Original subtitles

[Haunting music]

- Over to there, 7 and 8?

Sold $27.

- A voice said...

Both: I see you bought the dybbuk box.

- A dybbuk box?

- It's what my grandmother called it.

- I'm Jewish, and I know what a dybbuk is.

It's they type of a thing that you use

to scare little kids.

- Just pure evil.

- Say, "hi" to our new roommate.

[Rattling]

[Screaming]

- All of a sudden,

something's tearing inside of me.

- Jason? [Knocks on door]

[Sobbing]

[Loud popping]

- [Screams]

- Don't do that, or the dybbuk will come.

[Bells ringing]

My shop is located in downtown Portland

right at the base of the burnside bridge,

which is kind of the gateway to the city.

What I was looking for were small, unique items

that I could sell, I could retail,

and the best place to find those anytime

is at yard sales, garage sales, and estate sales,

small auctions.

- Hi.

- So on this particular day,

the family was selling items that had belonged

to the grandmother who had passed away

who was a holocaust survivor

and who had died at a ripe old age.

I believe it was 103.

They were selling things in job lots

that had all been grouped together

on these pallets.

But there was one pallet in particular

that I was interested in.

- Our next lot, 29, is a unique box lot here.

All righty, how about... Would you go $5, sir?

Thank you. Now $7.50.

$7.50 and $10. $10, friend.

$10, now $12.50. Now we're gonna go $15.

- I think it got to about 27 or 28 bucks

before finally, people got tired

and realized that I was going to get that pallet.

- Over to there, 7 and 8?

Sold $27. Number 35, thank you.

- I was really happy, because I had got

several hundred dollars worth of items that I really needed.

But along with those items, there were three items

that were unusual to be included in a lot like this.

One of them was a steamer trunk.

The other one was a sewing box.

And the final item was a cabinet of sorts,

a small wine cabinet.

And a voice said...

Both: I see you bought the dybbuk box.

- Dybbuk box?

- The young lady being in her late 20s, early 30s.

It didn't immediately register

that she had used the word "dybbuk."

I'm Jewish, and I know what a dybbuk is.

It's the type of a thing that you use

to scare little kids.

You'd say, "don't do that, or the dybbuk will come."

- It's what my grandmother called it.

- And she explained to me that whenever anybody

would ask about it,

grandmother would spit through her fingers three times

[makes spitting sound]

And say it was never to be opened.

When she told me this, it really didn't phase me

as being anything that was all that special.

So I loaded up the stuff that I had bought,

and away I went.

All in all, it was a good day.

So I drove back to my shop.

It was a small storefront,

perhaps 25 feet wide,

and the basement down below was quite a bit larger.

It was probably 4,000, 4,500 square feet.

The way the box was locked was that there was a brass hasp

with a small brass padlock placed on it.

So instead of cutting the lock off,

which I normally would have done,

I took a small screwdriver and sort of bent the hasp

or the metal part that came down and held it.

[Rattling]

The doors opened.

I didn't expect that.

It must have had a mechanism.

It was a nice touch to a box

that really didn't look like it deserved

that kind of detail.

There were quite a few items on the inside

that really didn't make a lot of sense to me.

There were two pennies from the 1920s,

a candlestick, kind of a fat, pear-shaped body,

a small chalice or wine goblet.

There was also a statue.

It was made out of granite, different pieces of granite,

and it had carved into it the word "shalom" in Hebrew.

And then there were two locks of hair.

- Hair?

- What crossed my mind was that this was an old lady

who had kept it for some sentimental reason,

not giving it any more thought than I would normally give

a small, little wine cabinet.

I had a young lady that worked for me at that time

named Jane who was absolutely a fantastic salesperson.

So on this particular day,

I left her in charge of the shop,

left the box in the basement...

[Bells ringing]

And went about my business

taking care of some errands.

- I was down in the back of the basement

and kind of cleaning things up

and organizing his tools and everything,

and then I was gonna go up and open the store.

All of a sudden, I just... I kind of felt

like somebody was watching me.

