The Black Hand and the Red Spot

Two stories from the same body, usually told back to back: the black hand that reaches out from under the bed or out of the wall, and the red spot on the ceiling that grows every night until it swallows the people living there. Both work the same way — the threat comes not from outside but from the flat itself, from the furniture and the walls, which is the one place a child cannot get away from. Folklorists have recorded them in many variants across the Soviet Union since the 1960s, and they remain the most durable layer of children's urban folklore.

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The Dybbuk Box

A wine cabinet listed on eBay in 2003 with a long description: supposedly it had belonged to a Holocaust survivor and contained a possessing spirit from Jewish folklore. The lot was resold repeatedly, each owner adding fresh misfortunes to the listing, the auction spread across the internet and eventually became a Hollywood film. In 2021 the original seller, the writer Kevin Mannis, publicly acknowledged that the whole thing was fiction he had written — a literary project that accidentally became a modern legend.