Episode 6: Dybbuk and Dybbuk Boxes

Laurens

Dybbuk in Jewish Mythology

The Dybbuk itself is a malicious possessing spirit from Jewish Mythology. It supposedly is the soul of a dead person. Early accounts of possession were of demonic possession and not possession by a ghost. It reminds me so much about exorcisms in Christianity. I read that a rabbi supposedly advised an individual said to be possessed to consult a psychiatrist and I know that priests who talk to possessed Christians often help these people find professional help. Dybbuks tended to be male spirits who possessed women on the eve of their weddings, in a sexual fashion by entering the women through their vaginas. This is seen in S. Ansky’s play titled The Dybbuk. This play popularized the concept of Dybbuk, even though Dybbuk’s are also found in the Torah. There are other forms of possession in Jewish Mythology. The Ibbur for example is a positive possession. A righteous soul then supposedly possesses a body temporarily. This is done with consent so that the soul can perform a mitzvah. Mitzvah is a religious duty. A person is commanded by God to perform this religious duty. Judaism has 613 such commandments. There are positive commandments number 365, coincidentally the number of days in a solar year and the negative commandments number 248, the number of bones and main organs in the human body.

The Unlucky Mummy

When we decided to do this episode about Dybbuk and Dybbuk boxes, I immediately thought of the unlucky mummy. This might sound a bit weird, it’s not a spirit and it’s no box, it’s the painted inner lid of a sarcophagus. The unlucky mummy is an artifact that is now stored in the British Museum in London. It is very misleading to call it a mummy because as i have said it is not a dead body or a mummy but a painted wooden mummy board or inner coffin lid. It probably dated from 950- 900 bc. The lid was of a female, the drawing is female at least, and the quality of the lid suggests it’s a person of high rank. There is no name on the lid, the hieroglyphs are all religious phrases. Why this unlucky mummy is so unlucky, that’s the reason I immediately thought of it when looking into Dybbuk’s. Let me tell everyone a story.

Of all tales of the supernatural, this one is perhaps the best documented, the most disturbing and the most difficult to explain …

The Princess of Amen-Ra lived some 1,500 years before Christ. When she died, she was laid in an ornate wooden coffin and buried deep in a vault at Luxor, on the banks of the Nile. In the late 1890s, 4 rich young Englishmen visiting the excavations at Luxor were invited to buy an exquisitely fashioned mummy case containing the remains of Princess of Amen-Ra. They drew lots. The man who won paid several thousand pounds and had the coffin taken to his hotel. A few hours later, he was seen walking out towards the desert. He never returned. The next day, one of the remaining 3 men was shot by an Egyptian servant accidentally. His arm was so severely wounded it had to be amputated. The third man in the foursome found on his return home that the bank holding his entire savings had failed. The fourth guy suffered a severe illness, lost his job and was reduced to selling matches in the street. Nevertheless, the coffin reached England (causing other misfortunes along the way), where it was bought by a London businessman. After 3 of his family members had been injured in a road accident and his house damaged by fire, the businessman donated it to the British Museum. As the coffin was being unloaded from a truck in the museum courtyard, the truck suddenly went into reverse and trapped a passerby. Then as the casket was being lifted up the stairs by 2 workmen, 1 fell and broke his leg. The other, apparently in perfect health, died unaccountably two days later. Once the Princess was installed in the Egyptian Room, trouble really started. The Museum’s night watchmen frequently heard frantic hammering and sobbing from the coffin. Other exhibits in the room were also often hurled about at night. One watchman died on duty; making the other watchmen want to quit. Cleaners refused to go near the Princess too. When a visitor derisively flicked a dust cloth at the face painted on the coffin, his child died of measles soon afterwards. Finally, the authorities had the mummy carried down to the basement figuring it could not do any harm down there. Within a week, one of the helpers was seriously ill, and the supervisor of the move was found dead on his desk. By now, the papers had heard of it. A journalist photographer took a picture of the mummy case and when he developed it, the painting on the coffin was of a horrifying, human face. The photographer was said to have gone home then, locked his bedroom door and shot himself. Soon afterwards, the museum sold the mummy to a private collector. After continual misfortune (and deaths), the owner banished it to the attic. A well known authority on the occult, Madame Helena Blavatsky, visited the premises. Upon entry, she was seized with a shivering fit and searched the house for the source of an evil influence of incredible intensity; She finally came to the attic and found the mummy case. Can you exorcise this evil spirit? Asked the owner. There is no such thing as exorcism. Evil remains evil forever. Nothing can be done about it. I implore you to get rid of this evil as soon as possible. But no British museum would take the mummy; the fact that almost 20 people had met with misfortune, disaster or death from handling the casket, in barely 10 years, was now well known. Eventually, a hard headed American archaeologist (who dismissed the happenings as quirks of circumstance), paid a handsome price for the mummy and arranged for its removal to New York. In Apr 1912, the new owner escorted its treasure aboard a sparkling, new White Star liner about to make its maiden voyage to New York. On the night of April 14, amid scenes of unprecedented horror, the Princess of Amen-Ra accompanied 1,500 passengers to their deaths at the bottom of the Atlantic. The name of the ship was of course, the H.M.S. TITANIC This story is false. This never happened. There never was a mummy aboard the Titanic, it isn’t on any cargo manifest and diagrams. The mummy was acquired in the late 1890’s but the medium Helena Blavatsky died in 1891. The mummy or rather the coffin lid never left the British Museum and is still there today. The ghost story was fabricated by two English men named William Stead and Douglas Murray.

