MrBallen Podcast: Strange, Dark & Mysterious Stories - The Dybbuk Box

Episode Date: December 28, 2023

Far and away the two scariest parts of this story are one, when Jason brings the Dybbuk Box home and he goes to bed that first night, and then two, the following night what Jason sees in his living room is just horrifying.Story name, preview & link to original YouTube video:#1 -- "Dybbuk Box" -- The famous 2003 Dybbuk Box event (Original YouTube link -- https://youtu.be/Bf_9w1vpq50?feature=shared)For 100s more stories like these, check out our main YouTube channel just called "MrBallen" -- https://www.youtube.com/c/MrBallenIf you want to reach out to me, contact me on Instagram, Twitter or any other major social media platform, my username on all of them is @mrballenSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey Prime members, you can binge eight new episodes of the Mr. Ballin podcast one month early and all episodes ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Far and away, the two scariest parts of the story are, one, when Jason brings the Dybbuk box home and he goes to bed that first night, and then two, the following night, what Jason sees in his living room is just horrifying. But before we get into today's story, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark, and Mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right podcast because that's all we do and we upload twice a week, once on Monday and once on Thursday. So if that's of interest to you, at the next solar eclipse, offer the Amazon Music Follow button a pair of children's 3D cardboard glasses and tell them, oh, don't worry, you can look directly at the sun with these on.

Okay, let's get into today's story. Hello, I'm Emily and I'm one of the hosts of Terribly Famous, the show that takes you inside the lives of our biggest celebrities. And they don't get much bigger than the man who made badminton sexy. OK, maybe that's a stretch, but if I say pop star and shuttlecocks, you know who I'm talking about. No? Short shorts? Free cocktails?

Careless whispers? OK, last one. It's not Andrew Ridgely. Yep, that's right. It's Stone Cold icon George Michael. From teen pop sensation to one of the biggest solo artists on the planet, join us for our new series, George Michael's Fight for Freedom. From the outside, it looks like he has it all, but behind the trademark dark sunglasses

is a man in turmoil. George is trapped in a lie of his own making, with a secret he feels would ruin him if the truth ever came out. Follow Terribly Famous wherever you listen to your podcasts, or listen early and ad-free on Wondery Plus on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. I'm Peter Frank-O'Pern. And I'm Afua Hirsch. And we're here to tell you about our new season of Legacy, covering the iconic, troubled musical genius that was Nina Simone. Full disclosure, this is a big one for me. Nina Simone, one of my favourite artists of all time.

Somebody who's had a huge impact on me, who I think objectively stands apart for the level of her talent, the audacity of her message. If I was a first year at university, the first time I sat down and really listened to her and engaged with her message, it totally floored me. And the truth and pain and messiness of her struggle, that's all captured in unforgettable music that has stood the test of time. Think that's fair, Peter? I mean, the way in which her music comes across is so powerful, no matter what song it is. So join us on Legacy for Nina Simone. In 2003, Kevin Maness owned an antique shop right in downtown Portland at the base of the Burnside Bridge, which is considered the gateway to the city. Because Kevin owned this antique shop, he was always at yard sales and estate sales looking to find the next thing he could sell at his shop.

And so one day there was this estate sale over at this woman's house. She had just passed house. She had just passed away. She was about 103 years old. She was a Holocaust survivor and her estate was being sold. And so he goes over to the house and he sees the way they're selling all of her items is by bundling them in different lots. So depending on what item it was, they'd be bundled with similar items and then sold as a package. So the people there would be bidding on the whole lot. They couldn't buy individual items. And Kevin had his eye on one particular lot called Lot 29. And Lot 29 included a couple of small tools that he wanted to sell in a shop. And it had this mystery box. And that's exactly as it

was labeled. It just says mystery box on it and he was intrigued by it and so he placed a bid on lot 29 and ultimately he won the bid and he was really happy about it so he takes the contents of lot 29 and he wheels them over to his car and as he's loading stuff into the back of his car someone behind him says oh so you went with the dimmock box huh and kevin in his head went right back to his car, someone behind him says, oh, so you went with the Dybbuk box, huh? And Kevin, in his head, went right back to his childhood, because growing up, he had always been scared of Dybbuks, because a Dybbuk is a malevolent spirit in Jewish folklore, and Kevin was Jewish, and so his parents used to say, oh, you better not do that, Kevin, or the Dybbuk's gonna get you. And so he

grew up terrified of Dybbuks, and so his interest is piqued. And Kevin turns around and he says, did you just call this box a Dybbuk box? And the woman's like, yeah. And my grandmother was terrified of it. And she said no one could ever open it. And Kevin turns to look at the box and it's about two foot high by one foot wide. And there are these little doors that swing open on the front. And then on the bottom, there's a drawer that comes out and there's one lock that sits across the two doors. And it's currently locked with a little padlock. And he looks up at her and he goes, why can't you open it? And the woman just says, we never knew, but our grandmother would always go, every time we said the word Dybbuk. And so it was weird enough

