First things first. I was both disappointed, and yet at the same time self-satisfied, that I was one of only about five people at last night's London Fortean Society talk, I've Got A Dybbuk Box And I'm Gonna Use It, that understood why they'd chosen that title. Console me! At least some of my fellow indie punk fans from the eighties joined me in a wistful trip down memory lane as we reminisced about The Butthole Surfers, Swans, and Zodiac Mindwarp.
But, Fuzzbox aside - and it was good to see Vix, Jo (RIP), Tina, and Maggie on the cover of 1986's Bostin' Steve Austin - the talk was a very good one. It was good to be back in The Bell and it was good to see Dewi, Jade, Scott, David, Michael, Mark, Paula, and Tim again. Even Simon made a late appearance. So late that he missed the talk but he did drag me to a speakeasy with the Shoreditch typical name of Discount Suit Factory for a couple of overpriced cans of Berliner lager afterwards.
Though I may know who Fuzzbox are I must admit I didn't have the slightest clue what a dybbuk box is until this talk was announced. I'd done a little research but I must admit I didn't have the highest hopes for the talk. As Dewi had put it in a WhatsApp exchange a few days before the talk the best we could hope for was "interesting bollocks".
Which was exactly what we got. Ian Simmons is the news editor of the Fortean Times so he seemed like he'd be more than qualified to deliver a good talk. Which, luckily for those of us in attendance, he was. He served it up, more or less, as something of a ghost story - and he remembered to use dramatic pauses and gestures to enliven a tale that's worth telling. Whether you believe it or not.
The story begins in 2003 in Portland, Oregon when furniture restorer Kevin Mannis buys a careworn old wine cabinet from a lady who was more than one hundred years old. This old lady had grown up in Poland and had escaped the Nazis by moving to Spain and then, eventually, America. She'd not taken many belongings with her but one of the things she'd brought from Poland was this wine cabinet.
Or dybbuk box. A name that references what's inside it. With the rise of the Nazis, some of the Polish Jews had the idea of calling up the spirits of the dead, dybbuks, to help fight the Boche. They succeeded in calling up those spirits but when the dybbuk arrived it not only spooked the enemy, it spooked everyone. It ran amok. It caused mayhem. So it was locked in a box.
Which became known as a dybbuk box. In fact it wasn't locked in just one box. It was broken up and locked in ten separate boxes. Only eight of which have so far been identified. Mannis' own dybbuk box started to cause him problems in the form of a string of bad luck and a series of nightmares. He'd made the mistake, after being told not to, of opening the box.
Mannis, however, didn't buy into this superstitious nonsense so gave the box, as a gift, to, variously, his mother, his girlfriend, and his sister! All of whom experienced terrible misfortune on receipt of what looked like a fairly ordinary, slightly tatty, wine cabinet. A wine cabinet that didn't even have any wine in it though there is a photograph of somebody stocking it with scotch, bourbon, whisky, and vodka. Conversations with spirits indeed!
Eventually, Mannis tired of the dybbuk box and the misfortune it seemed to be bringing to him and his loved ones. So he returned to eBay and sold it, at a fairly impressive profit it is worth nothing, to Jason Haxton, the Director of the Museum of Osteopathic Medicine in Kirskville, Missouri. The description Mannis had written on eBay didn't avoid the special powers the dybbuk box seemed to have it. Instead it honed in on them, using them to get a higher price for the box.
Haxton, too, started to suffer a run of poor luck. Between Haxton and Mannis there were multiple deaths of close family members, job losses, illnesses, and several far more petty downturns of fortune. Haxton, however, saw that this dybbux box might make him some money so he set up a website about it and that soon received thousands of visits.
Eventually, he sold his story to a Hollywood production company and the director Sam Raimi made the 2012 supernatural horror film The Possession about it. It wasn't a critical success but it did good box office, even briefly reaching number one in the film charts.
Haxton, having had his fill of the dybbuk box, later passed the supposedly accursed item on to Ghost Adventures host Zak Bagans to display in his museum and Bagans, of course, opened the box. Not only did he open it he invited his friend, the rapper Post Malone - check the guy's tattoos - he's got 79 of them, along for the grand reveal.
It's not recorded if Bagans hit a run of bad luck but Post Malone was certain that the opening of the dybbuk box was responsible for the run of misfortune that soon befell him. His long term partner split up with him, he narrowly avoided a plane crash, he crashed his Rolls Royce, and he started behaving very oddly on stage. Denying that it was anything to do with drugs.
The dybbux box was becoming ever more infamous. At least in certain corners of the Internet and in the world of the Fortean Times. Mannis, Haxton, and Bagans all started squabbling about who owned the rights to the story of the dybbuk box (there was money in it now) but when The Fortean Times went to who they believed the source of the story was, Mannis, they got a surprisingly frank answer.
He said "I am a creative writer. The dybbuk box is a story that I created and the dybbuk box story has done exactly what I intended it to do when I posted it twenty years ago. Which is to become an interactive horror story in real time”. He even admitted to adding new details every few years to keep the story fresh and relevant.
It was all, Mannis happily admitted, complete bollocks. But, as with crop circles and Slender Man, that didn't stop people believing in the power of the dybbux box and the spirits of the Jewish dead from hundreds of years ago. Even though it's been proven that the original dybbux box was made in America and dated from after World War II and it seems highly likely that the holocaust survivor Mannis said he originally purchased the box from is merely a figment of his, and now our, imagination.
When questioned about the story of the dybbuk box, Professor Chris French, former head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmith's in London and Greenwich Skeptics head honcho, offered his belief that if people believe they are cursed they will put every piece of misfortune in their life down to that curse. Shit happens to everyone. It doesn't matter if you've opened a dybbuk box or not.
So far, things haven't got out of hand. There's been no attempted murders in the case of the dybbuk box as there have been in the case of Slender Man and Ian Simmons ended what had been a fun and fascinating talk with his opinion that it was actually quite nice to have a weird piece of Internet bullshit that is not malign in intent. So many conspiracy theories these days have been taken over by vicious, racist, misogynistic, right wing nut jobs. The dybbuk box story he felt, unlike QAnon, is something we can all enjoy.
And enjoy it I did. But I wonder if this is the last we'll hear of the dybbuk box or if, like the band Fuzzbox, it will fade away into dim and distant memory and one day in a few decades time when someone in a pub asks everyone who remembers the dybbuk box to put their hands up there will be only a few people lifting their skinny fists like antennas to heaven. Calling International Rescue.
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