A Box of Horrors

I want to start off by saying that my Aunt found this in a magazine and I found it very interesting so I had to share it with you all.




     On Sunday. Oct. 10. 2004. Jason Haxton placed a wooden cabinet with a Hebrew Prayer carved on its back in the cellar of a rental property he owned in northern Missouri and performed a Wiccan ceremony to contain an evil spirit he feared might dwell inside it. Haxton isn't Jewish (he was raised Methodist). Nor is he a regular practitioner of pagan rituals. However a dramatic decline in his health since he'd aquired the wine-bottle storage cabinet eight months earlier had forced him to reconsider his beliefs -or lack of them and turn to a remedy he would once have regarded as lunatic. "I thought I was on a fast track to getting incapacitated," says Haxton.
    For the final part of the ritual, Haxton returned to his own home next door and took a purifying bath in sea salt and basil. While rinsing off, he felt ill and coughed up a huge mass of slime. "It was literally two handfuls of this curd," he says. "I'm 54, and nothing like that has ever happened to me. To this day it freaks me out."
    Today Lionsgate relased The Possession, a film produced by Sam Raimi (director of The Evil Dead and Spider Man) that's loosely based on the terrifying experiences endured by Haxton and the previous owners of the wine cabinet, which has become known in some circles as the Dibbuk Box. A "dibbuk" is a Jewish term for a restless spirit that finds refuge in a living creature.
    For almost a decade, the 12 1/2" by 7 1/2"  by 16 1/4" box has fascinated paranormalists and paranormal debunkers alike. Now it will reach the masses in cinematic form, with Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Kyra Sedgwick starring as the parents of a young girl (Natasha Calis) who acquires the box. Raimi, who raised in a conservative Jewish home, says he had a "natural curiosity" about the subject. "You don't hear about dibbuks when you go to synagogue," he explains. "I know the demonic lore of The Exorcist. But what does my faith believe about demonic possession?" The other thing was, "it scared me something horrible," he says. "The stories chilled me to the bone." They certainly gave Morgan pause for thought. "In the research I did, I started getting creeped out," the actor says. "My girlfriend was like, 'Let's just make sure that we don't actually go near the real Dibbuk Box.'"

