Chilluminati Podcast - Episode 104 - The Dybbuk Box

Episode Date: June 8, 2021

Patreon - http://www.patreon.com/chilluminatipod BUY OUR MERCH - http://www.theyetee.com/collections/chilluminati Thanks to our sponsors this episode http://www.hawthorne.co PROMO CODE - chill http://www.hellofresh.com/12chill PROMO CODE 12chill http://www.stamps.com PROMO CODE chill Jesse Cox - http://www.youtube.com/jessecox Alex Faciane - http://www.youtube.com/user/ThatOneLazerClown Art Commissioned by - http://www.mollyheadycarroll.com Theme - Matt Proft End song - POWER FAILURE - https://soundcloud.com/powerfailure Video - http://www.twitter.com/digitalmuppet

Mr. World here, about to take the plunge on the world's fastest roller coaster. I hope it's as fast as the in-store labs at Eyeglass World. When you drop in there, they make your glasses the same day. You should give it a whirl. Just remember to keep your hands and feet inside the Eyeglass World at all times. Get two pairs of glasses for $89 fast. At Eyeglass World, the world's best way to buy glasses. Visit eyeglassworld.com to schedule your exam online and for offer details.

Hello, everybody. And welcome back to the Chilluminati Podcast, Episode 104. As always, I am one of your hosts, Mike Martin, joined by my other co-host, Jesse Cox, and Alex Fosyame. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. How, how, how, how? And then thanks for coming to the Classic Rock Station,

104.1 Chill LX. The Classic Rock Station is called the Chill X? Is that what you call it? No, it says ZLX. ZLX sounds like... ZLX. That sounds like something you take to not poop your pants when you're old. No, we're on the same page.

We're like, whatever it is, it's gotta be about buttholes. It's about pooping. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's poop related. Yeah. See, Z-Top is not cool, you guys. I mean, like, the music is fine, but they're, like, sneaking around and there's sunglasses on stage.

It's a weird vibe. I don't get it. I don't trust them. They're, like, shady. They look like... How, how, how? How, how, how, how? They're like...

I watched them on Jail at no one time. They just walked over and turned on a little Tesla coil on stage during a solo. I mean, why not? I was like, really? If you have that kind of money, if you got ZZ-Top money, why not? Yeah, right. Dude, if I was in Back to the Future 3 instead of ZZ-Top, different movie, I would have stopped, I would have saved them from Mad Dog Tannen.

Sure, you would have. Yeah. Can you, you know how, you know what, though, the audience could save us, isn't that right, Alex? Well, you know... It's not that we're in... No, listen, dude. Like, listen, Jesse, hang on.

It's been a disappointing week for me, okay? I'm just... If you want to turn Mathis' week around, you should head to patreon.com slash chaluminati pod, where not only does every dollar that you contribute literally proportionally raise Mathis' actual life happiness. But also, it does keep us on a weekly schedule, and it does get you, amongst other things, episodes immediately following these episodes that just continue the jolly Mary vibe that we always bring.

I'm going to tell you something. Last week's episode, last week's mini-sode, is like the length of four mini-sodes. It really was. It was a long one. It was a big one. It was a big one. Yeah. So, you know, that's not even an afterthought.

That's a whole other show that you're not even on the level of. So, get over there. The patreon.com slash chaluminati pod, where you can become part of the chaluminati yourself. You can become a neophyte in our illustrious and storied ancient organization. Down at Coconut Grove. Coconut Grove, Los Angeles, California, keep in the world just a little bit more relaxed. We're not doing great right now. So, if you could just join, that would be great.

Speaking of Los Angeles, California, maybe like the last week of October. Just like, you know, the last week. You like scary things and weird things and spooky things. The last week of October. Probably like taco. Might be a great time to come to LA. Might be like the best time.

Wink. Come on. Come on down. Please do. That would be amazing. Keep your pocketbooks ready. Keep your pocketbooks in hand. Save the dates.

Yeah, that last week. Save the dates. Patreon.com slash chaluminati pod. Can I tell my story now? Yeah, I guess. Aliens aren't here and I'm just disappointed. That's all. I get it.

I get that. But here's the thing. We have time. It's not like until the 25th, apparently. But what did I tell you last week? And you're like, where are we talking about? Is there anything we're not going to talk about? I'm just letting you know.

I'm here to tamper your hype. It's no six weeks. It's not going to happen. They're not going to be like, and then the aliens arrived. It's just not going to happen. I'm letting you know. Something is going to come out. But I don't know what.

Nothing is going to come out. Some sort of release is going to be made by the government at the very least. Nothing that will be good enough for us to be like, it won't happen. It's going to be exactly what we all think it's going to be. They're going to say, we don't know what it is. And then they're going to immediately be like,

but we're watching it and that's it. Okay. But what if it was the Romulans? The Romulans. I would be, oh man, we're fucked. You know they don't have time. They would first contact. They would land and be like, all right, let's get this over with.

Always land and then we'd be their slaves and we're dead. Who's the real aliens that come and start? Is it the Vulcans who come originally? Yes, the Vulcans who land. I'm scared that it's the Romulans. That's my deal. I'm scared that they're going to just be like, we're dead. Like they want us dead.

We're dead. See you guys later. What? We couldn't do anything if that was the case. Let's be real. Exactly. That's true. I'll be a bummer.

That's very true. Okay. What about now? Can I tell my story now? Yeah, I guess you could start now, Alex. It's an Alex episode, everybody. So strap in, buckle up, put on whatever pants you wear during Alex episodes. Keep your pants on or if you don't normally wear them, leave them off.

