By CWS

Rapper Post Malone has been having some big problems lately. The private plane he was onboard had to make an emergency landing after blowing two landing gear tires on take off. Then he was in a serious car accident that destroyed his Rolls Royce. “You can’t fuckin’ kill me, motherfuckers,” he joked with paparazzi at the scene. Then his previous residence was violently burgled, the new tenants pistol-whipped, $20K stolen, all while the robbers yelled “Where’s Post Malone?” Malone had recently moved to a new home, escaping again what could have been a deadly fate.

These three events led Spin to publishing an article titled Is Post Malone Getting Final Destinationed? My thoughts exactly.

If you missed the early 2000s teen horror thriller Final Destination, and its subsequent sequels, the basic plot is this: high school student has a vision of a plan crash while he is waiting to take off. He freaks out, starts yelling that the plane is going to crash and is removed from the flight with several others also getting off with him. The plane indeed explodes in midair, right before their eyes, and those that chose to leave the flight are haunted by Death with a capitol D, the deaths they all avoided, the deaths that were fated to happen. Death comes after them, of course, in outrageous, creative, and graphic ways as the teens try to figure out how to break the curse.

So with Post’s three near-death experiences, some have been wondering what in the spiritual realm is going on here?

Another hypothesis is that he may be cursed not by Death with a capitol D, but by a malevolent ghost that latched onto him while he was hanging out with paranormal investigator Zak Bagans, star of Ghost Adventures. Zak released a video of Posty inside his Las Vegas haunted museum which claims to give “everyone a chance to experience the spine-chilling vibe of the spirit world.”

In the video, beer-sipping Post and Zak stand near a wine box allegedly containing something called a “dybbuk,” a malicious spirit of Jewish folklore. Zak touches the box and Post puts a hand on his shoulder. Then the two seem to experience something that makes them hurry from the room, which Zak claims was a dark figure Post saw that then followed them from the room. According to mythology, the dybbuk is the dislocated soul of someone who died, like a ghost. It can possess people, attempting to accomplish a goal it was unable to in its life.

The haunted wine box was originally auctioned on eBay by a man named Kevin Mannis, who also penned an accompanying horror story to go with it. The story records the apparent paranormal activity that the author witnessed surrounding the object. It was bought in 2003 from an estate sale of a Holocaust survivor, who had purchased the box in Spain before immigrating to the US. The granddaughter of the family insisted that Kevin take the box, telling him that her grandmother never opened it because a dybbuk lived inside it.

When Kevin opened the box he found a two locks of hair bound with string, one blonde and one dark brown. He also found pennies from the 1920s, a small golden win goblet, a dried rosebud, a candle holder, and a small statue engraved with the word “Shalom.”

As the days passed, Kevin said he began to experience horrific nightmares of an old hag, and so did anyone who stayed at his house. The day that Kevin gave his mother the antique box as a gift, she suffered a stroke. Those who have come in contact with the box say it smells of cat urine and jasmine. A student who owned the box after Kevin claimed that all the lights burned out in his house and his hair began to fall out as soon as he bought the box. The student sold it to Jason Haxton, who wrote a book called The Dibbuk Box about the subsequent health problems he developed: coughing up blood, hives, and head-to-toe welts. A Rabbi helped Haxton seal the spirit back inside the box, which was then donated to Zak’s museum where it lives to this day.

Skeptics say that with haunted objects like the dybbuk box, those who already know that the object is alleged to be haunted will be more likely to look for proof, attributing any sicknesses or unexplained happenings to the object when those things wouldn’t have been noticed as abnormal prior. It’s called confirmation bias.

On the other end of the reality spectrum, a ghost expert has said that even though Post didn’t touch the box himself, Zak did—and Post had his hand on his shoulder, That moment of contact was enough to complete a kind of spirit-circuit. Doesn’t seem fair, does it? Post definitely seemed to be afraid enough of the box to steer clear from actually touching it.

Bagan’s calls the box “the most haunted object in the world,” and it also inspired the 2012 horror film The Possession.

Of course, Posty is likely not cursed by an old Jewish ghost. And likely he is not being followed around by the vengeful spirit of Death with a captiol D because he avoided his original plane crash fate. Likely, the rapper has just had a bout of bad luck. Lets hope it lets up soon.