![]() ![]() He supposedly heard it say “Kevin,” referencing Mannis, and “evil,” then heard a child’s voice. Last year, the now 44-year-old Bagans opened the box on an episode of Ghost Adventures: Quarantine. Today it’s one of the museum’s highlights, touted as “The World’s Most Haunted Object.” That year, Bagans featured both Mannis and Haxton on an episode of Ghost Adventures: Deadly Possessions (also known as Ghost Adventures: Artifacts) in which he brings the box to his Haunted Museum in Las Vegas. ![]() In 2016, Haxton sold the box to Bagans for a sum neither party is willing to reveal. Over the past five years, dybbuk fever has hit an all-time high thanks to one man: famed ghost hunter Zak Bagans, the host of the Travel Channel’s Ghost Adventures show and its slew of spin-offs. He describes standing underneath an unlit neon light that randomly exploded and says that five days after shooting wrapped, all of the props from the film were destroyed in a mysterious fire. In an Entertainment Weekly article published around the time of the movie’s release, director Ole Bornedal claims that “really weird things” happened during production. Both Mannis and Haxton were production consultants on the film. In 2012, the most prominent of three movies about the Dybbuk Box - The Possession, produced by filmmaker Sam Raimi - was released. In his book, he details what befell him - everything from bleeding eyes to random choking attacks to, yes, recurring dreams of a creepy old woman - in the first few months after buying the box. The director of the Museum of Osteopathic Medicine in Kirksville, Missouri, Haxton has studied American antiques and ancient artifacts for decades and was fascinated by the mysterious wine cabinet. In 2011, a subsequent owner of Mannis’ box, Jason Haxton, released a book about the box. You can even watch people open dybbuk boxes on YouTube. You can buy dybbuk boxes of all shapes and sizes on Etsy, eBay, and a website specifically dedicated to them, The Dybbuk Box Store. Since then, the Dybbuk Box has captured the popular imagination, becoming the stuff of internet legend - and commerce. Toward the end of the description, he writes, “Help me.” Listing it on eBay in 2003, Mannis - who has a background in writing, advertising, and entertainment - wrote a very long and detailed product description, in which he dubs the item a “dibbuk box.” Mannis’ eBay listing details how he got it, the strange things that happened to him and his family afterward, and why he wants to get rid of it. Then he began seeing what he later described as “shadow things” in his peripheral vision. ![]() Mannis at one point tried to give the box to his then-girlfriend, but after keeping it for a time, she forced him to take it back. A couple years later, the worker himself also took his own life. And most disturbingly, he says, the brother of a store employee died by suicide shortly after visiting the shop and knocking the cabinet off the shelf. Mannis and his siblings suffered from the same recurring nightmares of an old woman with sunken eyes. His sister got creeped out by the cabinet because the doors kept opening on their own his brother and his sister-in-law complained of odd smells coming from the box, like cat urine and jasmine. Over the course of two years, a number of other mysterious events befell Mannis and those around him. The seller purportedly told Mannis it was never to be opened, and if it was, bad things would happen. The granddaughter told him her grandmother always kept it shut and out of reach because there was a dybbuk - in Jewish folklore, an evil, restless spirit that possesses the living - inside it. When Havela, who lived to 103, immigrated to the U.S., the wine cabinet was only one of three items she brought with her.Īs Mannis paid for the cabinet, Havela’s granddaughter said, “I see you bought the Dybbuk Box.” Mannis wasn’t familiar with the term. She, with other survivors, fled to Spain and lived there until the end of the war. Havela’s parents, brothers, sister, husband, two sons, and daughter were all killed. The story goes that he purchased an old wine cabinet from the granddaughter of a recently deceased Holocaust survivor named Havela, who escaped Nazi-occupied Poland. ![]() Back in 2001, Kevin Mannis was out visiting yard sales, looking for supplies for his furniture-restoration business, a hole-in-the-wall shop located at the base of the Burnside Bridge in Portland, Oregon. ![]()
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