The Dybbuk Box: The True Story Behind America’s Most Haunted Object — Ep. 33

The Dybbuk Box is one of the most infamous haunted objects in modern paranormal history.

But behind the viral stories, the museum footage, and the online legends, there was something real: a chain of people who claimed that nightmares, shadows, sickness, and fear followed the small wooden cabinet wherever it went.

In this episode, join Robert Barber as he breaks down the original estate sale in Portland, Oregon, the early owners who tried to live with it, the curator who believed it carried a presence, and the moment the story exploded into the public imagination.

Some of it is verified.
Some of it is personal testimony.
Some of it is exaggerated.
But all of it adds up to one of the strangest modern hauntings ever recorded.

Is the Dybbuk Box a genuine haunting, the power of suggestion, or something in between?

Let’s look at what really happened.

🎧 State of the Unknown — new episodes every Tuesday.

Chapters

• 0:00 A Harmless Find Turns Hostile
• 2:55 Estate Sale And The Warning
• 5:40 Opening The Box And First Nightmares
• 8:15 Lights, Shadows, And The Moving Smell
• 10:06 A Gift To His Mother Ends In Crisis
• 12:20 Returns, Illness, And The Watching Figure
• 15:05 Defining A Dybbuk And A Pattern
• 17:44 The Online Listing And College Days
• 20:14 The Curator’s Ordeal And Containment
• 22:44 Behind Glass: Public Reactions
• 25:44 Celebrity Visit And Viral Legend
• 27:44 Skepticism, Embellishment, And Evidence
• 30:44 Between Fact, Folklore, And Memory
• 33:04 Closing Thoughts And Listener Actions