    Powers of the Dibbuk Box first became public knowledge in June 2003, when Kevin Mannis, the owner of a furniture-refinishing business in Portland, Ore., put the item up for sale on eBay along with its original contents, which included two locks of hair, a small granite statue gilded with the word "shalom" in Hebrew lettering, and a cast-iron candlestick holder. Mannis had bought the box a couple of years earlier at the estate sale of a Jewish woman, a concentration-camp survivor named Havela who had died at the age of 103. In his lengthy seller's note, Mannis recalled being told by Havela's granddaughter that after escaping from the camp, she had wound up in Spain, where she purchased the cabinet. When Havela immigrated to the U.S., she brought the item and always claimed it contained a "dibbuk." Mannis, suddenly aware that he had bought a family heirloom, offered to let Havela's granddaughter keep what she called the "Dibbuk Box." She adamantly declined, telling him, "You bought it! You made a deal!We don't want it!"
    Mannis took the box to his store and left it in the basement workshop, where he planned to refinish the item before giving it to his mother as a birthday gift. He went to run some errands but returned when his sales assistant called and began screaming that someone was in the basement breaking glass and swearing. However when he arrived back he found no one down there but that there was the smell of cat urine. "Then" Mannis wrote in his sellers note, "things got worse."
    As planned, Mannis gave the mother the box as a birthday present. Five minutes after he handed her the item, she suffered a stroke and was taken to a hospital by ambulance. Having lost the ability to speak, Mannis' mother could communicate only by pointing to letters of the alphabet. When Mannis visited her the next day, he asked her how she was feeling. She started to cry. "N-O-G-I-F-T," she spelled out. "H-A-T-E-G-I-F-T." (she did eventually recover her speech.) Mannis found himself plagued by a dream in which he was physically beaten by a demonic-looking hag. Sometimes, he awoke covered in bruises and welts. Mannis, who is Jewish, did not connect these unfortunate events to the box. "I don't think in terms of ghosts or demons," says Mannis 47. "The last thing I thought was that these things had anything to do with the wine cabinet. That to me is like saying 'I've got a haunted turkey baster'." 
    Mannis then gave the box to his sister, who returned it, he says, after complaining that the cabinet's doors kept opening of their own accord. Next he gave the item to his brother, who also gave right back after his wife said it smelled like cat urain. Finally, he sold it to a middle-aged couple. Three days later he found the box sitting outside his store with a note that read, "This has a bad darkness." One evening, Mannis hosted a family dinner, and his relatives stayed the night. The next day his visitors all reported having had the same nightmare, about an abusive hag. "I went, 'What the heck ?What's the common denominator here?'" says Mannis "And the common denominator turned out to be the box."
    In the week after the dinner, Mannis started to see "shadow things" in his peripheral vision. Once, while trying to research the box on the Internet, he fell asleep and again dreamed of the hag. Upon waking, he had the feeling that someone was breathing on his neck and glimpsed one of the shadow things loping away down the hallway. Enough was enough. Concerned that if he destroyed the box, whatever entity it contained might stay with him, Mannis decided to sell it. "I have been told that there are people who shop on eBay who understand these kinds of things," Mannis wrote in his post. "If you are one of the people , please, please, please buy this cabinet and do whatever it is that you do with a thing like this. Help me." He eventually sold the box for $140, to a student who lived in Haxton's hometown. 
    On June 17, 2003, a young colleague of Haxton's at the museum announced that over the weekend his roommate had "bought a haunted box" and showed the curator Mannis' seller's note. Haxton was intrigued, and was soon able to buy the box himself when the student resold it on eBay several months later. In his note, the student said he had trouble sleeping, saw large vertical blurs in his peripheral vision, and had started to lose his hair. On Feb. 9, 2004, Haxton successfully bid $280 for it.
    Although Haxton was interested in the stories surrounding the box, he actually bought it for a magician friend, who planned to incorporate it into his act. After the box was delivered to Haxton's museum the pair inspected it while wearing gloves. Haxton even ran a black light over it in a futile attempt to locate any kind of residue that might explain the smell of cat urain that Mannis had mentioned, he found nothing. And when he removed his gloves and put his hand on the box it felt warm, and the wood seemed to shift beneath his fingers, as if it had a pulse. Suddenly, while his palms were still on the box, he felt a pain erupt in his side and migrate into his stomach, where it bothered him for hours. That night, Haxton dreamed of faces disfigured by wounds. Each face finally morph into that of a white haired hag who watched him with hollow eyes.
    In the days after the box arrived at the museum, various staff members began to suffer misfortunes of their own including the death of ones grandparant and expressed concern about having it on the property. Haxton repacked it, placed it in the covered bed of his pickup, and drove home. Upon returning to the vehicle the next day, he says, he was assaulted with the smell of cat urain. He kept trying to deliver it to his magician friend who kept putting him off, citing inconvenient timing or illness. Eventually Haxton just put it in a closet in an unused room in his home which he shares with his wife and children. Soon however the Haxtons started experiencing an array of inexplicable phenomena. The house was grew cold and stayed that way no matter how high they jacked up the heat. One day Haxton and his son watched a shadow expand and drift across the floor even though the room was brightly lit. But what really scared Haxton was his health. He developed vision problems and found it difficult to swallow. He also periodically broke out in head to toe welts that would suddenly vanish and reappear. "I've never been I'll" he says. " That's when I became really frightened."
    In June 2004, Haxton visited Portland for work and, after finding Mannis' unlisted number they arranged a meeting, and the two embarked on a Dubbik Box quest. Eventually Mannis found the original house where he bought the box and visited with an elderly lady named Sophie, Havela's cousin. Sophie recalled her own childhood in '30s Poland and how Havela had attempted to capture a spirit to help the Jews fight against the Nazis but instead had allowed a malevolent entity to enter instead.
    Today Haxton still has the box and hopes that when he dies he will be buried with it to put an end to its bad deeds.

