Mary King's Dead End is a series of gloomy medieval streets hidden beneath modern-day Edinburgh. The narrow streets of this area were entirely in the lowlands under the city, and were cut off from the rest of the capital of Scotland by a closing line of high impregnable walls.
Historical records say that in the 17th century, a plague epidemic threatened to completely destroy Edinburgh. The streets were littered with corpses and every night on a creaking cart the monks gathered the dead to take them out of the city and burn them. The burning of bodies slowed down the spread of the epidemic, but could not stop it in any way.
Over time, all infected were isolated in a special infirmary. The chronicles tell that in 1645 the plague threatened to spread to all of Edinburgh, and the magistrate ordered to enclose the dangerous quarter with a wall in order to strike the main focus of the epidemic.
Mary King was the owner of most of the fenced-off buildings, so the entire block began to bear her name. According to the official version, the residents were relocated to another place before immuring the quarter. It sounds incredible, since the main factor in the spread of the disease was precisely the infected. It is highly probable that part of the city really stands on the bones, hidden from the current inhabitants by ancient stone walls.
A hundred years after the plague epidemic, the inhabitants of Edinburgh dismantled all the destroyed houses of the Mary King quarter for building materials and a new cheerful city began to rise above the ruins of pain and death, and the secrets of past centuries remained in forgotten dungeons.
To get closer to the places where the tragic events of the struggle with a terrible disease unfolded, you need to go down a special system of narrow passages and stairs. It is there that the ancient plague city rests.
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Now its streets are dark and silent tunnels along the walls and ceilings of which there are rows of dusty lamps connected by a cord. A dim light pulls out from the darkness the remains of stairs that lead nowhere, blocked windows from which no one looks out, and wooden doors clogged with lime and rubble, hiding rooms that no one has disturbed for decades.
They say that with the onset of evening, the wind can bring to the ear the quiet groans or stifled cries of unfortunate people left to fend for themselves in a sealed quarter. Sometimes at night they see strange vagrants dressed in rags that disappear without a trace around the next turn. And in 2000, one of the tourists photographing a historical place managed to take a strange picture, which we published below. According to him, he was just filming the stairs and did not expect to see such a thing when reviewing photographs.