Tag Archives: Just Joni

Ghostly Pajama Party – my night at the Curtis House Inn

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I knew the moment I walked into the room that someone was waiting for me.

It had been a long day and a long night already. It was just after midnight and we’d just come from a four hour presentation. Lorraine Warren, the celebrated medium, had hosted an event in nearby Monroe, Connecticut. My friend, Sandy, and I had made the two-and-a-half hour drive down from Massachusetts to be a part of it. Since driving back two-and-a-half hours wasn’t an option, she had reserved a room for us at the Curtis House Inn, in Woodbury.

Built in 1735 by Anthony Stoddard for his son Elikim, the house would open its doors as an inn in 1754. Originally, the house contained two stories, with the second floor sporting a massive ballroom. The ballroom was eventually converted into individual rooms, with a third floor being added in the early 1900’s. It has the honor of being the oldest continually opened inn in Connecticut.

Our room was in the carriage house, which is connected to the main house by a charming footbridge. Four rooms had been carved from the structure, with the main floor being used for storage. While the main house is known to be haunted, no one had reported any activity in the carriage house.

I was tired when we got to the room. Thoughts of investigating were far from my mind. I actually hadn’t given the accommodations much thought. I’d reserved our tickets for the Lorraine Warren event, while Sandy had handled the overnight reservations. A friend had recommended the inn because of its relative proximity to the Warren event.

It didn’t dawn on me that we were going to a haunted inn until I walked in the door. It was as if the room was filled with invisible guests already.

As an experienced and enthusiastic paranormal investigator, finding a haunted venue is usually very exciting to me, but at that moment it was the last thing I needed. I just wanted to change into my pajamas, read a little from the new book I’d just purchased at the event, and then close my eyes for seven or eight hours until I was properly rested and ready for the next day. Dealing with ghosts wasn’t on my agenda.

It was then that I realized Sandy had mentioned we would be staying at a haunted inn.  I guess in the back of my mind I’d thought we could wander the grounds and inn to do a few EVP sessions, before retiring to our room. What I hadn’t considered was the fact that we’d be hosting a pajama party for the paranormal realm.

The room had two twin beds, so I quickly claimed the one nearest the door, and then retreated into the bathroom to brush my teeth, and to change into my sleeping attire. I’d barely closed the door when I realized I wasn’t alone.

Being clairaudient, with a dash or two of clairvoyance thrown into the mix, I can hear and sense ghosts and spirits. I hear an audible tone that drifts around the room, allowing me to identify the location of the entity, as well as the gender. My clairvoyant abilities, which are still developing, provide me with more information. This entity was a ghost, not a spirit who’d crossed over into the next realm.  While spirit tones usually don’t bother me, the sound of a true ghost always gets my attention. You never really know what a ghost is capable of.

This ghost was a young female, possibly a maid from the early 1800’s, who’d worked and lived at the inn. I saw her in my mind as thin, with long dark hair that she wore in a bun under a white cap. She wore a pale blue dress with a large white apron over the top of it. She didn’t mean me any harm, but was curious about me.

It’s my understanding that anyone with mediumistic abilities, the ability to communicate or sense ghosts and spirits, is instantly identifiable to the afterlife. I don’t know if we emit a certain glow, or they are just able to sense our abilities, but they definitely know we’re there and that we can feel them as well. Maybe she was looking for help, or to pass a message on. She might have just been seeking a human connection with someone who could feel her, after being ignored for the better part of two-hundred years. I’ll never know because my abilities don’t extend that far.

“I know you’re here, but I can’t communicate with you,” I told her. “I’m not a true medium. I can feel you and get an idea of what you look like, but I can’t communicate like a real medium can,” I told her. Most mediums won’t bother to say this out loud. They will talk telepathically with the ghosts or spirits. It often makes me feel inapt, not being able to do this. If I want to talk with them, I have to use my ghost hunting equipment.

After getting somewhat settled, I returned to the room to find Sandy already in her pajamas with her digital voice recorder in her hand. Also being a budding clairvoyant, she must have gotten a similar message while I was in the bathroom.