I had been left there alone several times,

and I could walk in the dark and down through the basement

and spend hours down there

and never felt anything until then.

There's a difference between

being afraid of someone or something.

[Phone ringing]

I had gotten a phone call.

- Addy's market. Jane speaking.

- And it was a friend of mine.

- Oh, hey. Hey, Geneva.

Yeah, no, you can come tomorrow. That's fine.

I'll just tell Kevin.

Yeah, I know. That's fine.

Yeah, when are you planning to come in?

Okay. [Stick clatters]

Hey, um, I got to go.

- I had that feeling inside, inside my gut

that something was wrong.

- Hello?

[Clattering]

Who's there?

Hello?

We're not opened yet.

- And when I turned around,

the light that I had switched off

turned back on.

[Glass shattering]

It was glass breaking.

Just like... [Imitates glass shattering]

It was very loud.

[Glass crunches]

- Oh, my god.

[Gasps]

Oh, my god.

- I went, and I grabbed the phone.

I called Kevin.

- [Sighs]

[Phone beeping]

Kevin, pick up. Kevin, pick up.

Kevin, pick up. [Phone ringing]

Kevin, pick up the phone. Kevin, pick up the phone.

Kevin, pick up. Kevin, pick up.

[Phone vibrating]

Kevin, pick up. Kevin, pick up.

- Hello?

- Kevin? - Jane?

- [Speaking indistinctly] - I can barely hear you.

- Someone's here.

- Somebody's in the store?

[Glass shattering]

- I was young.

I'm like, "when are you gonna get back here?"

To me, it sounded like it was a baseball bat

smashing things.

- Hysterical is the only way to put it.

She was trying to tell me

that there was somebody in the basement...

- Something's here, Kevin.

- That sounded like they were breaking glass.

They were throwing things around.

I said, "well, who's down there?"

And she said, "nobody's down there."

- Jane, okay... - [Shouting indistinctly]

- Call the police.

Call the police immediately.

Jane. - And as I said that...

- Jane! - My phone died.

[Engine revs]

- Kevin! Kevin!

- And I was scared to death for her.

Could have been someone that really had some bad intent,

either to steal something or to harm or to Rob.

It couldn't be good.

- [Screams]

[Glass shattering]

[Clattering]

[Screaming]

[Sobbing]

[Screams]

- Jane?

Jane.

- I approached the back of the shop.

I didn't know what to expect.

So I went to the basement door,

and I noticed that the wrought-iron gate

was locked, which was odd,

because I hadn't locked it.

- Jane, it's Kevin.

- I went to turn on the lights at that point.

I flipped the switch, and the lights wouldn't go on.

So I grabbed a flashlight and took a look around.

[Glass clatters]

And it was then that I noticed

that all the lightbulbs in the basement

had been broken.

There were ten four-foot fluorescent fixtures.

All of them had been broken out and were lying on the ground.

- Oh.

- Jane isn't the kind of person who cries.

Well, literally, she said...

- [Bleep] You.

- [Stammers]

- I just had this feeling that I had to go.

- Jane?

- I just left, and I never came back.

- There is no exit. There is no way out.

There's no crawl space.

There's nowhere for anyone to go.

Whoever had done this had to still be there,

because I had just unlocked the gate.

There was no way out.

I had to think at that time that it was Jane.

I had to think that,

because there is no other explanation,

and there was nobody else there.

So it was her, and I was sorry I upset her,

but there could be no other explanation.

So my mom's birthday is on October 28th,

and we were gonna go have lunch and do something else.

And on that day, she came down to the shop quite early

before I was open.

- Happy birthday, mom. - Oh, darling.

- There was a small, little display area

of some furniture,

and so she sat down.

- And he said, "this is an unusual present for you."

- In the past, I have gotten strange gifts,

not a wine cabinet, but, you know, strange gifts.

My husband used to give me plaid coats

every single birthday.

He knew I hated plaid and that I would return the coat

and get something that I liked.

- Kevin, there's a call for you. - Okay.

- When he went downstairs, I looked at the box,

and it was as though the box was looking back at me.

