Haunted Dybbuk Box Won on eBay Caused New Owner ‘Tidal Wave of Bad Luck’

A man who purchased a wine cabinet off eBay believes the wooden box, which served as inspiration for the horror film Possession, may be haunted by a malicious spirit called a dibbuk.

In June 2003, Jason Haxton won the online auction — but when he received the box in the mail it came with some unexpected consequences.

“The day it arrived, I put my hands on it, and it almost feels like the thing collapses into a liquid state,” Haxton told My San Antonio. “I feel like a knife is coming into my gut. I'm paralyzed in pain. When I go to bed, I have terrible dreams of a hag that seems to come with the box.”

Haxton, 63, said he first heard about the box from a colleague whose roommate had listed it for sale after bizarre experiences — including hair loss and smelling bad odors — that he associated with a dibbuk (also spelled dybbuk.)

The box’s owner put it on eBay under the title “Dibbuk Haunted Jewish Wine Cabinet Box,” referencing an evil spirit, in Jewish folklore, believed to be the dislocated soul of a dead person that possesses the living.

According to the listing, the person selling the piece had purchased it in September 2001 at an Oregon estate sale of a Holocaust survivor who passed away at 103 years old.

The listing stated the woman got the wine cabinet while living in Spain, and it was among the few things she brought with her when she immigrated to America after the war.

The woman’s granddaughter, the listing noted, told the person who bought the box at the sale that growing up she recalled it “was always shut, and set in a place that was out of reach” and the grandmother said it “was never, ever, to be opened.”

Haxton paid $280 for the box, which, instead of wine, 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 gilded Hebrew letters.

Haxton, he said, didn’t believe the stories associated with the box since he was “too science-based.”

He then began experiencing what he has called a “tidal wave of bad luck.”

“All I knew is I got this thing, and I got very ill. I don't know what happened. I still don't know,” he said.

Haxton noted all his problems vanished when he followed a rabbi’s advice to place the wine cabinet in a gold-lined wooden container to negate whatever spirit was haunting it.

He now keeps the cabinet “safe” inside a military-grade case, which he buried.

“Thousands of people are begging to take it off my hands at any price, but it's not ethical for me to sell it. It's not for sale,” he told My San Antonio.

Still, there’s one person who refuses to accept the dibbuk box: his mother, Rhea Haxton.

“He keeps telling me he's going to give it to me for my birthday, and I keep telling him I don't want it,” she said. “I've got enough problems.”