Mary King's Close: The Real Story Under the City Chambers

A Timeline of the Close

The dates below come from the historical record of the close and from the attraction that runs tours today. They cover the street from its years as a living thoroughfare to its burial and its modern reopening. The key dates are the 1753 demolition, when the Royal Exchange went up over the surviving buildings, and 1902, when the last resident finally moved out.

Who Was Mary King?

Mary King was a merchant burgess of Edinburgh in the 17th century, and the close takes her name because she lived there. The record shows her as a prominent businesswoman in the 1630s. She was a widow with four children who made her living trading in fabrics.

She was not the close's only famous connection. The street sat in the densest part of the Old Town, a steep alley running off the Royal Mile between tall tenement buildings called lands. Those tenements were standard from the 16th century because the city walls left no room to spread outward, so the city grew upward instead.

The Close Under the City Chambers

In 1753 the city built the Royal Exchange, which now serves as the City Chambers, and the close was partly demolished and buried beneath it. That is why part of the street survives underground.

The last of those occupants was Andrew Chesney. In 1897 he was offered a compulsory purchase order of 400 pounds for his home, and he held out until 1902 before leaving. The close ran close to the Nor Loch, a stagnant and polluted marsh that was never a source of drinking water. Gas from the loch is said to have created eerie lights and hallucinations in the lower rooms, and that is the kind of detail that fed the haunting rumours long before any tour operator arrived. The loch itself was drained in stages, with the western end emptied between 1813 and 1820, and its bed is now Princes Street Gardens and Waverley Station.

One distinction matters when you compare sites. The official site calls this the only underground close in Edinburgh, as distinct from the Blair Street and South Bridge vaults, which are storage cellars built into the South Bridge arches rather than a buried street. If you want the vaults version of underground Edinburgh, see the separate guide to the Edinburgh Vaults.

Edinburgh's Worst Outbreak

The 1645 outbreak was Edinburgh's 11th recorded plague. The first Scottish outbreak had come almost three centuries earlier, in 1350, so the city had long experience of the disease and none of a cure. The close was a bad place to be when it arrived. The laigh houses, the low-ceilinged rooms at the bottom of the tenements, held up to 14 people in a single room.

The city's response was organised but stretched to breaking. Infected households were marked with white flags and their residents could not leave. The number of foul clengers, the people paid to clean infected houses, fell to just six for the entire city. Victims who died were buried in mass graves at Greyfriars, Boroughloch and Leith Links. Greyfriars is covered in the Greyfriars Kirkyard guide.

The Plague Doctors

The council appointed Dr John Paulitious as plague doctor on 23 December 1644, months before the outbreak peaked. His salary started at 40 Scots a month and rose to 100 Scots. He died of plague in April 1645.

Dr George Rae succeeded him in summer 1645 and survived the outbreak. The beaked plague suit design is credited to Charles de L'Orme in 1619.

The Walled-in Story Is a Myth

The popular story runs that the council walled up the close with 600 residents inside and left them to die. It is a good story. It is also a myth. Historians who have worked on the records of the 1645 outbreak say plague victims were in fact cared for, not abandoned behind a wall. The city had plague doctors on salary, cleaning crews, marked households and burial arrangements, which is not the record of a place that sealed its poor underground.

The myth persists because it is dramatic and because the buried street seems to confirm it. A sealed room under a government building looks like evidence. It is actually evidence of 1753, not 1645: the close was buried for commerce, not for quarantine. When a guide tells you the walling-in story on any tour of the city, the honest framing is that it is a legend. The documented suffering of 1645, the overcrowded rooms, the six remaining cleaners, the mass graves, needs no embellishment.

The 1992 Visit

The story starts in 1992, when Japanese psychic Aiko Gibo visited the close while filming a programme about haunted places in Britain. In a room off Allan's Close she said she sensed a young girl called Annie who had lost her doll and was upset. Gibo went back up to the Royal Mile, bought a doll from a shop, and left it in the room for her.

