The Coltheart Haunting of Mary King's Close

Mary King's Close runs off the Royal Mile in Edinburgh's Old Town. Today it lies beneath the City Chambers. In 1685 George Sinclair printed a ghost story set there in Satan's Invisible World Discovered, as Relation XXXVIII. It opens "Sir, within these few years," and gives no year.

At its centre was Thomas Coltheart, "T. C." in the text, an agent about the session-house. A neighbour warned his maid that the house was "haunted with a spirit or ghost." "If you live there, I assure you, you will have more company than yourselves." The maid left. Coltheart stayed, lodging there that very night.

A Sunday afternoon. Coltheart was indisposed and lay down to sleep. His wife sat reading the Bible at the head of the table near the bed. At a little chamber door opposite her she saw "the head and face of an old man, grey headed, with a grey beard, looking straight upon her." She tried to wake her husband. She fainted.

That evening, after supper, Coltheart looked towards the chimney. The same old man's head was in the former place. Near it hung "a young child, with a coat upon it." Then "a naked arm appears in the air, from the elbow downward, and the hand stretched out." It came within its own length of him, as if to shake hands. Coltheart challenged it: "In the name of the living God, and of our Saviour Jesus Christ, tell me why thou troublest my family?"

A little dog came out of the small room and curled up on a chair, nose in its tail, as if to sleep. A cat came leaping out after it. Then the hall filled with "small little creatures dancing prettily," things none of them could name. The couple prayed. After an hour and more came "a deep, dreadful, and loud groan, as of a strong man dying." Every vision vanished at once.

Coltheart had the courage to live in the house until he died. Seeing some crows, he said they foretold that he must die shortly. He fell sick with an excessive ache in his head.

Near Tranent, a gentleman who was his client and friend lay in bed one morning. His nurse saw "a cloud moving up and down the room," and the gentleman laid his sword beside him. The cloud took the form of a man. "Art thou my dear friend Thomas Coltheart?" The ghost held up its hand three times, waving and shaking it towards him, and vanished about the very hour, as was guessed, of the agent's death.

After the burial an unnamed minister prayed with the widow and heard her story. At the dog's chair he declared: "I have seen his chair; in the name of Almighty God, I will see his chamber too." He went into the small room. Sinclair records no result. The story reached the Duke of Lauderdale, who had the minister recount it before many of the nobility.

Sinclair wrote against "Saducees and atheists." Thomas Frost and Andrew Lang later dismissed another of his relations, the Glenluce devil, as fraud by the household's son. No hoax claim has been made about Coltheart. Gas from the polluted Nor Loch may have produced eerie lights in the close and was thought to cause hallucinations, but no one has tied it to these visions. The text itself notes Coltheart was unwell before the first sighting.

Later retellings embellished the story. The head gained a floating beard. The arm became a child's, or dripped blood from the wall. In 2004 Most Haunted came to the close, its introduction recalling "a child's head, a severed arm."