Go skins. Take it away, Alex. I have not seen the 2012 movie, The Possession, but there is a scene in the trailer of that movie that I remember very well where you can hear it before you see it. The sound of a fork scraping against a plate as Jeffrey Dean Morgan sternly pleads with his daughter to take it easy as she quickly eats some pancakes. The sound of the metal.

The sound of maybe you remember this. I don't know. The sound of the metal scraping against the ceramic surface is used to build tension in the story. And admittedly, Jeffrey Dean Morgan probably went too far with his acting choice of the yelling over a couple of pancakes. But like I said, I haven't seen the movie. Maybe he just legitimately wanted his daughter to slow down because he loved

his daughter and he didn't want to see her choke while she was eating all these pancakes. But the reason that this scene sticks in my memory is that amid the rising tension as the fork scraping gets louder and louder and Jeffrey Dean Morgan raises his voice to like fan at the Superbowl level. He slaps the table and he screams to the top of his lungs and slow down. And without thinking, the girl reacts by taking the fork that she's been eating the pancakes with and plunging the fork right into the top of her dad's hands. And for like 10 years, for some reason, that little jump scare in the movie trailer

has been drifting around in my memory, comes into my mind. Sometimes I think about it. I it's just it's just imagery, loose imagery floating around in my head. And then the other day I was eating pancakes myself. Shoutouts, Bondi Harvest, butternut squash pancakes, so fucking delicious. And it was like on the tip of my tongue, I was like trying to remember where the fuck this like girl stabbing her dad in the hand with the pancakes was from. And I like went on one of those quests that people go on, you know, like where you need to

hear like the song that you're hearing in your head. I had to hear I had to see the pancake stabbing scene. So I went on Google and I did some searches for things like daughter stabbing father breakfast. And eventually I found the possession trailer from 2012 and I watched it and I saw the clip again and it doesn't even actually in the clip. It doesn't actually show it. It cuts away from her stabbing him in the hand. I forgot that part.

And in the end, I just felt nothing. It was not a satisfying. It was not a satisfying, you know, loop closed. So I just was like, OK, here I am. I watched this. This wasn't good. This is what didn't feel good. So I watched the trailer all again, hoping that somehow it will be better this time and I could

just feel something. But nope, not this time. And in reality, it was just my brain being weird and latching on to like a weird moment that I saw in a movie trailer one time. But at least now I don't have to worry about whether I made it up or not. I'm growing more and more concerned as this goes on. I want everyone to know the three of us can see each other. And as Alex's story is going on, our heads keep like angling to the right a little bit as we're

like, where are we going? What is happening right now? Where are you taking us? I don't know what's about to happen. So I watched the trailer again for the second time this time all the way through. And a thing came up in this trailer, which again is about an entity living inside this man's daughter, which grants her terrifying strengths and unholy demonic power. But in the in the trailer, it says, based on a true story, which seems crazy to me.

But at least I have purpose again. So I spent my week reading about this true story that this movie, The Possession from 2012, was based on, based off of this fucking vision of a pancake stabbing in my memory. No pancakes are ever mentioned again in this real story. But that's just the way the cookie crumbles. Life is random, you know what I mean? And I feel like in a way that's like Zen Buddhism, if you think about it. But let's just settle in.

Don't Google, please don't Google. Here is the true story, true story of the Dibbock box. Thank you to today's sponsor, Hawthorne. Rituals get results. You wouldn't skip leg day, would you? If you were one of those working out types. If I was a workout type, I probably wouldn't. It's probably bad to do that.

I don't skip reading Alien Book Day when it's time to start reading books about aliens. It's the same idea. And if you want better skin, hair, and overall health, rituals will help you do that. That's why Hawthorne has made it easy to build and maintain a personal care ritual that helps you look, smell, and feel your best. Hawthorne is a premium grooming brand that tailors your personal care routine to your new unique profile. First, you head to their website and you take their quiz, which is kind of fun.

It asks questions about your personal care routine, the types of products you like to use. And by the end, it recommends a couple of bundles that might be good for your personal ritual. At the end, I got an essentials bundle with all the products that tailored to my body type and lifestyle. I particularly went for the dry skin care routine as I moved across the country and my skin is very sensitive to this new dry heat. Hawthorne takes the risk out of shopping for personal care by giving you free shipping on your order and returns.

If you don't like what their products are, they'll even retailer them based on your feedback. Take the Hawthorne quiz today and get started on your personalized self care routine by going to Hawthorne.co and use promo code CHILL to get 10% off your first purchase. That's H-A-W-T-H-O-R-N-E dot C-O promo code CHILL Hawthorne.co promo code CHILL Hawthorne.co Okay, this is the... Okay, all right.

This is the Dibbick Box. This is the Dibbick Box. So first of all, if we're going to talk about Dibbick Boxes, we should talk about what a Dibbick is, right? So for starters, simply as possible, a Dibbick is a malicious possessing spirit from Jewish mythology. And since it's meant to be the ghost of a previously living person, and sometimes it has a specific goal in returning to the earthly realm, something that links it here, a possessing

ghost with unfinished business is a pretty good shorthand for the vibe of a Dibbick, right? And in fact, even its name, Dibbick, is derived from the Hebrew verb meaning adhere or cling and can be roughly translated to the act of sticking, most likely, in reference to possession of a living host. And the other thing about the Dibbick is that it can affect your health and make you act hysterical and speak with the voice of another person, basically just all the same type of stuff that you see at your typical Christian-style demonic possessions, but just it's a ghost of a person instead of a demonic entity from hell or whatever, right?