- Kevin speaking.

Yup. No, we still have it.

[Rattling]

- The doors opened, and it was just like

a cold breeze coming out.

I can't describe it,

just pure evil.

I couldn't run away. I couldn't get up.

I couldn't get away from it.

I knew I was having a stroke.

My mouth contorted,

just started to sag, and my eye pocketed.

- Mrs. Mannis?

Kevin?

- "Am I gonna make it?

Is this death?"

And my thought was, "Kevin is downstairs.

"Am I gonna die before I see my son?

Is he gonna know?"

"Am I gonna make it?"

- Mom.

- I was frozen.

I couldn't leave.

- Okay, they're here now.

- It was only me that could tell,

because she didn't have enough ability

to express herself,

but you could see the terror in her eyes.

- And I wanted to...

I had to communicate to him

to protect him,

and it was almost impossible to do.

When you're having a stroke, you can't write.

You can't talk.

- All the communication was through her eyes,

and so her eyes were kind of wandering,

and yet, you could tell.

You could tell that she was pleading

to get something out, to say something.

- The one thing that I wanted to do

was to impress upon him

how important it was

that he get rid of the box.

- God forbid

it did anything to him.

If it gave me a stroke,

what would it do to him?

I probably should have picked a better gift,

maybe taken a little bit more time in choosing it.

It never crossed my mind that it would be anything

other than what it was: A small box.

- I knew that it was something that was evil,

because I had felt the coldness inside.

- Everything started to fall into place now,

all hell breaking loose with the shop,

with my mom having the stroke.

The common denominator of all these things

was this box.

So I decided to try and sell it.

And a few days later,

an older couple came in and purchased it

and didn't think anything about it.

Glad to see it gone.

I got more stuff to do than that.

And I find the box sitting by the front door

with a note on it.

And the note read,

"this has an odd darkness about it."

This is hard to get rid of.

Nobody seems to like it.

I had a storage unit out in back of my house

that I decided I would put it there

and hopefully forget about it

until I could figure out what to do with it.

I started to have dreams, terrible dreams.

I would be with somebody who I knew and I trusted.

I would be in a very pleasant setting

with this person, and we would be walking.

And at that point, immediately,

whoever I was with in the dream

would change from that person

into the most gruesome, horrible, evil-looking hag

I'd ever seen.

And that hag would proceed

to just beat the living crap out of me.

- [Screaming]

- [Sighs]

- When I woke up,

I know that this sounds unbelievable,

because I didn't believe it myself.

I found bruises.

Something is happening where I'm getting injured

in the night.

And it got to the point where every single night,

I knew that I would be having this dream.

No matter what I thought of, no matter how I tried,

this was going to happen.

At that moment, I knew that the box was cursed,

that there was something wrong with that box.

But I decided I had to get rid of it,

and it turns out the quickest way

to be rid of it would be to put it on eBay.

[Camera clicking]

And it called it "the dybbuk box"

in the main heading

and then described it

as a haunted Jewish wine cabinet.

And I certainly wasn't going to sell it

without disclosing everything

that I thought had been happening.

My hope was that somebody who dealt with the occult

would see this and buy it

and dispose of it the way that they knew

it should be disposed of.

- When I first learned about the dybbuk box,

I was a student at Truman state university

in kirksville, Missouri.

- What are you looking at? - EBay.

- My roommate Sam had seen this posting

for this haunted box.

- What is that?

- The dybbuk box.

- And he was telling me about how the owner

was experiencing very terrible nightmares...

- "Haunted"? - Mm-hmm.

- How his mother, I believe, had become really sick.

It was this really long description

of what had transpired,

and it really captured our imagination.

- You want in? Come on.

Really? - I'm okay.

- All right.

- I didn't really want to spend money

on something that could be a hoax,

and that was really the end of it.

We didn't really talk about it after that at all.

- During the course of the week,

it finally got up to a number

of about 7,500 people that had seen this,

and I've sold a lot of stuff on eBay

and never had that kind of a response,

so I thought, "maybe there are a lot of people

involved in the occult."

