https://www.midjourney.com
Dybbuks have haunted Yiddish folk tales since the dawn of Judaism’s mystical movement in the latter half of the 16th century. “Dybbuk” literally means “an attachment, a cleaving to something”; a dybbuk is thought to be the spirit of a person who, instead of drifting into the next realm, sticks around and enters the bodies of living people.
A dybbuk is not a demon, but the wandering, possessing soul of a dead person, often a sinful one, that has been denied the afterlife and clings to a living person’s body. While it can cause distress and act maliciously, the dybbuk is essentially a troubled ghost seeking to complete unfinished business or find expiation, rather than a primordial evil entity. The belief in dybbuks emerged in 16th-century Jewish folklore and is distinct from traditional demonic possession. Often individuals suffering from nervous or mental disorders were taken to a miracle-working rabbi, who alone, it was believed, could expel the harmful dybbuk through a religious rite of exorcism. The belief in dybbuks is a part of Jewish folklore and mysticism, not a central tenet of the religious canon. The concept of a dybbuk, a human soul possessing another, gained prominence in the 16th century.
Most frequently, the unfortunate person whom the dybbuk possessed was a woman. The image of a dybbuk , usually male, penetrating her body is both sexual and an illustration of the doctrine of opposites. Male and female, living and dead, pure and impure, all fused together in one human body. Exorcising a dybbuk, removing the destructive forces from a pure soul, is not just an imperative to save a person who has been possessed. It is a battle in a cosmic war. Exorcising a dybbuk involved removing it from the body in which it had taken up residence and returning it to the world of the dead. In this way a small piece of the cosmic order would be restored. The dybbuk, of course, did not want to go. A dramatic, terrifying ritual was required to force the reluctant spirit out of the body in which it was squatting. The ceremony was conducted in the synagogue, in the presence of ten men who had purified themselves through fasting and ritual immersion. They would all dress in the white shrouds in which a corpse is buried, wreathed in prayer shawls, their heads and arms bound with the sacred parchments worn in daily prayer. The exorcist would address the dybbuk directly. Listing the offences that the soul had committed during its human life, which might include apostasy, talebearing, suicide, murder or ritually deviant conduct, the exorcist would both cajole and threaten the dybbuk. With the dybbuk fully cognisant of the trouble it was in, and the appeal to its better nature concluded, the ark in the synagogue containing the scrolls of the Torah was opened. Seven scrolls were removed, seven blasts were blown on seven rams’ horns and seven black candles lit. Curses were proclaimed, incantations recited, and seven different combinations of the 42-letter name of God pronounced. – Dr Harry Freedman
A dybbuk box is an antique wine cabinet from the Jewish folklore tradition, believed to be haunted by a malicious spirit called a dybbuk. In this context, the box is not “used” for a practical purpose; instead, it is associated with the dybbuk itself, a restless spirit that is said to cling to or possess the living. The box gained modern fame through a story created for an eBay auction in 2003 and served as the inspiration for the 2012 horror film, The Possession.
The box serves as a “cage” or container for the spirit. The folklore suggests that the spirit is trapped inside until the box is destroyed, and burning the box is said to release the dybbuk permanently.
Isaac Luria, a mystic, laid the grounds for Jewish belief in a dybbuk with his doctrine of the transmigration of souls, which he saw as a means whereby souls could continue their task of self-perfection. His disciples went one step further with the notion of possession by a dybbuk.
Dybbuks are basically malevolent spirits looking for a warm body to call home. So, what could go wrong when buying a strange box with a dybbuk inside on eBay?
As the story goes, a dybbuk box appeared in 2003 when antique store owner Kevin Mannis bought a vintage wine box from a 103-year-old Holocaust survivor on eBay. After a strange string of unexplained hauntings, recurring nightmares, bruises, and smells of ammonia, the box found its way back onto eBay and landed in the hands of a man named Jason Haxton. He too felt the wrath of the box, and ended up burying it somewhere in Missouri, but not before pulling it out of the ground to appear on the television show Ghost Adventures.
