
Above ground the streets of Edinburgh’s Royal Mile are a mass of tourists, souvenir shops, pubs and busking bagpipers. A walk across the Old Town is a journey through history, from Edinburgh Castle at one end to the Palace of Holyroodhouse at the other. But not all of Edinburgh’s history is on the surface – head below the city streets and you can uncover the secrets of underground Edinburgh at The Real Mary King’s Close.
Buried deep below ground, this network of narrow alleyways and abandoned houses has been lying beneath the Royal Mile since the 17th century. It’s the source of many a ghostly tale – but who really lived there and how did the street come to be buried underground?
Read more: Alternative things to do in Edinburgh

Mary King’s Close history
During the 17th century, Edinburgh’s Old Town was suffering from major overcrowding. The walls which had been built around the edge of the city to protect its residents meant there was no space for it to expand outwards. So instead as the population grew, houses were packed in more and more tightly, and grew upwards to eight stories high.
A web of narrow side streets called closes led off the Royal Mile, which were locked up at each end at night to keep undesirables out. The richest people lived in the top floors where the buildings got the most light – and the least stench of sewage. And the poorest lived in the dark, squalid ground floors, penned in with cattle and open sewers outside their front doors.

Most of Edinburgh’s closes were demolished or redeveloped into offices or apartments over the years, but Mary King’s Close had a different fate. The 17th-century city authorities were worried about losing trade to Edinburgh’s New Town, so they decided to build a grand new Royal Exchange. And they found the perfect spot opposite St Giles Cathedral.
There was just one small problem – the streets of houses which were already there. But rather than knocking these houses down completely, they took the top floors off and used the lower floors as the foundations for the Exchange.
Mary King’s Close was covered over and swallowed up into the basement of the Royal Exchange. The sloping ground meant that the houses fronting onto the Royal Mile were destroyed. But further down the close whole houses were buried in tact.

Even though it was buried underground, the close wasn’t totally abandoned. Some residents didn’t want to leave and carried on running their businesses in this strange half-buried world. So you could head underground to buy your tobacco or get a wig made.
Saw-makers the Chesney family were the close’s last residents. They hung on in there until 1902 when they were finally forced out as the Royal Exchange building – now used as the City Chambers – was extended and the last of the close was sealed up.
Then in 2003, Mary King’s Close was opened up as a visitor attraction once archaeologists and historians had analysed all the evidence they could find to uncover what life had been like for underground Edinburgh’s 17th-century residents.

Visiting The Real Mary King’s Close
Accompanied by a costumed guides (ours was poet Robert Ferguson – aka John), we headed down a dark staircase from the visitor’s centre and emerged into a labyrinth of underground streets connecting buildings with claustrophobic low-ceilinged rooms.
The street angles steeply down towards the old Nor Loch at the bottom of the hill. Today it’s the Princes Street Gardens, but originally it was a marsh turned sewage dump turned spot for dunking witches. With each close being just a few metres wide, you can imagine how dark and oppressive it must have been at the bottom with buildings towering up on either side.
The tour took us through a series of rooms, with stories of the close’s residents, from gravediggers to murderous mother-in-laws – and including Mary King herself.

Edinburgh’s closes were named after prominent local citizens and in the 1630s Mary was a fabric merchant who lived in the close. She set up her own business after her husband died – an impressive feat for a woman at that time.
There were also plenty of gory details of what life was like on the close during the 17th century, lots of them involving the not-too-sanitary ways of disposing of sewage that were used at the time (lets just say you really didn’t want to loiter outside a window for too long).
Life in the close was tough, and things got a lot tougher when the plague reached Edinburgh in 1644. The wealthy city residents fled but the poor were left behind, and the final death toll is estimated at between a fifth and a half of the city’s population.

A gruesome legend has it that Mary King’s Close’s gates were locked and plague victims were left to die. But in reality the area was quarantined with food and water brought in, until finally the last residents left – one way or another – and the close was abandoned in 1645.
After 40 years, people started moving back in to the close, but there were many tales of spooky sightings, from disembodied floating heads to a woman dressed all in black. Could it be the ghosts of plague victims who refused to leave home? Or maybe it was just hallucinations brought on by clouds of methane rising from the Nor Loch?
Either way, many ghost hunters have been lured to the close to search for spirits over the years – from TV spook hunters Most Haunted to a Japanese psychic who claimed to have met a young girl called Annie in one of the rooms. She was said to be a plague victim abandoned by her parents who wanted a doll to stop her feeling so lonely.

