabinet back to his furniture refinishing shop and left it in the basement, intending to dress it up and gift it to his mother. He then went on an errand, leaving a young female sales assistant in charge.
After half an hour (Kevin wrote) he got a panicked call from the sales assistant, saying an intruder had gotten into the shop basement and was breaking glass, swearing, and had locked all the exits so she couldn’t escape. Kevin raced back to the shop and found all the lights downstairs shattered on the floor – including four fluorescent tubes – and a strange stench like cat urine in the basement. The sales assistant left and refused to work there again.
Kevin then wrote that he got to work inspecting the dybbuk box. It had a mechanism inside that caused the opposite door and the drawer in its bottom to simultaneously open along with the door he pulled, and inside he found an inexplicable array of objects:
- A 1928 U.S. wheat penny
- A 1925 U.S. wheat penny
- A lock of blonde hair tied with string
- A lock of brown or black hair tied with string
- A small granite statue gilded and engraved with the Hebrew letters spelling “Shalom” (or “peace”)
- A dried rosebud
- A golden wine cup
- A black cast iron candlestick with octopus legs.
Kevin wrote that he then cleaned the cabinet and rubbed it with lemon oil, noticing something carved into the back of the box. Disaster struck when he tried to give the box to his mother as a gift, resulting in her having to go to hospital after suffering a stroke.
You can find out more about how things went from bad to worse for Kevin – according to his written account – at https://www.dibbukbox.com/story.html
Subsequent owners of the dybbuk box retold Mannis’s tale when selling the cabinet, and added their own accounts of terrifying phenomena in connection with it. You’d think that would put people off buying it, but then again, humans are strange.
Another of the cabinet’s owners, a Jason Haxton (Director of an osteopathy museum in Kirksville, Missouri) created the website about the haunted box at dibbukbox.com. It apparently received hundreds of thousands of visitors and the story became something of an online legend. In 2004, Jason Haxton sold the rights to the tale to a Hollywood production company.
The film that resulted from all of this was The Possession, released in 2012 and produced by Sam Raimi.
Jason then gave the dybbuk box to Zak Bagans, the star of Ghost Adventures, to put on display in his museum of haunted objects in Los Angeles.
In 2018, fans of the singer Post Malone suggested that his spate of misfortune was down to him having some contact with the haunted cabinet. Post Malone went to visit Zak Bagans’s museum and touched Zak on the shoulder after Zak had touched the box, which was apparently enough to get him “cursed.” In September 2018, the singer had some mishaps including two tyres on his private jet blowing out on the runway, his old house getting broken into by people with guns a few days later, and his Rolls Royce crashing into another car a week afterwards.
But what on Earth is a dybbuk, or a dibbuk? And what really happened?
The Dybbuk
According to the Encyclopedia Mythica, a dybbuk is a disembodied spirit possessing a living body that belongs to another soul. The spirit usually talks using that person’s mouth, and the idea of the dybbuk comes from Hebrew mythology.
A 1914 Yiddish play, The Dybbuk, was about the ghost of a dead man possessing the living body of a woman he had loved, and he had to be exorcised.
The word dybbuk comes from the Hebrew dibuq, meaning “a case of attachment.” This is derived from the verb dabaq (to adhere or to cling). The dybbuk is mentioned in old 16th century texts, but was more or less forgotten until the Yiddish play.
Traditionally, dybbuks were believed to be male spirits, as the Jewish religion held that women didn’t reincarnate. The dybbuks were said to possess women on the night before their weddings, typically in an inappropriate way, through their privates. However, dybbuks could also possess men and boys.
A Jewish boy in the Galilean village of Safed in 1540 was reportedly possessed by a soul that had previously been inside a dog. The soul within the dog possessed the boy to gain revenge after the boy’s father killed it.
In April 1999, a 38-year-old widow in Dimona, Israel was convinced she had been possessed by the soul of her dead husband. A rabbi diagnosed her with dybbuk possession and conducted an exorcism for it which was later shown on Israeli TV.
A dybbuk was believed to possess someone because it needed some kind of help, either to confess guilt about something, finish an incomplete task, or undergo expiation of a sin before it could move on to Gehenna or heaven. Exorcism was a healing for the possessed person but also a correction for the possessing spirit.
The idea of the dybbuk may have allowed people to express socially unacceptable urges in the past.
According to the author Brian Dunning, there is no precedent for a dybbuk possessing a box or other inanimate object in written folklore.
The Hoax
In January 2019, Kenny Biddle of the Skeptical Inquirer investigated the dybbuk box when it was on view in Zak Bagans’s haunted museum in LA. He concluded that the cabinet was not actually an old Jewish wine cabinet from Spain but instead a minibar from New York.
Kevin Mannis, being a creative writer, invented the story while posting the box for sale online. One of his Facebook posts to the Haunt ME page read:
“I am the original creator of the story of The Dibbuk Box which appeared as one of my Ebay [sic] posts back in 2003. … How about this – if you or anyone else can find any reference to a Dibbut [sic] Box anywhere in history prior to my Ebay post, I’ll pay you $100,000.00 and tattoo your name on my forehead.”
Mannis wanted the dybbuk box to become “an interactive horror story in real time.” The carving in the back of the box was his own handiwork, and the stone inside the box was also a design he created.
Sources
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-45559534
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dybbuk_box
