A Curious Cabinet

out dancing. But sometimes we get lucky and the people we spend our lives with become a part of our passions as well, and in doing so, we get closer to them and the hobbies that bring us so much joy, Like Victor Martin. Victor lived in a farmhouse on the Isle of Shepey, off the northern coast of Kent, England. He loved trains so much so that in nineteen twenty three he got a job running Warden Central Station in London. The station was part of the Midland main Line, which

he also helped build. He would work on it a little each day with the help of his first wife. She saw his love for trains and joined him to construct this pre war line with their own hands. It's unclear how long it took to complete, since at some point during the construction their marriage ended. Sometime later, Victor got remarried to a woman named Louise. Her father had been a railroad station master at Saint Pancras, so she was quite familiar with the concept of running a train line,

but building one that was new and still. Together, they completed their project and pretty soon engines were traveling between the two stations throughout the day. During the holiday season, they would even add extra cars to carry the additional Christmas cards and letters to Santa that filled the mailbags each year. The line ran between Saint Pancras and Saint Albans, a distance of about twenty four miles. This was a pretty difficult stretch of terrain for two people to build

by themselves, but they didn't mind. They only needed about a miles worth of track anyway. Plus it helped that all of the people, trees, livestock, and even the sky were fake because this train line, with its five hundred engines and cars, was only a scale model.

were full sized. Inside this shed was an elaborate control room, like one that you might see managing the actual train lines. Both Louise and Victor had their own signal boxes, complete with dials, switches and light up boards to indicate where on the tracks the trains were at all times. This was necessary because eventually the model outgrew the shed. Victor and Louise were only able to see the trains when they passed by their signal boxes in the tiny building.

Outside were yards of track and tunnels that stretched across their half acre of land. To the couple, though these trains weren't heading through grass and past the trees in their garden. They were zooming through Leicester and Manchester, collecting passengers and hauling freight to complete the effect of running an actual train line. Victor and Louise would wake up every morning, don their uniforms and tend to their duties as station masters of their model system for hours at

a time. Their schedule adhere to the same timetable used by the Saint Pancras station before World War Two. They also made sure to keep up to date with current events. When the docks would strike, they would add more freight cars to haul the additional loads, just as the real line had done, and they modified it again in nineteen fifty six. That year, the Egyptian government nationalized the Suez Canal, ripping it from the grasp of the British and French

company in charge of it. Victor and Louise stayed up all night running secret troop trains to transport military personnel as part of the Suez Crisis. If it was happening in real life, it was happening in victor shed Sadly, Victor eventually had to reduce his schedule to once a

week after Louise died in nineteen eighty six. With both of them gone, today, we're unsure of what happened to the model, but hopefully someone has kept it intact and is running the trains with the same passion and enthusiasm as Victor and Louise had done for all those years. Depending on how old you are, you might or might not remember the days of the early Internet. I'm talking twenty years ago, when MySpace was all the rage, Amazon was just a bookstore, and eBay was the prime destination

for online shopping. Today's story starts on that bidding website. In two thousand and three, a man named Jason Haxton hunched over his computer, placing bids on an item he desperately wanted to win. The price kept climbing, though, and Jason kept offering more money. He put up two hundred and eighty dollars and he finally won. A few days later, a box arrived on Jason's porch. Inside was an antique Spanish wine cabinet. It was made out of dark wood and was big enough to fit maybe two or three

bottles of wine. The front had two doors with images of grapes on them. Below that was a small drawer. Now, if you're wondering why Jason was so set on buying this curious cabinet, it's because it came with a mystery attached. You see, the eBay listing gave clear instructions to whoever won the auction. It said, in so many words, do not ever opened this cabinet, And well, curiosity killed the cat right. The first thing Jason did was open it up.

What he found inside was confusing. There was a goblet, a few pennies from the nineteen twenties, a dried up rose, a candlestick holder, a granite statue engraved with letters written in Hebrew, and last, but certainly not least, two locks of hair tied together with a string, Which would have been strange enough, But what happened next is way weirder. According to Jason, anytime he touched the box, he was struck with this terrible pain, like a knife going into

his stomach. He began having nightmares about an old woman trying to hurt him. His eyes became bloodshot, he broke out in hives. But as scary as those symptoms sound, Jason wasn't entirely surprised. It turns out something similar had happened to the person that he bought the wine cabinet from. The cellar had been very forthright about the box's history. He'd said that he had originally perched at an estate sale for a Jewish woman who lived to be one

hundred and three years old. The woman's granddaughter sold him the box but told him to never ever open it. But just like Jason, he couldn't help but look inside. Shortly after opening the box, his hair started falling out, his home became filled with a terrible odor, insects started crawling all over his walls. To this guy, only one explanation made sense. The cabinet was haunted by an evil

spirit and it was wreaking havoc on his life. Naturally, he didn't want the cabinet in his house anymore, so he listed it on eBay under the title Diebook Haunted Jewish wine cabinet box. Now in Jewish folklore, adebook is a malicious spirit. So the eBay listing literally said that this item was evil, and Jason bought it anyway. Apparently, he wanted to see if this supposed haunting was real, and after suffering his own spate of odd symptoms, he

was very much convinced that it was. He didn't want to keep the cabinet, but he also so didn't want to unleash its power on anybody else. So he consulted with scientists and rabbis, who told him that he should lock the cabinet in a box lined with gold to neutralize its effects. Now I know all of this is beginning to seem pretty far fetched, but Jason claims the golden box worked. He stopped having nightmares and his hives

went away. Case closed, right well, No, Jason started doing interviews about his ghostly experience, and next thing he knew, Hollywood producers were offering to buy the rights to his story. He agreed, and the Die Book Box saga was adapted into a twenty twelve horror film called Possession, which is about a young girl who buys an antique box at a yard sale then becomes possessed by the evil spirit inside.

At some point, the star of the Ghosted Ventures TV show, Zach Baggins, caught wind of the creepy cabinet and he managed to convince Jason to give it to him. Baggins put the Die Book Box on display at his Haunted Museum in Las Vegas in twenty eighteen. He took his friend, musician Post Malone to the museum to check out the box, maybe to try to freak him out. Baggins touched the box and then touched post malone, and you know what

after that, Post became plagued by bad luck. Two tires on his private jet blew out during takeoff, armed intruders broke into his house, and he got into a car crash in his rolls Royce And I know, maybe it's all a coincidence, or some story drummed up for fame and fortune, or perhaps that weird wine cabinet really does have some kind of supernatural power. Either way, if you happen to find yourself in its presence, I would suggest you avoid opening it and trying to find out for yourself.

I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at Theworldoflore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.