And most disturbingly, he says, the brother of a store employee died by suicide shortly after visiting the shop and knocking the cabinet off the shelf. Mannis and his siblings suffered from the same recurring nightmares of an old woman with sunken eyes. His sister got creeped out by the cabinet because the doors kept opening on their own his brother and his sister-in-law complained of odd smells coming from the box, like cat urine and jasmine. Over the course of two years, a number of other mysterious events befell Mannis and those around him.

The seller purportedly told Mannis it was never to be opened, and if it was, bad things would happen. The granddaughter told him her grandmother always kept it shut and out of reach because there was a dybbuk - in Jewish folklore, an evil, restless spirit that possesses the living - inside it. When Havela, who lived to 103, immigrated to the U.S., the wine cabinet was only one of three items she brought with her.Īs Mannis paid for the cabinet, Havela’s granddaughter said, “I see you bought the Dybbuk Box.” Mannis wasn’t familiar with the term. She, with other survivors, fled to Spain and lived there until the end of the war. Havela’s parents, brothers, sister, husband, two sons, and daughter were all killed. The story goes that he purchased an old wine cabinet from the granddaughter of a recently deceased Holocaust survivor named Havela, who escaped Nazi-occupied Poland. Back in 2001, Kevin Mannis was out visiting yard sales, looking for supplies for his furniture-restoration business, a hole-in-the-wall shop located at the base of the Burnside Bridge in Portland, Oregon.

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