And according to traditional accounts, things that can open your house to a Dibbick possession often are things that are centered around slacking on your orthodoxy, right? Like if your Mazza is like sloppy, or if you, and this is a specific one, if you doubt the idea that Moses really could like cross the sea. Oh, could have split the, split the scenes. Like being like, I mean, I'm a Jew, but like I don't, that seems crazy to me. Like that type of thinking is the way that you let a Dibbick in according to tradition, right?

And again, this is just all based on notes and references that I've read. I'm not purporting to be an expert on this, especially not on matters of Jewish religion or culture. I don't, I'm not an expert. So if I need to be corrected, I'm happy to be corrected, but I did my best. And apparently there are even accounts of rabbis exercising Dibbicks straight up, like exactly how you would maybe imagine it, like exorcist level to a level of detail that we even have a quote from a Dibbick that was possessing a pious widow and who was allegedly

exercised by a rabbi, our sin of sephed Israel, who coincidentally, the spirit also recognized this priest by name on site because the dude who was dead was actually a former student of the rabbi from when they both lived in Egypt. But anyway, but he was like evil now. Yeah. He like was back as a ghost. He was like, yo, I'm a ghost now. Like this sucks.

Yeah. Hey, teach. It's me. Hey, but here, Mathis, I'm going to give you this. You can read this. Where are we doing this? Okay, I see. Yeah.

All right. I'll try to do it in that voice the whole time, but I'm not sure I can make it all the way through. That's OK. I lost my life when the ship on which I was sailing sank. Noah was able to confess my sins before dying because it happened so quickly. When the news of the wreck reached the closest town, my body was recovered along with the others who had drowned and I was buried in a Jewish cemetery. But as soon as the mourners left, an evil angel opened the grave with a fiery rod and led me to

the gates of Gehenna. But the angel guarding Gehenna refused to allow me to enter. So great was my sin. And instead I was condemned to wander pursued by three avenging angels. Oh, dude. I have to have a fucking bounty hunter angels hunting you in the afterlife. That's like an anime, right? Like that's tight.

Is an anime right there? Yeah. Oh, man. All right. Angelic, righteous justice. That's the name of it. Avenging angels. Come on.

It could. Yeah. That's good. Good. That's the like 90s English translation. Yeah. Yeah. Very much so.

Twice before I tried to escape from this endless punishment, once I took possession of a rabbi, but he invoked a flock of impure spirits. And in order to escape them, I had to abandon his body. Later, I became so desperate that I took possession of the body of a dog, which became so crazed that it ran until it dropped dead. Then I fled to Safed and entered the body of this woman. Yeah. So that's literally a quote from a dybbuk.

But eventually, this rabbi was able to exercise the dude out of the woman by getting the widow to reaffirm that she believed that Moses really did part the Red Sea three times fast, which is a wild way to get rid of a ghost out of context. But yeah, that's basically I want to know what the what the ghost is thinking during that moment where she believes and then you're like, well, shit, I got to go. There was some other stuff that also happened like some other people had to be brought into like utter certain words at certain times and do all this stuff. But the crux of it is that, oh, she needs to like get back on her orthodox practices.

And that's basically what dybbuk are all about. But now we're going to shift gears to this specific alleged dybbuk, which eventually inspired the 2012 movie The Possession, which then inspired me based on the pancake scene to make this episode. But the story is nothing. But the story of the movie is nothing like this story really, which is how it always goes with these types of things. So it doesn't really matter.

But the story is nuts anyway. So here we go. So back in September of 2001, there was a man called Kevin Manis, who was at an estate sale in Portland, Oregon, where items being liquidated at the sale had belonged to a 103-year-old woman who was born in Poland, where she had just settled down and begun starting a family when because just because they happened to be Jewish, she and her entire family were sent away to a concentration camp during World War Two. And what's worse is that it wasn't long before her parents, her brothers, a sister,

her husband, her two sons, and her daughter were all killed in the camps. And now she was all alone and probably just completely devastated as a human being. But she was able to escape with a couple other prisoners to Spain eventually, where she lived until the end of the war. And while in Spain, somewhere along the way, she came into possession of a small wine cabinet. And when she eventually emigrated to the United States, it was literally the only thing that she brought with her besides her steamer trunk and a sewing box. And anyway, back in 2001, this was the same wine box that Kevin Manis found at the estate sale.

And he bought it along with the sewing box and a couple other pieces of furniture and just sort of thought nothing about it. You know, he just he goes to his state sales, he bought some stuff. But afterwards, he was approached by the granddaughter of this woman. I guess she was able to start a family once she moved back to the United States. And she warned him that the wine cabinet that he'd acquired that day was known by another name among their family because their grandmother had always called it the dibbock box. And whenever she would ask her grandmother what was inside, her grandmother would spit three times through her fingers and said it was a dibbock and that she should drop it. And she always kept it shut

tight and out of reach of any of the kids or anything like that. And apparently the original plan was that her grandmother asked if she could actually be buried with this box. But the authorities are the Jewish Orthodoxy wouldn't allow it because it's not part of an Orthodox burial. So that's why it was on sale rather than in the ground with her. And so this dude Manis was like in a weird position at this point because he's like, well, do you want me to open it with you? Or like, how do you want to do this? I don't want to like besmirch your family. She said no way. She said her grandmother was like way too scarily serious about it. She wanted to honor her memory. And then he was like, well, maybe I should just give it back to you guys then. And she was like,

no, no, no, no, no, you bought it. You bought it. It's all yours. And it kind of felt like it was his problem now. She started to cry. She was like, get out of here. Like it's yours. Just take it. Go, go, go. And so he was like, fine, it's mine. I'll take it. I have it. And so he took it. And the reason that he took it in the original case is because he ran a business where he was a furniture refinisher, like he like restored old furniture that was his business. And he thought that he could clean it up and give it to his mom as a gift as like a little wine cabinet for his mom for her birthday. So he chucked it in the basement of his shop and forgot about it because it was just part of a lot, you know, that he bought that day. But the next day, he got a call on his cell