Rei

What is a Dybbuk Box

A dybbuk box is supposedly a box meant to keep an exorcised spirit trapped. In 2003 a man named Kevin Mannis listed something on eBay called a Dybbuk Box. He added pictures of an old wine cabinet and a rather strange, but long product description. It was a story about a Holocaust survivor and paranormal phenomena. At the end of the description it apparently said “Help me”. Here is how the story goes. Kevin Mannis lived in Portland, Oregon. One day he was visiting a yard sale to look for some old stuff and furniture for his furniture refinishing business. Suddenly he came across an old, wooden wine cabinet. The person selling it was the granddaughter of a woman who had recently passed away at the age of 103. Her grandmother was a Holocaust survivor who grew up in Poland. She got married and raised a family until World War 2 happened and the Nazi's took over and send her and her family to a concentration camp. She was the only person in her family to survive. After her family was killed she escaped the camp and fled with other survivors to Spain and lived there until the War had ended. After that she immigrated to the U.S. And brought only 3 items with her. The wine cabinet was one of those items.

Mannis bought the box along with some other items the granddaughter was selling and she told Mannis it was a Dybbuk Box. Her grandmother told her to always keep it shut and out of reach because a Dybbuk was inside it. Before actually selling the box to Mannis the granddaughter warned him that he should never open it, or bad things would happen.

Apparently the grandmother had requested that the box would be buried with her but that is apparently contrary to the rules of an orthodox Jewish burial so her request was not honored.

Mannis asked the granddaughter if she didn't want to take the cabinet back, since it seemed so sentimental, but the woman told him he bought it now and she would not take it back.

So Kevin Mannis took the items he purchased back to his shop to restore it. He planned on giving the wine cabinet to his mother for her birthday which was on the 28th of October. To restore the cabinet he had to open it and so he did. Inside he found some curious objects. There were two U.S. Wheat pennies inside, one dating from 1925 and one from 1928, there were also two locks of hair: a blonde lock and a brown/black lock, a dried rosebud, a golden wine cup, a four-legged candlestick, and a granite sculpture with the Hebrew word SHALOM inscribed. The back of the cabinet had the SHEMA carved in, a prayer considered to be one of the most important in Judaism.

After opening the cabinet he decided to not refinish it but just clean it and rub it in lemon oil.

Mannis was not able to give it to his mother on her actual birthday since she already had plans that day with friends, so she came to his shop a few days later, on Halloween. Mannis gave her the wine cabinet and his mother seemed to really like it. At that moment Kevin's phone rang and went to the back of the store to take the call. Only 5 minutes later one of his employee's came running in the back to tell him something was wrong with his mother. Kevin ran to his mother only to find her sitting in a chair, no expression on her face but tears running down her cheeks. She would not respond to any of his questions. His mother actually suffered a stroke and was taken to the hospital. On the table next to the chair she was sitting in was the wine cabinet, and it was opened.

