Polybius Update: Likely Connection To 2003 Dybbuk Box Hoax

Steve Jobs wrote, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them by looking backwards.” He said this in reference to how one discovers their own personal path to success in life, but his wisdom is applicable to how one investigates any mystery, really, since the art of solving most enigmas begins with what happened first.

Over a decade ago I led the first real boots on the ground investigation into The Polybius urban legend, a science fictionesque conspiracy theory alleging that a highly addictive arcade game named “Polybius” had wreaked havoc on Portland, Oregon, teenagers in Fall of 1981. A subplot of the later version of the legend claims that the game was a government op, ala straight out of some Project MK-Ultra delusion, and that both the FBI and regional police were involved in conducting mind-control experiments on children via video arcade games.

If you’ve read the pulp fiction novel, “Arcade” by Peter Maxxe (1984) or “Little Brother” by John McNeil (1983), “Demon Seed” by Deen Koontz (1973) or “Colossus” by Dennis Feltham Jones (1966), you’ll understand that the trope of “rogue AI/computer technology threatening humanity” is a very old one. Polybius is, actually, an amalgamation of all of them.

Just briefly for those who aren’t aware of The Polybius Legend: According to a 1990s post from online message board Usenet, Polybius was an arcade game that produced psychoactive effects on players as well as caused a host of physical and psychological ailments. The game was supposedly contained in a plain, unmarked, black upright arcade cabinet (just like in Robert Maxxe’s 1984 novel “Arcade”) and the name “Polybius” appeared only on the game’s attract mode. Since I grew up in Portland, Oregon, and had never heard of this legend before, and neither had anyone else I knew for that matter, I was intrigued. And since the legend claims that Polybius had first appeared in a neighborhood that I spent a lot of time in from 1981-2004, surely, I and others had heard about it, right? Nope. Not a single one of us.

But no wonder. The game never existed. It’s a hoax.

But it never bothered me that the whole legend/conspiracy theory of Polybius was only a myth. The Pacific Northwest is a land of myths and legends. In fact, the entire area from Northern California to Vancouver Island in British Columbia is steeped in tales of ghosts, and UFO sightings; of wraith-women who haunt meadows and lakes and, of course, The Bandage Man, the dog-eating restless spirit who terrorizes a strip of road along the Oregon coast. This is the land of Bigfoot and D.B. Cooper, of lost Spanish gold and pirate treasure buried on Oregon’s beaches hence the reference to it in the film, “Goonies” (1985), filmed in Astoria, Oregon. This is the place where extraterrestrials are believed to shine lights over campgrounds in the forests of Skamania County (I’ve actually seen this phenomena), and where vampires and werewolves are rumored to maintain ancient battles lines in the rainforests of Washington State as referenced in the film, “Twilight” (2008). In fact, parts of Twilight were filmed less than a few miles from my home.

So, we’re used to mythology working its way into the fabric of our region’s cultural identity, and we love that it does. We can go for months without seeing much sunlight here during our endlessly rainy winters, so it’s cool that others admire our darkness. We still have deep wilderness here, too, unknown areas where few men have stepped or even dared to. There are wide open and exceedingly lush green spaces with romantic yet brooding isolation here. I suppose our legends are comfort from the dark and the unknown, and like the previous generations before us, folklore binds us together and others to us. Polybius, a mysterious mind-controlling arcade game, fits into the funky dystopian and paranoid pathos of Portland whose arcades of The 80s once were the focus of police who did everything they could to shut them down. The Polybius Myth and urban legend seems to be tailor-made for Portland, by someone who was from Portland.

Ironically, I titled my first article on Polybius “Reinvestigating Polybius” because I’d assumed others had investigated it long before me. But when I put boots on the ground in the Spring of 2011 and began tracing the story back to its alleged beginnings in 1981, and then forward in time and back again, I realized much to my astonishment that no one had. At the time all that made up the Polybius legend on the internet in 2011 was a handful of overly reiterated posts with zero investigative work attached.

Truth be told, if someone had known where to look, like a local like me would have and did, they’d have found that three major talking points in the original urban legend are actually true:

• Arcade game(s) in plain black cabinets were an average occurrence for “test games” in 1981 and was not an unusual sighting at all
• Two children were inadvertently injured in a Portland area arcade in 1981
• Police and FBI raids and surveillance did occur at several arcades and bars in The Pacific Northwest between 1981 and 1984

So, a series of real and perfectly average events happened in Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington that fit the Polybius legend’s storyline exactly sans the creative storytelling regarding “mind control”. Once you identify the sources of the original story you can then easily deduce that repeated retellings of these events over the decades had transformed these simple facts into a fanciful urban legend. This legend fit perfectly into the burgeoning new culture of The 90s internet chat rooms which was where the Polybius urban legend first launched in the late 90s on Usenet, an online message board.

