In Jewish folklore a dybbuk is a disembodied human spirit that, because of unfinished business or past sins, wanders restlessly until it finds a haven in the body of a living person.
The dybbuk was almost always the spirit of a Jewish man, who possessed or entered the person of a Jewish woman, often on the eve of her wedding. The word comes from the Hebrew dabaq, to cling or cleave to, and started to appear in the sixteenth century.
The first published account of an exorcism of a dybbuk was published in Basel in 1602. Others appeared in the 1660s and in 1696.
As with a lot of folklore it has been suggested that the dybbuk legend was created as a way to explain certain illnesses like hysteria, seizures, or Tourette syndrome. But everything old is new again. I found MANY listings like this on ebay:
Apparently these have been sold on ebay for more than 20 years, claiming to have exorcised dybbuks inside. There's actually nothing in the old folklore about dybbuk boxes. This is something that's been added in modern times. And that's how folklore grows.
