You’ve heard of haunted dolls, cursed mirrors, and demons that slide into your DMs — but few haunted objects have ever captured the world’s attention like the Dybbuk Box.
A simple wooden wine cabinet turned viral nightmare, this thing went from folklore-inspired hoax to a full-blown paranormal phenomenon involving Ghost Adventures, Post Malone, and the internet’s collective fear of “what’s in the box.”

In this episode of Loreplay, Dayna Pereira dives deep into the origins of the Dybbuk legend in Jewish mysticism, the true story behind Kevin Mannis’s eBay listing, and the chaos that followed — from Jason Haxton’s museum hauntings to Zak Bagans’s on-camera meltdown and the infamous Post Malone curse.

We break down the folklore, the fear, and the fine line between cultural myth and collective psychosis — because when enough people believe in something, even the internet can make it real.

Mannis, Kevin. Original eBay Listing for “Haunted Dybbuk Box.” (2003, archived on paranormal-collector forums and Wayback Machine)

Haxton, Jason. The Dibbuk Box. Truman State University Press, 2011.

Ansky, S. The Dybbuk, or Between Two Worlds. (1914; English translation, 1926)

The Jewish Virtual Library. “Dybbuk (Dibbuk).” JewishVirtualLibrary.org

Zak Bagans. Ghost Adventures: Quarantine — Episode 4, “Dybbuk Box: The Opening.” Discovery+, 2020.

Bagans, Zak & Haxton, Jason. Interviews via Las Vegas Review-Journal (June 2020).

Post Malone on Late Night with Seth Meyers. NBC, Oct. 2018.

Snopes.com. “Was the Dybbuk Box a Real Jewish Relic?” (2021).

LiveScience. “The Science of Haunted Objects and the Nocebo Effect.” (2022).

Haaretz. “The Real Story of the Dybbuk and How Pop Culture Got It Wrong.” (2019).
Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dybbuk_box