VEGAS MYTHS BUSTED: ‘World’s Most Haunted Object’ at Zak Bagans Museum

The centerpiece of Zak Bagans’ The Haunted Museum in downtown Las Vegas is a wine-coloured console advertised as “The World’s Most Haunted Object.” Also known as “The Dybbuk Box,” the artefact supposedly has a long account of bringing evil and demise upon anyone who disturbs it.

Bagans — principal host of the Travel Channel serial publication “Ghost Adventures” — claimed to hold experient forged juju as presently as he added the cabinet to his collecting of macabre and, frankly, distasteful artifacts inwards 2017. (His museum also contains Ted Bundy’s glasses, a painting made with the cremated ashes of Charles the Bald Manson, and a Camaro one time owned past St. David Koresh.)

According to the museum’s website, shortly after the locker arrived, “mysterious protruding holes began to appear in the walls around the artifact as if something was trying to break away out from within the exhibit.”

Bagans was scheduled to clear the damned cabinet himself, as the culmination of a live, four-hour Hallowe'en program from the museum inwards 2018. But he perceived so often wickedness interior of it, he claimed, he lost the nerve.

Wine Cabinet of Curiosities

The only if problem with the story so far is that the Dybbuk Box is just now an ordinary bicycle wine-coloured cabinet. In 2021, the piece who sold it on eBay 20 years earlier, Kevin Mannis, admitted inwards an question that he made upwards its in an elaborate way elaborated paranormal backstory as a societal experiment.

“I am a originative writer,” he told Charles Stuart Moss, a newsman for Inverse, the online science and engineering magazine publisher launched inwards 2015 past Bleacher Report co-founder Dave Nemetz. “The Dybbuk Box is a story that i created. And the Dybbuk Box story has through with(p) exactly what i intended it to get along when I posted it …  which is to get an interactive horror story in existent time.”

The box seat was reportedly sold for $140 to Losif Nietzke who was, at the time, a student inward Missouri. Nietzke resold it Jason Haxton, theater director of the Museum of Osteopathic Medicine at A.T. Still University. Haxton wrote most his allegedly dark experiences with the wine-coloured locker inward a rule book called The Dibbuk Box. Bagans purchased the boxwood from Haxton inward 2016 for an undisclosed sum.

Mannis’ in an elaborate way elaborated put to work of fiction even landed him a chore as a consultant on The Possession, since that Sam Raimi-produced 2012 horror cinema was based on Mannis’ story.

The eBay Listing

Here’s the story Mannis made up, consecutive from his his 2003 eBay listing…

Mannis was a Portland, Ore. furniture restorer when he purchased the Dybbuk Box at a garage cut-rate sale in 2001. It was sold to him past the granddaughter of a of late deceased 103-year-old Holocaust subsister named Havela, who escaped Nazi-occupied Poland. (Havela’s parents, brothers, sister, husband, II sons, and daughter weren’t so lucky.)

Havela’s granddaughter told Mannis that her grandmother always kept the wine-colored locker shut and come out of make because in that respect was a dybbuk — an evilness look inwards Jewish folklore — living interior of it. She instructed Mannis never to open it, or badness things would happen.

Mannis unheeded the warning, and bad things happened. (Bet you didn’t control that coming!)

While restoring the wine-coloured storage locker as a gift to his mother, Mannis found a serial of strange objects inside. There were deuce US wheat pennies (from 1925 and 1928), II locks of hair, a dried rosebud, a candle holder with octopus legs, a lucky wine cup, and a granite carving inscribed with the Hebrew word shalom. The Shema — a Judaic supplication from the Christian Bible — was carven on the backwards of the cabinet.

The first of all spoilt thing that happened to Mannis after curtain raising the boxwood was a phone phone call from a saleswoman at his piece of furniture restoration shop. She screamed that an interloper was inwards the basement, the location of Mannis’ workshop, breaking glass in and swearing. The intruder had also locked the branding iron security department gates and the exigency issue so she couldn’t capture out. As Mannis told her to phone the police, his electric cell phone electric battery went dead.

Mannis rushed support to his store and unlocked the gates and exits. When he entered his workshop, none of the lights worked. All the bulbs had been shattered inwards their sockets. Shortly thereafter, the comrade of a put in employee died past suicide after knocking the cabinet sour its shelf by accident. a couple on of years later, that employee also took his have life.

Mother Knows Best

Not a worshipper yet? Wait until you try what happened after Mannis eventually gave the Dybbuk box seat to its intended recipient. Once again, this is all according to Mannis’ 2003 eBay listing…

It was Hallowe'en (because of course it was). While his mother examined her gift inwards the store, Mannis left the way for pentad minutes. When he returned, she was unconscious and unresponsive. She had suffered a stroke. The next twenty-four hours inward the hospital, she could intercommunicate only if by pointing to letters of the alphabet on a flat solid of paper. She spelled come out “N-O  G-I-F-T.”

On the very same twenty-four hour period as his mother’s stroke, the lease to Mannis’ shop was terminated without grounds or explanation.

“I would destroy this thing inwards a second,” Mannis wrote inwards his eBay listing, “except I really don’t get any understanding of what i may or may not be dealing with. i am afraid (and I doh signify afraid) that if I ruin the cabinet, whatever it is that seems to make follow with the console may just now stay here with me.”

Mannis ended his itemisation with the tagline: “Help me.”

The Truth

There’s no such thing as a Dybbuk Box – at least there wasn’t before Mannis made the term up. Now, there are dozens for sales event on eBay, Etsy, and dybbukstore.com. (Yes, they get their own online store.)

Dybbuks are defined as evil spirits by Judaic folklore. But they were alleged to inhabit living beings, never piece of furniture pieces.

Mannis did buy the wine-colored cabinet at a garage sale. But it was sold to him by an attorney, not the granddaughter of a final solution survivor. Mannis placed the unusual objects indoors of it himself. He also carved the Judaic petition into the indorse of the cabinet.

Mannis’ fuss did hurt a stroke. But she was at home. And she didn’t spell out come out any ominous gift warnings inward the hospital. While the wine-colored locker was in Mannis’ possession, this was the only abnormally uncollectible thing that happened to him or anyone shut to him.

Oh, and Mannis ne'er had a furniture restoration shop. At the clip he purchased the wine-colored cabinet, he worked the perfect job for gathering intimate details from strangers’ lives to use inward his creepy-crawly stories.

He was a bartender.

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