Surviving the Soul Collector

After the Soul Collector blog picture

In 2011, I went through a horrific experience that will always remain with me. I think about it every time I walk into a dark room. It follows me into the shadowed hallways of my dreams and comes to me in quiet moments, like a whisper in the wind. I was the victim of an extreme haunting.

In many ways, I imagine it is similar to what people feel after they’ve survived an avalanche, a house fire or a near death experience. The symptoms of Post-traumatic Stress are very similar. My heart races and my self-defence mechanisms kick in. All I want to do is take flight and bolt from the room, even though I know this is something I can’t outrun.

People often ask me why I still continue to investigate the paranormal after living through something that has changed me to the very core of my being. I honestly don’t have a good answer for them. In some ways, I don’t think I have a choice.

I was born a sensitive. I can feel and hear the sounds that ghosts make when they wander into my space. It starts softly with a buzz in my ear that many dismiss as simple ear ringing. When I hear it, I’m helpless to resist it. It becomes stronger and louder, demanding my attention.

Most of the time, when I hear the sounds a ghost makes, I try to ignore it, but it’s often like trying to ignore a mosquito that buzzes near your ear. If I give it more than a few seconds of my attention, it acts as an acknowledgement. I can imagine them saying, “Oh, you can sense me!” That’s when they hover closer, often following me home to continue the one sided conversation.

Even though I practice paranormal protection, they still find a way to latch onto me. I have grounded and shielded. I have protection stones in my pocket and on my wrist. I carry religious medallions that make me feel safe. I spray my head and feet with Holy Water every time I leave the house, and  I keep a white light of protection surrounding me. I say prayers before and after investigations, and we always burn sage before we leave. While this would be enough for most people, it doesn’t work for me. They follow me no matter what I do. I’ve since learned that they can even come through the phone lines.

I was interviewing someone for the book I’m writing when I felt something drift into the room. It was dark and scary, the tone very similar to the one the Soul Collector possessed. In an instant, I was mentally back in that place in my mind. I remembered the way the Soul Collector hovered inches above me as I tried to fall asleep, and the way he caressed my hair as I lay on my side. I thought about the way he threatened to come after my daughter, holding me hostage with his demands, and the way he followed my son from his room one night. My stomach clenched as the sound moved closer. I could imagine him, licking his putrid lips as he imagined taking me over.

He could have been a serial killer in life. He had no conscious. All he had was the burning need for my soul. In that moment, I knew that I needed to do something to save myself. Thankfully, I had a savior in the wings who was eager to help.

If I’d known Michael Robishaw years ago, the Soul Collector would have been a three page book. Since meeting him, he’s helped me dozens of times in removing entities from my house. Michael is a Shaman, as well as a spiritual healer, Empath and medium. With the assistance of his Spirit Guides, he assists me remotely.

At one point, he recommended that I stop ghost hunting for a while to clear my aura, but it became abundantly clear that that didn’t make a difference. They followed me home from normal places too. I picked them up at grocery stores, movie theaters and from friend’s houses.

I excused myself from the telephone conversation as quickly as possible, promising to send the woman information that would lead her to more help, and contacted Michael. Shortly afterwards, I heard his spirit guides swoop into the room. The sound was like laser lights as they zipped around the room. I couldn’t see them, but there was no doubt they were there. The entity quickly retreated back to where he came from and the room grew quiet again. Michael had saved me once again.

Michael has helped hundreds of other people in the same way he’s helped me. One of those people was the woman I was speaking to. Unfortunately for her, the persistence of the dead will follow her through the days of her life just like it does mine. There will probably never be an escape. There will only be options.

Not all of the entities are as dark as the Soul Collector. Some of them are simply lost souls, looking for help. Those are the easy ones. I can help them cross over into the light and find their way to peace and tranquility. It’s the dark ones that bother me. They have no desire to cross over. All they want is to wrack havoc into the lives of the living. Those are the ones that make my blood run cold.

I will continue to search for answers. I won’t let the fear stop me in my pursuit of the solution to ending this madness. I will still walk into dark rooms, not allowing the entity to have power over me. I will fight it tooth and nail until it’s gone, but in the back of my mind I will never forget what it feels like to be helpless and afraid. I will carry that memory to my grave. And most of all, I will share what I’ve learned because knowledge is power.

Joni Mayhan is a paranormal investigator and the author of 13 books. To learn more about Michael Robishaw, read her chilling book Ruin of Souls.  Her other paranormal books include: Dark and Scary Things – A Sensitive’s Guide to the Paranormal World,  Devil’s Toy Box, The Soul Collector and Bones in the Basement, all available on Amazon.com, as well as Barnesandnoble.com and Smashwords. To learn more about her books, click on any of the covers below.
Ruin of Souls cover Dark and Scary Things- A Sensitive's Guide to the Paranormal World cover Devil'sToy Box  bones-in-the-basement-cover-small

The_Soul_Collector_Cover_for_Kindle Signs of Spirits front cover 400ppi Ghost Voices cover ghostly-defenses-cover-small

Rhino Skin

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Dear Readers,

Thank you so much for taking the time to review my books.

