The Real Mary King's Close

OVERVIEW

A steep close off the Royal Mile named for a merchant burgess, Mary King, who lived on it in the 1630s; its lower storeys were built over when the Royal Exchange (now the City Chambers) went up in 1753, and the last resident left in 1902. The sealed rooms and lanes were opened as an attraction in 2003. Its reputation is older than the burial: the close ran nearest of any to the stagnant Nor Loch, and its stories of lights and figures are on paper from the seventeenth century.

HISTORY

Plague struck the close in 1645; the legend that the sick were walled in alive is not in the record, which shows quarantine and a gravedigger's cart. In 1685 George Sinclair's Satan's Invisible World Discovered printed the account of Thomas Coltheart, a law agent who moved into the close with his wife in the 1680s and saw a disembodied head, a child, an arm and a menagerie of animals in his rooms. Escaping marsh gas from the loch, causing lights and hallucinations, is the explanation the tour itself offers.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

Annie, a girl said to have died of the plague in a small room, was 'sensed' by a Japanese medium, Aiko Gibo, in 1992, who left a doll; visitors have left toys there since, and the pile goes to charity. Guides and visitors report footsteps and a man in one of the lanes. The close is a tour and tells its ghosts; the Coltheart account is the part that predates tourism.

VISITING

Guided tours only, ticketed, from the entrance on the Royal Mile; book ahead.