The Real Mary King's Close — The Street Under the City
A 17th-century alley of tenements sealed beneath Edinburgh's Royal Exchange in the 1750s, forgotten for two centuries — now an official underground attraction with a plague myth and a ghost girl showered in gifts.
Case File No. 211
FILE 01 The Legend
Edinburgh's closes were vertical villages: named alleys lined with tenements rising ten storeys over the street. Mary King, a widow burgess recorded in the 1630s property rolls, gave her name to one of the best of them, off the High Street. The plague year 1645 emptied and killed through the close; in the 1750s the city, building its Royal Exchange, threw foundations over the whole warren and truncated it — houses cut mid-storey, the street left standing underground as support voids. For two centuries the sealed closes served as cellars and were misremembered above. Since 2003 the site has run as The Real Mary King's Close, a costumed heritage tour through the re-opened street. Its ghost canon: 'Mr Coltheart', a resident said to appear in parts, and above all 'Annie', a little girl whose room, identified by a visiting Japanese psychic in the early 1990s, became a shrine — visitors have left thousands of dolls, toys and sweets, and the attraction curates them still.
FILE 02 The Sightings Log
Annie's room is the epicentre: guides report temperature drops and the sensation of small hands, and visitors leave gifts for a child none of them met. Deeper in, the plague rooms produce the sound of a crowded street heard through a wall, and Mr Coltheart appears — typically from the waist up — near the shrine room.
FILE 03 The Skeptic’s File
The myth the tour exists to correct is its own best material: plague victims were never walled up alive here — the city records show quarantine, nurses paid, and burials by the book. Annie's shrine is a participatory ritual invented in the 1990s: leave a doll, feel the room, report the feeling, and the legend compounds. What is genuinely uncanny needs no ghost — a capital city paved a live neighbourhood into its foundations, forgot it for 150 years, and now sells tickets back down into it.