Dybbuk Box

The dybbuk box, or dibbuk box (in the Hebrew language known as קופסת דיבוק, or Kufsat Dibbuk), is a wine box which is said to be haunted by a dybbuk. A dybbuk is said to be a restless, usually malicious, spirit believed to be able to haunt and even possess the living.

According to Mannis' story, he bought the box at an estate sale in 2001. It had belonged to a survivor of the Holocaust in Poland named Havaleh, who had escaped to Spain and purchased it there before her immigration to the United States. Havaleh's granddaughter told Mannis that the box had been bought in Spain after the Holocaust. Upon hearing that the box was a family heirloom, Mannis offered to give the box back to the family but the granddaughter insisted that he take it. "We don't want it," she said. She told him the box had been kept in her grandmother's sewing room and was never opened because a dybbuk was said to live inside it.

Upon opening the box, Mannis wrote that he found that it contained two 1920s pennies, a lock of blonde hair bound with cord, a lock of black/brown hair bound with cord, a small statue engraved with the Hebrew word "shalom", a small golden wine goblet, one dried rose bud, and a single candle holder with four octopus-shaped legs.

Numerous owners of the box have reported that strange phenomena accompany it. In his story, Mannis wrote that he experienced a series of horrific nightmares shared with other people while they were in possession of the box or when they stayed at his home while he had it. His mother suffered a stroke on the same day he gave her the box as a birthday present October 31. 

Every owner of the box has reported that smells of cat urine or jasmine flowers and nightmares involving an old hag accompany the box. Iosif Neitzke, a student at Truman State University in Kirksville, Missouri and the last person to auction the box on eBay, claimed that the box caused lights to burn out in his house and his hair to fall out.