This movie was exactly what I expected it to be, a cheap sequel with a somewhat interesting plot twist of devil worship and torture. The writers knocked out the infamous Red Room and substituted it with growling vents, which I thought was very stupid and cliche. If I had gone to the movie theater to watch the Amityville Horror remake, I would have been disappointed. The bonuses on the DVD make this movie worth renting.

I enjoyed watching the bonus segment entitled Supernatural Homicide. The former police chief and medical examiner were interviewed, as well as psychic Lorraine Warren. While the police chief refuted Ronald DeFeo’s claim about demon possession and ghosts, he is haunted by the crime scene. Lorraine, on the other hand, believes that the house is possessed by evil and that DeFeo wasn’t solely responsible for the murders.

In Kabbalah and European Jewish folklore, a dybbuk is a malicious and possessing spirit believed to be the dislocated soul of a dead person who committed a serious transgression while they were alive. The dybbuk attaches itself to the body of a living person who faces the same obstacles as they when they were alive.

According to belief, there are good as well as bad dybbuks. The good ones act as spirit guides to help the person through their life’s trials, while the bad ones inflict the same pain and suffering on their “host” as they experienced in life. In some cases, they attach themselves to objects.

During September of 2001, I attended an estate sale in Portland Oregon. The items liquidated at this sale were from the estate of a woman who had passed away at the age of 103. A grand-daughter of the woman told me that her grandmother had been born in Poland where she grew up, married, raised a family, and lived until she was sent to a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. She was the only member of her family who survived the camp. Her parents, brothers, a sister, husband, and two sons and a daughter were all killed. She survived the camp by escaping with some other prisoners and somehow making her way to Spain where she lived until the end of the war. I was told that she acquired the small wine cabinet listed here in Spain and it was one of only three items that she brought with her when she immigrated to the United States. The other two items were a steamer trunk, and a sewing box.

I purchased the wine cabinet, along with the sewing box and some other furniture at the estate sale. After the sale, I was approached by the woman’s granddaughter who said, I see you got the dibbuk box. She was referring to the wine cabinet. I asked her what a dibbuk box was, and she told me that when she was growing up, her grandmother always kept the wine cabinet in her sewing room. It was always shut, and set in a place that was out of reach. The grandmother always called it the dibbuk box. When the girl asked her grandmother what was inside, her grandmother spit three times through her fingers said, a dibbuk, and keselim. The grandmother went on to tell the girl that the wine cabinet was never, ever, to be opened.

The above excerpt is from the story of The Dybbuk Box, a fascinating story about an old wine box that is allegedly haunted by an evil spirit and a priest. The second owner of this box was a man named Kevin, who experienced a string of nasty events after he bought it at the grandmother’s estate sale in 2001. The last straw came when he began experiencing nightmares of an old hag that would beat him up. He’d wake up and find bruises all over his body.

After his family and friends related the same nightmare he had, he decided to get rid of the box. This box was put up for sale on Ebay, where a college student bought it and experienced his own string of bad luck. He put it up for auction in 2004. The third owner delved into the box’s history, which took him back to the pre-WWII era, when seances were a hot fad in Europe.

I have no way of knowing if this story is true or clever storytelling, but I found myself fascinated nonetheless. One thing hasn’t set right with me, after reading these stories. If this box was so evil, why did Kevin and the second buyer put it up on Ebay so it can harm someone else? That leads me to believe that this is another one of those urban legends.

For reasons unknown, dolls seem to attract spirits. More troubling, dolls seem to become easily imbued with the spirit of the child to whom it most closely connected. And there is ample evidence to at least provoke suspicion that some dolls stay connected via this childhood link for years, even generations after their childhood playmate has grown to adulthood or succumbed to early death.

Other dolls are created for the enjoyment of the collector, and although they are never “played with” in the traditional sense they still can become objects of devotion and even obsession. Any avid doll collector will tell you that it can be hard to pass up the opportunity to purchase or obtain a beautiful, desirable doll. These dolls are no less loved and the emotional connection is no less intense; often these collectible dolls are the objects of the most terrifying haunted events.

Author Anne Rice is one collector of such magnificent dolls and they can be seen on display at her Doll Museum in New Orleans. Once the site of the St. Elizabeth’s Orphanage, the building now houses Rice’s vast collection and other artistic works. It is interesting to note, however, that Rice once stated that she moved her doll collection to the centralized museum location because it basically bothered her to have them around her house. Prior to the opening of the museum, when she and husband Stan Rice were making one last walk-through, Rice is quoted as having said she “wouldn’t like to be locked in here all night with all of them [the dolls].” Not only are most of the dolls allegedly haunted, they are now housed in a verifiably haunted location.

One of my aunts has always had a strong aversion to dolls, stating that they “creeped her out.” Out of all the dolls on the market, the ones she liked the least were the ones whose eyelids would open and close. I thought this was a simple phobia, much like the phobias of heights or spiders.

Over the course of my life, I’ve watched several horror movies where a child’s dolls or toys would spring to life after their owners met a violent death. These playthings would exact their revenge against the killer in a gruesome and/or creepy way. Possessed dolls were a product of fiction, I’d always thought until I started reading true stories about such things.

One such story is called Robert the Haunted Doll, which is about the doll of a wealthy and eccentric painter named Robert Eugene (called Gene) Otto. Apparently, this doll, named Robert, could move around on its own, glare at passing children from the turret window, and spark dark and violent mood swings in its owner.

You’ll find this story in the above link, along with other creepy tales of haunted dolls.

Synopsis

Or at least, if you believe the stories that have been told for the last fifty-odd years, a reasonable facsimile of him did. It is a story that has been told for three generations and has inspired books, films and documentaries. It is, without question, the greatest unsolved mystery of St. Louis and one of the most perplexing puzzles of the paranormal in American history. But is the story so mysterious because of the events that occurred — or because of the bizarre mixture of fact and fantasy that it has become? The story of the 1949 St. Louis Exorcism has become a confusing and convoluted mess over the years. There are so many theories, legends, tales and counter-stories that have been thrown into the mix that it’s become very hard to separate what it truth and what is fiction with this case.

Can this new book finally make sense of it all?

Get more information about the book at Prairie Ghosts