Since then, guests from around the world have donated toys for her, and a slightly creepy pile of dolls and teddies (and more bizarrely US police badges) has built up in ‘Annie’s Room’. Visitors have reported hearing footsteps in empty rooms and feeling unexplained chills.
The infra-red camera that’s used to capture pictures of visitors has even caught a translucent figure in the background late at night after the building was closed.
Though as the tour ended we emerged back into the light without spotting any ghostly apparitions. But we did get a few laughs, a few shocks and a warts-and-all insight into one of the darker sides of the city’s history and 17th-century underground Edinburgh life.

The details
The Real Mary King’s Close is just off Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, opposite St Giles’ Cathedral and a short walk from Waverley station. It’s normally open 10am–9pm (until 5.30pm on Sundays to Thursdays from November to April) with tours every 15 minutes. Entry costs £17.95 for adults, £15.95 for students/seniors and £11.25 for children aged 5–15 (children under 5 not permitted). It gets busy at peak times so it’s a good idea to book tickets in advance online.*
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*This article contains affiliate links where I receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. Photography isn’t allowed inside so all images courtesy of The Real Mary King’s Close.
31 Comments
anneharrison
April 28, 2016 at 9:58 amWhat an amazing discovery – thanks for sharing your tale!
Lucy
April 29, 2016 at 9:41 pmYou’re very welcome – really glad you enjoyed it.
Danielle
April 28, 2016 at 11:31 amI’d never heard about this before! I’m going to Edinburgh in September – maybe if I’m brave enough, I’ll make a visit (I’m a bit of a wimp when it comes to ghost stories haha!)
Lucy
April 29, 2016 at 9:50 pmIt’s not too scary honest! There are a couple of bits that might make you jump but it’s not really a ghost tour so you shouldn’t get too spooked.
amaatk123
April 28, 2016 at 11:39 amOh I’ve been to those years ago. It’s cool.
Lucy
April 29, 2016 at 9:51 pmFascinating isn’t it – a great bit of Scottish recycling to just use old buildings as foundations!
Darlene
April 28, 2016 at 5:23 pmThis sounds so cool! Would love to visit someday.
Lucy
April 29, 2016 at 9:51 pmIt was really unusual but so interesting – amazing how it’s still there after all these years!
Cristina
April 30, 2016 at 11:39 pmAwesome, I lived in Edinburgh for a year but never did this tour. Did you do the Greyfriar’s Graveyard tour? So scary. After doing that tour I came back by myself one day. I looked into a crypt and I (seriously, literally) ran out of the cemetery.
Lucy
May 1, 2016 at 9:21 pmWe had a look around Greyfriar’s cemetery but didn’t know about the tour – I’m back up in August though so will look that up, love a good spooky tour!
Cristina
May 2, 2016 at 12:01 amYou should take this tour then! http://www.cityofthedeadtours.com/city-of-the-dead-haunted-graveyard/ It is pretty scary. Read about the Mackenzie Poltergeist in this site. Have tons of fun!
Vlad
May 4, 2016 at 12:29 pmThis sounds so creepy, yet so interesting, I’d love to do the tour when I visit Edinburgh this summer 😀
Lucy
May 6, 2016 at 3:19 pmIt was really good fun – funny as much as scary, and tons of gross details!
Suzanne Jones
May 4, 2016 at 10:21 pmI chickened out of this tour when we were in Edinburgh – too spooky!
Lucy
May 6, 2016 at 3:20 pmHonestly it’s not too scary! I might try out the spooky late-night version in August though if I’m feeling brave enough.
thebritishberliner
May 8, 2016 at 12:33 amNice one Lucy! ‘Love Edinburgh. Have been a million times and have also been on this tour as I like ghost walks. We also went to the Jack the Ripper walking tour in London but I was a little anxious that our son might find it gruesome, but the guide assured us that older kids (he was 11 then) don’t find it scary, but fascinating! A bit like the “Horrible History” books.
Disturbing but really quite hilariously funny!
Lucy
May 13, 2016 at 11:14 pmI still haven’t done the Jack the Ripper walking tour – one for next time in London though as I love this sort of thing!
theitalianrover
May 10, 2016 at 12:15 pmLove it! I’m visiting Edinburgh in June, can’t wait! I’ll surely go on this tour, thank you!
Lucy
May 13, 2016 at 11:14 pmThat’s great – have an amazing trip!
Noelle
June 1, 2016 at 9:41 amI am heading to Edinburgh this weekend and remembered reading this article, so I just booked a ticket to visit St Mary’s Close. Thanks for sharing!
Angela Cowell
June 19, 2017 at 10:19 pmGreat post Lucy. How did you manage to take photos as we couldn’t when we visited?
Lucy
June 20, 2017 at 6:38 amHi Angela, the photos are all from Mary King’s Close that they kindly let me use – wish I could’ve taken my own though as it’s such a fascinating place!
Mayling
