The story behind the worlds most cursed object: The dybbuk box
Holocaust survivor claims she summoned an evil spirit on accident.
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The word ‘dybbuk’ comes from Jewish folklore. A dybbuk is an evil and malicious spirit that is capable of possessing a living body and occasionally objects. Once a person is possessed by a dybbuk, it typically won’t leave until an exorcism is performed or the person dies. Historically, mental illness was also brushed off as a person ‘just having a dybbuk’ attached to them that they needed to get rid of. If an exorcism was performed and successful, dybbuks would leave the host and return to where they came from, the ‘other side’. Part of the folklore is also that dybbuks come to this side by riding on the backs of black dogs and cats.
Important note: The dybbuk box is said to be so evil that even looking at a picture of it will curse you, so I will not include a picture of it in this blog but you can find a picture of it on the internet.
How we learned of the dybbuk box
In 2001, a very strange box appeared on eBay. It was being sold by a man named Kevin Mannis who owned an antique store. He bought the box from an estate sale and the items that were being sold belonged to a woman who had survived the Holocaust. The woman had died at the age of 103 but not before carefully instructing her family not to open the box.
The granddaughter who sold the box to Kevin also warmed him to never open the box. The granddaughter also told him that the box had been in her family for as long as she could remember. Kevin offered to give the box back to her, assuming it had some important meaning to the family, but the granddaughter was insistent that he kept it.
Kevin took the box back to his shop and placed it in the basement. He left to run errands but while he was out, he got a call from one of his employees who was freaking out. He returned to the shop quickly and said that he was hit by a strong scent of jasmine flowers. He goes to look for the source of the smell but found that all the lights in the basement had been shattered. The employee who had been freaking out told him that she had heard “otherworldly screaming” coming from the basement. After this day, this employee…
