A Curious Cabinet

Sometimes we seek out a curious hobby. Others have one dropped into their laps. Either way, today's tour will transport you in a weird and wonderful way.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of
the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all
of these amazing tales are right there on display, just
waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

(00:36):
It's not easy finding someone who shares our passions. One
person might love playing video games or building model airplanes,
while their partner would rather watch a movie or go
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,

(00:58):
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.

(01:19):
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,

(01:42):
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,

(02:03):
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.

Speaker 2 (02:25):
You see, Victor and his first wife had started building
it in the shed behind his house in the early
nineteen twenties. It was an exact replica of the Midland
main Line between Saint Pancras and Saint Alban stations as
it existed back in the nineteen thirties. But they didn't
stop at constructing a lifelike facsimile. They also treated it
like a real train station. On the property was a signal,

(02:47):
a crossing gates, and even a platform, all of which
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

(03:08):
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

(03:31):
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.

(03:54):
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

(04:17):
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

(04:40):
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

(05:03):
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

(05:26):
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

(05:49):
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,

(06:11):
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

(06:34):
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.

(06:55):
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,

(07:16):
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

(07:37):
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

(07:58):
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

(08:20):
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

(08:42):
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,

(09:03):
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

(09:24):
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.

(09:49):
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,

(10:12):
and you can learn all about it over at Theworldoflore
dot com. And until next time, stay curious.