Now for the back story of how these reviews affect me and other writers like me.

Being a writer means you often put your very soul on sheets of paper and allow the world to do what they like with it. Sometimes the world is very generous. They read your words and flood you with compliments and praise. They ask — no, beg, for you to write something else, and you practically dance back to your computer to happily comply. Those are the great days. They feel like cupcakes for breakfast on a Saturday, when you don’t have to get out of bed until noon.

The others are…well, let’s just say they are brutally honest. They dissect your soul, I mean your writing, as though it’s a lab project and they mean to remove every last organ, one by one, without benefit of pain medications. Those are the tough ones to take.

The best ones are like the one Renee Harrison left me:

“I read straight through Joni’s book in one sitting. She kept me using my imagination to live what she was living through. I also get ringing in my ears and have never thought of why it might be happening, after this book I gained some insight! For those new “ghosthunters” who think it is all fun and games, this book will bring you to a deep realization that bad things can happen when you are unprotected!!!”

Bless her heart. I smiled all day after reading it. Not only had she enjoyed my book, she also learned something valuable that will help her in her day-to-day life.

But then, you get reviews like this one from a woman named Maureen Bogdon:

“though i appreicate what joni went through i did not find the story overly compelling. It seemed as though her thoughts were not very well put together. The biggest emotion i was able to feel through the story was sympathy for her divorce as her feeling during that part of her life were told with some vigor, but after a while it felt overdone and annoying. Futhermore her shameless plugs for “Lighting Strikes” became tiresome…Lastly, and part of me feels bad for saying this..But I’ve heard the key aspects of the story in other fictional supernatural books..Overall this wasn’t a terrible book but wasn’t a good one either”

The first thing I should have noticed was the misspellings, lack of capitalization, and punctuation errors. While I personally struggle with my own comma-usage issues, I would be hard pressed to discredit anyone else for the same thing, but I think I would have been just a little bit nicer when tearing apart her story.  I might have suggested that the book needed to be fleshed out a little more, something I can fully appreciate. Or, maybe she could have said it just wasn’t her cup of tea. I could have lived with that as well. Instead, she took out her ultra-sharp scissors and snipped away a little bit of my soul.

I must have read it twenty times, my eyes wide with disbelief. Did she really just say those awful things to me? She even suggested that I made it all up for the sake of a story, something I assure you I’d never do. She even got it wrong. It wasn’t a divorce! It was a break-up. Seriously!!

I stopped myself short of filling an entire page with my annoyance over her review, while I only wrote two sentences about the great review, the one that filled my entire being with rainbows and butterflies. Why is this?

I think it’s just human nature. It’s the five year old child with a drawing for the refrigerator, hoping Mommy will love it, like it deserves to be loved. It’s finally finding a finger-hold on a crumbling ledge, and then having someone step very carefully and very painfully on your fingers. But it’s also life.

As Eleanor Roosevelt so eloquently put it, “Every woman in public life needs to develop skin as tough as rhinoceros hide.”

So, I will continue on, trying to allow the scar tissue of past wounds build up that rhino skin. But I will also attempt to cling to the good reviews as much as I give safe harbor to the bad ones. If they’re constructive, they’re healthy, and I will grow from them, getting tougher and stronger in the process. I will also write reviews for all of the books I read and love. I’ve written two today alone: one for a very popular writer, and another for a newbie, like myself, who probably needed to hear something nice about her very good book.

If you’ve read my work and loved it, please share this with me as a review on the site you purchased the book from. If you have a constructive criticism, by all means, share this too, but if you’re just a nasty, angry person who wishes to tear down someone else’s dream, please do me a favor and just keep it to yourself.

Very sincerely yours,

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

The Soul Collector – The true story of one paranormal investigator’s worst nightmare

http://www.amazon.com/The-Soul-Collector-ebook/dp/B00EIHG90Q/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1381464557&sr=1-1&keywords=joni+mayhan

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Angels of Ember trilogy – After a devastating virus nearly wipes the world clean of people, 16 year-old Ember Pain grows tired of running and hiding from the bad men who hunt her and her younger sister, Elizabeth. Fighting back becomes a necessity, even if it threatens her very life.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=angels+of+ember+trilogy&rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Aangels+of+ember+trilogy

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 Lightning Strikes

Ember Rain

Angel Storm