Over the next 15 years the legend would grow to include reports of “men in black” delivering, servicing and removing mysterious data from the game which was stored on a hidden device inside the game. Scores of people would claim that they had seen or played the game although I’m confident they did not. But the most interesting person to latch onto the Polybius crazy train was a man called, Steven Roach.

In 2006 via CoinOp.org Steven Roach would shake things up further by posting a bizarre manifesto claiming that he had worked for the company who allegedly created Polybius. I debunked all of Steven Roach’s claims as well as revealed his true identity which linked him to having been employed instead by WWASPS (World Wide Association of Specialty Schools), the same child behavioral modification outfit who Paris Hilton claims abused her. No kidding.

Although Steven Roach had been the most prolific of Polybius’ hoaxsters post-90s Usenet days, he could not have been the originator of the original 90s urban legend. He was only a mimic who’d added on to it. Another editor, if you will, like so many who would continue to alter the urban legend over the years. Due to the original hoax including vintage details that only a Portlander would know, the original hoaxer had to be someone with ties to Portland in The 80s. The problem was I didn’t know who that person was, let alone even know where to look for him…until now.

This past October, while I was getting in the spirit of Halloween by watching a horror flick, I saw a film that proved rather serendipitous. The film is, “The Possession”, released in 2012, about an evil spirit locked in a box who can take over the mind and body of anyone who opens it. Supposedly, the film was based on a true story which just so happens to have started as an internet urban legend that came out of Portland, Oregon. The man who created that urban legend in 2001 was former Portlander, Keven Mannis.

Suddenly, lightbulbs began firing up in my head at once. Could this be the guy?

Keven Mannis: Master Storyteller

You know the moment you speak to actor/producer Kevin Mannis that you’re about to take a walk on the wild side, but in a real good way. In fact, if you were having a mellow and somewhat boring evening, and then Keven Mannis calls you, better wake your ass up because it’s party time whether you’re ready for it or not.

Amusing, sweet-natured, highly intelligent, and boldly articulate, Mannis is the kind of conversationalist who makes you feel and taste whatever subject he’s talking about. Stories are like meals to him, ones that he doesn’t mind sharing. There is an air of the traditions of the ancient Greeks about him, who were made infamous for their wild tales of Gods and Monsters, while passing a jug of slightly hallucinogenic wine around to keep the audience focused. Mannis’ stories are pure “conversational food”. He tells stories that feed the soul by blowing your mind first.

Like I’ve said, Mannis is a master in the arts of conversation. But he’s also a master at something else: Internet hoaxes or what he refers to as “interactive storytelling”.

Mannis was interested in the arts and entertainment fields from an early age. As a teenager he was cast in the cult classic Student Bodies (1981), the first to parody teen horror movies. It doesn’t have anything to do with Polybius, but it shows that Mannis got an early start in innovative concepts and projects.

In 2001, Mannis via eBay created the internet myth The Dybbuk Box which, like the urban legend of Polybius, became a national sensation and the obsession of paranormal fans around the world. Mannis’ Dybbuk Box Myth created such a shockwave that a sensationalistic book was written about it about it, and Sam Raimi (Evil Dead, Army of Darkness, Spiderman) based his film, The Possession (2012) off of it. This led to thousands of YouTubers rushing out to thrift shops across the nation to buy late 1960s and 1950s Mediterranean-style wooden after-shave and candy boxes to construct bogus Dybbuk Boxes out of so they could thrill their gullible viewers. Many of these oftentimes unintentionally comical hoax-videos racked up millions of views but the creation of hoax Dybbuk Boxes has destroyed hundreds of beautiful antique candy and cologne boxes in the process. Not cool.

As reported and researched by Charles Moss‘ in his exceptional piece for Input, “Finally, The Truth Behind the ‘Haunted’ Dybbuk Box Can Be Revealed”, a clear picture of how The Dybbuk Box hoax was pulled off has been entirely disclosed.

According to Moss’ research, Kevin Mannis’ story begins with a 2001 visit to the estate sale of a deceased Jewish woman who was a holocaust survivor. At the estate sale, Mannis bought an old wooden liquor cabinet box. As he was leaving, the daughter of the deceased woman stopped him and remarked, “Oh, I see you bought that Dybbuk Box“ and then proceeded to tell him that her mother believed that an evil spirit (in Jewish lore a “dybbuk”) lived inside the box and that if he opened it bad things would happen to him.

Unconcerned with superstitions, Mannis took the box to his shop and cleaned it up. Inside he found human hair, some candle sticks and old coins. Later he gave it to his mother for her birthday. When she opened it, she immediately had a series of strokes. So, Mannis took the Dybbuk Box back to his shop, tried to give it away, but each time he did it was brought back with complaints that the box was “evil” and caused people to have nightmares, bad luck and/or a host of other difficulties. However, the “bad luck” turned deadly one day when the brother of one of Mannis’ employees accidentally knocked the Dybbuk Box over. Soon after the man committed suicide, then another employee began reporting poltergeist activity in Mannis’ shop.

