Mary King's Close

The story

Mary King’s Close is a lane of old Edinburgh that survives partly underground beneath the City Chambers on the Royal Mile. What visitors see are the remains of houses of the 17th and 18th centuries, later buried under a larger building.

The close is said to be named after Mary King, a merchant burgess. Wikipedia’s article on her, citing National Records of Scotland papers, gives her dates as about 1590 to 1644 and makes her the daughter of Alexander and Jonet King; we did not see those records ourselves.

The real turning point came in the 1750s. The Royal Exchange, designed by John Adam and opened in 1760 under Lord Provost George Drummond, was built over several closes between 1753 and 1760. The buildings on them were truncated and the closes blocked off. The town council bought the whole complex in 1893. A single-source claim on Wikipedia, flagged as needing citation, says the last resident, Andrew Chesney, was compulsorily bought out for 400 pounds and left in 1902. Wikidata dates the attraction to 2003, though the pages we read did not confirm that date. Today it is run by Continuum Attractions as The Real Mary King’s Close. It is a different site from the separate Edinburgh Vaults beneath South Bridge.

The legend

The oldest dated trace of a haunting here is a printed book. In 1685 George Sinclair published Satan’s Invisible World Discovered, which includes a relation of apparitions in a house in Mary King’s Close; we read it in the Project Gutenberg text. The man, identified first as T. C. and further on as Thomas Coltheart, was moving house. Sinclair says only that it happened “within these few years,” and describes one night in the house: the head of an old bearded man at a chamber door, a child in a coat, a naked arm reaching out, a small dog and a cat, small dancing creatures, and finally a deep, loud groan. A few weeks later Coltheart fell ill and died, and his figure is said to have appeared to a client near Tranent. Sinclair gives no identity for any of them. Ingram’s 1897 collection retold the story, calling Coltheart “a respectable law agent,” and US papers reprinted a version in 1881, among them the Sacramento Daily Record-Union of 12 November. Robert Chambers’s Traditions of Edinburgh, in the 1868 edition we read, tells a different version of a deserted house in the close, with a floating head, a hand holding a candle and dancing feet, and calls such things “grandams’ tales.”

Note what Sinclair does and does not say. He calls Coltheart “by profession an agent about the session-house,” a man who handled a client’s law affairs, but he never mentions the plague, let alone a refusal to flee it. That addition comes from modern visit sites, not from the 1685 text.

A modern legend says that the close was walled up with plague victims inside. We found no early source for it. A ghost-walk site itself rejects it, saying that the healthy, and those who wished to leave, were moved to Burgh Muir while the sick hung out white flags, though without citing a source, and the owner of the Mysterious Britain site calls it a myth. On the plague doctor George Rae the sources conflict: an educational page says his name appears in no known 17th-century record, while Wikipedia, citing among others the operator’s own site, says he was appointed on 13 June 1645. We did not see any council minutes. Sources also disagree on the plague date, 1644 or 1645, and on the death toll, which ranges from 300 to 600 in unsourced figures. The real sealing of the street was architectural, from 1753.

The second story, a little girl called Annie, is also recent. The operator’s own website places it in the 1990s, when a Japanese medium, named there as Aiko Gibo, is said to have sensed a girl separated from her parents and missing her doll. Visitors now leave dolls. We found no 17th-century document that mentions an Annie, the operator itself says it has found no reference to her in the history books, and it is the only source we found, so it should be read as part of the attraction’s story, not as old folklore. Disembodied limbs and a ghost dog curled on a chair are listed by a ghost-walk website without sources, though they echo the naked arm and the sleeping dog in Sinclair’s 1685 text.

We found no demonstrated hoax, and no old press beyond the 1881 reprints of the Sinclair story. Television programs said to have visited, such as Most Haunted and Ghost Hunters International, come from Wikipedia and we did not re-check them. Ian Rankin set a novel here, Mortal Causes (1994), according to the same source.

What remains today

The surviving rooms and passages are the stumps of the houses that were sealed under the Royal Exchange in the 18th century, now beneath a municipal building. The visitor experience is staged around them, with costumed guides, so it combines real architecture with modern storytelling. The council owned the site from 1893, and the close long stayed shut to the public before opening as an attraction.

Visiting

This is a legitimate, ticketed visit. According to the official page we consulted in November 2026, it is open seven days a week with guided tours led by guides in costume and several ticket options; booking is through the official website. We did not verify prices or times, so check there. The site is underground, so ask the operator about accessibility before booking. If you go, treat the plague and Annie stories as presentation and the 1685 Sinclair text as the real old record.

Sources

1. Wikimedia Commons category : Mary King's Close — Wikimedia Commons
2. John Paulitious — Wikipedia
3. Mary King (merchant) — Wikipedia
4. Mary King's Close — Mysterious Britain
5. Mary King's Close — Haunted Rooms
6. Official website
7. Royal Exchange, Edinburgh — Wikipedia
8. Satan's Invisible World Discovered (George Sinclair) — Project Gutenberg, 1685
9. The Haunted Homes and Family Traditions of Great Britain (Ingram) — Internet Archive, 1897
10. The Story of Annie's Doll — The Real Mary King's Close
11. Traditions of Edinburgh (Robert Chambers) — Project Gutenberg, 1868
12. Wikipedia article — Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Text written by AI from the sources above and checked by a separate AI fact-check (how we work). Images: credits and licenses under each picture.