Mary King's Close: the history of Edinburgh's buried street

What's a close?

Before we go down, a word of local vocabulary. In Edinburgh, a close is one of the narrow alleys that run off the main street and drop away down the hillside. UNESCO describes the Old Town as a herringbone: the High Street along the spine of the ridge, from the Castle to the Palace of Holyroodhouse, with closes, wynds and courtyards branching off on either side. With plots that narrow, the houses grew upwards.

Mary King's Close was one of those alleys. What makes it different is that you can't see it from the street any more. It's underneath the pavement, or near enough.

Why is it buried?

No earthquake, no lava. Just town planning. According to the building's official listing, in the mid-eighteenth century the town embarked on a great scheme of improvements, and this was the first part of it to be built. Ruinous tenements were cleared, and on 13 September 1753 the foundation stone of the Royal Exchange was laid. It was meant to house a merchants' exchange, a customs house, homes, shops and coffee houses.

There were four closes on the site, and Mary King's was one of them. Between 1753 and 1761 the new building swallowed part of it; in 1901 an extension covered another stretch. Even so, "17th and early 18th century sections of the Close survive under the building". The old Royal Exchange is now the City Chambers, home of the city council, and its front on the Royal Mile is a screen of seven arches closing off a courtyard.

So "buried street" is a fair way to put it, as long as you don't picture a lost city. It's a street that had a building put on top of it and ended up inside, like a fly in amber.

Who was Mary King?

Less than the name promises. According to Scotland's national historic environment record, which cites a scholar of the city's street names, in 1530 this close was called John Towris Close. In 1615 and 1621 it turns up as the close of Alexander King, an Edinburgh advocate, and the name Mary King's Close doesn't appear until the Town Council minutes of 1694. There was, as it happens, a Mary King renting a property on the High Street in 1635, right next to the mouth of the close. Did she give it her name? Nobody knows: how King's Close became Mary King's Close, the record says, remains a matter of speculation.

The ghost that went to print in 1685

The close's reputation didn't start in a tourist leaflet. It has been in print since the seventeenth century. In 1685 George Sinclair published Satan's Invisible World Discovered, a book meant to persuade sceptics that spirits are real. One of its stories is headed "An apparition seen in a dwelling-house, in Mary King's close, in Edinburgh", and it's presented as something that had happened "within these few years".

The tenant is Thomas Coltheart, a man who works for the law courts, and he moves in with his wife. A neighbour warns their maid that in that house she and her employers will have "more company than yourselves", and the girl doesn't stay. Her master just smiles at the warning and decides to stay. Then one Sunday, with the Bible open in front of her, the wife glances up to find the head of a grey-bearded old man peering at her through a small door. That night the head comes back, and with it a child, a bare arm offering, "after a courteous manner", to shake their hands, a dog curling up in a chair, a cat, and a whole room full of tiny creatures dancing. Finally comes a groan "as of a strong man dying", and then nothing at all.

The best part comes afterwards: Coltheart didn't move out. He stayed put for the rest of his life. And Sinclair rounds it off with an epilogue made for his book: at the hour of Coltheart's death, his ghost appeared to a gentleman in Tranent.

Does that prove there were ghosts? No. It proves that by the seventeenth century the close already frightened people, and that someone wrote it down with a very clear purpose in mind.

"Grandams' tales"

In the nineteenth century, Robert Chambers, who gathered up the memories of Edinburgh's old folk in his Traditions of Edinburgh, came back to the subject. He wrote that a house in the close had been left empty once a head, a hand gripping a candle and some dancing feet had shown up there. And he dismissed the lot in four words: "Such were grandams' tales".

Notice what's missing from both Sinclair and Chambers: no plague, no little girls, nobody locked in. Those layers came much later, and we haven't been able to find out when.

Were plague victims walled up in Mary King's Close?

It's the story you'll hear most often: that during an outbreak of plague the town sealed off the close with the sick still inside. We haven't found a single document to support it, and the dates don't help: during the plague of 1645, Mary King's Close was still an open-air street, and the building that covered it went up more than a century later.

What Scotland's national archaeological record does say is rather more mundane: the close was gradually abandoned around the middle of the seventeenth century, after outbreaks of plague. Abandoned, not walled up.

Who is Annie?

Annie is now the close's most famous ghost: a little girl who, so the story goes, was abandoned during the plague. Her story has a birth date, and a recent one. A Japanese psychic brought it to light in 1992 and left a doll in the close. Ever since, visitors have been leaving her all sorts of mementos.

Nobody needs to laugh at anyone who says they've felt something down there. But it's worth knowing that some three hundred years separate the close's oldest ghost from its most famous one.

Is there an underground city beneath Edinburgh?

Not in the way some legends paint it. What there is are streets covered over by later buildings, like this one, and the vaults inside bridges. The best known are under the South Bridge, built in 1785–1788, which crosses the Cowgate on nineteen arches, only one of which is still visible. They were meant as storerooms and workshops for the businesses on the bridge; the town's directory of 1799, for instance, already lists a haberdasher on South Bridge. Damp drove them out. The idea that the poorest people then lived down there, or that illegal taverns hid in them, is told a great deal and documented very little.

They're two different things: the close is a seventeenth-century street that ended up inside a building, and the vaults are the hollow belly of a bridge. Neither is a lost city.

Fact or legend.

• Fact: the Royal Exchange, now the City Chambers, covered part of Mary King's Close from 1753, and an extension of 1901 covered another stretch. Sections of the close from the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries survive beneath the building.
• Old legend: the apparitions in Thomas Coltheart's house, printed in 1685 in a book that set out to prove spirits were real. It's a story of its time, not evidence.
• Legend recorded in the nineteenth century: the house that stood empty because of its apparitions. Chambers called it a grandam's tale.
• No document to back it up: that the plague-stricken were sealed in there. During the plague of 1645 the close was open to the sky; the archaeological record speaks of abandonment, not confinement.
• Unresolved: who the Mary King behind the close's name was.
• Modern legend with a date: Annie, first told by a psychic in 1992.
• Myth: an inhabited "underground city" beneath Edinburgh.

Where to hear it

Podtour tells this story on Ghosts, Witches and Legends of the Old Town, at the stop "A ghost story in print since 1685", which you listen to on the Royal Mile, facing the arches of the City Chambers. The route gives every legend its date of birth, from the witches of Castlehill to Greyfriars Bobby, and the Chambers name pops up again where you least expect it. For the practical side of your trip, see our Edinburgh guide.

Further reading

• George Sinclair, Satan's Invisible World Discovered, 1685 (1769 reprint), Relation XXXVII. https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_satans-invisible-world-_sinclair-george_1769
• Robert Chambers, Traditions of Edinburgh, new edition, W. & R. Chambers, Edinburgh, 1868. https://archive.org/details/traditionsofedin00cham
• Historic Environment Scotland, "City Chambers, High Street" (LB17597). https://portal.historicenvironment.scot/designation/LB17597
• UNESCO World Heritage Centre, "Old and New Towns of Edinburgh". https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/728/
• Gazetteer for Scotland, "South Bridge". https://www.scottish-places.info/features/featurefirst7778.html
• Historic Environment Scotland, trove.scot, "Edinburgh, High Street, Mary King's Close" (NRHE 52306; archaeology notes, activity 713660). https://www.trove.scot/activities/713660