That is the whole of it. There is no historical record of a girl named Annie in the close. The tale rests on one psychic's account from a single television visit. The official attraction tells the story openly on its own website, and guides repeat it on the tour, but it is a modern legend, not documented history.

The Doll Room Today

Visitors from around the world leave dolls and toys in the room, and some police officers and fire crews leave their badges.

The original doll did not stay. It disappeared on 17 April 2019, and was later identified as a 1960s Daisy Doll designed by Mary Quant. The room is still filled with visitors' gifts. Treat the story as the modern folk tale it is. It says more about what visitors want from the close than about anything that happened there in the 17th century.

Where It Is and How to Get In

The entrance is at 2 Warriston's Close, on the Royal Mile, postcode EH1 1PG. You walk down into the close from street level, and the buried lanes sit beneath the City Chambers. You cannot wander in on your own. Every visit is a guided tour with a costumed character guide, so joining a tour is the only way in.

Tours leave about every 10 minutes through the day, so advance booking is wise. Groups of 15 or more qualify for discounted rates.

Tour Types and Length

The standard tour lasts one hour. Continuum Attractions runs the site and offers a Signature Guided Tour, a Lantern Led Tour and a 17th Century Medicine Experience. The Lantern Led Tour runs daily from 6pm between 2 October and 1 November 2026.

The medicine experience, led by the character Dr Arnott, runs Friday to Sunday through 2026, with visitors examining samples and making herbal remedies. There is also a Closes and Coffee Tour daily all year, an Above and Beyond Tour daily from 29 June to 1 November 2026, and seasonal events including a four-hour Cape Controversy dining experience and a Victorian Christmas Experience on Fridays to Sundays from 4 to 27 December 2026.

Rules, Access and Hours

Children under 5 are not allowed on the tour, for health and safety reasons. Photos and video are banned during the tour, including phones, cameras and smart glasses, so leave the camera in your pocket. A souvenir photo is taken at the end and sold afterwards.

The attraction is open seven days a week, and the official homepage showed hours of 9:30am to 10:30pm. Arrive 15 minutes before your start time. Details on stairs and step-free access are not stated in the sources checked, so contact the venue directly if access matters to you.

The official site displays no ticket price, so check the official booking page for the current figure. Tiqets sells entry with free cancellation up to 24 hours before, rated 4.6 from 227 reviews, with a live English guide and audio guides in nine languages.

If It Is Sold Out

If your slot is gone, the vaults are the nearest underground alternative. Mercat's daytime vaults tour ($36.34) takes groups of up to 18 into the Blair Street Underground Vaults for 75 minutes, and the Auld Reekie vaults and graveyard tour ($34) adds Greyfriars Kirkyard in 1.5 hours. The Edinburgh Vaults guide compares every vault option.

The Short Version

The Real Mary King's Close is a genuine 17th-century street, buried when the Royal Exchange was built in 1753, and the official site calls it the only underground close in Edinburgh. The vaults are storage rooms in the arches of South Bridge and under Blair Street, built in the late 18th century and later abandoned by the late 19th century. One is a buried home street. The other is a network of rooms that later became slum housing.

The table below sets out the practical differences, using figures from the official Real Mary King's Close pages and from the tour listings on this site. If you want the full vault picture, read the Edinburgh Vaults guide.

Side by Side

Figures come from the official Real Mary King's Close site and the listed tours on the booking platforms.

Ticket

Each row gives the lowest adult rate shown on the booking page and the length of the visit.

Television and Novels

The close has appeared in Most Haunted, Ghost Hunters International and Cities of the Underworld. Ian Rankin used it as a setting in his 1994 Rebus novel Mortal Causes. The attraction itself is run by Continuum Attractions as The Real Mary King's Close, with costumed character guides leading every tour and a souvenir photo taken at the end, since visitors may not take their own photos or video inside.

Tours leave about every 10 minutes through the day and last one hour, so most visitors combine it with an evening ghost tour such as Mercat's vaults tour with whisky, which meets a short way down the Royal Mile at the Mercat Cross.