An underground street, now a tourist attraction

A merchant burgess gave the close her name

Mary King's Close is a buried street beneath Edinburgh's Old Town, now run as a guided underground attraction. It sits directly under the City Chambers, just off the High Street on the Royal Mile. The close took its name from Mary King, a merchant burgess who lived and traded there in the 17th century.

Mary King was born in Edinburgh in the late 1500s. After her husband Thomas died in 1629, his will named her a Burgess of Edinburgh, a rare honor that gave her a vote and a seat on the city council. In 1635, she bought a house and a shop on the close, selling cloth and fabric while raising four children alone. She died in 1644, a year before the disaster that would come to define her street's reputation.

Plague struck the close before it was buried

In 1645, plague swept through Edinburgh, killing between a fifth and half of the city. Mary King's Close, packed tight with tenements rising seven stories high, was among the worst hit. Families who stayed indoors signaled for food and water with white flags hung from their windows. Those who wanted to leave were offered shelter outside the city.

The close recovered, and people kept living and working there for centuries. In 1753, builders began raising the Royal Exchange, now Edinburgh's City Chambers, directly over the close. Rather than demolish everything, they sealed the lower floors in place as foundations, burying streets that had stood in daylight for two hundred years.

One by one, the close emptied. In 1897, the city forced out its last residents with a compulsory purchase order. Andrew Chesney, the final tenant, held on until 1902, ending three centuries of continuous life underground.

A sealed close grew a reputation for hauntings

After Andrew Chesney left, the close stayed sealed for over a hundred years. The City Chambers used parts of it for storage, and the buried streets sat in the dark, cut off from daylight. Stories about the place kept growing even though almost nobody could get inside. Guides and writers told of floating heads, women in black and ghosts of plague victims still wandering the tenements. Some blamed the hauntings on biogas leaking from the old Nor Loch, the polluted marsh that once ran close by. The gas was said to cause strange lights and even hallucinations, which may explain why so many swore they had seen something.

One story became the close's signature legend. It makes for a grim image, but it is not what happened. The legend of being bricked in alive does not hold up, but it has outlived the truth in the retelling.

The close's own name carries a smaller dispute. Before it took Mary King's name, it was called Alexander King's Close, after an Edinburgh lawyer. The switch to a woman's name was unusual. Edinburgh named streets after its merchants and officials, almost always men, and Mary King's Close is one of the few exceptions in the city's long history.

Guides reopened the close to paying visitors

In 2003, the close reopened to the public as a guided attraction, now called the Real Mary King's Close. Visitors walk the same sealed streets that Chesney left behind, led by guides playing characters from the close's past. One plays Mary King's daughter, Jonet. The character has become part of the tour anyway, a face put on a history that otherwise has none.

The close has since turned up in television and print far beyond Edinburgh. A 2004 episode of the Rebus series, based on Ian Rankin's novels, used it as the scene of a fictional murder. Ghost-hunting shows have filmed there too, drawn by the same stories of floating heads and strange lights that followed the close through its empty decades.

Edinburgh City Chambers still stands directly above, carrying the weight of the Royal Exchange that first buried these streets in the 1750s. The close beneath it keeps the shape of a town that vanished from daylight but never from memory.