I was at a very bad place in my life.  I’d been unceremoniously dumped by my boyfriend of two years, my family was a thousand miles away, and a very negative spirit had attached himself to me.

I wouldn’t learn how bad he was until I made the trek to Maine to spend Thanksgiving with my paranormal friends. The minute I walked into the house, the psychic of our group told me that I had a spirit with me and that he was bad.

Really bad.

He was a soul collector.

She said that when she looked at me, she saw hundreds, if not thousands, of spirits behind him. They were lined up, row upon row, following this spirit everywhere he went. And they looked sick, as if they’d died of some sort of tragic disease.

My blood turned to ice.

The place we investigated was the site of an old tuberculosis hospital.  How could this have happened?

I am always very respectful of spirits when I investigate. I always ask them if they need help and never, ever provoke them just to get a response. Why would one of them follow me? It made no sense. Surely there were other people out there who were far more interesting.

That’s when I began to learn my fate in life.

I am a beacon.

People who are “sensitives” are able to sense spirits. Some just feel them move into the room, others have physical cues like a tingling on the back of their necks, or goose bumps that rise up on their arms. For me, the cue is actually physical. I hear them. I am clairaudient.

The tones move in, almost swooping down upon me. Some tones are high, some are low. As they move farther away, the tone grows softer. I’ve dealt with this ability all my life, but had recently been working with it on investigations. It was like having a new toy.

Unfortunately, like any muscle, once you begin flexing it and working with it, it grows stronger. It literally made me grow brighter in the spirit world. I must stand out like a bug light to a flock of moths.

She promised to help me with it and sent me on my way. It was a long drive home, hearing his signature tone in the car with me. I began to almost panic. How could I live like this, knowing someone very evil was lurking over my shoulder? How would I even begin to lie in bed and close my eyes? I was terrified.

I researched the subject as much as I could, learning that negative entities could actually collect other spirits. In some cultures, they are known to do this in order to achieve a higher rank in the spirit world.  I slept very little, often retreating to the couch in the living room, where it felt a little safer. One thing was for sure: my bedroom was a hotspot for spirit activity.

Every time I went in there, my ears would ring like crazy. I could feel the sensation of eyes glaring at me, could see the movements out of the corner of my eyes. I would feel soft touches on my face, feel my hair being gently caressed. Sometimes the covers would be pulled off of me. My cats got to the point where they would flee from the room with their ears flattened. I tried to pray. I burned sage. I recited the Saint Michael’s Prayer. I recited The Lord’s Prayer.  And I cried a lot.

Why me?

Seriously… This guy could have picked on any number of people. The place where I went to was popular with the paranormal world. Investigators were in and out of there on a regular basis. I touched base with the psychic again and she told me that it might have something to do with my overall well-being at the time of the investigation. When people are depressed, they are more susceptible to spirit attachments.  Great.  There’s nothing like being kicked when you’re already down.

The days passed by slowly. I couldn’t sleep and I couldn’t talk about it. My teenage son lived with me four days a week and I didn’t want to scare him with what was happening to me. But, on the other hand, I didn’t want to endanger him either.  What was I going to do?

The psychic told me that the soul collector wanted me. That he wasn’t ever letting me go.

Mine. He told her.

She said that he stood behind me constantly, whispering in my ear.

“Can you hear him?” she asked me.

Thankfully, I couldn’t. I could just hear the ear shattering buzz that followed me through all the hours of my day. Knowing that he was with me nearly sent me off the deep end. He followed me into the bathroom, was always lurking close as I showered and dressed, he hovered over my bed all night long, just inches away from my face. He wasn’t letting me go.

He wanted to cut me off from everyone and he started with my electronics. I suddenly began having issues with my internet connection, and then my cell phone. I would call someone and the line would become filled with static. Sometimes it wouldn’t work at all. My phone would be dead and nothing short of rebooting it would get it to work again. Not only was I terrified, I was being systematically cut off from the rest of the world – cut off from the help I desperately needed.