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:01

What would you do if you brought home something that seemed completely harmless? And within a few days, every person who touched it started getting sick. You're hearing slow footsteps in the hallway when nobody's there. You're smelling something sour and animal-like that doesn't belong in your house. You're waking up from the same nightmare over and over, heart pounding, certain that someone was standing right next to your bed a second ago. And every time you try to give the item away, the person who takes it ends up bringing it back and saying the same thing. I don't want this. Something's wrong with it. That's what happened to a man who bought a small wooden wine cabinet at an estate sale in Portland, Oregon. He thought it was just another antique he could clean up and resell. But once he opened it, light bulbs started bursting. Shadows began moving in empty rooms. People around him got sick. And when the box finally left his hands, the nightmares didn't stop. They simply followed it to the next person. This is the story of that cabinet. The people who tried to live with it, and the thing some of them believed was attached to it. Most haunted objects earn their reputation slowly. One person has something strange happen. Someone else adds their experience. Details are passed around, retold, twisted, and years later you end up with folklore. The Dybbock box didn't need years. The first man who opened it reported strange activity almost immediately. So did the next owner and the next. Different houses, different states, different people, all describing nearly the same pattern. Nightmares that felt like attacks. Illness that seemed to flare up around the cabinet. Shadows where there shouldn't be shadows. A thick, hostile feeling in the air when the box was in the room. Over time, parts of the story were clearly exaggerated. Some of it was turned into a horror legend. But underneath all of that, there's still a chain of events that's hard to ignore. And every link in the chain starts at the same moment. The moment someone lifted the latch and opened that box. I'm your host, Robert Barber, and tonight we're looking at a small wooden cabinet that some people believe is one of the most dangerous haunted objects in America. This is the story of the Dybbock Box. When you think of haunted objects, you probably picture a creepy setting, a dark attic, a locked basement, an abandoned building. This story starts in a bright, ordinary house on a regular day. In the late 1990s, an antique dealer named Kevin Manis walked into an estate sale in Portland. This was just routine for him. He ran a small shop, and most weeks he was picking through furniture, glassware, and old artwork, trying to find pieces he could fix up and sell. The home belonged to a woman named Havila. She had survived the Holocaust, immigrated to the United States, and built a life and family here. By the time Kevin arrived, her children and grandchildren were sorting through what she left behind. There were piles of clothes, old photographs, dishes, and the kind of furniture you see in a lot of older homes. Nothing about the house itself felt threatening. If anything, it felt tired. A place where someone had lived a long, hard life, and that life had simply come to an end. On one of the pieces of furniture, almost tucked away in plain sight, Kevin noticed a small wooden cabinet. It looked like a little wine box with a door and a set of drawers. The wood was worn but solid, the kind of piece that could be cleaned up and sold to someone who liked vintage things. He picked it up, turned it in his hands, and thought, this will be easy to move. When he asked about it, though, the mood in the room changed. One of the family members tensed up and pulled him aside. They told him quietly but firmly that they did not want anyone opening that cabinet. Ever. They didn't launch into a ghost story, they didn't say it was cursed. They just looked at him and said they did not want it opened. Kevin assumed it was a sentimental issue. Maybe it held something private once. Maybe it reminded them of something painful. He offered to buy it. They agreed. But as they handed it over, they repeated the warning. Please do not open it. He heard the words. He just didn't think they meant anything beyond emotion. He put the cabinet in his car, brought it back to his shop, and set it on his workbench. And like most of us would, once he was alone, he gave in to curiosity. He unlatched the door and opened it. Inside were small personal objects, a lock of hair tied off in a little bundle, a stone with Hebrew letters carved into it, two old pennies that had darkened with age. A dried rose brittle to the touch, a tiny goblet, and finally a candle holder that looked like it had been used and carefully cleaned. None of it looked dangerous. There were no bones, no sigils burned into the wood, just things that felt like a private ritual, sealed inside a box and hidden on a shelf. He pulled the items out, examined them briefly, and set them aside. Then he locked up the shop for the night and went home. That should have been the end of it. Instead, that night, he woke up choking. In his dream, he was walking through a place that felt underground. The air was heavy, the walls were close. He could hear his own footsteps and another set just behind him, slightly out of sync with his own. Whoever was behind him never spoke, never touched him, but he could feel the presence closing the distance. Close enough that he could sense breath on the back of his neck. Every time he turned around to see who it was, something rushed him. Not a clear face, not a body he could describe, just the violent impact of something lunging at him in the dark. He woke up gasping, heart racing, with that leftover panic you get after a bad dream, where your brain knows you are safe, but your body is still sure something is wrong. In a horror movie, that would be the moment where ominous music kicks in and he instantly connects it to the box. But in real life, he shook it off, blames stress, and went to work. The next day at the shop, small things started going wrong. He turned on the lights, starting to move around, and within a short time, one of the overhead bulbs made a sharp popping sound and blew out. A little annoying, but nothing more. He replaced it. Later that day, another bulb went. Then another. At first he thought it was just old wiring or cheap bulbs, but the timing felt off. They were not failing weeks apart, they were failing one after another after that cabinet had arrived. He started noticing movement in the corners of the shop. Not full figures, just dark shapes sliding along the walls as if someone was walking just out of his line of sight. Every time he turned to look, there was nothing there. Then came the smell. It started as a faint whiff at the back of the shop, a sour