that we just never asked any questions and we stayed away from her Dybbuk box. Kevin agreed that was pretty weird and he finished loading his car, shut the trunk, said bye to the woman, hopped in his car and he drove away and he never really gave it a second thought. At this point he's not thinking the Dybbuk box is anything malevolent. He thinks it's just some random chest that he won at an auction. Kevin drives back to his antique shop and he begins unloading all the things he won at the auction. He brings them inside and he brings them downstairs because the top floor, the main floor, was really where he sold things. When he got new items, he would bring them downstairs to his warehouse of sorts, which was much bigger than the first floor.

It had lots of rows of shelving and it had a workstation down there. He would bring his new things down there and he would price them and get them ready before bringing them back up. And at some point he brought the Dybbuk box in and he brought it down and he put it on the back table. He was about to just leave it there and go back upstairs when suddenly he became really curious and he really wanted to open the Dybbuk box. And so he goes over and he kind of yanks on the front two doors. He doesn't want to damage it, but he can tell this lock is relatively new and it's not just going to come off. And so he doesn't have the key to it and he doesn't have a way to clip the lock.

And so he takes a screwdriver and he basically wedges it underneath the actual metal clasps that are attached to the wood. And he slowly kind of bends it up and bends it off and pops it out of the wood. And as soon as he does that, the doors swing open and there's like a mechanical device inside of the Dybbuk box that activates the drawer. Basically, anytime the doors open, the drawer also opens at the same time. And Kevin remembered thinking how silly it was that this kind of old, crummy looking wine closet had this fairly complicated mechanism inside of it that still worked. Inside the Dybbuk box were two pennies from the 1920s. There was a used candle. There were two locks of hair.

There was this small tombstone that said Shalom on it. And there was also a small wine goblet that was inside. And that was it. And Kevin immediately thought, well, this is just some older woman's keepsake, and these things maybe have sentimental value to her, but they don't to me. And so he shut the Dybbuk box, pushed it to the side of the desk, and walked upstairs and didn't give it another thought. Kevin had one employee at the antique shop. Her name was Jane. She was a younger woman. She was an incredible saleswoman. And Kevin thought very highly of her.

And so the day after he had brought the Dybbuk box into the antique shop and put it downstairs on the desk, he needed to run out and do some errands. And so he put Jane in charge of the store. And so Kevin leaves and Jane locks the front door to the shop behind Kevin because she needed to go downstairs and get a few items that she wanted to bring upstairs to sell that day and it was before opening time. So front door's locked, no one else is inside the shop and Jane goes down into the basement. Once you went down the wooden steps into the basement you'd be looking out at this huge room of all these industrial shelves that run the length

of the room where they would keep their antiques and other valuables on. And the lighting down there was never that great because they used these long fluorescent tube lights that at best cast a kind of subtle yellow glow on everything. They were not particularly bright. And it was a real pain to actually go up and change them because you needed to place a ladder but the ladders were not perfectly aligned with the lights you basically had to reach over the shelving where all the antiques were and you ran the risk of knocking things over and so a lot of times jane and kevin would wait until you were down to like one or two crappy working lights before they'd say okay we really gotta go up there and replace some of these bulbs. And so as it happens this day, they're down to like two or three working lights.

So in classic horror movie fashion, she's going into this dingy basement with very poor lighting. And so once she gets to the bottom of the steps, she walks to the far end of the room, a little bit away from where the Dybbuk box was placed on that back table. She's in the other corner in the back of this basement and she's getting some things off the shelf when all of a sudden she stops and she can't help but shake the feeling that she feels like someone is watching her. Now she is down in this basement all the time whether it's well lit or dark, whether Kevin is there with her or she's alone. This is a place she goes all the time. And she's never had this feeling before.

There's no way to get into the basement unless you come down the stairs. And she locked the front door and she was the only one who came downstairs. She hasn't heard anything. There's no other way to leave this space. So she doesn't know where she's getting this feeling from, but she really can't shake it. And as she's kind of looking around and she's starting to get a little bit paranoid, the phone rings. They had a landline that was on a table right at the base of the stairs. The phone rings down there and it startles her. And then it kind of jumps her back into reality. And she's like, okay, I'm getting paranoid. And she walks over and she picks up the phone and it's actually her friend who was planning on coming by the antique shop that day so as they're chatting jane hears what sounds like a broom imagine if a push broom is lined up against the

wall and then it falls over the sound that the wooden stick would make as it hits concrete that's the sound she hears as she's on the phone. And it startles her again. And she goes, hey, let me call you back. She hangs up on her friend and she's looking out. And because the lighting is terrible from where she is, she's now at the foot of the stairs looking down all these rows. And she's heard that stick land on the ground on the far side, back where she had been originally. She's kind of looking around and she can't see anything.