Haunted Australia

Haunted Beechworth Lunatic Asylum:
     Located in the beautiful, scenic town of Beechworth, just a few hours from Melbourne up in the Victorian Highlands is the Beechworth Lunatic Asylum. The Asylum was later renamed the Mayday Hills Hospital, it is the second oldest asylum in Victoria, dating back to 1867. When the asylum opened it stretched half a kilometer from one end to the other.
    The Beechworth Lunatic Asylum held a total of 1200 patients when full 600 men and 600 women. Over 3000 patients died within its walls in the 128 years the hospital operated. Its doors closed in 1995, and since then has operated as a campus of La Trobe University, run as a hotel and conference center.
    In one of the day rooms, the signature of a J. Kelly is scratched in the glass. J Kelly was Ned Kelly’s (the famous outlaw) uncle James Kelly. After burning down his sister in laws house in Greta, in which a young Ned was in at the time, Jim was sentenced to 15 years hard. As part of his sentence he was sent to Mayday Hills to help build the hospital. After serving his time, it’s said his mind “was broken” and as such spent the rest of his days housed in the hospital until his death in 1903.
    One of the ghosts most often seen at Beechworth is that of Matron Sharpe her apparition has been seen in several different parts of the hospital. Matron Sharpe’s ghost has been seen in the former dormitory area, which is now part of Latrobe University’s computer rooms. Witnesses have seen her walking down the granite staircase and into one of the classrooms. Matron Sharpe was apparently very compassionate toward the patients, which is uncharacteristic of the era.
    One patient whose ghost is thought to haunt Beechworth is Tommy Kennedy. Tommy was well liked at the hospital and was given a job as a kitchen hand. Tommy actually died in the kitchen which is now part of the Bijou theatre, it is here that people have said they have felt the sensation of someone tugging at their clothes or poking their ribs.
The Reaction Hall was an area where patients could sing, play music or perform in plays, on Sundays the hall doubled as the chapel. In 1939 the hall became a cinema, where inmates could come in to watch movies. There are two common sightings in the hall, one is of a young girl, who approaches women and desperately tries to communicate with them. The other ghost has been seen in a window that was once part of the Bell Tower; the apparition of an elderly man facing away from the window is often seen.
    The Grevillia wing was the section of the hospital all patients feared, it has been closed for 13 years, and now in a derelict state. As medication wasn’t introduced until the 1950s, restraints such as straightjackets and even shackles were commonly used as well as electro-shock treatment. Electro shock treatment was widely used in the hospitals early days and there are stories of mass treatments in which almost the entire patient population was shocked in one session. When the shocks were administered the patient’s bodies either splayed out backwards with force or contracted inward into a fetal position, which ever position ligaments would snap, bones were often broken and teeth shattered.
There are two common sightings in Grevillia, one is thought to be that of an unknown male doctor, his apparition has been seen wandering the corridors at night. The other is Matron Sharpe whose ghost was often seen in this area by the nurses who worked at Mayday Hills. They would report seeing the Matron sitting with patients who were due to have electro-shock treatment. Those who say they’ve witnessed this say the room was icy cold, but her presence was comforting, and seemed to bring a sense of reassurance to the patients.
    Workmen at the hospital have reported hearing the sound of children laughing and playing; when they investigate the sound they are unable to trace their source. Several years ago on a ghost tour a parent noticed their 10 year old son talking to himself when asked who he was talking to the boy said he was talking to a boy called James who lived there.
A patient, a woman who was a big chain smoker was thrown out of a window to her death by another patient who wanted her cigarettes. Because the woman was Jewish her body was not allowed to be moved until a Rabbi had seen it, so her body was left lying out the front of the hospital dead for 2 days whilst the Rabbi made the trip up from Melbourne. Her ghost has been seen on the spot where she fell, by several witnesses over the last decade.
     The gardens of Beechworth have long been subdivided into allotments; those who live nearby have seen the ghost of a man, wearing a green woolen jacket. The ghost is thought to be of a gardener named Arthur who worked the gardens for many years earning ten shillings a week. He wore his green jacket in winter and summer and no one could persuade him to remove it. After Arthur died, it was discovered why Arthur had been secretly storing his wages in the seam of his jacket. When the nurses opened it, they found 140 pounds, over four years of his wages, hidden inside.
    There’s one final and grizzly tale of a patient who disappeared, despite efforts by staff to locate him. Several weeks later his location was discovered when the resident dog Max, was found chewing a leg near the gate house at the grounds entry. A second search found the body up in a tree; the body had decomposed so badly that his leg had come off. The ghost of the patient has been seen near the entrance to the Asylum, the sightings have often been in the early hours of the morning.

