Ghost Hunt, Volume Six by Shiho Inada and Fumiya Ono

Mai is working at SPR when a strange, very friendly woman comes calling, asking for Naru. Naru isn't there, but Lin is, and the woman is very unusual, for she is able to fluster the usually aloof and inscrutable Lin. Her name, she says, is Madoka Mori, and as Mai discovers, she was Naru's mentor.

She has travelled to SPR to ask for Naru and Lin's assistance in the matter of an unusual manor... and so, Naru asks for the help of the psychics and exorcists they have worked with in the past. The mansion that Madoka needs help with belongs to the Prime Minister of Japan, and lately, people have been disappearing at the mansion.

But they won't be the only ones working on this case. In addition to SPR, there is the chief priest of an important temple, Igarashi-sensei, an instructor from the National Defense Academy and her young female assistant, a group from Minami Psychic research and its head, plus their observer: Dr. Oliver Davis from the British Psychic reasearch Society. Dr. Davis is something like a superstar among psychics, so everyone ie excited to meet him.

With each group or team, everyone has their own way of investigating the mansion. But Mai doesn't like the place. It gives her cold shivers, and when members of the teams begin disappearing, it appears that everyone is in danger... especially if they are young and female. With Mai and Masako both being part of SPR, that puts them doubly in danger, and Mai is once again having dreams... of women being abducted by two large, hulking figures who drag the women to a concealed room, where they are cut apart and their blood used to bathe a monstrous figure that should be dead, and yet is somehow alive.

Can Mai and Masako escape the mansion with the rest of their team, or will their spirits and bloody corpses join those who litter the ground in the secret places inside the mansion? Is there any hope for escape?

This story reminded me of two things, the first being the Winchester Ghost House, where the widow of the man who manufactured the Winchester Guns (and owned the company) was told by a psychic that the ghosts of everyone killed with a Winchester would haunt her if she ever stopped construction on the house.

Like the Winchester House, the mansion here is constructed with stairs that lead nowhere and hidden rooms, but this house is much more menacing than the Winchester House. For while Winchester House was made to keep ghosts out, this one was made to keep them in.

The second thing this story reminds me of, is Erzebet Bathory, the Blood Countess, who believed that bathing in the blood of young women would keep her eternally young anf beautiful. And so she killed and killed and killed the young servant women who worked at the castle. But her downfall came when she ran out of serving women and now felt that only the blood of noblewomen would do. And she was caught and walled up inside a single room in her own castle, her food pushed through a slot in her door for the rest of her life. She lived almost 13 years.

I'll leave you to decide what about the story reminds me of that, but the horror here is growing stronger yet, and Mai is in danger because of who and what she is. This is one of the best stories in the series as of yet, and I urge you to read it, and this series. It's just too good to miss.