And so she takes a deep breath and she begins walking down the rows to see what fell over. And so she takes a deep breath, and she begins walking down the rows to see what fell over. And as she's walking down the row, something smashes behind her, and she turns around, and one of the fluorescent tube lights has fallen from the ceiling and smashed onto the ground. And so all of a sudden,

she doesn't want to explore this falling broom that's behind her in the dark corner of the basement. Instead, she's ready to leave. And so that's behind her in the dark corner of the basement. Instead, she's ready to leave. And so she starts walking back towards the stairs to get out of here. And as she's walking down one of these rows, a wooden chair that is on one of the shelves comes flying off of it and lands squarely in the middle, blocking her path. And there's no way this could have happened unless someone pushed this chair and suddenly she thinks someone's down here with me and she screams and she hurdles the chair and she runs to the steps she starts running up and to her horror there is a metal door that locks the

basement at night so if someone were to break in it's another layer to protect the store from thieves and it was shut and locked. It can only be locked from the outside and with a key. So there's no way she would have done this by accident and now she's freaking out because she's trapped in the basement with some person running around pushing chairs over and breaking lights. And so she grabs the gate and she starts shaking it and she's yelling for Kevin, thinking maybe he came in and forgot I was down here and shut and locked the gate. And she's checking over her shoulder, looking down into the basement and she starts hearing more lights falling off the ceiling and shattering on the ground. She is in absolute panic mode.

She's just waiting for someone to come bounding up the stairs towards her. She has no idea what to do. She pulls out her phone and she calls Kevin. Meanwhile, Kevin is making his way back to the antique shop. He's only a couple minutes away and he sees his phone ringing that was sitting on the passenger seat and he picks it up and it's Jane. And he answers and immediately Jane is hysterical and she's screaming that someone's in and immediately jane is hysterical and she's

screaming that someone's in the antique shop that's breaking things and kevin's like slow down slow down what's going on and all he can hear in the background is the sound of what sounds like glass shattering and things falling and breaking he's like wait what's going on are you okay jane like where are you and he hears her say someone's in in the basement. And he goes, where are you? And she's like, I'm in the basement. And he was like, get out of the basement, call the police. But as he's trying to get her to do that, the phone cuts out.

Kevin was only about a block away from his shop. So he floors it to his shop. He parks outside and he's thinking to himself, what am I walking into? Is there going to be like an active burglary going on? Is she going to be held hostage? Like, are the police going to be there? But he just knows he needs to get in there to Jane and he gets to the front door and it's locked. So he unlocks the front door and he goes inside and it's silent. He's looking around. There's no damage to the first floor. There's no damage anywhere. And he yells for Jane. There's no answer from Jane.

And he starts walking kind of tentatively through the store towards the back. And he gets to that door leading down into the basement, the same one that Jane couldn't open when she ran up the stairs to get out of the basement. And he looks at it and Jane's not at the top of the stairs anymore. And he's thinking, I didn't lock that door. And I'm the only one with the key to lock that door. How is it locked right now? Does Jane have a key that I don't know about?

And why would she lock it? Does that jane's up here somewhere is that what happened and he's like jane come out did you lock this door but jane's not on the first floor and their first floor is very small and so he thinks okay she has to be downstairs and so he opens up the gate and swings it open and he starts walking down the steps and he's really cautious as he's going down because again he has no idea what he's walking into. He hits the lights, but the lights don't work down there. And as he starts to bend around the corner where he can actually see into the basement, he sees Jane sitting at the chair right next to that table where that phone is.

And she's just sitting there kind of stunned. And he goes to Jane and he's like, what happened down here? And he glances out quickly at all the rows and he sees all this furniture that's come off the shelves and there's glass all over the ground. And he's looking at Jane and Jane's just showing no reaction. She's sitting there like she's in shock. And he turns to Jane again and he says, come on, you got to tell me what happened down here. And Jane just goes, I don't know. I don't know how to explain what happened down here. I was walking down the row and then I felt like someone was watching me

and then things are falling off the ceiling and the shelves. I've never seen anything like this before. Now, at this point, Kevin's adrenaline is through the roof. He came charging in here thinking he was going to have to save Jane from some person breaking in and breaking stuff. But as far as he can tell, there's no one here but Jane. And so he decides he's going to take a flashlight and he's going to explore the basement because either there's someone here or Jane did this. So he grabs his flashlight and he