“This room is wall-to-wall ghosts,” she told me.

Normally an investigation has more of a formal feel to it. We gather our equipment, including our meters to measure electromagnetic energy, and our beloved Spirit Boxes, and conduct a session. It usually starts with one of us sweeping the room with a Mel Meter, to see if there are any electromagnetic spikes that would cause our equipment to alert us. A false spike could often be caused by faulty electric wiring, or devices like clock radios, that usually emit high levels of energy. We didn’t even bother this time. The room was full of ghosts and we knew it. All we needed was a way to record them.

We turned on our recorders and began asking respectful, gentle questions of our invisible guests. As we began, we started sensing the others as well. One entity was male, and was joined by several other females. I didn’t like him as much. He felt controlling and a bit hostile. We asked them general questions about where they lived, how old they were, and why they were still lingering at the inn. We even pulled out a Spirit Box to see if we could get a response, but the ghosts just weren’t talking. We didn’t record a single EVP.

By this time, I was getting really tired. I’d been up since seven that morning and had worked a full day before making the two and a half hour trek south to Connecticut. All I wanted was some nice REM time to recover my energy. As I’d soon find out, it wasn’t going to happen.

The minute I turned out the light and rolled onto my side, I felt them swoop in. The feeling is very similar to the sensation of a person walking very quietly into a room. Sometimes I just know they’re there. I can feel the displacement of air, the sense of their energy behind me. Added to this was the very loud buzzing in my ears. By the sound of it, there were at least a handful of ghosts trying to get my attention.

I’ve been taught to surround myself with white light and then inform the entities that they are not allowed to come near me for the duration of the night, so I did this. I envisioned the light as being very bright, radiating from my body like a solar flare. As it would turn out, it would be like a bug light to a flock of moths.

One touched my hair, pulling it back from my face. Even though I’ve had this happen numerous times, it still unnerves me. I don’t like to be touched, especially by people I can’t see.

“Stop touching me!” I said, probably jarring Sandy out of early sleep stages in the bed across the room. I closed my eyes again and tried my fail-safe method of counting backwards from 21. Usually, all I have to do is think the number “21” and I’m well on my way, but this time it wouldn’t work because someone touched my leg. It felt like a cold hand being placed on my ankle. I pulled my knees up into a fetal position, wondering if I would ever get to sleep.

“Are they bothering you?” Sandy asked.

“Yeah, they keep touching me,” I told her. She sighed, feeling bad for me.  She could feel them as well, but they usually gave her a wide berth when she told them to stay away. For some reason this never works for me. The more I resist, the closer they come.

I tried reciting the Lord’s Prayer in my mind, something that usually calms me, but before I could get to the “amen,” I was jolted off my pillow in pain. It felt as though someone reached into my eye socket and grabbed a handful of eyeball.

I started to sit up, when the pain moved to my chest. The hand lunged into my chest and grabbed onto my heart. It almost felt as though I were having a heart attack before the feeling eased and then moved to my leg. I was under attack.

I jumped up from bed. The room was dark, with just a gentle glow from the street lights filtering through the window. While I once loved sleeping in total darkness, I just can’t do it anymore. After experiencing what I did with a negative demonic entity that I wrote about in my book, The Soul Collector, nothing would ever be the same for me.  I’m not afraid of the dark. I’m afraid of what’s hiding in the dark that I can’t see.

“Do you mind if I turn on the lamp?” I asked.

“No, go ahead,” Sandy said.

I have to give Sandy credit. Being my friend comes with a very large burden. While she also is coming into her own abilities, mine seem to be far more disruptive.

I turned on the light and then turned around to consider my bed.

“Maybe I can sleep in the car,” I mused.

Sandy laughed. “I think they’d find you there just as easily.” It was a truth I didn’t even need to respond to. If I was in the vicinity, a ghost would be sure to find me. I have a very hard time sleeping in hotels for this reason. If there is even one lingering around the building, it will hone in on me within minutes of my arrival, promising me a night of restless sleep. It’s another reason why I’m still single. Some baggage is okay, but mine would be difficult to handle for most people.