phone from the woman working the shop that day at his store. She said she thought someone had broken in this person or whatever had caused the security gates to come down and lock. So she was trapped inside with whatever it was. And she could hear this, this, this entity smashing glass and screaming curse words down in his workshop in the basement. And this part's a little weird because he says that he wasn't able to call the cops because his phone died, which doesn't sound like an incredible reason not to call the cops in like any year after the year 2000. But based on how the story goes next, I think that maybe he just didn't make it super clear that the girl working had only heard the noises of somebody maybe breaking stuff downstairs, but I don't have any reason to give

anybody the benefit of the doubt here. So I'm just going to report the facts as they are told. But anyway, instead of calling the cops, he goes to the store himself and he finds this girl hiding in his office crying, but it's quiet now in the shop. She said it stopped a little while ago, but the girl has been in the shop the whole time. So she assumes the guy's still down there. And when he goes down to see what happens, what happened down there, he's immediately as soon as he opens the door, he's hit with this like nasty ass cat pee smell that just like washes over him. And it's just makes him like so sick. And he looks around and no one's down there. But all 13 light bulbs in the basement were smashed. And nobody was down there at all, even though there was only one way

in and out of the basement. So something weird happened. There was sound. There was something that was breaking, but nobody was in there. And that woman who weirdly isn't named in the story at all apparently never came back to work ever again. And even years later, wouldn't talk about what happened that day. But at the time, obviously, man has had no reason to connect anything about what was happening to the Dibbock box specifically, really, at least until two weeks later when he finally decided to go through with his original plan. Because remember, the whole reason he got it was to fix it up, give it as a gift to his mom. And actually, according to Manus, it was a pretty nice little wine cabinet and even had this functionality. You can see where if you open

one door, the other door and a drawer would all pop out, which is kind of cool. That's really cool. And of course, once you start refinishing something, inevitably, you are going to actually have to open it. And when Manus finally did, he found some very, very specific things inside. So Jesse, I'm going to send you the itemized list of things that were inside the Dibbock box. I have so many questions, but I'm going to wait. Well, here, we'll just go. Let's just get into it. I found the following items. One 1928 U.S. wheat penny. By the way, those are awesome. One 1925 U.S. wheat penny. One small lock of blonde hair bound with string. One small lock

of black brown hair bound with string. One small granite statue engraved and gilded with Hebrew letters. I've been told that the letters spell out the word shalom. One dried rosebud. One golden wine cup. One strange black cast iron candlestick holder with octopus legs. Yeah. So that's everything that was inside this little wine cabinet. And he also noticed an inscription on the back of the cabinet and he was as he was rubbing it with some lemon oil, but he didn't try to read it as it seemed to be in Hebrew, which he didn't speak, though he did take pictures of it, which I have here. And I will happily share with you. We just got to grab them here. And obviously, I will put them on the subreddit if somebody

bugs me about it later. Where is the pictures? Here we go. Should be. Did that go? I see nothing. Yeah, I don't see it. How do I give this to you? Maybe I'll go through Twitter. That's what I was going to say. I'll just drop it into the Twitter chat. You guys can see it because it's really important that you guys see the pictures because I think it makes it sound a little bit less like a creepypasta. You see him now, right on the Twitter DMs. Yeah, I just got the light up notification. Yeah. So if you want to just kind of. There it is. Yep. Lay that out for the people there a little bit. Ah, oh, okay. Um, boy, it looks like something that would have housed, I don't know, like something

that you break out once every so often. Does that make any sense? Like it's a cabinet that exists in your house, especially like an older person's house that inside maybe like, I don't know, like a menorah would be if we're on the subject, right? A little, a little special cabinet, a little. It also reminds me of when you look at museums that have very, very old artwork, especially if you're like in London, for example, and you go see those things that it's a cabinet, then we fold it out. There's a painting in the middle. Paintings on all the other paintings. Yeah, yeah, yeah, those panel paintings. Exactly. Except it's a cabinet that just has some things in it. Yeah, it looks very like a handmade, I would say, right? It looks

kind of old, right? Yes, it looks very old. Absolutely. But there's also maybe like a cup holder. I don't know. Yeah, I imagine those would be like, oh, no. Yeah, cup holders, I guess. Yeah, I don't know. I think it could be like maybe somewhere to put some duct, like a scroll or something, maybe two. It's hard. Yeah, it's hard to tell how tall it is too, because maybe you could put a bottle of wine in there and just like the neck goes up that hole. I mean, he thought it was a wine cabinet originally. So I think that's probably a fair assessment. But anyway, his mom's birthday was on October 28th, but they weren't able to get together until three days later on the 31st when she came down to his shop to go out to lunch with him. But before they left, Manis gave

his mother the cabinet and he left her to look it over for a second while he briefly stepped out to take a phone call. And when he came back, he found his mom unresponsive in a chair with tears streaming down her face, having just that moment while he stepped out suffered a stroke. He got her to the hospital pretty quickly, but she unfortunately was left partially paralyzed and was for a while after even unable to speak or form words. And in fact, the next day when he went to visit her in the hospital, instead of instead of talking, she was just kind of like pointing to letters like a Ouija board. And she spelled out N-O-G-I-F-T. No gift. Originally, he thought that the stroke had, he thought that his mom was teasing her. He thought his mom was