animal smell like cat urine that seemed too strong and too specific to ignore. He assumed an animal had gotten in overnight. He searched, he checked behind shelves, he looked for leaks, mold, anything that might explain it. There was nothing. Oh, and the smell moved. One day it would hit him when he walked in the front of the shop. Later, he could be in the office and smell it there instead. Always strong, always temporary, never traceable. Even with all of that, he still didn't jump straight to the haunted box. He was an antique dealer. Old stuff does weird things. Old buildings do weird things. It was unnerving, but not enough to make him pack up his life and run. The moment that changed things was not about him at all. It was about his mother. He thought the cabinet might make a nice gift for her. He cleaned it, polished the wood, and brought it to her for her birthday. She opened it. She put her hands on it, and within minutes she collapsed. She had suffered a stroke. One moment she was standing there, touching this little wine cabinet. The next, her body went slack and she dropped, her face beginning to sag on one side as her speech blurred. The family called an ambulance. Doctors treated her and she lived. But Kevin didn't forget what he had just watched. And in the back of his mind, it was hard not to replay the timing. Later, when he visited her in the hospital and brought up the cabinet, she didn't gently say no. She became agitated. With the limited movement and speech she had, she made it very clear she did not ever want that box near her again. To Kevin, that was the first time the cabinet stopped being an odd little antique and started to feel like a threat. And when he tried to pass it on again, that feeling only got stronger. After his mother refused to keep it, Kevin took the cabinet back to his shop. At this point, it was starting to feel like a problem he needed to get rid of. He gave it to a friend. She brought it home, put it in her house, and within a couple days called him back and said, I need you to come pick this up. When he asked why, she didn't launch into a big story. She just said her house felt different. The air felt heavier. The rooms felt tense. She said it felt like her home was mad. Not haunted, mad. Another friend agreed to take it. He kept it for about a week. During that week, his hair began falling out in clumps in the shower. He felt exhausted and sick for no clear reason. He didn't keep it long enough to see if it would get worse. He brought the box back to. Someone else tried keeping it in their bedroom. They told Kevin that one night they woke up for no obvious reason. The room was quiet, the clock was glowing on the nightstand. When they looked towards the doorway, they saw a woman standing there, just inside the frame. She looked older with sunken eyes and a hollow expression, like all of her energy had been scraped out. The figure didn't speak, didn't move, just stood there, watching. They quickly turned on the light and the doorway was empty. They didn't sleep in that room again while the cabinet was in the house. They pushed it out into another space and told Kevin to come get it. By now it was not one bad event tied to emotion. It was a string of people in different homes describing similar things. A feeling of pressure in the air. Nightmares that started only after the cabinet arrived. Shadows in doorways, illness that seemed to flare up and fade away with the box. Kevin knew the folklore around the word that would eventually stick to the story. In Jewish tradition, a Dybak is not a demon. It's not some non-human creature. It's the spirit of a person who has died and not moved on. A soul that clings to a person or an object because of an unresolved pain, guilt, or trauma. Not necessarily evil in the Hollywood sense, but not peaceful either. He didn't claim he suddenly believed all of that, but he couldn't ignore how closely the idea of something that clings lined up with what he was seeing. Every time the cabinet left his hands, the same kind of problems followed it. Every time someone reached a breaking point, the box came right back. Eventually he decided he was done trying to place it with people he knew. He listed it for sale online. He wrote a detailed description. He didn't just say old wine cabinet, good condition. He wrote about the estate sale, the warnings not to open it, his mother's stroke, the nightmares, the smell, the shadows, and the reactions of the people who had taken it. He didn't claim to have scientific proof. He didn't label it a cursed object. He simply wrote down what had happened and said, in effect, if you buy this, you are buying it with all of that attached. Someone still bought it. A college student took it, brought it to the apartment he shared with roommates, and set it up like a strange conversation piece. For a little while, it was a joke. Then it wasn't. Within days, bruises started appearing on their bodies. Not from fights or accidents, just marks they couldn't explain. Electronics in the apartment began to fail. Devices that had worked fine before started shorting out or refusing to turn on at all. Cold spots showed up in certain corners of the apartment, where you could walk through a doorway and feel like you'd stepped into a refrigerator, then walk two steps further and feel normal again. The roommates reported waking up in the middle of the night with the feeling that someone was standing next to their bed, even when the room was dark and quiet and no one else was awake. After a short time, the novelty wore off. They packed the cabinet back up and returned it, telling Kevin they wanted it out of their lives. Different people, different locations, the same pattern. Nightmares, shadows, sickness, and a final line that kept repeating. I do not want this. The cabinet eventually landed in the hands of a man named Jason Haxton. Jason worked as a museum curator. He had a background in history and artifacts, and he was used to handling objects that carried stories with them. When he learned about the Dybbock box, he wasn't coming at it as a paranormal investigator. He wasn't trying to make a TV show. He was interested in why so many people seemed to have intense experiences around the same object. He decided to acquire the box and see what happened if he lived with it for a while. He didn't have to wait long. Almost as soon as it entered his life, he began to notice changes. He developed strange welts and rashes on his skin. They would flare up, then fade, then flare again with no clear trigger. He went to doctors. They looked for allergies, skin conditions, anything obvious, and they couldn't give him a solid answer. He started waking up at night, gasping for air, feeling like someone had been pressing down on his chest while he slept. There's a medical term for that kind of sensation, sleep paralysis. But for him, it didn't feel like a random one-time