The Dybbuk Box

Picture generated with AI
Location: Las Vegas, Nevada, United States of America
Dates Active: 1930s to Present
Category: Demons, Evil Spirits, Mysterious Sounds, Poltergeist, Spontaneous Combustion, Witchcraft
Cause: Witchcraft and/or Evil Spirits
Status: Ongoing
Entry ID: 041424B-00093

Summery:

A small wine cabinet dating from World War II is said to contain an evil spirit.

In Depth:

A dybbuk is a malicious spirit from Jewish mythology that can possess or cling to a person. The name comes from a Hebrew verb that means "to cling" or "adhere," and according to legend they can cause all sorts of problems, including speaking through those that they possess or create a separate (or "alien") personality similar to schizophrenia. They're also known to cause physical harm in the form of accidents. According to Hebrew folklore, a dybbuk is either a demon or the spirit of a deceased person (a ghost) who was not laid to rest and became a sort of demon. They attach themselves to a human host, making it necessary to perform an exorcism to get ride of it. Now, dybbuk can also be freed and sent on to the afterlife if you can complete a task that the dybbuk could not do in life.

The dybbuk box is something of a more recent thing, but is said to contain a dybbuk, or at least some sort of spirit like a dybbuk. It is an antique mahogany wine cabinet dating from sometime in the mid to late 1940s, being about 12.5 inches wide, 7.5 inches deep, and 16.25 inches tall. It features two cupboard doors above a small lower drawer, and the metal handles on the doors are shaped like bunches of grapes with leaves. The drawer has sharp winged points that look to be a replacement for the original drawer, and the drawers and doors are connected so that when either door or the drawer is opened the others do as well. On the back of the cabinet there is an inscription of the Shema in Hebrew, which in English reads: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Blessed be the name of the glory of His kingdom forever and ever." It contains the following items: 2 US wheat pennies (from 1925 and 1928); 2 small locks of hair tied together with a cord, 1 blond and 1 blackish-brown hair; 1 granite plaque engraved with a Hebrew word 'SHALOM'; 1 dried rosebud; 1 golden wine cup; and 1 cast iron candlestick holder with four octopus-like legs.

The story of the box starts back during World War II Poland, with two young Jewish women named Havela and Sophie. The two were worried about the potential invasion of the Nazis, and took it upon themselves to try to perform witchcraft in order to try and fight them off. They attempted a summoning ritual which didn't go according to plan: apparently whatever they summoned escaped and caused a great many disasters.

What disasters the spirit caused are not entirely clear, but the Nazis did invade Poland in 1939 and there was the whole World War II thing. Havela and Sophie managed to escape the concentration camps to Spain, but somewhere along the way Havela managed to track down the spirit and capture it inside of a wooden wine cabinet. That wooden wine cabinet went with her everywhere she went, including when she moved to the United States of America.

Fast forward to 2001, when a man named Kevin Mannis acquires a small wooden wine cabinet at an estate sale in order to fix it up and resell it as his antique store. After he had made the purchase, he was approached by a young woman who was apparently the granddaughter of the woman who had passed away. She told him that the cabinet was always referred to as the 'dybbuk box' and that she always told everyone in the family to never touch it or open it. When asked what was in it, the grandmother would spit three times through her fingers and said it contained a "dybbuk" and "keselim." She went on to say that her grandmother wanted the cabinet to be buried with her, but that went against their Orthodox Jewish traditions and the request could not be honored by the family, so instead it was put up for sale with the rest of her furniture. Thinking that it might have some sentimental value, Mannis offered to give the cabinet back, but the granddaughter refused, and began yelling at him angrily and crying.

Mannis took the cabinet to the basement of his refinishing business where he was planning to restore the cabinet. He opened up his shop, and left a young female employee, Jane Howerton, in charge while he went to run some errands. He soon got a frantic call from Jane claiming that there was someone in Mannis' workshop breaking glass and cursing up a storm, and whoever it was had locked the iron security gates and emergency exit, leaving her trapped inside. Mannis quickly hung up and attempted to call the police, but his phone, which had been fully charged that morning, died before he could complete the call. He raced back to the shop and found that the iron gates were indeed locked, and upon opening them a frantic Jane immediately ran out the door and she refused to ever return. Meanwhile, Mannis entered the basement expecting to have to deal with an intruder, but instead no one else was inside. He did find evidence that something had happened, though: every single light through the entire basement floor had been smashed and broken, and the place reeked of cat urine.

At that point, Mannis had not made any sort of connection to the dybbuk box and that event, and went to work making some minor cleaning and repairs on the cabinet. He decided to give it to his mother for her birthday, and she came by the shop on October 31st, 2001, where they were meeting up in order to go to lunch. He showed her the cabinet, and while she was examining it stepped away for a moment in order to take a phone call. It wasn't long before one of his employees burst into the room saying something was wrong with his mother, and they found her lying on the floor. She was taken to the hospital, where it was discovered she had a stroke, and was unable to speak due to partial paralysis. After a day in the hospital, she was able to tell people things using a letter board, and when Mannis came to visit and ask how she was doing she was strangely focused on the cabinet, spelling out N-O G-I-F-T and H-A-T-E G-I-F-T. He told her that he would get her anything she wanted as long as she got better.

He then tried to give the cabinet away to other people. First he gave it to his sister, but she brought it back after a week when she couldn't get the drawer and doors to stay closed. He gave it to his brother, but he brought it back after saying it smelled like jasmine flowers and cat urine (and no, he didn't have cats.) His girlfriend had it for two days before she gave it back and told him to sell it, so he did. Mannis put the cabinet up for sale in his antique shop, and it sold the very same day. However, three days later he found the cabinet sitting by the front door of his shop with a note that read: "This has a bad darkness." Not knowing what else to do, Mannis took the cabinet home. He then started having strange dreams, seeing shadows in his peripheral vision, and smelling cat urine even though he also did not have a cat. In a last ditch effort he decided to list it on EBay, fully listing everything that had happened to him and his family after having received the cabinet. It sold to a college student in Missouri named Iosif Neitzke.