teasing him that she didn't, that he didn't get her a gift because she forgot that he gave her the gift. But he was like, Mom, I did get you a gift. I got you this cabinet. Remember? And she got upset when he said that. And she shook her head and she spelled out H-A-T-E-G-I-F-T. Hate gift. And so he thought that was a little weird. And then later that day, he also found out that the lease on his store had been terminated without cause, but that's weirdly treated as a little more than a footnote in this story. And I guess eventually they got it handled, but I'm not really sure because it's not really a focus, but apparently that also happened on the same day. And then a few months passed. It's a rough day, dude. Yeah, I know. And now Manis' sister has the

cabinet, but she only keeps it for about a week because according to her, she couldn't get the doors to keep from like springing back open no matter what she did, even though there were no springs in it in the first place, the doors of the little wine cabinet just kept opening. And she was like, it's busted. I don't want it. So then he gave it to his brother and his brother's wife, who also returned it because the brother said he smelled beautiful jasmine flowers in his house when he brought the cabinet in, but his wife just said it smelled like stinky, stinky cat pee. So he was like, she was like, get rid of it. This is disgusting. My man, she needs to go see a doctor. Yeah. He tried giving it to his girlfriend,

but she gave it back really quickly just because it gave off bad vibes. And he even tried selling it to someone, but the next morning it was back on the steps of his shop, on the front, on the front door of his shop in the morning with a note that complained of quote, a bad darkness. So eventually he just gave up, he just gave up, took it home, and that immediately proved to be a bad idea because every night he began to have a recurring nightmare where he was out on a walk with a close trusted friend looking into their eyes and then suddenly realizing that it wasn't his friend at all, but rather some sort of evil gruesome hag, which then, according to Manis, quote, beat the living tar out of me. And of course he would always wake up in the morning to find

bruises and scratches on his arms. So shit's getting real, real wild. All right. So then one day his sister, his brother, and his brother's wife all come over for like a dinner party or something and end up spending the night, I guess just because they live far away or it's winter or something like that. And in the morning over breakfast, they all together start talking. And this sounds unbelievable. This has actually happened to me before. I mean, it does. So far it does. The freshness of this episode can only be rivaled by one thing. The freshness of the meals delivered to your doorstep by HelloFresh. What's even better is that HelloFresh has a wide variety of easy, delicious options for all three meals a day, plus every snack and special treat in between.

You will have tons of choices and I promise you'll find something you enjoy. HelloFresh's ingredients are sourced directly from the growers. I wasn't kidding about the freshness of Hello. I mean, it's in their name, HelloFresh. And it's all delivered from the farm directly to your front door in under a week. Contact free, of course, in case, you know, you don't have the vaccine yet. I've been using HelloFresh now for a few months and the amount of time it saved me is immeasurable. I am replacing about three meals a week now with HelloFresh, and that alone has saved me time and money at the grocery stores. Go to HelloFresh.com 12Chill and use code 12Chill for 12 free meals, including free shipping.

That's HelloFresh.com slash 12CHILL and use code 12CHILL for that 12 free meals, which includes free shipping. Head over there and sign up for America's number one meal kit. Yeah. I mean, this specific type of thing, they all sort of like share and reveal together that they all have had this same dream where they were getting the shit beat out of them by this old lady, which again, I think I talked about this on the show recently. My whole family one time, we all like revealed that we had been seeing the same ghost for years, all of us at the same dinner. So at least that part, I can at least say that's not unrealistic. And suddenly after that moment, they all were sort of just like

full in on the whole. This cabinet is cursed. This is fucked. We fucked up. We're possessed or whatever. And so they end up storing the thing outside in a storage unit for the night, getting on with their day. But then that night, the smoke detector in the storage unit starts going off. So Manus starts running out there to see what the hell is going to go. What's like, what's going wrong next? What's on fire? He opens the door. The smoke detector is going off, but there's no smoke inside the unit. It just smells a shitload like cat pee. Again, it just smells like cat pee everywhere in there. And he brings the thing back in the house with him and the cat pee smell comes with him. But he feels like the thing got mad by being outside. So we

brought it back inside. And more and more activity followed, including shadows darting around corners, the pee smell switching back and forth from a jasmine smell to a pee smell again, the death of all 10 fish in his aquarium all at once, the feeling of being breathed on from behind while trying to sleep. And then finally Manus had just had enough and decided to list and sell this item on eBay, which he did in June of 2003 to a college student in Missouri called Yosef Nitzka for $140, including all the items inside. And this didn't change anything. Nitzka was still like he got the thing and immediately he was having problems. He was having health issues. He was seeing things in his apartment, hearing things. He re-listed the apartment. He re-listed

the box on eBay the following February after experiencing a quote, title wave of bad luck. And his hair started falling out in clumps, even though he was 20 years old in college and getting like a relatively clean bill of health from his doctor. So he listed this thing on eBay and instead of selling it for $140, he sold it for $280 because by now this thing is sort of like starting to become viral because of these eBay listings. And he sells it to somebody called Jason Hackston, who was the director of the Museum of Osteopathic Medicine in Kirksville, Missouri, who actually heard about the box through Nitzka's roommate. So now Manus got the box from an estate sale. Manus put the box on eBay. Nitzka, the college student got it and

kept it for like 10 months or something, eight months, something like that, re-listed on eBay himself. And now the box is in the possession of Jason Hackston, who was the one who eventually sold the story to Legendary Pictures or whoever it was, Linesgate, optioning it for a movie. But that didn't happen till later. But the day it arrived, he immediately experienced many of the same negative effects, physical discomfort, cat pee in flowers, all the stuff that he expected to hear. But by now it was like a known object. People were excited about this thing because it was on eBay. And he had it. And so he was like, I have this haunted thing. I'm going to study it. So rather than like passing it on, like the fame sort of like convinced him to like hold on to it. He started

