The Horror
The story begins, as the best modern hauntings do, with a product description. In 2003 a small wooden wine cabinet was listed on eBay by Kevin Mannis, a furniture refinisher and writer in Portland, Oregon. The listing did not simply describe a piece of furniture. It told the reader that the cabinet had belonged to a woman called Havela, a Polish Jew who had escaped the Holocaust after her parents, siblings, husband and children were killed, had made her way to Spain, and had eventually reached the United States carrying only three possessions, the cabinet among them. Inside, the listing said, was a dybbuk: in Jewish folklore, the restless soul of a dead person that clings to and possesses the living.
The listing catalogued what the cabinet supposedly contained, and the inventory is the part that has been copied and recopied ever since. Two American wheat pennies, dated 1925 and 1928. Two locks of hair. A dried rosebud. A four-legged candlestick. A golden wine cup. A small granite sculpture cut with the Hebrew word shalom. On the back of the cabinet, the listing said, someone had carved the Shema, the central declaration of Jewish prayer. Mannis wrote that misfortune had followed the cabinet into his workshop and into the lives of everyone who handled it, and he closed with two words: help me.
It sold for 140 dollars to Iosif Neitzke, a student in Missouri, who blogged about his own run of bad luck and then passed it on. In February 2004 Jason Haxton bought it for 280 dollars. Haxton was not a showman; he was curator of the Museum of Osteopathic Medicine at what is now A. T. Still University in Kirksville, Missouri, and that credibility mattered enormously to what happened next. He reported a swollen eye, exhaustion and a metallic taste in his mouth. He built a website for the box, sold the story rights to a production company, and in 2011 published a book about it with Truman State University Press, presented as a true account of a cursed object whose origins he traced back to the Holocaust.
By then the story had outgrown everyone in it. The journalist Leslie Gornstein came across the auction through a friend and wrote it up for the Los Angeles Times in 2004 under the headline “A jinx in a box?” That article was bought as source material and became The Possession, directed by Ole Bornedal and produced by Sam Raimi, released in August 2012 with Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Kyra Sedgwick. It cost around 14 million dollars and took roughly 83 million worldwide. The box appeared in other films afterwards, and in 2018 fans of the musician Post Malone decided that a run of accidents had followed his proximity to it. A phrase that had not existed before 2003, dybbuk box, had become a category of object that anyone could sell.
What the record says
Here the usual order of things reverses. There is no documented haunting to weigh against sceptical argument, because the documented part of this case is the writing of it.
In January 2019 the investigator Kenny Biddle published an examination of the cabinet in Skeptical Inquirer, concluding that the object was not a Jewish wine cabinet from Spain but a mass-produced minibar of American manufacture, and that the accompanying history had been made up. Then, on 8 July 2021, Charles Moss published an interview with Mannis in Input. Mannis did not hedge. “I am a creative writer,” he said. “The Dybbuk Box is a story that I created.” He described conceiving the idea, the term and the name, and writing the story around the cabinet to post on eBay as, in his words, an interactive horror story unfolding in real time. He said the carving on the back was his own work. He had bought the cabinet at a yard sale from a lawyer, not from a grieving survivor’s granddaughter. Two people who knew him at the time, Curt Morris and Matthew Christensen, corroborated his account to the magazine; one of the locks of hair, they said, had come from Christensen. Mannis linked the writing of it to a bad period in his own life, a relationship falling apart and a run of ordinary misfortune around the time of Yom Kippur.
Havela should be named for what she is. She is a character in a short piece of horror fiction written in Oregon in 2003. No record supports her existence, and there is no archive, transport list or testimony to check, because there is no person to check for. The Holocaust in the story is scenery. It was borrowed to make a minibar frightening, and nothing in the listing describes anything that happened to anyone.
The dybbuk itself is not invented. It belongs to a real tradition, emerging clearly in the sixteenth-century kabbalistic world of Safed, entering wider culture through S. An-sky’s play The Dybbuk in 1920, and carrying with it genuine rituals of expulsion. What that tradition does not contain is a box. The idea that a dybbuk can be shut in a cupboard and shipped by post has no basis in Jewish folklore and no existence before this auction.
The later owners have not retreated. Haxton has continued to maintain that what he experienced was real, whatever Mannis now says about the origins of the story, and Zak Bagans has disputed the significance of the admission on the same grounds. Those are claims about personal experience and cannot be tested at this distance. What can be established is narrower and firmer: the provenance in the listing was written as fiction by the man selling the object, and he has said so on the record.
The Modern Relic
The cabinet still exists, and unusually for this kind of story you can go and stand in front of it. Bagans, of Ghost Adventures, bought it from Haxton in 2016 for an undisclosed sum and installed it in Zak Bagans’ The Haunted Museum at 600 East Charleston Boulevard, Las Vegas, which runs guided tours most days of the week. He opened it on camera for a Travel Channel broadcast on 2 July 2020. The museum bills it as the world’s most haunted object and tells visitors about holes appearing in the walls around the exhibit and a black-cloaked figure passing through its closed door. Those are the museum’s claims, made by its owner about his own attraction, and they should be read that way.
What is on display, then, is a modest wooden cabinet of no great age, a set of objects placed inside it by the man who wrote its history, and a piece of Hebrew lettering he cut himself. That is a genuinely interesting thing to look at. It is one of the few physical artefacts of an invented legend where the invention has been fully admitted by its author, the fabrication dated, the motive stated and the witnesses named. The horror in the case is not a spirit in a box. It is how little effort it took to attach a fictional Holocaust to a piece of furniture, and how thoroughly the world preferred the fiction.