starts walking around and all he sees is a bunch of broken glass and some furniture that's come off the shelves and a couple other things that are on the ground. But other than that, there's no one down here and there's no other way to come in or out of here besides the stairs. So after Kevin is certain that no one else is here, he turns to Jane and he regrets this now. He says in an interview that he feels horrible about this now, but at the time he's thinking to himself,

you know, this had to have been Jane. Who else would have done this? I don't know why she did this, but there's no one else here. And he goes, Jane, did you do this? And this is when Jane's emotions came through because before she was in shock, now she's mad. And she goes, F you, Kevin. And she leaves and she doesn't say another word to him and she doesn't come back. She quits on the spot. But at the time, Kevin believed she had done it. So he was kind of like, oh, well, he was not even a little bit thinking the Dybbuk box had anything to do with this.

Hello, I am Alice Levine, and I am one of the hosts of Wondery's podcast British Scandal. On our latest series, The Race to Ruin, we tell the story of a British man who took part in the first ever round-the-world sailing race. Good on him, I hear you say. But there is a problem, as there always is in this show. The man in question hadn't actually sailed before. Oh, and his boat wasn't seaworthy. Oh, and also tiny little detail, almost didn't mention it.

He bet his family home on making it to the finish line. What ensued was one of the most complex cheating plots in British sporting history. To find out the full story, follow British Scandal wherever you listen to podcasts or listen early and ad-free on Wondery Plus on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. with your Prime membership? That's right.

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That's amazon.com slash ballin. Or download the free Amazon Music app. It's just that easy. Just a couple of days after the basement incident, Kevin's mother was supposed to come by the antique shop and the two of them were going to leave and get lunch together to celebrate her birthday. As soon as she walked into the shop, Kevin goes, hey mom, I got a gift for you.

And he brings over this wrapped box and he sets it down on a table right in front of his mother who's sitting on a chair and he unwraps it and it's the divot box before kevin can explain what it is the phone rings at the other end of the store and he was expecting a call and he goes hold on mom i gotta get this and he goes to the back of the store to answer the call while his mom is just sitting there looking at the box and so while kevin is at the other end of the store his mother opens the dybbuk box and she says she had to sit down as soon as she opened it because she had this unbelievable overwhelming sense of dread as soon as the doors were open and she's staring at it like she can't take her eyes away. And then all of a sudden she has a massive stroke.

And so she keels over and she can't move and she can't talk. And Kevin sees this happening. He runs over and he's like, mom, what's going on? Calls 911. And as the paramedics are working on her, she would say that while she was in this kind of paralyzed state when she couldn't talk and she couldn't move, all she wanted to communicate was to somehow get her son to get rid of that box. She didn't know why, but she felt like the box had something to do with her having the stroke. And so all she could do was move her

eyes. And so she found herself, because her son's right here, looking at the Dybbuk box and looking away, looking at the Dybbuk box, looking away, hoping her son would see her eyes as a signal to look at the Dybbuk box and put it together that that thing's bad. And Kevin does realize that his mom is flicking her eyes at the Dybbuk box, but in the moment, he's much more concerned about the health of his mother. And it wasn't until she got put in a hospital and she was being taken care of and he knew she'd be okay, that he remembers, he kind of went over it in his head later that day, that his mom was really scared looking and she was looking at the Dybbuk box like that was the thing that was causing her to be scared. Not the stroke, the Dybbuk box. And Kevin starts thinking to himself, I don't know, there's something off about the Dybbuk box.

Either it's really bad luck or there's some truth to you don't open up this Dybbuk box. Either way, I don't want to take any more chances because so long as I've owned this thing, I've had a horrible thing happen in the basement and now my mom's had a stroke. So I want to get rid of it. So Kevin puts the Dybbuk box at the front of his antique store and he puts it up for sale. And very quickly, a young couple came into the store and they bought the Dybbuk box. And Kevin's relieved. He's like, thank goodness that bad luck charm, that whatever's going on with that thing is gone and out of my life.