Monte Christo Homestead:
   Just off the Hume highway in New South Wales, a short distance from Wagga Wagga, is the quaint and sleepy town of Junee. Drive through the peaceful streets, and you will be stopped in your tracks by the sight of an imposing mansion house squatting high on a hill and casting its gloomy shadow down on the town and its residents.
     This is the infamous Monte Cristo, Australia's "most haunted house". Over countless years, a catalogue of ghastly incidents and horrific deaths has plagued this dark and brooding homestead. At least seven ghoulish residents are reputed to be at large in both the house and the grounds.
Monte Cristo, meaning "Mount of Christ," was built in 1884 by Christopher William Crawley, a local farmer whose luck changed when he acquired some land under provision of the Robertson's Act of 1861. He was married to Elizabeth, a hard and brutal woman who ruled her husband with an iron fist. She habitually wore black-lace dresses, lace caps, and a cape with a stand-up, beaded collar. Local residents laughed behind her back and took to calling her "Queen Victoria" in private.
     Christopher Crawley died at Monte Cristo on December 14,1910, at age sixty-nine. The constant rubbing of his starched collars resulted in gangrenous abscess on his neck, which, in turn, caused his heart to fail. Following his death, Elizabeth retreated into deep mourning, converting an upstairs box room into a chapel that she rarely left. In fact, she is reputed to have left the homestead only twice in the twenty-three years between her husband's death and her own death, from a ruptured appendix, on August 12,1933, at age ninety-two.
     In 1948, the last of the Crawleys left the homestead, and Monte Cristo fell victim to rot and vandalism.
Years later in 1955, Reginald Ryan, a tailor from Wagga Wagga, drove past Monte Cristo and felt an instant but eerie connection. He somehow knew he was destined to live there. Sure enough, eight years later on June 3, 1963, Reginald, his wife, Olive, and their three children moved into their new home, which Reginald then set about restoring to its former glory. The family still live alongside their spiritual lodgers, and an uneasy truce prevails. For any outside visitors, however, it is quite a different story.
     By far the strongest ghostly presence in the homestead is that of Elizabeth Crawley. She is the most often seen in the converted chapel, wearing black and carrying a large silver cross. Her presence is extremely domineering, and she is very particular about what goes on in her house and does her best to unsettle any guests. She has been known to order people out of the dining room, and an icy atmosphere descends whenever her spirit is present.
     The sound of loud footsteps on hard wooden floors can be heard around the house. This is unsettling, but even more so when you consider that the whole house is now carpeted.
An apparition of a young woman in period dress has been seen gliding slowly along the front balcony. A pregnant maid jumped to her death from this very spot. The bloodstained steps below were cleaned with bleach, but to this day, you can still see the discolorations.
     The second story of the house has witnesses at least three deaths. A young woman died after a particularly long and tortuous labor, and Christopher Crawley himself died in what is now known as the boys' bedroom. Sad faces are often seen staring in through the second-story windows even though there is no balcony outside.
     The atmosphere surrounding the staircase is one of the most disturbing in the whole house. Today, many young children become extremely frightened and agitated when in the vicinity. Some have been known to have asthma attacks. This is less surprising when you learn that the Crawley's baby girl was dropped from her nanny's arms down the stairs to her death. The horrified nanny claimed that the baby had been pushed out of her arms by an unseen force. Whatever the truth of the matter, a menacing aura still lingers.
     Outside the house, the forlorn figure of a vulnerable young boy is often seen loitering in the vicinity of the coach house. This was the scene of the tragic death of a stable hand named Morris, who slept in the stables but was too ill to get up for work one day. His boss did not believe him and set fire to his bedding. Poor Morris was too sick to escape and burned to death where he lay.
     The most recent tragedy happened in 1961, after a local youth had watched repeated showings of the movie Psycho. Late at night he crept up to the grounds of the homestead carrying his rifle and shot dead the caretaker, Jackie Simpson. To this day you can see the words "Die Jack Ha Ha" inscribed in a macabre scrawl on the wooden door of the caretakers cottage.
     Monte Cristo has been featured on many television shows and has been visited by many paranormal investigators. No one has ever come away without seeing something strange or feeling very uncomfortable.