Now, Iosif Neizke was originally a skeptic of Mannis story, but bought the cabinet and started keeping a log of what happened to him. At first, Neitzke's log started with mundane stuff that could easily be explained, but there seemed to be a lot of it: his roommates got sick, swarms of bugs would surround the house they were in, weird odors started filling the house and the dumpster outside began to overflow (probably due to a missed pickup), Neizke broke his finger and his hair began to fall out, even though he was otherwise perfectly healthy. Multiple electronics died within a 10 day period including an original Xbox, a toaster, a TV and multiple watches, light bulbs would burn out unusually fast, and the transmission fluid in his car burned out of the reservoir making it a costly and somewhat strange repair. He started seeing black shapes and shadows in his peripheral vision, and started smelling "juniper bushes" and "stingy ammonia" inside the house, but never at the same time and he and his roommates could never pinpoint the source. Becoming fed up with the experiences, he also listed it on EBay like Mannis, and sold it to a man by the name of Jason Haxton on February 9, 2004.

Jason Haxton is the director for the Museum of Osteopathic Medicine in Missouri, but also collects supposedly supernatural objects from Mayan and African cultures, and often does lectures on the paranormal. He had heard about the dybbuk box from a colleague at the museum where he works, and had been following Neitzke's blog with great interest. When he heard that the cabinet was being sold he jumped at the chance, interested in examining the box and the claims by both Mannis and Neitzke. He took it to museum and examined it under a black light and tried to find anything that could explain the strange smells of cat urine or jasmine, but could not. Still, the other employees expressed concern of the box being at the museum, so Haxton took it home.

From there, Haxton started having is own experiences, starting with nightmares involving an old hag. Then his house would grow cold, and turning up the heat wouldn't have any effect no matter how high they went. They witnessed a black mass moving through the middle of a brightly lit room. Smells started appearing out of nowhere. Then Haxton started becoming ill, with vision changes, having a hard time swallowing, breaking out with welts and hives, and coughing up blood and "gunk." Haxton decided he had to do something about his situation, but first there was something he needed to do.

Haxton was visiting Portland, Oregon on a work-related trip, and decided to look up Kevin Mannis and see what more information he could get from him about the cabinet. The met up and Mannis took Haxton on a tour of the locations he had taken the box and relayed several stories about it. Before Haxton left, Mannis also told him where Havela's old house had been. Haxton went to see the house and met Sophie, who just so happened to be the Havela's cousin, and she relayed the story of Havela and her playing around with darker forces during the war.

Now armed with more information on the box, Haxton returned home and decided the only thing he could do was bury the box. He consulted a group of Jewish rabbis on the issue in order to make sure it was sealed, put it in a gold-leaf lined box, and then hired some Wiccans to perform a cleansing ceremony on that before he buried it in the ground for a few years. During that time Haxton wrote a book on the whole thing, and that was the inspiration for a couple of horror films.

Now, despite the cabinet being buried at the time and the cast and crew of the film The Possession never having come into contact with it there were numerous strange occurrences on set. A neon light exploded over the head of director Ole Bornedal even though it wasn't on at the time, and several 5K lights exploded while they were filming key scenes. Star Jeffery Dean Morgan claimed that sudden gusts of wind would suddenly blow through the set even though they were filming on closed, indoor sets. When filming wrapped, the production company put all of the props into a storage unit in Vancouver, BC, Canada, in case they needed them for any reshoots. However a few weeks later the unit caught fire, destroying everything inside. An investigation revealed that the fire started from inside the unit, but the exact cause could not be determined.

Then, despite all the trouble that Haxton had gone through in order to bury the box, he dug it back up in 2017 and sold it to none other than Zak Bagans of Ghost Adventures fame. Bagans purchased the cabinet in order to display it inside of his Haunted Museum in Las Vegas, and had been showing the box to the public for several months when rapper Post Malone showed up and got a private tour, which included direct contact with the dybbuk box.

After his encounter with the dybbuk box Post Malone had a bunch of near-disasters: his private jet blew a tire which prompted an emergency landing, he wrecked his Rolls Royce, and his home was invaded by three armed men, all of which happened within the span of less than a month.

The last we've heard about the dybbuk box was during the Covid-19 pandemic, when Bagans decided to reopen the dybbuk box for his 2020 miniseries Ghost Adventures: Quarentine. Before the episode was filmed, Bagans got into contact with Kevin Mannis, who claimed that in the last few years he had found more dybbuk boxes out there that were hidden by Havela and Sophie, which contained portions of the dybbuk they had trapped in the wine cabinet. Mannis then sent these new dybbuk boxes to Bagans for him to open them alongside the cabinet. The Ghost Adventures crew claimed that they were able to spot a mist with eyes manifesting on camera, but it was hard to tell since they have a tendency to use the grainiest night vision cameras available.

Not much else has gone on with the dybbuk box, but there is at least one remaining question, and that involves what Havela's granddaughter told Mannis. She said that the box contained a dybbuk (a concept which we're now familiar with) and a "keselim", which no one has bothered looking into. After doing a bit of research, I discovered that the second thing the dybbuk box contained was a "kesilim", which in Jewish demonology is a demon that plays tricks and misguides people, and when they fall for those tricks makes fun of them. It is a term that many rabbis should know, especially since much of the activity surrounding the dybbuk box is directly associated with the kesilim: they act as poltergeists, which can pick up and throw objects, cause phantom smells, make mysterious sounds, and start fires.

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Last Update: April 14, 2024

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