7,500 is a lot of people

to watch a little wine cabinet sell.

- About three weeks later in the middle of June,

I had come home for lunch,

and I opened up our front door,

which entered into our living room,

and I was instantly hit

by this overwhelming stench of urine.

There was newspaper and packing peanuts

strewn throughout... All over our floor,

and my instant thoughts were,

"who made this mess,

and where did somebody urinate in my living room?"

And it was just sitting there staring at me

and me staring at it,

and I was thinking, "I can't believe he bought it."

- Say hi to our new roommate.

- After I got over that initial shock that he bought it,

I laughed, 'cause I couldn't believe

he spent his money on this.

Once, though, the dybbuk box was in my house,

I really wanted to go into this with an open mind.

I didn't want to think that this thing

was actually haunted.

- Well, what are we gonna do with this?

- And he said...

- I'm gonna sleep with it.

- Well, I think Sam was really curious.

If there was any spirit trapped in the box,

maybe antagonize it a little bit saying,

"are you gonna come out and play?"

- Ooh!

[Ominous piano music]

♪ ♪

[Indistinct chatter]

- It had a very prominent spot in the living room.

We didn't ever hide the box.

- Yeah, I bought it on eBay for, like, really cheap too

for an antique.

It was only 140 bucks.

- Once everybody got done checking out the dybbuk box,

we would say just kind of off-the-cuff,

"by the way, this is cursed,

"and you might have nightmares for the rest of the semester

or possibly your life."

- Yo, guys.

- It was a big novelty,

and people were kind of laughing around

and joking around.

- Time has come to open the box.

- Some of the girls got quite upset and disturbed

by the fact that this was a potentially haunted artifact.

All: Ooh.

[Rattling]

- [Screams] - Whoa.

- [Laughs]

[All laugh]

Come on, it's funny.

- She got upset that her hand was put in the box,

that she potentially exposed herself

to this possessed spirit.

She was definitely freaked out,

and she was concerned for her safety and ours.

But we were just having fun.

We were just having pranks on people.

But there came a point whenever...

We realized that things were about to change.

- Hey, what's up? - Oh, you know...

- we experienced some really unusual things with electronics.

- How was last night?

- Oh, you know...

- studying the... [Loud popping]

Whoa! Jeez!

- Whoa.

Okay, this is... - What the hell, man?

- What the hell just happened?

- He was telling me that his laptop just crashed.

- Whoa.

- It was a critical failure with the hard drive.

Well, I woke up one morning

and was getting ready to go,

and one of my roommates came out of his bedroom,

which was next to mine,

and he looked awful.

His eyes were all bloodshot, bloody... almost... looking,

and it looked really, really bad.

[Insects buzzing]

And then there was these bugs that were crawling all over.

We found them in our living room.

They were crawling up the walls in our bedroom.

They were in our kitchen and our bathrooms.

They would be in the sink, or they would be on the walls

or in the mirror or around the toilet

or wherever it may be.

They got into everywhere.

Over the summer and into the fall,

Sam started to become a little bit more reclusive.

So we got to see him less and less.

I felt really bad for Sam.

I felt that there was despair

and that he was really just done

and hopefully that getting rid of the box

would be a turning point for him where he could start to recover.

- I'm the director in a medical museum.

I've always had a love of history

and the artifacts that tell the stories of history,

so we're always looking at objects as puzzles

to be unraveled.

Sam was keeping online in a personal blog

all the things that had happened to him.

So I could actually follow week-by-week

all of the things

that were going on with this box.

If I could get this box,

I could rationalize pretty much through

what I would consider a scientific basis,

is it what it was supposed to be?

Looking back at the words he wrote,

there was a warning

that I probably should have heeded

and I didn't.

- When Sam listed the dybbuk box on eBay,

I followed the sale.

- No bid had been taken place,

so I just threw in a bid of... I think it was 50 bucks.

- You could see the bid price

jumping up by different dollar amounts.

It would start off with $30,

and then it jumped to $45, and then maybe $50.