I kept reaching out to the psychic, asking if she could come to my house, offering to pay her way, offering anything I could think of to get this spirit off of me. Unfortunately, she was going through issues of her own with family and her job. She kept telling me she would help me, but as the days went by, I began to lose hope. I fell into an even deeper fugue that I just couldn’t emerge from.

I’ve always been a “bounce back quickly” kind of person. I’ve never suffered from depression or had anything truly get me down for more than a day. I usually wake up the next morning, determined to conquer what is ailing me. This time, there didn’t seem to be any hope.

I’m thankful I had great friends as I was going through this. Since they were also ghost hunters, I didn’t have to prove to them that I wasn’t crazy. They knew that what I was dealing with was real. They listened to my stories, offered me couches and spare beds to sleep on, and tried to help me figure it all out. But, no one had an answer for me.

And it just kept getting worse.

The ear ringing grew to a level where it nearly drove me insane. I started hearing louder thumps on my walls, and the nightmares intensified, leaving me on the brink of insanity.

One day while I was working, I could feel him looming over my shoulder, but I tried to ignore him as usual. “Don’t give him anything,” the psychic had warned me. But, he found other ways to get to me. Very suddenly, my cell phone came on and began playing music. I sat stock-still, just staring at it. In order to turn my phone on, I had to push and then slide a button. To get music to play, I would have had to scroll through the apps to find the music icon. The worst part of all of this was the song choice.

“Addicted” by Saving Abel.  It’s a song about a man who is emotionally and sexually addicted to a woman.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-ChyVXzbjA

It’s not the kind of song I wanted a soul collector serenading me with.

It hit me on two levels too, something I’m sure he was well aware of.  I used to burn my ex-boyfriend CDs, selecting songs that made me think about him. This was one of the songs on the last CD I burned for him and it brought me back to a place where I didn’t want to go.

Emotionally, I was simply shutting down. I didn’t sleep more than a few hours a night. I stopped eating. I lost fifteen pounds, which wasn’t something that has ever been easy for me, and I started smoking again. I’d given it up years earlier, but here I was lighting up again. I was quickly moving from depression to oppression, something I wouldn’t understand until I reached out to another friend, Michael.

Michael is a paranormal investigator and a friend. He’d been studying with the Catholic Church on exorcisms. He is now the investigator the church calls when they have a report of a demonic possession. He goes in to check it out. If he feels it’s a true possession, he calls in the church to perform an exorcism, which he also participates in.

Michael, his wife Nancy, and friend, Steven, were at my house the day after my call. They literally dropped everything to help me.

Michael’s background in the paranormal field is complex. His mother was an Irish witch, who helped many people during his childhood.  Besides being an experienced paranormal investigator, Michael is also a medium. He has the ability to sense and communicate with the spirit world. He walked around my house with his eyebrows raised. I knew he had found something, but he wasn’t telling me everything.

“You definitely have something here,” he told me. “But, we’ll deal with it.”

He burned sage, recited prayers, and sprayed holy water on every wall, window and mirror. He even blessed my pets. He told the spirit to leave, and then planted Saint Benedict medals at the four corners of my property. All was well for several days.

I got some of my energy back and began feeling like myself again. I was working on the first book of my paranormal trilogy, Lightning Strikes, at that time. I was down to the final edits and began making some real progress with it. I felt like I had my life back until he came back again.

The next time would prove to be even worse than the last.

He had me in his sights and he wasn’t letting me go.

Lucky me.

Joni Mayhan

Many of my experiences with the soul collector ended up in my paranormal trilogy, Angels of Ember. Lightning Strikes, the first book in the series, is available on Amazon.com for Kindle for only $2.99.

http://www.amazon.com/Lightning-Strikes-Angels-Trilogy-ebook/dp/B0085Q6SCK/ref=cm_cr-mr-img