Port Arthur:

Is a small town and former convict settlement Port Arthur is one of Australia's most significant heritage areas and the open air museum is officially Tasmania's top tourist attraction. It is located approximately 60 km south east of the state capital, Hobart. In 1996 it was the scene of the worst mass murder event in post-colonial Australian history.
Port Arthur was named after Van Diemen's Land Lieutenant Governor George Arthur. The settlement started as a timber station in 1830, but it is best known for being a penal colony.
From 1833, until 1853, it was the destination for the hardest of convicted British and Irish criminals, those who were secondary offenders having re-offended after their arrival in Australia. Rebellious personalities from other convict stations were also sent here, a quite undesirable punishment. In addition Port Arthur had some of the strictest security measures of the British penal system.
    Port Arthur was one example of the “Separate Prison Typology” (sometimes known as the Model prison), which emerged from Jeremy Bentham’s theories and his panopticon. The prison was completed in 1853 but then extended in 1855. The layout of the prison was fairly symmetrical. It was a cross shape with exercise yards at each corner. The prisoner wings were each connected to the surveillance core of the Prison as well as the Chapel, in the Center Hall. From this surveillance hub each wing could be clearly seen, although individual cells could not. This is how the Separate Prison at Port Arthur differed from the original theory of the Panopticon.
    The Separate Prison System also signalled a shift from physical punishment to psychological punishment. It was thought that the hard corporal punishment, such as whippings, used in other penal stations only served to harden criminals, and did nothing to turn them from their immoral ways. For example, food was used to reward well-behaved prisoners and as punishment for troublemakers. As a reward, a prisoner could receive larger amounts of food or even luxury items such as tea, sugar and tobacco. As punishment, the prisoners would receive the bare minimum of bread and wate. Under this system of punishment the "Silent System" was implemented in the building. Here prisoners were hooded and made to stay silent, this was supposed to allow time for the prisoner to reflect upon the actions which had brought him there. Many of the prisoners in the Separate Prison developed mental illness from the lack of light and sound. This was an unintended outcome although the asylum was built right next to the Separate Prison. In many ways Port Arthur was the pin-up for many of the penal reform movement, despite shipping, housing and slave-labour use of convicts being as harsh, or worse, than others stations around the nation.
    Port Arthur was also the destination for juvenile convicts, receiving many boys, some as young as nine. The boys were separated from the main convict population and kept on Point Puer, the British Empire's first boys' prison. Like the adults, the boys were used in hard labour such as stone cutting and construction. One of the buildings constructed was one of Australia's first non-denominational churches, built in a gothic style. Attendance of the weekly Sunday service was compulsory for the prison population. Critics of the new system noted that this and other measures seemed to have negligible impact on reformation.

    Despite its reputation as a pioneering institution for the new, enlightened view of imprisonment, Port Arthur was still in reality as harsh and brutal as other penal settlements. Some critics might even suggest that its use of psychological punishment, compounded with no hope of escape, made it one of the worst. Some tales suggest that prisoners committed murder (an offence punishable by death) just to escape the desolation of life at the camp. The Island of the Dead was the destination for all who died inside the prison camps. Of the 1646 graves recorded to exist there, only 180, those of prison staff and military personnel, are marked. The prison closed in 1877.
    On 28 April 1996, Martin Bryant went on a killing spree at Port Arthur, murdering 35 people and wounding 21 more before being captured by the Special Operations Group of the Tasmania Police. This led to a national ban on semi-automatic shotguns and rifles.

Aradale Mental Hospital:
Originally known as Ararat Lunatic Asylum, Aradale and its two sister asylums at kew and Beechworth were commissioned to accommodate the growing number of "lunatics" in the colony of Victoria.
    Construction began in 1864, and the guardhouses are listedas being built in 1866 though the list of patients extends as far back as the year before (1865). It was closed as an asylum in 1998 and in 2001 became a campus of the Northern Melbourne Institute of TAFE administered Australian College of Wine.
    At its height it had over 500 staff and as it stands today the complex is made up of 63 buildings ranging in age from the original wings built in the 1860s to the modern forensic unit which was built in 1991 only two years before it was closed. Despite being closed as an asylum the facility continued to house female prisoners during the building/renovation of Dame Phyllis Frost Centre right up until its current management took over in 2001.
                           