episode. It kept happening. Around the house, he began to hear sounds that didn't match the environment. Soft voices, like someone having a low conversation in the next room, just quiet enough that he couldn't make out the words. He would step into that room and the sound would stop. He saw shapes pass behind doorways the same way Kevin had. Quick, shadowy movement, not tied to any person he could find. And then the dream started. When he later heard Kevin describe his own nightmares, the similarity was unsettling. The dark place, the footsteps behind him, the sense that something was slowly closing in, the rush of impact when he turned to face it. As a museum professional, Jason also had colleagues and visitors around him to observe. He kept noticing that people who spent time near the cabinet would sometimes complain of dizziness or nausea. Some felt pressure in their heads, like a sudden headache hitting only when they were in that space. Visitors who didn't know much about the story still walked away saying there's something wrong with that thing. At a certain point, Jason decided it wasn't safe to keep the cabinet sitting out in his home, the way that you might display a normal artifact. He commissioned a larger wooden chest and lined it with gold, hoping that the combination of physical layers and symbolic protection would act as a barrier. He placed the cabinet inside, closed it up, and left it there. And after that, he said, his house began to feel like a normal house again. The nightmares eased. The physical symptoms calmed down. The atmosphere lightened. For years the Dybbock box faded from public view. It was not gone, but it was not on display for crowds either. Jason didn't give out the exact location where it was kept. He simply told people he believed there was something attached to that cabinet that fit the idea of a Dybbock. Not a demon in the popular sense, but a restless presence that clung to the object. And for a while, that is where the story rested. Until the box came out again. Years later, the cabinet was included in a private museum collection focused on strange and haunted objects. By that time, the Dybbock box already had a reputation online. There were articles, message board threads, and dramatic retellings. Some people thought it was one of the scariest objects ever documented. Others thought it was just a story that got out of control. But most of the people walking into the museum had not gone down those rabbit holes. They were there to see something unusual, maybe feel a bit unsettled, then go home and get on with their lives. The room where the cabinet was displayed held other odd items, but the Dybbuck box stood out. Not because it glowed or hummed or did anything obvious, but because it did almost nothing at all. It sat in a case, small, closed, and still. People would walk up to it, lean in to read the placard, and that's when some of them started to feel off. Some visitors said that as they approached the case, they felt a weight settle on their chest. Not a heart attack, not full panic, just the feeling that breathing had suddenly got harder for no good reason. Others reported feeling like someone had stepped in close behind them in that intimate, uncomfortable way where another person is just a little too far inside your personal space. They would turn, expecting to see another guest inches from their shoulder. No one was there. A museum worker began to dread walking past the case. They reported that when they stepped near it, the air temperature seemed to drop sharply in that one spot. There was climate control in the building. The room wasn't drafty, yet there was this cold bubble around the cabinet that didn't drift the way normal air does. On its own, any of those experiences could be chalked up to nerves. People go into haunted museums expecting to feel something. The mind fills in the gaps. But then the dream started again. After visiting, a number of guests reported having almost the same nightmare. They described walking through a dark space where the walls felt too close and the air felt too thick. They could hear someone walking behind them, matching their pace, getting closer with every step. They couldn't see a face. They couldn't get a clear look at whoever or whatever it was. They only knew that when they tried to turn around, something slammed into them, and that's when they woke up. When those descriptions were compared to Kevin's early accounts and to what Jason had written about his experience, the shape of the nightmare was nearly identical. Different people, different times, different places, the same dream. The cabinet was now locked behind glass and layered with security. No one was opening it, touching it, or moving it freely through their homes. But if the stories are to be believed, the pattern hadn't stopped. It had simply moved from private houses into a public room. But the story wasn't done shifting because once the Dybbock box went public, something unusual happened. The experiences around it didn't fade away with distance and security. They spread. For years, the Dibbick box lived in a quiet corner of a private collection. It was behind glass. It was locked. It wasn't being passed from person to person anymore. But that doesn't mean the story stayed contained. At a certain point, the Dybbock box stopped being a strange object that a handful of people had talked about, and it started to move into something else. It became a public legend, a viral story, a symbol. And when that happened, the experiences around it didn't get weaker. They got louder. One of the moments that pushed the Dybbock Box into mainstream attention happened when a well-known musician visited the exhibit. Just Google Dibbock Box Musician and you'll see for yourself. He walked through the room, looked at the case, and spent time close to the cabinet. Nothing dramatic happened on the spot. There was no shaking glass or sudden explosion of activity. But soon after that visit, he went through a stretch of events that caught people's attention. A near-miss plane emergency. A robbery. An accident that left him injured. And a series of frightening, chaotic moments all packed together in a short window of time. None of those events prove anything. Accidents happen. Bad luck clusters sometimes. People put patterns on things that may not have any real connection. What made it stand out was the way people reacted. The more the story circulated, the more people looked back at that visit and said the same thing. It started after he saw the box. At the same time, something else was happening on the other end of the spectrum. Skeptics and researchers began digging into the history of the cabinet, trying to sort out what was real and what wasn't. People started asking pointed questions. They wanted documentation. They wanted dates and names and receipts. And that's when another twist surfaced. Kevin Manis, the