What happened
In June 2003 an eBay listing offered a small wooden cabinet, about 12 by 7 by 16 inches, with two doors, the Shema prayer carved inside, and a story. The seller, Kevin Mannis, ran a furniture refinishing business in Portland, Oregon. He wrote that he had bought the cabinet at the estate sale of a 103-year-old Holocaust survivor who had escaped Poland for Spain, and that her granddaughter had warned him it was a dybbuk box, kept shut in a sewing room because a malicious spirit lived inside. Inside he said he had found two 1920s pennies, two locks of hair bound with cord, a small goblet, a dried rosebud, a candle holder and a slab of stone carved with the word shalom. From the day it entered his shop, he wrote, there had been smashed light bulbs, a wall of jasmine scent, nightmares of a hag, a stroke that felled his mother on the day he gave her the box, and relatives who sent it back with notes saying it carried a darkness. It sold for $140 to Iosif Neitzke, a student at Truman State University in Kirksville, Missouri.
Neitzke posted updates about hair loss, insects, strange smells and dark shapes at the edge of his vision, then relisted the box in February 2004 with Mannis’s story pasted beneath his own. The winner was Jason Haxton, director of the Museum of Osteopathic Medicine at A.T. Still University, in the same town. Haxton reported a swollen eye, fatigue, a metallic taste, congestion and a cough, consulted a Kabbalah-literate adviser about what the object was, published a book, The Dibbuk Box, in 2011, and sold the story to Hollywood, where it became the 2012 film The Possession. In 2016 the box passed to the television ghost hunter Zak Bagans, who has displayed it at his Haunted Museum in Las Vegas since 2017 as the world’s most haunted object.
The investigation
Skeptics had been pulling at the story since the first listing. The Los Angeles Times interviewed Mannis in 2004 and noted that his dates did not line up: the auction said 2001, and he told the paper he had bought the box in 2000 but left that out because so much had gone wrong that year. A rabbi consulted by the paper called the subject essentially a kook subject while declining to rule it impossible. In 2018 Kenny Biddle, the chief investigator for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, examined the box at Bagans’s museum and in archive footage and showed that it is not a Spanish wine cabinet at all but a mass-produced American minibar from the late 1950s, matching a 1957 patent filed in New York; its door racks are too small for a wine bottle. Biddle also published a screenshot of a Facebook post from October 2015 in which Mannis described himself as the original creator of the story of the Dibbuk Box and offered $100,000 to anyone who could find an earlier use of the phrase.
The explanations
In July 2021 Mannis told Charles Moss of Input magazine the rest. He is a creative writer; the dybbuk box was a piece of interactive horror fiction written for the listing, and he invented the term. He had bought the cabinet at a yard sale from an attorney, not from a survivor’s family. He carved the Hebrew on the back himself. The hair came from a friend, who confirmed it. The stroke his mother suffered was real; the rest was embroidered over the years to keep the story alive once it got away from him. Haxton and Bagans both rejected the confession, Haxton suggesting that Mannis had cursed the box without meaning to, and Bagans insisting it is very much cursed and evil, citing visitors who had to be carried out and the rapper Post Malone, who touched Bagans’s shoulder while Bagans had a hand on the box in 2018 and later blamed it for an emergency landing, a burglary and a car crash.
Where it stands
The Dybbuk Box is a hoax by the admission of its author, and a minibar by the evidence of its hinges. What it also is, is a successful piece of internet folklore: a story launched in an auction listing that acquired owners, symptoms, a book, a feature film, television specials and a museum, and that still frightens visitors who have paid to see it. The verdict is hoax.