There are haunted objects with stories that stretch back generations. There are objects surrounded by conflicting histories, missing records, and witnesses who swear something happened even when no one can explain exactly what.

And then there is the Dybbuk Box.

The small wooden cabinet became an internet legend after it appeared on eBay in 2003. The story attached to it was disturbing. According to the listing, the cabinet had once belonged to a Jewish Holocaust survivor and contained a dybbuk, a restless spirit from Jewish folklore. Strange smells, nightmares, illness, bad luck, and other frightening experiences were eventually connected to the box.

The story spread well beyond eBay. Other owners reported experiences of their own. The box inspired books, paranormal investigations, television appearances, and eventually the 2012 horror movie The Possession.

There was just one very big problem.

The history of the Dybbuk Box wasn’t history.

Kevin Mannis, the man who originally put the story into the world, later acknowledged that he created it. He had purchased the cabinet at a yard sale and built the story around it. The supposed history involving a Holocaust survivor, the haunted backstory, and even some of the physical details that made the cabinet seem mysterious were part of what he created.

That doesn’t make the story less interesting to me.

It makes it stranger.

Because I didn’t know any of that when I originally sat down with my tarot cards.

About This Reading

I originally did this reading on February 26, 2026.

At the time, I knew the basic Dybbuk Box legend, but I had not researched the history behind it. I didn’t know that Kevin Mannis had admitted creating the story. I didn’t even recognize his name months later when I returned to this reading.

That matters because of what happened in the cards.

For these mystery readings, I sometimes work from investigative questions prepared by my research assistant, Elliot. That lets me go into a reading without researching every person or detail beforehand. I see the question, pull the card, and read what’s actually in front of me. After I’ve interpreted it, Elliot can fill me in on the history or context I deliberately didn’t know going into it.

The cards are physically shuffled and pulled by me, and the interpretations are mine.

I pull the entire spread face down and turn the cards over one at a time. I read each card as I reveal it, but sometimes a later card gives me another piece of the story and I go back to something I noticed earlier. That’s just part of how I read a spread. The cards aren’t always separate answers. Sometimes they start connecting to each other as I go.

What happened with this reading is a little weird, especially once I came back to it months later. So I’m going to keep everything in the order it happened. This is what I pulled in February, what I thought the cards were saying at the time, and what I learned when I returned to the reading in October.

This is part of my ongoing subscriber tarot series, with a new reading published every Tuesday at 10:00 AM ET.

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