The Dybbuk Box

A small cabinet that Kevin Mannis sold on eBay in 2003, with a long haunting story he later said he wrote himself.

Kevin Mannis owned a secondhand furniture store in Portland, Oregon, according to Skeptoid's Brian Dunning. Kenny Biddle, writing in Skeptical Inquirer, describes him as a professional writer and musician from the Pacific Northwest. In 2003 Mannis auctioned the Dybbuk Box on eBay as a haunted item. His listing said he had found it, apparently a wine cabinet, at an estate sale in 2001. At great length it described the strange events that followed for him and his family, and it closed with a plea for help.

The story spread and, as Biddle notes, reached the cinema. The box now sits in Zak Bagans' The Haunted Museum in Las Vegas, which calls it the world's most haunted object. The museum says it has been blamed for several deaths, a stroke and a curse on the singer Post Malone.

In 2021 Mannis told the writer Charles Moss, for Input, that he had made the whole thing up. Wikipedia quotes him calling it "an interactive horror story in real time", and reports that he kept adding fresh details over the years to keep it alive.