man who wrote the original listing and told the first full version of the story, publicly admitted that he had exaggerated and shaped parts of it. He didn't say the counter was harmless. He didn't deny every strange event. But he did say that pieces of the narrative were crafted the way that a writer shapes a horror story. In one moment, you had a celebrity streak of bad fortune fueling belief. In the next, you had the creator of the original account saying he'd added dramatic touches for effect. Both things happened at the same time. Both pushed the Dybbuk box into a stranger space where fear, folklore, personal experience, and doubt all collided. And that's where the story sits when we look at it today. Not simply in private homes, not simply in a museum, but out in the world, moving through pop culture, skepticism, and belief all at once. And once you're standing in that middle ground, the only way forward is to pull back and separate what we can confirm from what we cannot. Once you step back from the fear and look at the Dybbock box as a case, you run into a wall that shows up in a lot of paranormal stories. Some things are documented, some things are personal testimony, and some things are clearly stretched or dramatized. And all of that is true at the same time. Here is what we can say with confidence. There really was a woman named Havila whose belongings were sold in Portland. There really was a small wooden cabinet that Kevin bought. There really were objects inside that multiple people saw. Kevin really did write an extremely detailed listing about the box and what he believed had happened around it. A college student really did buy it and later reported disturbing events in his apartment. Jason Haxton really did acquire it and write a book about his experiences. His accounts have stayed mostly consistent. Multiple people who spent time with the cabinet describe nightmares, physical symptoms, and strange activity. Those accounts are written down, they're not anonymous internet comments. They came from people who put their names on the line. Now the harder part. We don't have medical records that tie any one health event directly to the box. People get rashes, breathing problems, strokes, and fatigue for many reasons. The timing, in some cases, is unsettling. The connection from a scientific standpoint is not proven. Electrical problems can absolutely be random. Old wiring and cheap equipment can cause all kinds of strange malfunctions. The smell of cat urine could be mold, dead animals in the walls, or any number of unpleasant things. There is no historical document from Europe that mentions a ritual to trap a dybic inside this specific cabinet. The idea that it was created for that purpose seems to be more interpretation and later storytelling than a traceable fact. And then there's the biggest complication. Years after the story gained fame, Kevin Manis admitted that he had embellished parts of his original account. He didn't claim he invented the whole thing. He did say that some of what he wrote was shaped for effect. That doesn't automatically erase everything. It does mean we have to put some distance between the narrative and reality. Even so, Jason and others who had the box in their possession have not retreated from their testimonies. They still insist that, whatever the exact origin, something felt off around that cabinet. So the Dybbock box ends up in a familiar, uncomfortable spot. Half in the world of fact, half in the world of story. A real object with a real chain of owners, surrounded by layers of experience, belief, folklore, and exaggeration. For me, the scariest part of the Dybbuk box is not the label. It's not the word Dybbuk or the idea of a cursed wine cabinet. It's the way the same kinds of experiences keep showing up in different people's lives, in different places, years apart. Nightmares with the same basic shape. The feeling of someone behind you getting closer. The sudden pressure on your chest. The sense that the mood in a house is turned against you. Humans are good at scaring themselves. When you expect to be afraid, your brain will gladly help you out. But not everyone in this story started with that expectation. A lot of them were just trying to live their lives. They wanted a piece of furniture. They wanted a curiosity. They wanted something for their collections. They didn't go searching for a haunting. The haunting, if you take them at their word, found them. I don't know if there is truly a spirit clinging to this cabinet. I don't know how much of what has been written about it is literal and how much is a story that just spiraled. I do think objects can carry weight. When something has been present in the worst chapters of a person's life, when it is silently sat in rooms where people suffered, grieved, or hid, it's not hard to believe that later owners might feel something heavy in its presence, even if there's no ghost in the traditional sense. The idea of a Dybak is not about a Hollywood demon. It's about a person who died with something unresolved and can't let go. Put that idea on top of an object that has passed through real trauma, and you get a story like this. Maybe the box is haunted in the way people think, with a spirit that reacts and pushes back. Maybe it's haunted by memory, by suggestion, by our own fear of what we can't see but feel pressing in from the dark. Whatever the answer is, the Dibbo box has done something very real. It's left a trail of people who walked away changed. Some of them got rid of it and still felt like it wasn't entirely gone. Some of them still won't talk about it casually. And even now, with the cabinet behind glass and layers of protection, people stand in front of it and say their chest feels tight, their breathing feels wrong, and they cannot shake the feeling that someone is right behind them. Maybe that's imagination. Maybe it's something else. Either way, the story of the Dybbuck box isn't finished. It keeps being reopened. Not by lifting the lid, but by telling its story. This has been State of the Unknown. If you're listening on Apple Podcasts, leaving a rating or review is one of the best ways you can help the show grow. It takes just a few seconds and it really does make a difference in how the show is found. If you're on Spotify, all you have to do is tap the stars. There's also a poll under this episode. Tap in and tell me what you think the Dybit Box really is. A genuine haunting, the power of suggestion, or something in between. Thank you so much for spending time exploring the unknown with me. If you have an idea for a future episode or a story from your own life that you think fits what we do here, you can reach me anytime at state of the unknown.comslash contact. You can send me an email message there or even a voice message. Until next time, stay curious, stay unsettled, and remember some objects are not meant to be opened.