- The difference was, I had now made the commitment

that not only would I bid,

I would buy this box.

- All of a sudden, it would be a large jump,

and it would go up to $108

and then $150 and then $200.

- When Sam had bought it, he'd spent $140,

and so I put in a bid for double.

- Finally, within the last second,

it jumped to $280.

- Yes!

- Basically, I won the bid,

and so I was very excited

once I knew the dybbuk box could not escape me.

- I was taken back by it at first, thinking,

"well, why would someone spend that kind of money

on something that would potentially ruin their lives?"

- So that night, I decided

to actually examine the dybbuk box.

It was dark.

Everything was closed down on campus,

and I'd had to unlock and go through,

and all of the minimal lights were on.

I was already aware

that both Kevin's family and the college students

had had spontaneous illnesses

and what appeared to be, like, infections.

It seemed good practice

to put on the white gloves

to basically examine this item

just in case there are any contaminants.

So I dimmed the lights

and turned on the black light.

There was a little bit of glow.

It was wax,

but it did indicate to me

that someone had lit a candle,

and it had dripped on the outside of the box.

It made me think,

"this actually could have been used ritually."

So the next thing was to see what was contained inside.

The moment just before opening the doors,

I kind of just wondered what would happen.

[Rattling]

[Rattling]

- Like, I guess I kind of expected

that if this thing really was haunted,

it would happen immediately,

and so in opening it up

and seeing all these other pieces...

And yet, the stillness,

there was no strange things happening.

It was like, "okay,

well, maybe it's just a historical piece."

But I didn't realize how wrong I was

and what was yet to come.

Within days of it being in the museum,

the computers were crashing.

- Yes, I've tried turning the computer on and off.

- We were losing valuable information,

weeks of work.

- Yeah, well, my colleague's going

through the exact same thing right now.

- And then the lightbulbs.

[Popping]

And what was odd about it,

it was the bulbs all around where the dybbuk box...

Where they were all going out.

And just... then things seemed to get a whole lot worse.

- Okay, well, I guess we've explored every option

from "a" to "z."

- The staff felt a depletion of energy, illness.

They made it clear that this artifact

was an unwelcome guest.

- Listen, I'm losing my whole office here.

I got to go.

- And then I knew I had to take it out

of the museum.

I had no choice.

I have a lockable back part of my truck,

and it was secured in there.

But just driving home, you know, I just felt

that I was forced against the wall.

I really didn't want to take it home,

but I thought I had no option.

And that night was completely restless.

I kept having dreams of these sunken-eyed old women,

and then their face would literally

just dissolve into the most ghastly injuries

as if the flesh was being torn and ripped.

I'd wake from these in shock

only to go back into sleep,

and it started all over again,

the same women with gray, flyaway hair

and sunken eyes,

and it just happened all night long.

- [Screaming]

- [Panting]

[Groans]

- When I woke that morning,

I was just glad just to be up.

- [Sighs]

[Breathes heavily]

- And I was thinking,

"could I have done this to myself?"

- What's wrong with your eyes?

- I don't know.

- Things in my life had gotten really bad.

I mean, things had gotten really bad.

Health issues, family concerned and upset.

It wasn't long after umm that my son and I were...

It was an evening hour together

down in where the TV was on.

And all of a sudden, he calls over to me...

- [Whispering] Dad.

Dad. - Yeah, buddy?

- What is it?

- What?

- Look.

- It looked like flames,

this black mass,

and he's looking and going, "what is that?"

And I see the true fear in my son's eyes.

I was worried about my family.

Now it's taking over my life.

I'd explored the scientific side,

and there was no explanation

for what was going on in science,

not to me.

I was thinking, if this box

truly had something trapped in it

and I'd released it

that I needed to do something

to seal it again.

We have this rental property that had a cellar.

It wasn't being used, and so I decided

that I would take the dybbuk box over there,

and that is where I felt would be the best place

to isolate the box.

As I'm finishing up this process,

the sound as if wind is building in the space...

[Clattering]

And yet there is nothing that could create this.

We're completely entombed.

