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The story behind the worlds most cursed object: The dybbuk box

Holocaust survivor claims she summoned an evil spirit on accident.

Dani Erinn
8 min readNov 4, 2020

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.

Photo by Bee Felten-Leidel on Unsplash

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…

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Dani Erinn
Dani Erinn

Written by Dani Erinn

I love writing true crime and fascinating stories about humans.

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