But just a couple of days later, he was in the back of the shop when he heard the door open and then the door shut. And he walked out expecting to see some customers. But instead, he sees the Dybbuk box that's sitting right inside his store. Someone must have just dropped it off. And so he walks up to it and he sees there's a piece of paper that's been taped to the top of the Dybbuk box. And there's writing on it. And all it says is, this has an odd darkness about it. This really freaked Kevin out because in a way,

it was like other people were confirming that something was wrong with this box. Kevin did not want the Dybbuk box to be in his store. So he put it in his car and he drove back to his house and he put it in his storage locker and he locked it up and then went back to work for the day. That night when he went home, he went to bed and he had this dream. Or in the dream, he's walking in this courtyard and he's holding the hand of this woman who he believes is his friend. And he trusts this person. And the area he's in feels very friendly and it's a very positive dream. And as he's walking all of a

sudden this person starts to pull away from him and he can't move anymore and he's he's losing the grip on this person's hand and they keep moving and moving until their hand is out of his and they disappear into the corner of the courtyard where it's totally dark and so he's looking into the darkness waiting for his friend to come out again and he can't move he's anchored to the spot and as he's looking he sees what looks like an old woman walking out of the mist and her head is down and he can't tell what she's doing and she's pretty far away and she's walking closer and closer to him and when she's about five six feet away she raises her head up and her whole face is falling off all the skin is falling off of her face. It's rotting. She's like a corpse and she raises her hands up in

front of her. Then she grabs his face and begins pulling off pieces of his face until he suddenly wakes up. Kevin had to compose himself in bed because he was so scared from the dream he just had. He sits up and he goes into the bathroom to get a sip of water and as he walks past the mirror he notices there. He sits up and he goes into the bathroom to get a sip of water. And as he walks past the mirror, he notices there are marks on his shoulders and his arms that he did not have before. It looks like bruising almost. And he's looking at them and he's thinking, no way. That has nothing to do with the dream. This is just coincidence that, you know, she was grabbing me in this area in the dream and now I have marks there. It's just coincidence. And so he kind of writes it off and he goes back to bed.

And he has the same dream. He gets up again and he's breathing heavily. He's sweating because he just had the same dream. It was this terrifying dream. And he goes back into the bathroom. And now his entire back is covered in bruises. He has bruises all over his back, all over his arms. He's got red marks on his neck.

And now in his mind, he feels like it has to do with the Dybbuk box. The Dybbuk box is now in my backyard. It's not a coincidence that all of a sudden I'm having these horrific dreams that are apparently manifesting themselves in bruises and marks on my actual body. And so Kevin is done with the Dybbuk box. and instead of going back to bed, he goes to his computer and he puts the Dybbuk box on eBay up for sale. And that night, two college kids named Sam and Brian, who lived in Missouri, they buy the Dybbuk box, and Kevin could not be happier to package that thing up and ship it off. Sam and Brian had seen the ad on eBay for the Dybbuk box, and at first it did not seem remarkable. But they saw that Kevin had given this really detailed description of all the strange things that had happened for him since he owned the Dybbuk box. And I think clearly Kevin's angle was he was almost trying to advertise it to groups of people that might be interested in that.

And Sam and Brian were exactly that demographic because they were looking for things online that were considered haunted. They wanted to see if ghosts and the paranormal were real. And so they were eager to buy the Dybbuk box and test it out. And so three weeks later, when this package finally arrives in Missouri at their house, Brian was still out at class, but Sam home so he receives the package he eagerly brings it into the kitchen he unpackages it and he sets it on the kitchen table and just a few minutes later brian comes home and brian would say in interviews that when he walked in it smelled like someone had peed all over the apartment like there was urine everywhere and he's walking around thinking what happened this smells so bad in here And he walks into the kitchen where it was the strongest smell.

And there's Sam proudly standing next to this awful looking chest, which was, of course, the Dybbuk box. And he realizes, Brian does, that the Dybbuk box is what smells like urine. And he goes, Sam, do you smell that? And Sam's like, yeah, that's the smell of ghosts. Sam would pick it up and go, ooh, to Brian as soon as he walked into the kitchen. And Sam joked about how he couldn't wait to sleep in the same bed as the Dybbuk box. They were just making a big joke out of it.

Sam had also set up a blog where he was going to document everything that happened from day one of receiving this Dybbuk box to whenever they got rid of it or till whenever something happened. And for the first two weeks they had the Dybbuk box in their possession, nothing did happen. But when Sam started bringing the Dybbuk box out and leaving it right in the middle of these huge parties they would throw or people were spilling beer on it and they were opening it up and putting things inside of it and making jokes with it, when they were doing that to the Dybbuk box,

suddenly they started seeing a pretty significant uptick in strangeness inside of their house. It started with their technology. Sam's laptop crashed and the hard drive was unrecoverable so he had to replace his laptop. All of their watches just didn't work while they were in the house. No matter what they did, no matter when they fixed it, the watch just simply did not work. Their Xbox would not turn on, but when they brought it to another person's house, it worked just fine. It just couldn't work inside of their house. And the toaster, anytime you turned it on,

it basically immediately incinerated whatever you put inside of it. But none of these technological difficulties were frightening to Sam or Brian. They were just frustrating. And I don't even think they were connecting them with the Dybbuk box. It was just this thing that was happening to them. It wasn't until the light bulbs in their house started bursting in the middle of the night that they started to get

