An old world curse. I'm Jason Horton. I'm Rebecca Leib. And this is Ghost Town.

In 2001, a man named Kevin Manis was out visiting yard sales in Portland, Oregon to find

things to sell in his furniture restoration store. He happened upon an estate sale that he learned

was for a recently deceased Holocaust survivor named Hevella. There, Manis found an old wine cabinet.

He went up to Hevella's granddaughter after he paid, and she said, I see you bought the

Divick box. Manis has no idea what she's talking about. But he would soon find out, big time.

Today we're talking about the owners and stories and controversies around a famed Divick box,

a Jewish superstition turned real life curse. In Jewish folklore, a Divick is a disembodied human

spirit that, because of former sins, wanders restlessly until it finds a living person to host in.

The idea of a Divick gained popularity in the 16th and 17th century Europe. Similar to the idea

of being possessed by a demon, but for the Jews. People who were suffering from mental disorders

were taken to a rabbi who specialized in miracle working on the supernatural. And this rabbi alone

was the one who could expel the harmful Divick through Judaic exorcism. You think exorcisms

were just for the Catholics? Think again. Rabbi Isaac Luria is considered the father of contemporary

Kabbalah, or Jewish mysticism, and he loved working with the spirits. He gained a cult-like

following in the late 1500s for his ideas on ghosts, demons, and souls, laying the groundwork for

the Jewish belief that souls could continue their task of self-perfection and evolution beyond

their body's death. His disciples went one step further, with the idea that a body could be

possessed by a Divick. Now with some of that background, I'm sure you can guess what a Divick

box is. But at that point, Divics were spirits looking for human hosts, not spirits holding up in

rural Oregonian wine cabinets. So 35-year-old Kevin Mannis bought a sewing box, the wine cabinet,

and some other items from the sale. He, of course, learned at the sale that the items had personally

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