Annie of Mary King's Close: Aiko Gibo and the Plague Child's Doll

Mary King's Close lies buried beneath the Edinburgh City Chambers, off the High Street on the Royal Mile. Its 17th century households survive underground, cold and dark, and its plague history is well known. Today the site is run as The Real Mary King's Close. The Coltheart haunting of 1680, recorded by George Sinclair in Satan's Invisible World Discovered, had already given it a ghost story.

Aiko Gibo was a psychic, writer and television personality from Yokohama. She became famous in Japan in the 1980s on Nippon TV's Anata no Shiranai Sekai.

Most accounts give the year as 1992. Gibo came to the close with a documentary crew filming the haunted places of Britain. Towards the end of the close, off Allan's Close, she reached a particular room and stopped. "I cannot enter this room… it is too strong…" She spoke of a terrible sense of sickness, hunger and cold.

Then the touch. She felt a young girl's spirit beside her, clutching her trouser leg. In The Scotsman's telling, the child tugged at her hand instead. In the earliest accounts she saw no figure. She sensed one.

At last she went inside, apparently "invited" in by the child. Near the fireplace, Gibo spoke with the girl, who gave her name as Annie. She had been separated from her parents and wanted to go home. She had lost her favourite doll, and she was heartbroken. The Scotsman reported that Gibo described a girl who had died of the plague, abandoned by her family.

Gibo went to a shop on the Royal Mile and bought a tartan doll. She left it in the room for Annie. As long as the doll remained, she said, the spirit would not disturb the room again. The Scotsman saw the gesture as in keeping with Japanese customs of honouring the dead. Staff nicknamed it "Tartan Barbie", but it was really a tartan-clad air-stewardess doll from the Daisy Doll airline collection designed by Mary Quant.

Visitors began leaving gifts of their own. Barbies, beanie babies, Raggedy Anns, painted wooden soldiers, a Westlife CD. First responders left badges, from the NYPD to Newport Beach Police. Toys and coins went to the Royal Hospital for Sick Children, about £10,000 in the year before March 2008. The Scotsman reported more than £40,000 for Sick Kids.

17 April 2019. A guide named Pedro noticed the doll was gone from its usual spot. A search of the whole site found nothing. Manager Paul Nixon told the Edinburgh Reporter that "the story of Annie, Aiko Gibo and Tartan Barbie have been a significant part of our history for 26 years". The attraction promised "no questions asked" for its return. One travel feature put it simply. "She's never been found."

The attraction itself found no record of a child named Annie. The closest link is the unnamed daughter of Jean McKenzie, recorded in Allan's Close during the plague. A Scotsman feature called the story of abandonment and death "just conjecture based on the psychic's story".

Physicist Yoshihiko Ohtsuki argued that most of Gibo's readings could be explained by advance research from her six staff, though he never doubted her personal character. At the Tower of London, in 1993, she sensed the two young princes of Edward IV. Critics said her account closely matched a Natsume Sōseki story. Others point to the cold, dark setting and its well known history.