July 18, 2017 at 8:48 amIt was fun to read this post. Thank you so much for sharing. I first heard about Mary King’s Close in 1986 when my new husband took me to Edinburgh to meet his family. The Vaults had been recently discovered and they told us about the Close as well. We really wanted to see it, so we headed to the Council Chambers the next morning, only to learn that there were no regular tours, there was only a gentleman that one could write to make arrangements, and he was only available a few times per week. We were given a tab of paper with an address.
Since we had already made plans to bicycle to Iona for a week, we were hoping that there would be sufficient time for us to make the tour upon our return when we had a three day window before catching our flight home. Not being used to twice daily mail delivery, we were absolutely stunned to receive a response the following morning with an invitation to piggyback onto a tour that he was giving the next day for another group. We were thrilled to delay our departure to Iona by one day and join this group of six!
Our gentleman guide, probably in his late 80s, had only been giving these tours for about six years. He said that he replaced the man who had conducted them for the previous 26 years, after he passed away. Like his predecessor, he was a lifelong avid amateur historian and happy to share that passion with us. He wore a jacket and tie.
Even though it was strictly forbidden for the group to separate, he discretely looked the other way when I slipped into a few of the rooms that he did not take the group into but which seemed to be calling me. It was lovely that he allowed me those moments of quiet so I could get a “feel” for where I was.
We were allowed to take photographs back then, but mine weren’t very good (dingy & dark), and no interesting anomalies appeared in the prints. You didn’t have to be psychic to pick up the vibes though, lots of energies were still hanging about. I think there might have only been one doll at the time; “Annie” had not yet collected a lorry load of them. Our guide shared the story of the Japanese psychic and Annie, but even at the time I was unable to decide whether the story was his or one from his predecessor’s days. He himself had no interest in the paranormal…”Unlike you,” he said, wagging his finger at me. At then end of the tour, he said that the psychics always gravitated to the same places, even if the rooms were closed (and many of them were).
I no longer remember the name of our guide, but we spent a wonderful two hours that on a leisurely tour that was so non-commercial the City didn’t even charge admission. Our guide would not permit us to tip him either, believing that it was his privilege to be guiding us.
I am suddenly stuck by the changes in 30 years, grateful that I got to take a tour that really doesn’t exist any more, but the place looks so much smarter now; it would be great to see it if I make it back to Scotland. Thanks again.
Lucy
July 25, 2017 at 7:59 pmWhat a great story! It’s definitely changed a lot now but it must have been so interesting to see it like that before it was commercialised and you could really get a sense of the place’s atmosphere.
marianne mcdougall
February 13, 2018 at 10:30 amFabulous post Lucy, this now makes me want to go on my next trip to Edinburgh.
Lucy
February 13, 2018 at 7:56 pmThanks! It’s such an interesting place, well worth a trip.
Diana Thorneycroft
February 23, 2018 at 8:42 pmI have just been reading some of the “Rebus” books, set in Edinburgh and in one of them he mentions the underground streets that were built over. I was fascinated by the idea and so thought I’d do an internet search. How glad I was to find your site. It is so well written and interesting to read. I can’t wait to go and see it. One day soon I hope.
Thank you so much for sharing this. I’m off upstairs to share it with my son.
Very best wishes to you and very happy wanderings. Remember “All who wander are not lost”
Diana
Lucy
February 25, 2018 at 6:28 pmThanks Diana, I haven’t read any Rebus books for a long time but this is a great reminder to check them out again! Fascinating place, and so interesting to visit, hope you get there too someday.
Melanie Chadd
March 26, 2018 at 8:42 amI only live in Perth and this has been on my list of things to do in Edinburgh for some time now. I have heard lots of really good things about it and it sounds fascinating.
Great post
Lucy
March 28, 2018 at 5:24 pmThanks, it’s a fascinating place – so unusual!
Bert Patient
December 13, 2020 at 10:19 pmMy wife and i went there three years ago and a young lady dressed for the tour was excellent
My relations live in the city and have never been there
I would say any visitor to the city would find it most interesting to take a visit
We watched the tv progamme on hidden city secretss and was very much amazed that this was not visitted at the time of the Edinburgh showing
A thank you to all who keep it going