Mary King's Close, Edinburgh

Mary King's Close is an underground historic close beneath Edinburgh City Chambers, and it now forms a visitor attraction. Its name comes from Mary King, a merchant burgess who lived here during the seventeenth century. When the Royal Exchange was built, part of the close was demolished and buried in 1753.

It later stayed closed to the public for many years. Local legend has filled these buried passages with stories of ghosts and murders, while escaping gas from the polluted Nor Loch has been offered as a possible source for eerie lights and hallucinations. The close also holds a remarkably late human connection: Andrew Chesney remained its final resident until he left in 1902 after receiving a compulsory purchase order in 1897. What you see here is therefore both a surviving underground street and a place where documented history and powerful legend meet.