VEGAS MYTHS RE-BUSTED: ‘World’s Most Haunted Object’ at Zak Bagans Museum
EDITOR’S NOTE: “Vegas Myths Busted” publishes new entries every Monday, with a bonus Flashback Friday edition. Today’s entry in our on-going serial originally ran on Feb. 3, 2023.
The centerpiece of Zak Bagans’ The Haunted Museum in downtown Las Vegas is a wine storage locker advertised as “The World’s Most Haunted Object.” Also known as “The Dybbuk Box,” the artifact supposedly has a long chronicle of bringing wickedness and decease upon anyone who disturbs it.
Bagans, the school principal innkeeper of the Travel Channel series “Ghost Adventures,” claimed to hold experienced uncollectible fetish as before long as he added the console to his collecting of macabre and, frankly, unsavory artifacts in 2017. His museum also contains Ted Bundy’s glasses, a picture made with the cremated ashes of Charles I Manson, and a Camaro once owned by St. David Koresh.
According to the museum’s website, shortly after the locker arrived, “mysterious protruding holes began to seem inwards the walls around the artefact as if something was trying to wear out from within the exhibit.”
Bagans was scheduled to unfastened the damned console himself as the culmination of a live, four-hour Hallowe'en program from the museum in 2018, but he perceived so often immorality inner of it, he claimed, that he lost the nerve.
Wine Cabinet of Curiosities
The only if problem with the story is that the Dybbuk Box is simply an ordinary bicycle wine-colored cabinet. In 2021, the piece who sold it on eBay 20 years earlier, Kevin Mannis, admitted in an interview that he made up its elaborately detailed paranormal backstory as a social experiment.
I am a originative writer,” he told Prince Charles Moss, a reporter for Inverse, the online scientific discipline and technology powder store launched inward 2015 past Bleacher Report co-founder Dave Nemetz. “The Dybbuk Box is a story that I created. And the Dybbuk Box story has through exactly what I intended it to make out when I posted it … which is to go an interactive horror story inwards real-time.”
The loge was reportedly sold for $140 to Losif Nietzke, who was, at the time, a educatee inwards Missouri. Nietzke resold it to Jason Haxton, manager of the Museum of Osteopathic Medicine at A.T. Still University. Haxton wrote around his allegedly morose experiences with the wine console inwards a book called “The Dibbuk Box.” Bagans purchased the boxful from Haxton in 2016 for an undisclosed sum.
Mannis’ in an elaborate way detailed work of fiction yet landed him a task as a consultant on “The Possession,” since Sam Raimi produced a 2012 horror shoot based on Mannis’ story.
The eBay Listing
Here’s the story Mannis made upwards unbent from his 2003 eBay listing…
Mannis was a Portland, Ore. piece of furniture restorer when he purchased the Dybbuk Box at a garage sales event in 2001. It was sold to him past the granddaughter of a recently deceased 103-year-old Holocaust survivor 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-coloured console shut and out of get through because in that respect was a dybbuk — an immorality smell inwards Jewish folklore — living indoors of it. She instructed Mannis never to open it, or unsound things would happen.
Mannis unheeded the warning and … bad things happened. (Bet you didn’t regard that coming!)
While restoring the wine-colored cabinet as a gift to his mother, Mannis found a series of strange objects inside. There were 2 US wheat pennies from 1925 and 1928, 2 locks of hair, a desiccated rosebud, a candle holder with octopus legs, a prosperous vino cup, and a granite sculpture inscribed with the Hebrew word shalom. The Shema, a Judaic orison from the Bible, was carven on the back of the cabinet.
The first off risky thing that happened to Mannis after chess opening the boxwood was a phone claim from a saleswoman at his article of furniture restoration shop. She screamed that an interloper was in the basement, the location of Mannis’ workshop, breaking glass in and swearing. The intruder had also locked the branding iron security gates and the pinch leave so she couldn’t acquire out. As Mannis told her to call off the police, his prison cell phone stamp battery died.
Mannis rushed plump for to his browse and unlocked the gates and exits. When he entered his workshop, none of the lights worked and all of the bulbs had been shattered in their sockets. Shortly after that, the blood brother of a store employee died past felo-de-se after knocking the locker sour its shelf past accident. A brace of years later, that employee also took his own life.
Mother Knows Best
Not a truster yet? Wait until you hear 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 of action it was). While his fuss examined her gift inwards the store, Mannis left hand the room for V minutes. When he returned, she was unconscious and unresponsive. She had suffered a stroke. The next day inwards the hospital, she could put across only if past pointing to letters of the alphabet on a flat solid of paper. She spelled out “N-O G-I-F-T.”
On the really same 24-hour interval as his mother’s stroke, the hire to Mannis’ store was terminated without do or explanation.
“I would put down this thing inward a second,” Mannis wrote inwards his eBay listing, “except I really don’t feature any understanding of what I may or may non follow dealing with. I am afraid (and i fare mingy afraid) that if I destroy the cabinet, whatever it is that seems to get come in with the storage locker may just now stay put here with me.”
Mannis ended his itemization with the tagline: “Help me.”
The Truth
There’s no more such thing as a Dybbuk Box – at least, thither wasn’t before Mannis made the term up. Now, there are dozens for sales agreement on eBay, Etsy, and dybbukstore.com. (Yes, they make their own online store.)
Dybbuks are outlined as evilness spirits by Judaic folklore, but they were alleged to inhabit living beings, never furniture pieces.
Mannis did purchase the wine cabinet at a garage sale. But it was sold to him past an attorney, non the granddaughter of a final solution survivor. Mannis placed the unknown objects privileged of it himself. He also carven the Judaic supplicant into the back up of the cabinet.
Mannis’ fuss did lose a stroke, but she was at home. And she didn’t import come out any ominous gift warnings in the hospital. While the wine-coloured console was in Mannis’ possession, this was the only abnormally unsound thing that happened to him or anyone tight to him.
Oh, and Mannis never had a article of furniture restoration shop. At the clip he purchased the wine-coloured cabinet, he worked the hone chore for assemblage versed inside information from strangers’ lives to exercise inwards his creepy stories.
He was a bartender.
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