In the hospital Kevin's mother was doing a little better but she was still unable to speak, she could respond by pointing letters to spell words and so she was able to tell Kevin that she hated the gift. Kevin laughed it off and told her sorry you didn't like the gift, but he still didn't link it to anything paranormal.

He then gave the cabinet to his sister but after only a week she gave it back. His sister told him that the cabinet doors wouldn't stay closed. Kevin then gave it to his brother and his wife but they only kept it for 3 days before returning it, saying it smelled like cat urine and they couldn't get the smell out. He then gave it to his girlfriend but she came back with it after only 2 days and then Kevin decided to sell it in his store. Now guess what, 3 days later the cabinet was sitting at the front doors of his shop with a little note attached. The note said “This has a bad darkness”. Kevin had no idea what all of this meant and decided to take the cabinet into his own house. This is where things got even worse.

Once the box was in his house he started having a recurring nightmare. In this nightmare Kevin would be walking with a friend and at some point find himself looking in the eyes of that friend. He would then realize it was not his friend but something demonic looking back at him. The demon then proceeds to beat him and Kevin would wake up with bruises and marks on his body.

Still, Kevin did not link it to anything paranormal. Until his sister, brother and his brother's wife came over to his house and spent the night. The next morning his sister complained about having a nightmare and described to Kevin the exact same nightmare that he's been having. As they were listening his brother and his wife froze and eventually told them they had been having the same nightmares. Kevin then called his girlfriend and asked her if she had been having nightmares, she responded that she had and described to him the exact same nightmare.

After that Kevin began seeing shadows in the corners of his eyes. Eventually he put the cabinet in an outside storage unit. One night he woke up to the fire alarm going off in the storage unit. He got up to see what it was but nothing was burning. There was, however, an intense smell of cat urine. When he went back into his house, the smell was there too. Kevin has never owned a cat. Instead of going back to sleep, he went on his computer and started researching these kinds of things. He read that there are people who actually look for these types of haunted boxes and buy them on eBay and such. So Kevin decided to put the box up for sale on eBay, including this entire store and begging someone to help him.

After he put the listing online he proceeded to add some updates to the description before the bidding ended. One of the last updates was that he thought the box stopped haunting him until he got home one day (on a Friday the 13th) and saw all of his 10 fish dead in their aquarium.

Some More Facts

→ The box was sold for 280 dollars on the 9th of February 2004.

→ The starting bid was 1 dollar

→ There were 51 bids.

→ You can find the entire story, including the original eBay listing on Kevin Mannis his website DIBBUKBOX.COM

→ All the original items were included in the sale with the box.

→ In 2011, Jason Haxton, who had briefly owned the cabinet, wrote a book about the Dybbuk box.

→ In 2012, a movie about the Dybbuk Box was made. The movie is called The Possession and both Kevin Mannis and Jason Haxton were production consultants on the film.

→ Apparently 5 days after the shooting of the film ended, all the movie props were destroyed in a mysterious fire.

→ In 2016 Haxton sold the box to Zak Bagans, the host of the show Ghost Adventures.

→ In the same year both Kevin Mannis and Jason Haxton were featured on an episode of Ghost Adventures: Deadly Possessions where they bring the box to Bagans' Haunted Museum in Las Vegas. The box resides there until this day and is highlighted as “The World's Most Haunted Object”.

→ Zak Bagans opens the box himself on an episode of Ghost Adventures: Quarantine. Apparently they heard it say “Kevin” and “Evil” and even saw a shadow figure. Later in the episode security camera footage was included of Bagans' friend, Post Malone, touching Bagans' shoulder who was touching the closed Dybbuk Box before Bagans opened it on the show.

→ After they opened the Dybbuk Box, Post Malone got into a car accident, almost had a plane wreck, his house got broken into, and some other bad luck events, all within a month's time.

→ Dybbuk boxes are now found on eBay, Etsy, the Dark Web, etc... in all kinds of sizes and for all kinds of prices. The typical box is square with wax to keep them shut. Many YouTubers open them in their videos and sometimes paranormal stuff happens after that, sometimes not. It is of course up to the viewer I guess to believe what is real and what is not.

→ According to Kenny Biddle the wine cabinet did not come from Spain but was actually a minibar from New York.

→ Kevin Mannis later admitted that the story was made up and he kept adding updates to keep it interesting.