TWO 1920S WHEAT PENNIES, TWO LOCKS OF HAIR, A GRANITE STATUE, A DRIED ROSEBUD, A WINE CUP, A CANDLE HOLDER, AND A DYBBUK
CURRENT LOCATION:
ZAK BAGANS’S THE HAUNTED MUSEUM, LAS VEGAS, NEVADA
PREVIOUS OWNERS:
KEVIN MANNIS, IOSIF NIETZKE, JASON HAXTON
In Jewish folklore, a dybbuk is an evil spirit, sometimes defined as the soul of a dead person that has become perverted in its afterlife. Its name means “to cling,” and that’s what it does, Saran Wrapping itself to the soul of a living person to very bad ends. But when you stuff one into a box, that box becomes a cursed object. And the most infamous dybbuk box story — the first dybbuk box story, in fact — is borne not of ancient folklore, but of twenty-first-century digital platforms and pop culture celebrities.
In 2001, a man named Kevin Mannis visited an estate sale in Portland, Oregon, to see if there were any nice pieces he could pick up for his used furniture business. The house had belonged to a woman who had survived the Holocaust by escaping to Spain after the rest of her family was killed.
In the house, Mannis found a small wooden box about the size of a backpack. It was a portable wine cabinet that the woman had bought in Spain. It had two doors carved with clusters of grapes, large hinges, and a small drawer at the bottom. It was made so that when one door was opened, so did the other and the drawer as well. A Jewish prayer was engraved on the back of the box. Mannis bought it.
Back in his shop, Mannis discovered that he didn’t just get a box, but a box full of stuff. Inside were two wheat pennies from the 1920s, a lock of blond hair, a lock of dark hair, a small granite statue engraved with the word shalom (Hebrew for “peace”), a dried rosebud, a golden wine cup, and a cast-iron candle holder with legs shaped like octopus tentacles.
The contents were mysterious, but they’re pretty much irrelevant to the story. What is relevant is that bad things started happening after Mannis acquired the box. His shop got trashed, and he started seeing shadowy forms, smelling ammonia, and having nightmares of a hag. Everyone he tried to give or sell the box to gave it back, including his mother, who suffered a stroke after he gifted it to her. Eventually, Mannis put it together that the source of all this strangeness was the dybbuk box.
Stories like this usually end with the owner dying, or with the object disappearing or winding up in a museum, but this story took a twist that could only be possible in the modern digital world. In 2003, Mannis posted the dybbuk box for sale on eBay, which at that time had been online for about eight years. In his description of the item, he went into extreme detail about his suspicions concerning the box and admitted that he was hoping somebody more knowledgeable than he about the paranormal could take it off his hands. He didn’t even put a reserve price on it. The beat-up old box full of strange ritualistic items sold for $140.
The buyer was a college student in Missouri named Iosif Nietzke. Whether Nietzke was an expert in cursed objects or Jewish ghosts, or wanted it for the story or — heck — to store wine is unclear. What is clear is what he recounted happening to him after winning the high bid on the dybbuk box.
According to Nietzke, he and his roommates began to experience various annoyances such as having sudden allergy-like symptoms, detecting strange smells, struggling through extended periods of torpor, and noticing their electronic devices dying often. Those strange happenings eventually escalated to hair loss and visions of dark, blurry things.
In an interesting twist on the trope of sending something dangerous back from whence it came, Nietzke listed the dybbuk box on eBay again, complete with the new story of his experiences. This was in 2004, less than a year after he won the box. This time it sold for $280.
The third buyer was Jason Haxton. He was the director of the Museum of Osteopathic Medicine at A. T. Still University in Missouri. Haxton claimed to have suffered various physical ills caused by the box, as well as receiving a big physical boost: he asserts that the box reversed the aging process for him, calling it his “fountain of youth.” He kept it in an acacia wood box lined with 24-karat gold.
Haxton raised the profile of this wine cabinet stratospherically, writing a book about it in 2011, creating a website for the object, and discussing his paranormal purchase in interviews. He frames the chronicling of the box as a defense against the overwhelming number of requests for information he was getting about it once it was discovered that he was the owner.
The dybbuk box’s reputation grew, and its story was fictionalized as a 2012 horror movie called The Possession, based in large part on a 2004 Los Angeles Times article about the box by Leslie Gornstein. The movie credits include a production consultant nod to Kevin Mannis, the owner who originally put the box on eBay.
In 2017, Zak Bagans, star of the paranormal reality TV show Ghost Adventures, bought it for his Haunted Museum in Las Vegas (for more on The Haunted Museum, see this page). One source states that Bagans paid $10,000 for the Internet-famous box, a price that is in line with some other high-profile purchases for his museum. (Moral of the story: invest in cursed objects.)
The dybbuk box became the star of Bagans’s museum. It’s featured on the paper tickets alongside the words “the world’s most haunted object.” Inside, the box gets its own room, where it’s displayed (and imprisoned) in a glass case under a spotlight and surrounded by a protective double ring of salt and dried sage. On my visit, the tour guide pointed out the place where the salt is disturbed and noted that the doors to the box have come ajar of their own accord. The gold-lined case Haxton kept it in is off to the side in its own glass case.
The final twist to the strange story involves the rapper Post Malone, who encountered the dybbuk box while guest-starring on an episode of Zak Bagans’s Ghost Adventures in 2018. Subsequently, Post Malone suffered a series of high-profile misfortunes, including an emergency landing in a plane, a car accident, and a burglary. Not too long after, Bagans released infrared security footage showing Post Malone in the museum’s dybbuk box room. The clip has no audio; in it, the rapper seems disturbed and eventually shoves Bagans out of the room. The implication was clear: Post Malone was the latest victim of the cursed dybbuk box.
Of course, another element of this story that’s worth noting is that there was no such thing as a dybbuk box before Mannis’s eBay listing. Sure, there were dybbuk folktales. And, sure, there were boxes. But Jewish mythology had no antecedent for this evil-genie-in-a-lamp-type story. In addition, a writer for Skeptical Inquirer magazine named Kenny Biddle has posited, and shown considerable evidence, that the box is too small to be a Jewish wine cabinet and is instead a minibar manufactured in New York in the mid-twentieth century. Oops. Still, that is no less strange a starting point than a Holocaust survivor’s estate sale for the strange journey of this wooden box.
From an odd eBay listing to the silver screen to cursing one of the country’s top music performers, the dybbuk box has ascended to pop culture infamy. As a result, there is always a dybbuk box for sale on eBay. So you could buy one today. If you dare.