a website for it to field inquiries, quote unquote. And just purely out of curiosity, he teamed up with this Orthodox Jewish bookkeeper from Brooklyn called Rebecca Edery, whose qualifications. I mean, this is, this is, by the way, this is the movie part now. Like if this isn't in the movie you're talking about, this is the part where like in the movie, they're like, we need someone. And then like the weird person shows up was like, I can help you. This is that part. We're at that part now. This person does not sound real, but she is real because she is from literally the Los Angeles Times in the ninth. Like this is like a real article. So he calls this person Rebecca Edery. Her qualifications are that one of her qualifications listed is at her father's study

the Kabbalah. I don't know. Oh, excellent. But that's real. It's real helpful. Here's a quote for you to read, Mathis, for this from from Rebecca Edery about this box that maybe answers our questions about some of the features. Why is that so funny to me? Like your qualifications are her dad did some stuff. Yeah, I don't know. Why would LA Times be like that's her qualifications? The two doors on the outside open up just like the Holy Closet or Aaron Hockadesh, a receptacle for Torah scrolls. And I saw and I saw round metal hoops on the inside of the doors that would hold scrolls. This particular size is used when going to come comfort the family of the deceased. This was done deliberately for a specific purpose. Yeah. So and that's a thing,

right? Experts agree like that. It's a common practice that people and maybe you've heard of people who do this, where they get a coin that has their kid's birthday on it and like keep that coin as like a token of their kid. Same thing with a lock of their hair. Some of the items inside of the Divock box could maybe be linked to some specific people. And a 1928 coin maybe has something to do possibly. I think the line they're trying to draw is that maybe those items are related to this grandmother's lost her pre-Holocaust family because she wanted to be buried with these things. And you know, I think that's the sort of line they're trying to draw without exactly saying it. But there's nothing to support any direct connection between any of the objects

and any of those actual people. So I'm not going to say that, but I just want to make that clear because I think that's sort of part of the legend of this here a little bit. I honestly, while you were talking about this story, I had to look up demonic cat pee smell question mark because apparently it's a thing. Apparently demons be cat pee. Yeah, ammonia. That ammonia smell is very common with like paranormal happenings. It's the same thing with that like fire and brimstone deal, I guess. But yeah, eventually Haxton, you know, he was running tests. He was doing all the stuff. He optioned this movie in 2004, by the way, didn't come out till 2012. But around the time that he

this was like within a year of him getting this thing, he optioned it for a movie because that's how popular this was online. And he started the website and everything. So like on the website, he posted the eBay listings that have like most of the story and, you know, connected some things and got some people to like some some like cultural insight from like some community leaders to like talk about what a dip it is and, you know, stuff like that on the website. And so yeah, he optioned it, which is so weird. But he was actually able to finally control the paranormal activity on the advice of, quote, rabbis and scientists who apparently both agreed that he should put the box into an

acacia arc lined with gold. And apparently that worked because it somehow turns the magic on itself or turns the electromagnetic fields onto itself. What kind of arc? Acacia? How do how do you spell that? ACACIA? I think it's a type of wood. Okay. I think it is. They specifically mentioned acacia. And it's lined with gold, which is wild. But that is not where this story ends just yet, because guess once he got it under control, guess who came along and bought that shit for his haunted museum in Las Vegas, Mathis? Fucking my nemesis, who doesn't know he's my nemesis, Zachary M. Baggins. Is that really his name? What's his middle name?

I have no fucking idea. I have no fucking idea. What's the M stand for? Manfred. Manfred Zach Manfred Baggins? Zachary Manfred Baggins. Oh, wow. So the acacia tree is that's arc of covenant stuff. Really? That's what it'd be like to say it on the internet. So this is some powerful magic that to this apparently that took this civic box. Okay. I mean, I'll take it. Do you think do you think Zach got possessed? Dude gets possessed like every episode. Do you think that thing actually finally possessed him? Well, funny story. I mean, I hope so.

Funny story. Zach Baggins doesn't let anybody look at the box, at least as of the time of publishing the article about it. He doesn't show it to the public. It's like a it's in a room in his museum that you have to sign a release to like. Oh my God. Access because that where it says that he's not responsible for any sort of like negative effect that being with the box might have on you. So, you know, if you go out there, don't expect to waltz in and see it for yourself unless you're somebody like, I don't know, international music star post Malone, perhaps. Because that happened in 2018 in September. And we know for sure it happened.

Thanks to footage of him doing it, which was posted on TMZ. So you can kind of give hell if you want to take a look at that. I'll give you guys a link to that if you bug me. But you guys can watch it right now and sort of give the give the listeners the rundown of what's going on. I think it's only like a minute long. The immediate thing I see is he goes in there and he shoves Zach right away. He just shoves him. Yeah, there's walking around the box right now, having a chat. He's got a little drink in his hand, probably a beer or something. Yeah. And they're talking. Hey, I'll skip it. He did put it in the like creepiest room he could create.

And they both ran out at like the 35 second mark. Something happens and they both run. Yeah. So there is some sort of activity that happens with the box. And then the TMZ logo scared the hell out of me because there was a sound. Oh, yeah. The video has no sound. So be be wary of that TMZ logo. I don't know what they're why they keep showing the same. They keep showing the same clip over and over again. And it's not like scary. It's just, it doesn't make any sense. There's a clip. They really zoomed in on Post Malone's face. Yeah. Like we're going to see something on his face, but there's like no reaction.

