Here is something Edinburgh does better than almost any other city: it builds on top of its past and then wonders why the past won’t stay buried. Mary King’s Close is the best example. In 1753, construction began on the Royal Exchange — a grand commercial building designed by architect John Adam — and the solution to the inconvenient cluster of occupied medieval streets in its path was simply to incorporate them into the foundations. The buildings were partially demolished, the tops sliced off at street level, and the lower stories sealed into the basement of the new structure. The people who had lived and died in those streets were not moved. Their walls, hearths, and floors were left exactly where they were.
The result, preserved beneath what is now Edinburgh’s City Chambers, is something genuinely strange: a 17th-century street that has been underground for 270 years and has not been particularly improved by the experience. It is not the only buried space in the city — the Edinburgh underground vaults beneath South Bridge tell a parallel story of a city that kept building upward and forgetting what it left below.
Who Was Mary King, and Why Does She Have a Street?
Mary King was a merchant burgess who appeared in Edinburgh’s city records by 1635 as a property holder and trader with full civic voting rights. That detail deserves to sit for a moment. In 17th-century Scotland, very few women held recognised economic authority of that kind. The property had passed to her on her husband’s death, as was common, but what she did with it was not common at all — she established herself as a working merchant of sufficient standing to have a close named after her.
The close she presided over ran steeply downhill from the Royal Mile toward the Nor’ Loch — the marshy body of water at the base of the castle rock that Edinburgh’s residents had spent generations converting into a sewage dump. On either side of the close, tenement buildings rose as high as fourteen storeys, crammed with artisans, traders, minor professionals, and the simply destitute. The ground floors were workshops. Above them, the same families lived, worked, cooked, and died in rooms shared with several other families, with no sewer system and a sanitation strategy that amounted to throwing waste out of windows with a shouted warning.
By the early 17th century, the close housed approximately 500 to 600 people in these conditions. It was, by the standards of the time, perfectly ordinary Edinburgh.
What the Plague Actually Did
In the summer of 1645, Edinburgh experienced what historians consider its eleventh recorded outbreak of plague, and by a significant margin its worst. According to research by Dr. Aaron Allen of the University of Edinburgh, who analyzed the 1645 outbreak in detail, the epidemic killed an estimated 7,500 to 12,000 people in the city — roughly 30 percent of Edinburgh’s population of approximately 35,000. In Leith, the port town just north of Edinburgh, the toll was higher still: close to 3,000 dead, roughly half of the population there. The disease arrived by ship, carried in the fleas on rats, and moved through the overcrowded closes with a speed that left the council scrambling.
The council’s response was not, contrary to popular legend, to seal people inside Mary King’s Close and leave them to die. What actually happened was more organized and, in the context of the time, more humane than the legend suggests — while remaining genuinely terrible. The Edinburgh Burgh Council appointed a plague doctor: on December 23, 1644, they hired John Paulitious at a salary of 40 Scots per month. As the outbreak worsened, his pay was doubled, then raised to 100 Scots — a substantial sum. Paulitious died of the plague in April 1645. His replacement, Dr. George Rae, demanded 110 Scots per month and survived the outbreak, thanks in part to the leather plague suit designed by French physician Charles de L’Orme in 1619, whose tight-sealed coat and beak-filled-with-herbs mask, for all its theatrical appearance, provided genuine protection against flea bites.
Infected households received a white flag on the window. Food and water were delivered to their doors. The sick were sometimes moved to isolation huts outside the city walls on the Boroughmuir. A team of “foul clengers” — sanitation workers tasked with removing the dead and disinfecting properties — handled the bodies. At the peak of the outbreak, the entire city of Edinburgh was served by six foul clengers. The sheer number of dead overwhelmed the established cemeteries. Mass burial pits were dug at the Burgh Muir and Leith Links. The exact death toll from Mary King’s Close specifically was never recorded; estimates suggest the plague killed approximately 600 of its residents — somewhere between a third and half of those who lived there.
The sealing legend — the story that plague victims were walled in alive — appears to derive from the combination of genuine quarantine measures, which did trap infected families inside their homes, and the close’s subsequent physical entombment under the Royal Exchange a century later. Two real facts, separated by a hundred years, collapsed into a single story that is more dramatic than either individual truth.
A Hundred Years of Slow Decline
After the plague passed, the close was not abandoned. People continued to live and work there. This is worth emphasizing: the residents of Mary King’s Close went back to their lives. Dr. Allen’s analysis found that Edinburgh’s demographic recovery from the 1645 outbreak was relatively swift — baptism records show that roughly 87 percent of the population drop was recovered through births within a generation.
The close declined gradually over the following century as Edinburgh grew and changed around it. By the time the Royal Exchange project began in 1753, the properties in and around Mary King’s Close were among the city’s most dilapidated. John Adam’s construction incorporated the lower stories of multiple closes — Mary King’s, Stewart’s, Pearson’s, and Allen’s — as foundations for the new building. The residents moved out. The lower floors became storage spaces, then were sealed when the building above was completed. The City Chambers, as the Royal Exchange was eventually repurposed in the 1810s, sat on top of a network of 17th-century rooms that Edinburgh’s residents gradually forgot existed.