pretty creeped out about some of the things that were happening in their apartment. But now all of a sudden it did seem like, you know, maybe if the Dybbuk box really is cursed, this might be how it would manifest. And so they'd replace the light bulb and then sure enough, it would burst again. And they couldn't keep light bulbs in because they kept popping. And so their house was dark a lot of the time. But the worst part was when they had

this massive insect infestation inside of their apartment. And they were really localized around the Dybbuk box. All these insects would come out of the walls, out of the toilets, out of the sink. They'd come from behind the fridge and they would all kind of like converge on the Dybbuk box and go inside of it. The Dybbuk box at one point was swarming with insects all over and they had to shut the door. They couldn't even go in the room with the Dybbuk box because it was just covered in insects. room with the Dybbuk box because it was just covered in insects. But despite how scary this was for the boys, they had become kind of like a cool talking point on campus because of Sam's blog that a lot of other students were following. And so the boys kind of liked the clout they got with

that and they decided they didn't want to get rid of the box after all. But it wasn't long after the insect infestation that Sam began losing all of his hair. And at the same time, he started having this constant hallucination that there was an old woman in his peripheral vision on either side of his head pretty much at all times. Anywhere he went, there basically was someone he couldn't quite see following him around. Whether he was well rested, whether he was totally exhausted, it didn't matter. around. Whether he was well rested, whether he was totally exhausted, it didn't matter. He always saw this shrouded dark figure that he believed was an old woman. And it scared him so much he couldn't sleep. And so he began going into Brian's room and sitting on Brian's bed because it was the one place he felt a little bit of comfort. And as he's sitting on the bed,

he would see these dark figures standing on either side of him all night. Finally, no matter how cool their blog was, it became too much and they decide we have to get rid of the Dybbuk box. And so they put it on eBay and very quickly it gets sold to a guy named Jason who was this museum director over at this other university in Missouri and he had actually been following along with Sam's blog. He was very interested in what was going on with the Dybbuk box and when it was listed for sale he was all over it. He wanted to buy it. So the boys eagerly ship off the Dybbuk box and Jason receives it in the middle of a workday. So he puts the package in his truck and he goes upstairs and he works for the day. And then afterwards, when everyone's left the office, he goes downstairs, gets the package,

brings it back up to his office, puts it on his desk, and he cuts open the packaging. Jason decided he wanted to evaluate the Dybbuk box the way he would evaluate any other antique or item that was coming into the museum that he was the director of. And so Jason starts by taking a whole bunch of pictures all around the outside of the Dybbuk box. And then he gets his blacklight out and he begins scanning around the outside. And he finds all these traces of wax all over the outside, which leads him to believe this was probably used in some sort of ritual. And then he takes a deep breath and he sits down right in front of the Dybbuk box and he pops off the lock and gets ready and he opens the doors and the drawer slides out with that whole mechanical device. It all kind of comes open and Jason's totally let

down because nothing happens. And part of him thought like, if this thing is haunted, as soon as you open it up, the haunting's going to begin. And nothing happened. And he's pretty let down about it. And so ultimately after staring at it and looking at the pennies that are in there and the Shalom statue and the locks of hair, he's just kind of let down by it.

And he decides, okay, I kind of got my hopes up for something. This was clearly a hoax. There's nothing going on here.'s just just a random old chest and so he closes it up and he puts it on another desk that wasn't the one that he worked at but was just kind of a another table inside of this office that he shared with some other people and he figured it would be a good talking point to tell his colleagues about and it would be kind of like a showpiece so the next day his colleagues come in and he explains what a dybbuk box is and the history around it that it's supposed to be haunted and you know it makes people sick and gives people strokes and you know there's been

insects that have been known to come out of it and go into it. It's this very creepy thing and his colleagues are like wow that's pretty cool but they don't think much of it. Until all of the electronics inside of their office start to fail. Namely, their computers start crashing and their IT department comes up and they're like, we don't know why this is happening, but sorry, we can't recover it. And the light bulbs kept going out to the point where they went out and got this huge pack of extra light bulbs to replace the light bulbs as they went out. Something they never had to do before. But all of a sudden, the Dybbuk box is in the room and the light bulbs are going out left and right.