I went back to bed with a determination of finding some sleep. We had a big day planned for the next day. Our friends had invited us to investigate at the abandoned Sterling Opera House in nearby Derby. I’d seen photos of the building and was eager to experience it for myself.

I curled back on my side and with a dire determination, finally fell asleep. I’d be woken up minutes later by someone again grabbing my ankle. This would go on the entire night. The minute I’d fall asleep, I’d either be poked or touched until I woke back up again. Several times the touch would come with a strong smell. Once I smelled cigarette smoke and another time the very foul smell of a dirty animal nearly made me choke. What little sleep I would manage was interlaced with dreams of people I didn’t know, trying to urgently tell me things they wanted me to hear. When I woke up the next morning, I felt as tired as I had when I walked into the room at midnight.

I don’t have any wild stories to tell about furniture being thrown across the room or the contents of my travel bag being dumped on the floor. All I have is the personal experiences that prodded and pulled at me for a solid nine hours.

If you invite me to go somewhere that involves overnight travel and I hesitate, please don’t be offended when I decline the invitation.

Being a sensitive in a world filled with ghosts isn’t always easy, but it’s all I know. Maybe one day I’ll learn to handle it, but for now I’m just doing the best I can.

Joni Mayhan

Joni Mayhan is a paranormal investigator, as well as a free-lance writer. Please check out her paranormal thrillers on Amazon.com and BarnesandNobles.com. For more information about the author, please see her website: Jonimayhan.com

Check out Joni’s latest TRUE paranormal thriller – Hanover Haunting – The DeAnna Simpson Story. Available on Amazon.com – Click HERE

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The Soul Collector – part 1

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I was warned to never talk about him.

Never write about him.

I was told to completely erase him from my memory. If I didn’t, there was a very good possibility that he could come back to find me again. I held onto this story for several years, trying to do what they told me to do, but I just couldn’t.

I needed to tell my story.

I wasn’t in a very good place when he found me. I was at the end of a two-year relationship with someone I thought I would spend the rest of my life with. When he walked away very suddenly, it left my whole life in shambles.

With my entire family living a thousand miles away, I didn’t have anyone to turn to. After spending weeks locked inside my house with the curtains drawn, I finally decided to get out and do something. People told me that staying busy was the best cure for a broken heart. So I tried.

I had been ghost hunting for several years and found it to be a fun, exciting way to pass the time. By this time, I’d already developed a true knack for getting EVPs, Electronic Voice Phenomena. When I turned on my digital voice recorder and asked questions during an investigation, the spirits spoke to me. I didn’t understand why they singled me out, giving me very clear responses to my questions. I was just happy to be successful at something. My entire life up to that point felt like a near miss.

I’d spent twenty years trying to find my way as a writer, only to be shot down by countless agents and publishing houses. I tried to open my own pet store in the early eighties, but was stopped short due to financing issues. I was married for nearly twenty years, but found myself divorced and all alone at forty-two. After the failed relationship that ended with a blindside, I needed something to cling to, something I could claim as my own. So I dove deeply into ghost hunting.

At first it was just pure entertainment. I was invited to explore creepy places where I had the opportunity to speak with actual dead people. As I got more confident, I became fearless. I would be the first person who dared to go into the darkest, scariest places. I’d crawl into basements, sit by myself in a totally dark room and invite the spirits to touch me and communicate with me. It was an adrenaline rush, a way to push my life to the edge, a way to feel something other than misery. And I became good at it.

I booked investigations at the creepiest locations I could find. Sometimes I had two ghost hunts in one weekend. I was completely captivated.

Imagine: actually speaking to the dead.

I asked questions I’d always wanted to know the answers to, and I began getting very clear responses. They told me that Heaven was beautiful. They told me they were lonely, that they enjoyed talking with us. They told me their ages, the places where they lived, the reasons why they still clung to their homes.

