The Real Mary King's Close

A couple years back when on holiday, I chatted with a member of my tour group who happened to be a fairly well-travelled student. A first-year at Oxford, she had just visited Auschwitz, and spoke about it with an almost unnatural enthusiasm. She pronounced it 'very cool,' and said I absolutely had to go there. I found it mildly disturbing that she spoke of an ex concentration camp with the air of one describing a ride on Space Mountain.

But I guess everyone feels an innate and inexplicable draw toward the dark and macabre. Murder, torture, insanity - all repulsive and all consequently fascinating. You have to wonder why the tourism of death continues to draw millions. Everyone likes gazing at the blacker side of life when its sealed up in a glass exhibition case. Sometimes its contents continue to evoke shock, pathos and the sense that a real atrocity has happened. I'm thinking of things like the human hair exhibit in the Washington D.C. Holocaust museum (I believe there's a similar one in Auschwitz), or the bones and soiled rags lying littered across the killing fields of Cheong Ek. In other cases, perhaps the horror is somehow more palatable, or its been so far removed it's simply been domesticated into...just another Disneyland?

So it was in Edinburgh's own street of death - the now subterranean Mary King's Close, which has gained infamy for its association with the devastating plague in Edinburgh. But somehow we don't think of one of the worst plagues in European history as on par with more recent cases of human genocide, do we?** Interesting thing to think about.



A 'close' refers to an extremely narrow lane, which usually has residences on either side. Mary King's I am told, was one of the more popular closes off the Royal Mile in the 17th-century - now the main thoroughfare in Edinburgh. The requisite myth goes, that when the residents of Mary King'swere infected with the Plague during the 16th-century, the entire close was walled up to prevent the pestilence from spreading and the sad residents...well, left to die either of plague or starvation. Is there any truth in that? Who knows?

In any case, the close is now sealed off and lies underneath the City Chambers. And I suppose the contrast between the rather posh Royal Mile government building and the gritty close which lies underneath it is something the management has latched upon. Discover the 'hidden' and dark side of Edinburgh as it were! (For 9 pounds)

Trying to look scared but failing.

So come Saturday, we set off for a one-hour guided tour of the famed Mary King's, which has apparently featured on Britain's Most Haunted. It's apparently also a popular spot for psychics and mediums to commune with the restless dead, but you wouldn't really sense that from the brochure which looked campy enough. Incidentally, it featured pictures of guides dressed up in what I presumed was medieval-esque garb...although I really doubt all 17th-century men went around in lavish plumed hats!

The tour itself was really quite entertaining although our guide (a 'medieval aristocratic woman') had this annoying habit of leading us into darkened rooms and turning around suddenly and going 'BOO!' We got a look around the various tenements (these little connected rooms) on Mary King's including the oldest preserved house on the stretch - literally held up by various sturdy-looking poles. We walked up the close itself which is really not all that long a street, but it is extremely steep with wide grooves on either side - presumably meant for people to dump their sewage in those days before flushable toilets were invented! I think the main attraction for me however was the guide and the very interesting stories she regaled us with throughout the tour - to put it very crudely, ghost stories if you will. But don't you remember how those used to enthrall us when we were kids? That really made the tour if I may say, because visually it's mostly just a lot of similar-looking darkened rooms with 'mood' lighting (flickering lights and not-so-discreet exit signs haha). Seeing the actual close itself was kind of cool though.

I also found the historical bits of the story quite engaging. The 'tour narrative' focuses primarily on 3 things: i) witch-hunts, ii) the plague, iii) ghosts. Number iii is a given, but I was quite impressed with the 'plague' section which was in essence, my Medieval history lecture on the Black Death condensed! Well nice to know there's some substance there.

My parents might be going on this tour (based on my review haha), so I won't spoil it all for them if they do opt for it, but suffice to say there were some rather creepy moments one of which I'm not sure was entirely staged. Great fun if you go with a bunch of friends. You can take turns scaring each other. The atmosphere (and the cold) certainly lends itself to that.

Overall, it was certainly quite interesting. Not sure if it was entirely worth 9 pounds. Edinburgh castle was about 10pounds, and it offered about a whole day's worth of sight-seeing as opposed to just 1 hour. But it was an experience nevertheless.

**An interesting fact which I cannot help slipping in! Excuse my bookwormishness. The plague in Europe was actually blamed on the Jews at one point of time. Paranoid medieval folk in some quarters believed in a 'Jewish conspiracy' and thought resident Jews had poisoned the wells and were thus responsible for the plague. This resulted in a way of anti-semitism across certain parts of Europe, at times involving the expulsion of Jews from the city, or at its worst, mob killings.