[Wind rushing]

Then I locked the door to the basement.

Then I was done with it.

It was gone.

[Rattling]

- [Sighs]

- I now needed to finish it,

which was to wash myself free

of any attachment of anything that was connected

to me being in the presence of this evil.

The steam and the heat,

it's invigorating.

It's really powerful.

- Jason?

- All of a sudden,

something's tearing inside of me.

- Jason?

- And then it just comes out,

this gelluous mucus.

- [Coughing]

- Something I've never had out of my body

was in my hands.

- [Gagging]

- There's no way to explain it.

It just happened, and I was in disbelief.

- Jason?

- Yet I also knew that something came out of me.

- Jason? - What?

- Open the door.

I got to show you something. You got to see this.

- Okay.

- And outside the door, I hear my wife yelling to me

about something about poison Ivy and jeans.

- Jason, open the door. - What?

- What is this?

Have you ever seen anything like it?

Look at it.

- And what I'm seeing are watery blisters

that have broken out with blood,

and they're all over, and it's swelling.

I needed to kind of get this thing taken care of.

I needed to finish it.

I needed to find Kevin mannis,

the original owner of this dybbuk box.

[Phone ringing]

- I got a call in the middle of the night.

- [Clears throat]

Hello?

- And I hung up on him.

I was frightened that somebody had a problem

that I was going to have to try and solve

or I was gonna have to take that box back.

[Phone rings]

The phone rang again,

and Jason said, "please don't hang up on me.

"Talk with me about this.

It's very, very important."

- Within a few minutes of the conversation with Kevin,

I knew that I was no longer alone with this problem,

that he was going to work with me

and help me come to some way of getting this out of my life.

- I went looking for the house

and had a hard time finding it at first.

Couldn't remember exactly where it was,

and it took me a little bit to finally locate it.

- Hi, um...

- I told her that I was trying to get some information

about the box.

- I bought this box. - I think you should leave.

- I wasn't gonna get anywhere, so I started to take off.

And I had made it maybe 10 or 15 steps

when I thought she said...

- I know exactly why you're here.

- There was a little old lady

drilling me with her eyes.

The woman introduced herself as Sophie

and said she was the cousin of the woman

who had passed away, havola.

And so I listened.

She said that she had lived with havola in Poland

prior to world war ii.

At that time, it was kind of the rage in Europe

to have seances, to contact the other side,

to play with games like that.

And havola had made what looked like a ouija board

that was made out of a tablecloth.

And on the tablecloth, she had embroidered

letters of the alphabet,

and they would take a little pendant.

And as they would ask questions, the pendant would swing

and either spell out a word

or answer a question that they asked.

- [Gasps]

[Distorted buzzing]

- During the course of doing this,

they felt like they had contacted a spirit

that started asking them to bring it over

from the dark side,

and they became suspicious

that what they had actually contacted

was a dybbuk,

a dark, evil entity that would try

to grab on to one of their souls.

So they devised a ritual

where they would be able to bring this thing over

and trap it in a box.

[Clattering]

- [Screams]

- That's why havola, the grandmother,

had been so emphatic.

- Don't open the box, because what's inside...

- Because what was inside was so dark and so terrible.

Apparently, when I bought it

and brought it back down to my shop

and opened it up for the first time,

I released it.

- The story that Kevin told me

was like nothing I'd ever heard.

It seemed almost too impossible to make up.

It seemed very real,

he was very earnest about it,

and it started to make some sense.

I contacted rabbis and got the information

on the best means to seal this spirit away.

Some people may think this is a hoax,

but every person that has come in contact

with this box

has suffered sickness,

calamity,

misfortune.

- I know that when I owned this box,

terrible, awful, rotten things happened to me.

When I got rid of it, they stopped happening to me.

- Everything that happened that was bad

was because of the box.

- People have asked me,

"what would it take to buy the box?"

I wouldn't sell it to anyone.

It weighs on my mind,

because eventually, something will change.

I'm not gonna be here forever.

The one dilemma is having this thing

and not knowing what to do with it.

For now, it is safe.