Published on: October 27, 2025, 07:21h.
Updated on: October 26, 2025, 09:11h.
This Halloween season, what better way to celebrate than by exposing yet another of the many dubious exhibits curated at Zak Bagans’ Haunted Museum located in downtown Las Vegas?
The Cursed Guitar
A guitar acquired by Bagans made headlines in March 2021. This was the moment when Newsweek amplified Bagans’ assertion—that this guitar was responsible for a teen’s death—without any fact-checking.
Bagans reports that a 13-year-old boy, allegedly involved in Satanic worship, met his demise via this guitar in 1979, specifically on Halloween, naturally.
Bagans procured the “Cursed Guitar” from a mysterious individual named “Merribaker” via the online marketplace Reverb.com. The listing from 2021 claimed the boy’s untimely death due to the guitar remains unsolved; he was allegedly found lifeless on his bed with the guitar resting across his body, reportedly electrocuted—despite it being an acoustic model!
Grieving over this tragedy, the boy’s mother supposedly handed the guitar over to Merribaker, who then claimed it emitted “spooky, discordant melodies” on its own, vanished from closets only to reappear on beds, and even levitated from a trash can in which he tried—and failed—to dispose of it.
It’s at this point in the tale that your close friend, to whom you warned about the campfire location, appears from the woods, covered in ticks and sporting a claw.
Bagans shared with Newsweek—which we believe used to be recognized as a credible publication: “I was astounded by the backstory of the guitar and how the seller acquired it directly from the boy’s mother. That’s what motivated me to purchase it immediately.”
To add more absurdity to this tale than one could foully imagine, Bagans claimed he shelled out $666 for the guitar. (Cue sinister laughter!)
Questionable Foundations
When Skeptical Inquirer reporter Kenny Biddle tracked down the enigmatic Merribaker in May 2021, he discovered that he was, in fact, a truthful, working musician named Eddie Merribaker.
Biddle had legitimate curiosity about why there’s no record in any available newspaper database about an alleged Satanic teen’s death via electrocution in Halloween 1979 due to his guitar.
Such a sensational story would have been prime for The New York Post to headline during the height of heavy metal hysteria.
He then inquired of Merribaker regarding the provenance that convinced Bagans to purchase the guitar.
Merribaker disclosed three key points:
- “I never provided proof regarding the validity of the tale.”
- “He never asked for any proof.”
- “If he had requested proof, I wouldn’t have been able to offer even a sliver of evidence about the guitar’s alleged haunted characteristics (for reasons I believe are quite clear).”
Completely Misguided
Similarly to the museum’s infamous “Dybbuk Box”—which Bagans proclaims as “the world’s most haunted item” but is merely an ordinary wine cabinet he acquired from a yard sale by a clever horror novelist—the “Cursed Guitar” crumbles under straightforward fact-checking.
(The screenwriter, Kevin Mannis, confessed to crafting an eBay listing for the Dybbuk Box that was so compelling it secured him a consulting role in “The Possession,” a 2012 horror film directed by Sam Raimi.)
While Bagans insists he curates genuinely haunted artifacts, it’s primarily spectral fiction. He relies on a continuous influx of ghostly narratives to fuel the financial success of his dubious museum and career.
In Bagans’ self-produced 2018 documentary, “Demon House,” a title card boasts him as “one of the leading experts on ghosts and demonology,” an astonishing claim for someone who has never conducted a single study.
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