And then finally, Jason's co-workers that share that space with the Dybbuk box, they all got sick and they blamed the Dybbuk box. They said, you know what? We were fine until that thing came in here. Now all of a sudden our computers don't work, the lights don't work, we're getting sick. Get rid of it, Jason. So that day after work, Jason goes and takes the Dybbuk box, puts it in the back of his truck, and his truck had a cover on the back. So he secures it in the back. He drives home, and he doesn't want to bring it inside because it just seemed weird to bring a cursed object inside that his coworkers just made him get out of their space because it was making them sick and it was ruining their thing. So he thinks, okay, I'll leave it in my truck overnight and I'll figure out what I'm going to do with it tomorrow. He goes inside, he says hi to his family, and before long it's time for bed and Jason goes to sleep. In order to understand what happened to Jason, you need to understand the layout of his house. When you open the front door, you walk inside and there's a wall on your right-hand side that's the side of the house,

and you walk forward about five or six feet, and on your left is a staircase that goes up to the second floor. If you walk up that staircase, straight ahead of you is going to be a bathroom. If you go left and walk down the hall another five or six feet, you come to the master suite where Jason and his wife would sleep. If you walk through that door, there is a wall on your left where there's a big bay window that looks out onto the street. And there's a big streetlight that sits right outside that projects very orangey yellow light into their room at night. Even though they have a shade up, it's this orange glow that comes through this window right here on this side. And then on the other side of the room is the bed. And the bed is situated where the feet are pointed towards this window over here

and the head of the bed is against this wall. And it's centered on this wall here. And Jason, if you were looking overhead at the top of this bed, Jason's on the left side. So he's the farthest into his room and his wife is the closest into the room. So that night Jason goes to bed and he falls asleep but just a couple hours later he wakes up suddenly and he can't move his body. He can only move his eyes. He's laying on his back and the light from the street light is very strong. It's this orangey glow in their whole room and he's laying there trying to move his hands and his legs but he can't do it and as he doing that, he starts hearing footsteps out on the stairs. And they're distinctive sounds, slow, plodding steps all the way up to the second floor. And Jason's laying here with his eyes looking towards the door

because his door is open and he can barely see into the second floor landing. And he's waiting to see who came up the stairs. And his heart's racing and he's looking and out of the corner of his eye, he sees what looks like a dark figure begin to walk into the room. And his heart starts racing even faster when he can tell it's definitely not someone he knows. It's this woman, this older woman with a shawl over her head

and her head is tucked down so he can't see her. And this is all out of the corner of his eye. And because of the orange hue coming in from the window, he can definitely tell that there is a real solid figure right there this is not in his imagination it's right there and this woman begins shuffling her way across the foot of the bed and right at the foot of the bed as jason's looking at her she turns and looks directly at him and then she runs around the corner and she looks down at him and she takes her fingers and she drives them into his eyes. And Jason thinks it's real. And he's screaming

in pain and he wakes up and his wife is grabbing him. And she's like, Jason, Jason, what's wrong? And he said, what's going on? And she says, honey, it's just a bad dream. You're fine. And he's shaken up. You know, his heart's still racing from this dream he's just had. And he's trying to think like that felt really real. And he's like feeling his eyes. And he can't believe that that was a dream. That was the most vivid dream he's ever had in his life. And so eventually he goes back to sleep. And then the next morning when he gets up, he goes in the bathroom and he looks at his eyes and they're all red around the outside. And the whites of his eyes are covered in blood. His eyes look horrible. Like he's having

this terrible allergic reaction to something, or it looks like someone might have punched him in the eyes, or maybe gouged his eyes. That's how it looks. And his wife comes in and she's like, what happened to you? And he's like, oh my God, I have no idea. It was around this time that Jason began to think the Dybbuk box might just be cursed because the two previous owners have said in their disclosures on eBay that horrible, vivid dreams, just like the one he had, to include physical manifestations, are part of having this Dybbuk box. Jason considered just dumping this thing in a dumpster somewhere, but then he was concerned that he might be passing on this Dybbuk box to someone who wasn't ready for it. And so he decided he would give it another day and he would do some research about how to properly dispose of a Dybbuk box. And so that

night when Jason came back from work, he left the Dybbuk box in his truck covered up in his driveway. And so Jason goes inside, he has dinner with his family, and then he's sitting down in the TV room and he's watching TV with his son. And as they're watching TV quietly, Jason hears his son say, hey dad, who is that? And he looks over at his son and his son is pointing behind him. And Jason turns around and standing right behind him is the same woman who had come in his room with a shawl on and gouged his eyes out in his dream. And then she suddenly disappears. And Jason's looking at his son like, you just saw that too? And he's like, yeah, who was that? And so Jason grabs his son. He yells for his wife and says, we have to leave the house right now. His wife comes downstairs and she's like, what's going on? And he was like, I will explain in the car and we have to take your car and so his wife

sees how serious jason is and she says okay and they get into her car and they drive down the road and that's when jason explains what's going on with the dybbuk box and how he and his son just saw the same woman that he had seen in his dream the night before that gouged his eyes and his eyes were red and his wife's starting to get really scared and his son's really scared of what's going on and so the solution they came up with was they were going to drive back to their house drop jason off who was going to get in his truck where the dybbuk box is still in the back it's still locked in the back of the truck and he's going to drive it a few miles outside of town to a rental property they owned that no one was staying in and he was going to put it in the basement and it was going to stay there until they figured out how to dispose of it.

