Mary King’s Close

Edinburgh’s Old Town grew upward and outward along the ridge of the Royal Mile, with narrow alleys called closes plunging steeply downhill on either side. Mary King’s Close took its name from Mary King, a merchant burgess who lived there in the 17th century. In 1753 the city began building the Royal Exchange, now the City Chambers, on top of it: the upper floors of the close’s tall tenements were knocked down and the lower ones used as foundations, sealing a stretch of the old street underground. A few people went on living and working there; the last, Andrew Chesney, left in 1902.

The close’s ghost stories are unusually old. In 1685 George Sinclair, a professor at Glasgow, published Satan’s Invisible World Discovered, which included the case of “T. C.,” a law agent who moved into a house in Mary King’s Close despite neighbors’ warnings. On a Sunday afternoon his wife saw the head of a gray-bearded old man staring at her from a doorway; that night the couple saw the head again, then a child, then a disembodied arm reaching out as if to shake hands, while they prayed in terror. The story became the foundation of the close’s reputation. Sinclair wrote to prove the reality of the spirit world, and his book is better read as a religious tract than as reporting.

Later lore tied the close to the plague of 1645, one of the worst outbreaks to hit Edinburgh, when cleansers and doctors such as George Rae worked in the afflicted streets. The best-known modern ghost arrived in 1992, when the Japanese psychic Aiko Gibo, filming a program on Britain’s haunted places, said she could barely enter a small room off Allan’s Close because a sad little girl was clutching her leg. The child, she said, was called Annie, had been separated from her family, and had lost her doll. Gibo bought a doll on the Royal Mile and left it in the room.

Visitors have since piled the room with thousands of dolls, toys, jewelry and even police and firefighter badges. The attraction’s own researchers say they have found no record of a girl named Annie, the closest match being an unnamed daughter of Jean McKenzie listed in Allan’s Close during the plague. The original doll, nicknamed “Tartan Barbie” but actually a Mary Quant Daisy doll, was stolen in April 2019. The close is now run as a tourist attraction and has appeared on Most Haunted and Ghost Hunters International.

Floating heads, a child and a disembodied arm (the 1685 account), a little girl tugging at clothing in “Annie’s Room,” sudden cold, sadness and sickness, footsteps and figures in the dark rooms — reported by residents, psychics, guides and visitors.

The underground tenement rooms off Mary King’s Close and Allan’s Close beneath the City Chambers, especially the small 17th-century room known as Annie’s Room.

The close features in Ian Rankin’s Rebus novel Mortal Causes (1994), V. E. Schwab’s City of Ghosts (2018), Most Haunted, Ghost Hunters International and Billy Connolly’s television tour of Scotland.