In 2003, Mannis tried to sell the Dybbuk Box on eBay. In grand theatrical fashion, he included a a long disclaimer detailing the evil and terrifying things it had done to him and others. People went wild over the story and the fascination with it had very long legs:

• First, a college kid in Missouri buys the Dybbuk Box, catches bad vibes off it, then flips it on eBay (for a profit) to local museum curator, Jason Haxton, who knows a good story when he sees it.
  
• Jason Haxton writes and publishes the book, The Dybbuk Box and it’s a hit.
  
• The book is made into a movie by producer Sam Raimi called, The Possession in 2012. Both Haxton and Mannis become advisors to the film.
  
• Haxton sells The Dybbuk Box to The Travel Channel’s “Ghost Adventures” host Zak Bagins who puts it on display in his Haunted Museum in Las Vegas.

In 2015, and perhaps because Mannis began to realize that Haxton and others might have taken too much advantage with a story that initially belonged to him (Ya think?), admitted that it had all been a hoax that he created in the early 2000’s. On October 24, 2015, via Facebook on Haunt Me @hauntmeofficial/TV show, he confessed to creating The Dybbuk Box Hoax:

As mentioned earlier, in 2021, Mannis gave a full interview to investigative journalist and researcher Charles Moss and spilled even more secrets and details, including that he had made the initial physical Dybbuk Box himself and that his employees helped him do it by donating locks of their hair to go inside it as well as backing up the hoax with affirmative statements.

So, do I think Mannis created The Polybius Urban Legend? I don’t know for certain, but I think there’s a good chance that he did.

Polybius vs. The Dybbuk Box: A Comparison of The Legends

The Dyybuk Box Myth and The Polybius Urban Legend have a lot in common. Let’s examine those commonalities:

Like all “Pandora myths”, many of the factors are the same:

• The object is usually a box
• The object is usually given to another by a woman (not present in The Polybius Myth)
• When the box is opened bad things happen/evil spirts come out/possession occurs

Pandora myths, an unfortunate trope created by stone age misogyny that believed that women cannot be trusted in either body or soul and/or were practitioners of “witchcraft”, can also include houses (ghosts are often female in films), cars (Christine also female) and anything else that is a container in principle, including Eve’s Apple.

• Polybius is a box. A big, black box
  
• You open the box by playing the game. Its dark magic is held in the program, on the pcb, inside “the box”
  
• A coin provides you the key to unlocking it
  
• When you “open” it bad things happen to you

The list of physical ailments allegedly caused by The Dybbuk Box fit The Polybius Myth as well. This includes:

• Suicide ideation; suicide; homicide ideation

• Obsession over the object

• Sleep disturbances; nightmares, insomnia

• Neurological disturbances: strokes, seizures, headaches, basal migraines, temporary blindness, neuropathy, memory loss

• Hallucinations, both visual and auditory, feelings of not being in control of one’s own body, sensations of being “possessed” or controlled by the object through programming

• Nausea, vomiting, loss of consciousness

The legends are essentially the same in many ways. With Polybius, the legend claims you are “programmed”. With The Dybbuk Box, you get “possessed”. Possession/Programming -not much difference between the two. The point is you are being taken by force by a perceived unseen entity.

How Mannis Connects to The Polybius Urban Legend

• Mannis lived in Portland during The 80s
  
• Mannis was a skateboarder who knew the arcade scene in an around Lloyd Center the location where the Polybius urban legend begins in 1981.
  
• In later years, and as an adult, Mannis’ place of business was located less than a mile from Lloyd Center.
  
• In 2001, when the second wave of Polybius internet activity began online, Mannis was laying the initial groundwork for The Dybbuk Box Hoax

I realize that these points are merely supposition and in no way can they be accepted as concrete evidence that Mannis created The Polybius Urban Legend. However, we do know that he created the “other Portland legend”, The Dybbuk Box.

Over the phone, I asked Kevin Mannis point-blank if he created the Polybius urban legend and his response to me was rather cryptic.

“I might have. I do remember something like that, but I don’t remember the particulars. The Dybbuk Box was my focus. See, not all stories online reach people right away. Some take years to sink in and by the time they do they’ve been added to by so many others that they’re barely recognizable from what you initially put out there. Urban legends require a group effort. Like, I recall some video game thing I did a time ago, but I don’t really recall exactly what it was.”

Fair enough.
It’s not the answer I wanted, but I’ll take it.
Still, The Dybbuk Box and Polybius are too close in structure to convince me that Mannis didn’t create both or at least have something to do with some part of Polybius. I think he’s holding back information.

But like any deep subject, more research is needed. I’ll certainly keep digging.

Sources:
The Dybbuk Box by Jason Haxton
Charles Moss with Input Mag

My friends at Insert Coin Toys have some great Polybius merchandise, including this compact POLYBIUS replica for sale. Created as a power station, these units are also a fantastic addition to any game room or office just as a piece of art alone.