The Dybbuk Box: The Haunted Wine Cabinet That Started a Legend

The listing reads like a dare. A small wine cabinet, the seller explains, bought at the estate sale of a Holocaust survivor, sealed by family instruction, and responsible, since he opened it, for a cascade of nightmares, smells, smashed electronics and worse. He wants it gone. You can have it for the opening bid, plus shipping, plus whatever comes with it.

That auction, posted on eBay by Portland antiques dealer Kevin Mannis in the early 2000s, invented an entire category of haunted object. Mannis wrote that he had acquired the cabinet in 2001 from the estate of a Polish-born survivor named Havela, whose family said she kept a dybbuk, a possessing spirit of Jewish folklore, shut inside it. Opened, the box allegedly yielded two locks of hair, a granite slab, a dried rosebud, a goblet, two wheat pennies and a candlestick, along with escalating misfortune for everyone who housed it.

The chain of owners

The box sold, and its story compounded with interest. A Missouri student, Iosif Neitzke, blogged about health problems and swarms of dead mice before reselling it. The next buyer, Jason Haxton, director of a medical museum in Kirksville, Missouri, reported coughing blood and welts, consulted rabbis, and eventually sealed the box in a gold-lined ark, later writing a book about the experience. A 2004 Los Angeles Times article spread the tale nationally; the 2012 film The Possession, produced by Sam Raimi, spread it everywhere else. The box ultimately landed in Zak Bagans' Haunted Museum in Las Vegas, where its reputation got a fresh boost in 2018 after the rapper Post Malone touched it and promptly ran through a burglary, an emergency plane landing and a car crash, a sequence he discussed with good-humored unease.

The confession

In 2021, Mannis told the technology magazine Input, on the record, that he had made the whole thing up. He described the original listing as a work of interactive fiction, said he assembled the box and its contents himself, and expressed a certain awe at what the internet had built on his foundation. Haxton and Bagans, holding respectively a book and a museum exhibit, were not eager to agree. Believers note that a hoaxer's confession is just one more claim; skeptics note that it is the only claim in the whole saga that came with a named author taking responsibility.

It is worth saying plainly: there is no tradition of "dybbuk boxes" in Judaism. The dybbuk itself is genuine folklore, a clinging spirit of the dead that enters a living person, described in Jewish mystical literature and made famous by S. Ansky's 1914 play The Dybbuk; exorcisms of such spirits were recorded events in early modern Jewish communities. But the folklore concerns possessed people, not furniture, and Jewish scholars have repeatedly pointed out that trapping a spirit in a wine cabinet is a Hollywood mechanic, not a mystical one.

None of which fully explains why the story worked so well. Mannis built his fiction on real grief, real history and a real category of spirit, and the owners who came after him reported their symptoms in public, on dates, under their names, before any movie deal existed. Suggestion is powerful, and a box you believe is cursed will curse you as efficiently as one that is. The interesting question is whether that distinction would comfort you with the thing sitting in your basement.

Our readers keep their own inventory of objects that seemed to carry something home from the sale, and each account below stands before the jury for a verdict of True, Fake or Not sure. Add yours to the docket, or judge the rest.