He sees Zach react and then he goes with Zach. Yeah. While the world is getting back to some form of normalcy and I myself am cautiously attempting to reintegrate with the outside world again, there are some habits that I don't plan on picking back up. And one of them is going back to the damn post office. Are you still going to the post office and paying full price for things? Well, you should join me and stop doing that with stamps.com. With stamps.com, you don't have to do that anymore. Mail and ship any time, anywhere, right from your computer. It saved me a ton of time and money as I ship things pretty

constantly over here in Chiluminati headquarters. It's a must have for any business, whether you're a small business office sending invoices, a side hustle Etsy shop, shipping out orders, or just navigating the hybrid work life that the modern era has brought upon us. Simply use your computer to print official US postage 24 seven for any letter, any package, any class of mail, anywhere you want to send. Once your mail is ready, just schedule a pickup or drop off. It's really honestly that simple. It's a no brainer. So stop wasting time going to the post office and go to stamps.com instead. There's no risk with our promo code. Chill. You get a special offer that includes a four week trial plus free postage and a digital scale.

No longterm commitments or contracts. Just go to stamps.com, click on the microphone at the top of the homepage and type chill that stamps.com promo code chill. Now, Post Malone did not comment on this himself. It says on Wikipedia that he did, but he did not. I went and I traced that quote and it's actually just fans of Post Malone speculating about this, but it doesn't matter because here's the facts. That video comes out of him doing that and within a couple days. I'm not saying this is real, but this is true. Post Malone did have a plane emergency where two tires on his private jet blew out on the runway. And then a few days later, his house was broken into by dudes with guns who tried to like steal shit from him.

And then a week later, he was involved in a call, a car crash with his roles that were his Rolls Royce crashed into another car all within like two weeks of him doing this, this thing with Zach Beggin. So I'm not saying again that there's definitive proof connecting the two things, but it's pretty, pretty interesting. You can speak with us nonetheless. And that, and that is basically where I'm leaving the story of the Dibbock box. But I want before I go, I want to give a little bit of time on the floor to the opposition party. So Jesse, I have a quote for you from Brian Dunning. Do you know who that is? I have no clue. Brian Dunning is the host of the podcast called Skeptoid, which is like,

if you wanted to watch the Chilluminati, but you don't like jokes or imagination or wonder, it's a similar, it's a similar kind of deal. Wow. No, I mean, look, it's a great show. It's just a very cold and like, wonder-sucking fact-based show about these, about these occurrences, right? So here's a quote from him about this situation. The whole idea of the box being inhabited by a Dibbock, I don't know why I was named Dibbock, like it was Psyduck. I don't know why that is, but I was Dibbock. We've been talking about it literally for the last 40 minutes and I for some reason was like, Dibbock is nonsensical.

According to what a Dibbock is supposed to be, 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 Dibbock was about the spirit of a dead man who possessed the living body of a woman he had loved and had to be exercised. Nowhere in the folkloric literature is there precedent for a Dibbock inhabiting a box or inanimate object. Yeah, so that's one of the key problems with this is that there isn't really a lot of like, Dibbock mythology that links up with it being in a box, which kind of calls into question what that girl said about the box's purpose and what it is. You know what I mean?

Like, sure. I mean, to the defense of that, if that's, you know, what happened, plenty of times maybe families just have their own spins on a particular lore, or what have you, or they build their own familial legend around something that may come from their religion and stuff. So maybe it just kind of comes from, it could be like a family thing from there. If you know what I mean, do you kind of understand what I'm saying? It's like the evil eye curse on my family, for instance, the way my grandmother says to protect against it. It doesn't fall in line with the way you're supposed to protect yourself against it, which is, you know, whatever X, Y, Z. Yeah, I just think it's,

I think it's just a little bit sus because like the whole point of what that dude was trying to do was to like get to the bottom of like the magic quote unquote behind it. So maybe it is some kind of personal shit, but I just, it was weird that she was like, my father studied the cabala. I'm ready for this. That, you know, that's an enormous red flag. That, for any other reasons, is a reason that I don't believe it necessarily, not necessarily because the strict definition of the encyclopedia mythic it doesn't match up with the story. I mean, it could just be like they got the name wrong. Yeah. I mean, like, and this is me not believing any of it. This is me being like, it could be any spirit and they just called it that because that's what they thought.

That's there because that's their like tradition. Right? Yeah. I mean, yeah. Though I will say in 2019, Kenny Biddle from the Skeptical Enquirer did find a mini bar for sale online from New York that looks suspiciously similar to the Dibbock box. That is actually very funny. I'll show you the picture. Oh yeah. Yeah. I'll let you be the judge of whether or not that that's the same exact piece of furniture. I mean, now that I see, now that I see this, I want to let you know everyone who is, yeah, this is, I'm going to be real with you. This is, it even, you can see on the right side where the one holders, the alcohol holders would be. Yep. And how they're pulled out. But that's, but here's the thing that, yeah,

it doesn't, just because it was once a place where you would store your, like your bar set, it doesn't mean that this doesn't have another purpose. Like this is again, Skeptical Jesse just saying it could, it could have over time. These are loose arguments to this, to this particular story. But with that said, it 100% is the bar thing. Oh yeah. It is exactly it. I'll tell you this. They look very similar. It's not confirmed or anything that like it's the same exact model or anything like that. Very similar 99% the same exact same damn similar. Also, I'll give it that. But I'm also, I also have this one more quote from this dude, Manus Mathis that I think. Okay. You should read some people would say that this quote alone is incriminating, but some people