Haxton stated that:
‘The day it arrived, I put my hands on it, and it almost feels like the thing collapses into a liquid state, I felt like a knife was coming into my guy, I was paralyzed in pain. When I go to bed, I have terrible dreams of a hag that seems to come with the box.’
Haxton said he first heard about the box from a colleague whose roommate had listed it for sale after a string of terrifying events.
The box is said to have come from an Oregon estate sale of a Holocaust survivor. The person who bought the box at the estate sale was told that the box was ‘always shut, and set in a place that was out of reach. It was never, ever to be opened.’
Haxton had paid $280 for the box, and when opened, contained a goblet, two locks of hair tied with string, pennies from the 1920s, a dried rosebud, a cast iron candlestick holder, and a granite statue engraved with Hebrew letters. Haxton said that he didn’t believe the stories associated with the box, and didn’t have any worries when opening it.
After he acquired the box, he became very ill. He called it a ‘tidal wave of bad luck.’
Haxton stated that all of his issues vanished when he followed a rabbi’s advice to place the cabinet in a gold-lined wooden container to negate whatever entity was inside. He now keeps the cabinet inside a military-grade case, which he buried.
Thousands of folks have offered to buy the box for any price, but Haxton states it’s unethical for him to sell it.
The Box’s Resurfacing
Haxton states that he isn’t worried by the box’s resurfacing — he believes that the dybbuk’s unfinished business is finished. In fact, Haxton now believed that the dybbuk box’s energy has reversed, so much so that he calls it his personal ‘fountain of youth,’ and states that his vitals are better now than when he was 40 — he attributes his enhanced feeling to the haunted heirloom. Today, the market is full of dybbuk boxes. Boxes are on online auction marketplaces such as eBay for as low as $20, some as high as $1,000. Haxton states that most of these boxes are fake, just made to be a creepy accouterment to show off to your friends. He says that there are only a few ‘real’ boxes in the world — but who in the world would take the risk?
Where is the infamous Dybbuk Box now?
Zak Bagans, host of the paranormal television show Ghost Adventures, owns the Dybbuk Box and displays it at his Haunted Museum in Las Vegas, Nevada. Bagans acquired the box from Jason Haxton the former director of the Museum of Osteopathic Medicine in Kirksville, Missouri, who had previously purchased it on eBay.
https://neon.reviewjournal.com
And Zak opens the box…
His opening of the wine cabinet, which has the reputation as one of the world’s most haunted objects, was touted as the centerpiece of the four-hour live Halloween special broadcast from Bagans’ Haunted Museum in 2018.
Even before the event, Bagans admitted he wasn’t sure if he would open the box. In the end, he didn’t, and plenty of viewers let him hear about it on social media.
“I believe that the Dybbuk was causing my production to fall apart during that moment,” he says of his reasons for keeping it closed that night.
“The Dybbuk Box knew that I was going to be opening it,” Bagans says, “so I wanted to see if there was going to be any kind of things going on before that.”
After removing the glass case surrounding it, he set up cameras that he says captured footage of mist manifesting out of it.
“I wasn’t attacked. I wasn’t harmed. I just felt something. I felt the power of it. To me, it felt good,” Bagans says of his encounter with the box. “I believe that it doesn’t affect me as bad as it affects others around it, because it knows that I am its owner.”
“It was a rush. I just felt a warmth through my body. … I don’t know if it felt like I was crossing over or something. It was an influence that it had on me. It was a feeling kind of like I felt in the Demon House,” the home in Gary, Indiana, that was the subject of his 2018 documentary. “Scary and terrifying, but there’s a sense of awkward enjoyment out of it,” he concludes. “I guess it’s hard to explain. I’m a weird guy.”
Yes, the whole thing is Weird indeed.
Resources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dybbuk
https://neon.reviewjournal.com/
https://www.thejc.com/judaism/how-to-deal-with-a-dybbuk-p3c4sgkb