                    Reported Paranormal Activity
As well as apparitions being seen at the former hospital, footsteps and loud bangs have been heard, some people have claimed to have an immense nauseating feeling and some have felt so frightened they are unable to enter some parts of the building.  











Mayday Hills Lunatic Asylum:
Aka Beechworth Lunatic Asylum. Established in 1867 at the height of Beechworth's gold rush period as one of three major asylums in the state of Victoria, the hospital operated for almost 130 years until its closure in 1995. During this time it grew to incorporate 57 buildings spread across a 200 acre site, at its peak accommodating over 1,200 patients. Close to 9000 patients died on site making this one of Australia's most haunted locations.
    One of the ghosts most often seen is that of Matron Sharpe her apparition has been seen in several different parts of the hospital. Matron Sharpe's ghost has been seen in the former dormitory area, which is now part of Latrobe University's computer rooms. Witnesses have seen her walking down the granite staircase and into one of the classrooms. Matron Sharpe was apparently very compassionate toward the patients, which is uncharacteristic of the era.
    Another patient whose ghost is said to haunt this place is Tommy Kennedy. Tommy was well liked at the hospital and was given a as a kitchen hand. Tommy actually died in the kitchen which is now part of the bijou theatre, it is here that peopel have said they have felt the sensation of someone tugging at their clothes or poking their ribs. 
    The reaction Hall was where an area where patients could sing, play music or perform in plays, on Sundays the hall doubled as the chaple. In 1939 the hall became  a cinema, where inmates could come in to watch movies.
     There are two common sightings in the hall, one is of a young girl, who approaches women and desperately tries to communicate with them. The other ghost has been seen in a window that was once part of the Bell Tower; the apparition of an elderly man facing away from the window is often seen. The Grevillia wing was the section of the hospital all patients feared, it has been closed for 13 years, and now in a derelict state. As medication wasn't introduced until the 1950s, restraints such as straightjackets and even shackles were commonly used as well as electro-shock treatment. Electro shock treatment was widely used in the hospitals early days and there are stories of mass treatments in which almost the entire patient population was shocked in one session. When the shocks were administered the patient's bodies either splayed out backwards with force or contracted inward into a fetal position, which ever position ligaments would snap, bones were often broken and teeth shattered.
    There are two common sightings in Grevillia, one is thought to be that of an unknown male doctor, his apparition has been seen wandering the corridors at night. The other is Matron Sharpe whose ghost was often seen in this area by the nurses who worked at Mayday Hills. They would report seeing the Matron sitting with patients who were due to have electro-shock treatment. Those who say they've witnessed this say the room was icy cold, but her presence was comforting, and seemed to bring a sense of reassurance to the patients.
    Workmen at the hospital have reported hearing the sound of children laughing and playing; when they investigate the sound they are unable to trace there source. Several years ago on a ghost tour a parent noticed their 10 year old son talking to himself when asked who he was talking to the boy said he was talking to a boy called James who lived there.A patient, a woman who was a big chain smoker was thrown out of a window to her death by another patient who wanted her cigarettes. Because the woman was Jewish her body was not allowed to be moved until a Rabbi had seen it, so her body was left lying out the front of the hospital dead for 2 days whilst the Rabbi made the trip up from Melbourne. Her ghost has been seen on the spot where she fell, by several witnesses over the last decade. The photo on the right was taken of the window from which she was thrown, an orb is clearly visable in the photo.
    The gardens of Beechworth have long been subdivided into allotments; those who live nearby have seen the ghost of a man, wearing a green woolen jacket. The ghost is thought to be of a gardener named Arthur who worked the gardens for many years earning ten shillings a week. He wore his green jacket in winter and summer and no one could persuade him to remove it. After Arthur died, it was discovered why Arthur had been secretly storing his wages in the seam of his jacket. When the nurses opened it, they found 140 pounds, over four years of his wages, hidden inside.

There's one final and grizzly tale of a patient who disappeared, despite efforts by staff to locate him. Several weeks later his location was discovered when the resident dog Max, was found chewing a leg near the gate house at the grounds entry. A second search found the body up in a tree; the body had decomposed so badly that his leg had come off. The ghost of the patient has been seen near the entrance to the Asylum, the sightings have often been in the early hours of the morning.