In 2003, a guy joined the growing club of people who were having fun selling allegedly haunted

items on eBay. His offering was an old wine box that he claimed was possessed by a

dibbuk, a tormented spirit from Hebrew mythology. Somehow, this particular item transcended

the norm for haunted auctions and found a solid place in pop culture. Why? The truth

behind the dibbuk box is up next Unskeptoid.

You're listening to Skeptoid. I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com. The haunted dibbuk

box. Every once in a while, there's a small local ghost story that's not very good or that

even has an obvious commercial origin, and it has no business becoming popular. But it

does. The famous dibbuk box is one such story. It went from a screenwriter's pen on an

eBay auction page all the way onto the Hollywood big screen, with 2012's The Possession,

starring Kira Sedgwick and directed by Sam Raimi. It is the story of a small antique wooden

box designed to hold a few bottles of wine, to which was attached a horror story going

all the way back to the Holocaust.

Whoever owned the box it was said experienced terrible disturbances for as long as the

box was in their home. Why? Because according to the story, the wine box was inhabited by

a dibbuk, said to be a tormented spirit come back from the dead.

The whole idea of the box being inhabited by a dibbuk is nonsensical, according to

what a dibbuk is supposed to be. The encyclopedia mythica describes it as a disembodied spirit possessing

a living body that belongs to another soul, and usually talks from that person's mouth.

An important 1914 Yiddish play, the dibbuk, was about the spirit of a dead man who possessed

the living body of the woman he had loved and had to be exercised. The word comes from

the Hebrew verb to clang, so a dibbuk is specifically a soul who clangs to another.

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