I began to really tune into the way my ears began ringing when I was on investigations. I started learning that each spirit had a different tone. I could track them around the room, knowing immediately where they were. And they spoke to me on my digital recorder. I didn’t understand why all this was happening to me until I came far too close to one.
We investigated at a location I won’t name. I don’t want other thrill-seekers to go there and try their luck. I’ll just say that it was a place where very bad people once resided, a place I had no business visiting.

Nothing exceptional happened during the investigation. We sat in the dark, asking questions and marveling at how our equipment was responding. When I got home, I had a strange feeling that just wouldn’t leave me. My ears were ringing with a strange tone, and I had the almost constant feeling that someone was standing right behind me. When I listened to the audio I had recorded the night before, I heard something that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

“Who are you?” I had asked.

“John,” was the answer, spoken directly into my recorder. It was an intelligent response!
(I deleted many files after this experience, so I don’t have a copy of this evp.)

I was elated. People were always trying to debunk my evps, telling me it was just the wind, or someone clearing their throat. But, there was no denying this very clear response. Someone had answered my question.

Then, a woman began talking to us. She told us she was back in.


And another told us that it was cold in there.

I listened some more, hoping for something more. What I heard nearly made my heart stop.

“What do you want us to do?” I had asked.

“Fall,” came the answer.


“What are you doing here?” I asked again.

The answer came swiftly. “Following.”

I tried to shake it off, but the feeling of being watched was so strong I couldn’t ignore it. My ears started ringing even stronger and I began to get mental images of a very scary man frowning at me, looming over my shoulder. My moods became dark. I lost track of time, finding myself sleep walking at night. I became jumpy. The least little thing scared me. I stopped being the first person to crawl into dark places during investigations. I spent a lot of time glancing over my shoulder and I hardly slept at all.

My bedroom became a torture chamber for me. The minute I walked in, I could feel something there, standing in the corner. I started seeing movement out of the corner of my eye. Strange sounds began to happen throughout the house. Suddenly ghost hunting didn’t sound like such a great idea. What had I messed with?

It just got worse. My cats began watching things come into the room and drift over the top of my bed. They both stared with the same intensity that they would watch a housefly, except it was winter and there weren’t any bugs. I tried to debunk it. I looked for any possible explanation, but there weren’t any. I had picked up an unwanted hitchhiker.

Being a paranormal investigator with a few years under my belt, I knew about sage and the process of cleansing a house. I did this frequently, filling my house with the rich smell of burning herbs. I followed up by telling the spirit to leave. I prayed, asking for protection. I recited the Saint Michael’s Prayer. I did everything I could think of, but nothing worked. He hovered over my shoulder, making my life miserable.

Probably the worst part was having to keep all this to myself. If I started talking about having a ghostly attachment, people would surely think I was crazy. I tried to maintain a normal existence and continue living my life as if nothing horrible was happening to me. I posted happy, silly things on Facebook, worked feverishly on my first book, Lightning Strikes, and spent time with my nearly grown children. I wouldn’t understand what was truly happening to me until I began spending time with a very powerful psychic.

Thanksgiving was a very depressing holiday for me. With my family a thousand miles away and my promising relationship having hit the rocks, I had nowhere to go. My two children were spending the holiday with their father’s family. I didn’t want to spend the holiday by myself.

I put out a very needy plea on Facebook, asking if anyone had room at their table for me and my wish was quickly granted. I was invited to spend the holiday with several of my ghost hunting friends in Maine.

I made the trek, trying not to think about all that I had lost, but I couldn’t help it. After nineteen-years of marriage, I had spent five lonely years trying to find my place in the world. I thought I’d finally found it and had embraced all the opportunities, only to find myself completely alone again. I wasn’t sure I was up for the challenge. Having to spend a family-oriented holiday with near strangers seemed like the end of the world to me. And then it got worse.

Much worse.

The minute I walked into the door, the psychic took one look at me and said four words that nearly rocked my world off its axis.

“We need to talk,” she told me.

That was when I learned that my suspicions were right. I did have a negative spirit who was following me around. What she said next would leave me with nightmares for months.

“It’s bad. Really bad,” she told me. “He’s a soul collector and he has his sights set on you.”

The next six months would be the worse months of my life.

…to be continued

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.