228 OLD AND NEW EDINBURGH, [High Street.
? arms, and took her by boat across the loch that
rippled at the foot of the slope.
In Drummond of Hawthornden?s poems, published
by the Maitland Club, there is an epigram
on Mary King?s ? pest : ?-
? Turn, citizens, to God 5 repent, repent,
And pray your bedlam frenzies may relent ;
Think not rebellion a trifling thmg,
This plague doth fight for Mu& and the King.??
An old gentleman, says Wilson, has often described
to us his visits to Mary King?s Close, along
with his companions, when a schoolboy. The
most courageous of them would approach these
dread abodes of mystery, and at-ter shouting
through the keyhole or broken window-shutter,
they would run off with palpitatiflg hearts; the
popular superstition being, that if these longdeserted
abodes were opened, the deadly pest imprisoned
there would once more burst forth and desolate
the land.
Mr. George Sinclair, Professor of Moral Philosophy
in the University of Glasgow, and afterwards
minister of Eastwood in Renfrewshire, by the publication,
in 1685, of his work, ?Satan?s Invisible
World Discovered,? did much to add to the terrors
of Mary King?s Close, by his account of apparitions
seen therein, and recorded ?? by witnesses of
undoubted veracity ?-a work long hawked about
the streets by the itinerant sellers of gingerbread
The last, or northern portion of the close, with its
massive vaulted lower storeys, was an open ruin in
1845 ; the south, or upper, had fallen into ruin
after a fire in 1750, and was in that condition
when a portion of the site was required for the
west side of the Royal Exchange, three years
after.
It would appear from the Professor?s narrative,
that Mr. Thomas Coltheart, a respectable law
agent, whose legal business had begun to flourish,
took a better style of house in AIary King?s Close.
Their maid-servant was, of course, duly warned by
obliging neighbours that the house was haunted,
and in terror she gave up her situation and fled,
leaving Mr. and Mrs. Coltheart, to face whatever
they might see, alone.
Accordingly, it came to pass that, when the lady
had seated herself by the bedside of her gudeman,
who, being slightly indisposed on the Sunday afternoon,
had lain down to rest, while she read the
Scriptures, chancing to look up, she saw to her
intense dismay a human head, apparently that of
an old man, with a grey floating beard, suspended
in mid-air, at a little distance, and gazing intently
at her with elvish eyes. She swooned at this terrible
sight, and remained insensible till the neighbours
returned from church. Her husband strove
to reason her out of her credulity, and the evening
passed without further trouble ; but they had not
been long in bed when he himself espied the same
phantom head by the fire-light, floating in mid-air,
and eyeing him with ghostly eyes.
He lighted a candle, and betook him to prayer,
but with little effect, for in about an hour the
bodyless phantom was joined by that of a child,
also suspended in mid-air, and this was followed
by an arm, naked from the elbow, which, in defiance
of all Coltheart?s prayers and pious interjections,
seemed bent on shaking hands with
him and his wife !
In the most solemn way the luckless lawyer conjured
these phantoms to entrust him with the story
of any wrongs they wished righted ; but all to no
purpose. The old tenants evidently regarded the
new as intruders, and others came to their aid, for
the naked arm was joined by a spectral dog, which
curled itself up in a chair, and went to sleep ; and
then came a cat, and many other creatures, but
of grotesque and monstrous forms, till the whole
room swarmed with them, so that the honest couple
were compelled to kneel on their bed, there being
no standing room on the floor ; till suddenly, with
a deep and awful groan, as of a strong man dying
in agony, the whole vanished, and Mr. and Mrs.
Coltheart found themselves alone.
In those days of superstition, Mr. Coltheart-if
we are to believe Professor Sinclair-must have
been a man of more than ordinary courage, for he
continued to reside in this terrible house till the
day of his death, without further molestation ; but
when that day came, it would seem not to have
been unaccompanied by the supernatural. At the
moment he expired, a gentleman, whose friend and
law agent he was, while asleep in bed beside his
wife, at Tranent, ten miles distant, was roused by
the nurse, who had been terrified ? by something
like a cloud moving about the room.?
Starting up with the first instinct of a Scot in
those days, he seized his sword to defend himself,
when ? the something ? gradually assumed the form
and face of a man, who looked at him pale and
ghastly, and in whom he recognised his friend
Thomas Coltheart.
?( Are you dead, and if so, what is your errand?
he demanded, despite his fears, on which the apparition
shook its head twice and melted away. Proceeding
at once to Edinburgh, the ghost-seer went
direct to the house of his friend in Mary King?s
Close, and found the wife of the former in tears
for the recent death of her husband, This ac