The last occupant of the accessible portions of the close left in 1902. During the Second World War, the sealed chambers were used as air raid shelters. They were formally surveyed by archaeologists in the 1990s, and in 2003 — 250 years after they were sealed — the attraction known as The Real Mary King’s Close opened to the public.
The Ghost in the Room
The most famous ghost associated with Mary King’s Close is a child named Annie. The story goes that an 8-year-old girl died of the plague in one of the close’s back rooms in 1645, and that her spirit has remained there ever since. The particular origin of the Annie story is traceable: a Japanese psychic visiting the site in 1992 reportedly felt a presence in the room, claimed to see a girl in rags standing by the window, and brought back a doll to comfort her. Visitors have been leaving toys, dolls, and trinkets for Annie ever since. The room now contains hundreds of offerings.
Marcus Hale’s considered view on this: the Annie story is not supported by any historical documentation of a specific child by that name dying in that room. What it is supported by is something more interesting — a consistent pattern of visitors since 1992 reporting experiences in that particular room that they don’t report in others. Whether that’s the power of suggestion, genuine spiritual residue, or something the existing evidence doesn’t yet explain is a question I find genuinely worth asking rather than dismissing.
The room’s documented history is unsettling enough without the ghost. It is a small stone chamber that housed multiple family members in 1645 while the plague worked through the close floor by floor. The walls have not been substantially altered since the 17th century. The temperature in the sealed underground chambers averages several degrees cooler than street level year-round. Whether Annie is there or not, something about that room tends to affect people — and the history alone is sufficient explanation for that.
What Survives Down There
The physical survival of Mary King’s Close is remarkable by the standards of European urban archaeology. The walls retain their original soot from hearths. Architectural features — window frames, floor joists, plasterwork — date to the 1600s. Artefacts recovered from the site include ceramic fragments, rusted keys, a child’s shoe, and tool remnants that allow historians to reconstruct daily life in specific rooms.
The site also preserves something harder to quantify: the physical experience of the close’s original scale. Visitors routinely report claustrophobia at the ceiling heights and corridor widths that were standard for 17th-century Edinburgh housing. Buildings were built to fill the space between the defensive walls, not to provide light or air. The wealthy lived at the top floors, above the stench. Mary King lived somewhere in the middle, as befitted her status. The destitute lived at the bottom, closest to the waste that ran down the street from above.
That stratification — the literal vertical hierarchy of 17th-century Edinburgh — is legible in the architecture of the close in a way that no text can fully convey. You can see exactly what it meant to be poor in Edinburgh in 1645. The buildings tell you.
If you are visiting Edinburgh, The Real Mary King’s Close is at 2 Warriston’s Close on the High Street, beneath the City Chambers. Our full Edinburgh ghost tours guide covers the other sites and operators worth your time in the city.
Frequently Asked Questions
Were plague victims sealed inside Mary King’s Close?
No, and this is one of Edinburgh’s most persistent myths. Infected residents were quarantined inside their homes during the 1645 outbreak — a real and documented measure — but they were brought food and water and had access to medical care. The close was not sealed as a containment strategy. It was physically buried a century later, in 1753, when the Royal Exchange was built on top of it. The two facts, separated by 100 years, became conflated into a single dramatic legend.
Who was Mary King?
Mary King was a textile merchant and property holder who appeared in Edinburgh’s city records by 1635 with full civic voting rights — an unusual status for a woman in 17th-century Scotland. She is believed to have inherited property from her husband and used it to establish herself as a legitimate trader in the Old Town. The close that bore her name ran steeply downhill from the Royal Mile and housed several hundred residents by the 1640s.
How many people died in the 1645 Edinburgh plague?
According to research by Dr. Aaron Allen of the University of Edinburgh, the 1645 outbreak killed an estimated 7,500 to 12,000 people in Edinburgh — roughly 30 percent of the city’s population of approximately 35,000. Leith, the adjacent port town, lost close to 3,000 people, approximately half its population. Within Mary King’s Close itself, approximately 600 residents are believed to have died of the plague.
When was Mary King’s Close opened to visitors?
The attraction opened in 2003, following archaeological surveys in the 1990s. It had been physically sealed since 1753, when the Royal Exchange — now the City Chambers — was constructed over the site. During the Second World War, portions of the underground space were used as air raid shelters.
What is the story of Annie’s ghost?
Annie is reportedly the spirit of an 8-year-old girl who died of the plague in 1645 in one of the close’s back rooms. The specific origin of the story is traceable to a Japanese psychic who visited the site in 1992 and claimed to sense a child’s presence there. Visitors have been leaving toys and trinkets in the room since that visit, and it is now lined with hundreds of offerings. There is no historical record of a specific child named Annie dying in that room, though the room’s history during the 1645 outbreak is well documented and sufficiently disturbing on its own terms.