EDITOR’S NOTE: “Vegas Myths Busted” publishes new entries every Monday, with a bonus Flashback Friday edition. Today’s entry in our ongoing series originally ran on Feb. 3, 2023. 

The centerpiece of Zak Bagans’ The Haunted Museum in downtown Las Vegas is a wine cabinet advertised as “The World’s Most Haunted Object.” Also known as “The Dybbuk Box,” the artifact supposedly has a long history of bringing evil and death upon anyone who disturbs it.

Bagans, the principal host of the Travel Channel series “Ghost Adventures,” claimed to have experienced bad juju as soon as he added the cabinet to his collection of macabre and, frankly, distasteful artifacts in 2017. His museum also contains Ted Bundy’s glasses, a painting made with the cremated ashes of Charles Manson, and a Camaro once owned by David Koresh.

According to the museum’s website, shortly after the cabinet arrived, “mysterious protruding holes began to appear in the walls around the artifact as if something was trying to break out from within the exhibit.”

Bagans was scheduled to open the cursed cabinet himself as the culmination of a live, four-hour Halloween broadcast from the museum in 2018, but he sensed so much evil inside of it, he claimed, that he lost the nerve.

Wine Cabinet of Curiosities

The only problem with the story is that the Dybbuk Box is just an ordinary wine cabinet. In 2021, the man who sold it on eBay 20 years earlier, Kevin Mannis, admitted in an interview that he made up its elaborately detailed paranormal backstory as a social experiment.

I am a creative writer,” he told Charles Moss, a reporter for Inverse, the online science and technology magazine launched in 2015 by Bleacher Report co-founder Dave Nemetz. “The Dybbuk Box is a story that I created. And the Dybbuk Box story has done exactly what I intended it to do when I posted it …  which is to become an interactive horror story in real-time.”

The box was reportedly sold for $140 to Losif Nietzke, who was, at the time, a student in Missouri. Nietzke resold it to Jason Haxton, director of the Museum of Osteopathic Medicine at A.T. Still University. Haxton wrote about his allegedly dark experiences with the wine cabinet in a book called “The Dibbuk Box.” Bagans purchased the box from Haxton in 2016 for an undisclosed sum.

Mannis’ elaborately detailed work of fiction even landed him a job as a consultant on “The Possession” since Sam Raimi produced a 2012 horror film based on Mannis’ story.

The eBay Listing

Here’s the story Mannis made up straight from his 2003 eBay listing…

Mannis was a Portland, Ore. furniture restorer when he purchased the Dybbuk Box at a garage sale in 2001. It was sold to him by the granddaughter of a recently deceased 103-year-old Holocaust survivor named Havela, who escaped Nazi-occupied Poland. Havela’s parents, brothers, sister, husband, two sons, and daughter weren’t so lucky.