would just say that he's pretending. And this is the guy that, that the movie, he made the money for selling it. No, no, this is not the guy who made the money. This is the guy who was the original eBay guy. And then the third eBay guy was the one who sold the movie. So, okay. Some people say, yeah, eBay man. Some people say that he was just reacting to that. Some people say that this is almost incriminating of his whole story. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna post you this, this, this quote right here. I am the original creator of the story of the Dibbock box, which appeared as one of my eBay posts back in 2003. How about this? If you or anyone else can find any reference to a Dibbock, Dibbock box anywhere in history prior to my eBay post, I'll pay you $100,000 and tattoo your name

on my forehead. Yeah. Okay. So I don't know. I don't know what he's trying to say there. If he's saying like I wrote a made up story and that, you know, it starts and ends with me and he's just mad that he didn't get his paycheck for the possession movie, which by the way has Kyra Sedgwick and Jeffrey Dean Morgan. I haven't seen the movie, but maybe it's good. Like those are both good actors. Oh, let's look up some reviews while you do. But, you know, I don't know. It's a little bit weird. And that is the story of the Dibbock box. I think it's a neat little story. I think that little narrative is really, you know, sort of like captivating. And before we go, I just want to shout out a couple of articles that I used to do this research. There was one called a Jinx in a

box, which was by Leslie Gornstein from the LA Times in 2004. Also, there is a story of Haunted Box isn't just the tale dreamed up in Hollywood by Jessica Bellasco from My San Antonio 2012. And then there's also the true story of the Dibbock box and where it is now by Marquis Mayhem from Exemplor. I think it's exemplar. What was that person's name? Marquis Mayhem. Kill Marquis de Mayhem. That's amazing name. The King of Chaos. Marquis Mayhem. Come on now. That's Dr. Doom's best friend. That's his legal name. Actually, Dr. Doom's legal name is Dr. Doom. Yeah, but. Yes, correct. That website is called Exemplor. I think it's a mix between Explore and Exemplary

from 2020. And then, of course, there are the original eBay listings by Kevin Manis and Yosef Nitska, which you can see at thedibbockbox.com. Classic little internet story, especially if you're from Gen X and you loved the ship back then. You'll probably remember this one as one of the big ones from those days. It was a good one, Alex. I love the Dibbock Box. I had known of the Dibbock Box and had an idea of what it did, but I did not understand it. I find your pathing to storytelling quite interesting. You're like, this is what happened, and I'm going to tell you a thing that's not related. And then, gotcha, bitch! And I'm like, all right, here I am. Listen to this. That's really how it happened. I believe it. I believe it. It's just

crazy, is what I'm saying. Got these butternut squash pancakes from this Australian place, and I was like, this sounds so good. Oh yeah, remember that pancake scene? What the fuck is that from? Yum, yum, yum, yum. I have a song on the tip of my tongue right now. I can't get out of my head. It goes, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. I can't figure out what it is. Somebody can help me. That's guitar. Might be like the kinks or something. I don't know. Maybe T-Rex. That's the kind of, that's how my brain works. So please just help me. That's how I've got to the Dibbock Box yesterday, literally. So thank you guys for listening. Thank you, Alex. Yeah. I got some, I got some more great ones coming down the pipes. I suddenly became silly with

guest opportunities, and so I've got a couple episodes in the can. One of them is just too much. I got to find the right guest for it. One of them is just, Jesse's just going to be like... He's just going to leave the show? He's just going to be like, I don't know what to say to this. One of them is like so insane, and one of them is like pretty fact-based. So I don't know. You know that I didn't know what to say to most this story till I was like, eff it. I'm just going to buy in and like let's go on an adventure. It was pretty good though, right? Like you could see this being a real story compared to like definitely the one that I'm going to tell you later, but don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. I also wanted to shout

out, if you haven't done it in a while, I wrote that little skit between us and Deanna a couple weeks ago for the 100th episode where she references the Patterson Gimlin film, which is the Bigfoot film that's famous from the 60s. And I think of that film, I think of it as like the poster child film for like, oh, it was so blurry that we'll never know what was really there, right? Like that sort of like thought about paranormal stuff kind of comes from that original Bigfoot footage. But I was thinking about that footage the other day because I was listening to Luminati and I was literally like, what about like camera stabilization? Like, surely someone has gone in and like done, done this, you know what I mean? Somebody has like gone in and looked at

this, right? And it turns out people really have and it really like, I'm doing a promo for the guys. Come to the mini-sode that we're about to have right now, patreon.com, so Luminati pod, and I will tell you more about the Patterson Gimlin film. We're going to react to the 4K 100 FPS version of it and heads will turn, heads will roll. Sleepy Hollow, 1998. Johnny Depp, Christina Ricci, go watch it. It's a great movie. It's a really good chance to like it if you like the Luminati show. And while the aliens made out of burden confirmed by the government, umbring a video, an alien has landed in India, everybody, and walking the streets in the middle of the night. And they caught it on video. I saw this. This looks absolutely, this is

going to happen. Listen, dude. Yeah, it happened. All right, we'll see you guys next week. Thank you guys so much for watching. We love you. Goodbye. Anyway, me and my wife were sitting outside indulging on our porch one night enjoying ourselves. I needed to go to the bathroom, so I stepped back inside. And after a few moments, I hear my wife go, holy shit, get out here. So I quickly dash back outside. She's looking up at the sky. I look up too. And there's a perfect line of dozen lights traveling across the sky. So so

Finding your perfect home was hard. But thanks to burrow, furnishing it has never been easier. Burrows easy to assemble modular sofas and sectionals are made from premium, durable materials, including stain and scratch resistant fabrics. So they're not just comfortable and stylish, they're built to last. Plus, every single burrow order ships free right to your door. Right now, get 15% off your first order at burrow.com slash podcast. That's 15% off at burrow.com slash podcast.