Because they didn't like the idea of just dumping it somewhere because they felt like if this is real and it's actually this cursed Dybbuk box, then somebody else is going to be cursed by this Dybbuk box unless we find a way or at least attempt to find a way to contain it and destroy it. And so Jason gets dropped off. He gets in his truck. He drives to the rental property. He puts it and destroy it. And so Jason gets dropped off. He gets in his truck. He drives to the rental property. He puts it in the basement.

He seals it up and he goes back to his house. Once Jason got back to his house, his wife and his son came back as well. And that night, Jason would go on eBay and he would find the contact information for Kevin, the original owner of the Dybbuk box after the estate sale. And he called him that night and Kevin actually picked up and the two of them spoke. And Kevin ultimately agrees to help

Jason find a way to properly dispose of this Dybbuk box. And what Kevin offers to do is drive back to the house where he had originally purchased this Dybbuk box and see if he can get some more information about what it is and what they do with it. The next day, Kevin, the antique shop owner, he goes back to the house where he originally bought the Dybbuk box at the estate sale. He knocks on the door and an old woman comes to the door and Kevin introduces himself and he says, hey, you know, I was here not too long ago and I purchased lot 29 that included that Dybbuk box and I wanted to know some more information about it. And the woman reacted and she's like, you know, I told my family not to sell that. I know what was inside of it and I know you're not supposed to open it. And I

tried to tell my family and they didn't listen. I really hope you didn't open it. And Kevin's like, actually, yeah, I did open it. and he described all the horrible things that happened and he described selling it and all the subsequent owners how they've had all these issues and how they've arrived at this place now where Jason in Missouri is having all these issues and they're trying to find a way to dispose of it and that's when Sophie describes what's actually inside of this box Sophie said she lived in Poland before World War II with her cousin Havala, who was the woman who had passed away and all her things were being sold at the estate sale. And she said that at the time, it was all the rage to have seances and try to talk to dead people and spirits. And

they would just do it for fun. Sophie, Havala and their mother, they would just, they would just do it for fun sophie havla and their mother they would just they would do this for fun and havla had made this ouija board where she had stitched letters onto this blanket and they put it over this table and they would all hold this pendant that was suspended by a chain and they would ask questions and they would hope that you know a spirit that they were interacting with would interact with this chain and it would swivel around the pendant and it would point to the different letters whenever they asked a question and it would spell out, you know, whatever their answer was. And Sophie said nothing ever happened. It was just kind of a fun thing for them to do. But one time it did work and they said the chain would go rigid and it would point over and over and it would spell the words, release me, release me, release me.

Sophie said the women were incredulous and didn't believe it at first, but then they started to worry that if they didn't help this thing, that if it were a dybbuk and were a malevolent spirit, they would find a way to attach itself to one of them. And so Sophie said they devised this ritual where they released it, but into this wine box that they were able to shut and lock. And that wine box became the Dybbuk box. And that Dybbuk box is the same one that was sold to Kevin. Kevin told Sophie that, what do we do? We've already opened it up. And she said, you need to contact a rabbi.

And so they would call a rabbi. And apparently they were able to reclaim the Dybbuk inside of the box and lock it and put it away in a secret location where it's been since 2003. And apparently since it's been sealed off, Jason and Kevin have said they've experienced no demonic activity. And they never plan to tell anybody where this thing is because they don't want anyone else to have even the opportunity to reopen the Dybbuk box and have to deal with all the horrible things that they went through. Thank you for listening to the Mr. Ballin podcast. If you enjoyed today's story

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head to our YouTube channel, which is just called Mr. Ballin. So, that's going to do it. I really appreciate your support. Until next time, see ya. I'm going to go. So, please tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. In May of 1980, near Anaheim, California, Dorothy Jane Scott noticed her friend had an inflamed red wound on his arm and he seemed really unwell. So, she wound up taking him to the hospital right away so he could get treatment. While Dorothy's friend waited for his prescription, Dorothy went to grab her car to pick him up at the exit. But she would never be seen alive again, leaving us to wonder, decades later,

what really happened to Dorothy Jane Scott? From Wondery, Generation Y is a podcast that covers notable true crime cases like this one and so many more. Every week, hosts Aaron and Justin sit down to discuss a new case covering every angle and theory, walking through the forensic evidence, and interviewing those close to the case to try and discover what really happened. And with over 450 episodes, there's a case for every true crime listener. Follow the Generation Y podcast on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts.