Last month, Rhonda and I took a good old-fashioned road trip down to Dixieland. We headed west out of Indianapolis with plans in hand to stop at as many tourist trap destinations as we could handle. Our goal for the first leg of the trip was Elvis Presley’s Graceland, reportedly the second most visited house in America behind the White House. When I informed Rhonda of my plans, she was not amused. She’s a disco girl and Elvis Presley never held any charms for her. I’ll leave that alone. I simply told her to trust me and that she’d have a good time.
We booked a night at the Guest House at Graceland just outside of Graceland’s famous gates. I can highly recommend a stay there should you ever find yourself in Memphis. It is clean, comfortable, elegant, and not much more expensive than any other hotel in the area. The $92 million property opened in 2016 (Priscilla Presley cut the “blue suede” ribbon) as the largest hotel project in Memphis in over 90 years. The resort hotel features 430 guest rooms and 20 specialty suites with design and décor supervised by Priscilla Presley herself. It opened on Oct. 27, replacing the Elvis-themed Heartbreak Hotel that had been on the spot since the 1980s. Graceland is located at 3764 Elvis Presley Boulevard in the Whitehaven neighborhood, about nine miles south of central Memphis and fewer than four miles north of the Mississippi border. Graceland was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on Nov. 7, 1991, becoming the first site recognized for significance related to rock music. It was declared a National Historic Landmark on March 27, 2006, another first for such a site. Graceland attracts more than 650,000 visitors annually.
While we were there, the property was “all shook up” about the biggest news to hit Graceland since Elvis left the building back in the summer of 1977: Graceland was being foreclosed on! Word was that Lisa Marie Presley had foolishly put the home up as security on a $3.8 million loan back in 2018 and allegedly defaulted. You can imagine the disbelief and outrage voiced in the halls, shops, and restaurants of the Guest House and the unrelenting stream of local and national news stories flooding the airways while we there. It didn’t take long for the lawyers to figure out it was nothing more than a Nigerian scam cooked up for a quick buck by a shell company using fraudulent documents with dubious signatures. The Duval County Florida Notary whose name appears on the documents quickly stated she didn’t sign them and had never met Lisa Marie.
The Guest House at Graceland offers a free shuttle bus for guests to take the short trip over to the mansion. It so happened that our bus driver was a transplant from Peru, Indiana. She found out Rhonda’s birthday (May 1st) had just passed and led the whole bus in singing Happy Birthday to her. What a treat! Once inside the gates, we were dropped off (along with about 10 other guests) at the front door of Graceland. Judging from my first impression, it certainly looked like it was going to live up to the hype. The 13.8-acre estate in Memphis, Tennessee, was once home to Graceland Farms owned by Stephen C. Toof, founder of S.C. Toof & Co., the oldest commercial printing firm in Memphis. He was the pressroom foreman of the Memphis Daily Appeal newspaper and he named the estate after his daughter, Grace. According to the website, “Grace inherited the property from her father in 1894. After her death, the property passed to her niece Ruth Moore, a Memphis socialite. Together with her husband, Thomas Moore, Ruth Moore commissioned the construction of a 10,266-square-foot Colonial Revival style mansion in 1939.”
In 1957, Elvis purchased the home for $102,500 after giving his parents, Vernon and Gladys Presley, a budget of $100,000 to find a secluded “farmhouse” with plenty of land around it. At the time, Graceland was located in southern Shelby County, several miles south of Memphis’s main urban area. As Memphis expanded over the years, Graceland became surrounded by other properties. After Gladys died in 1958, Presley’s father Vernon married Dee Stanley in 1960, and the couple lived at Graceland for a time. There was some discord between Presley and his stepmother Dee at Graceland, so Elvis moved them out of the mansion and into a nearby house on Dolan Drive which ran alongside Elvis’s estate.
Priscilla Presley lived at Graceland for a while before she and Elvis married in Las Vegas on May 1, 1967. Their daughter Lisa Marie Presley was born on Feb. 1, 1968, and lived the first years of her life on the estate. After her parents divorced in 1972, her mother moved with Lisa to California. Lisa Marie would return to Graceland to celebrate Christmas together. On Aug. 16, 1977, Presley died aged 42 in his upstairs bathroom at Graceland. The official cause of death was cardiac arrhythmia but later toxicology reports strongly suggested a drug-induced heart attack as the primary cause of death (14 different drugs were found in Elvis’s system including large doses of codeine). Presley was laid out in a 900-pound, copper-lined white marble coffin just inside the foyer as more than 30,000 of his mourning fans passed by the mansion’s doorway to pay their last respects. According to news reports, so many people flooded Memphis that President Jimmy Carter had 300 National Guard troops sent to the area to keep things in order. President Carter said Elvis had come to symbolize America’s “vitality, rebelliousness, and good humor.”
A private funeral with 200 close friends, family, and close associates was held on Aug. 18, 1977, in the mansion. Elvis’s casket was placed in front of the stained glass doorway of the music room, flanked by a pair of peacocks. There were over 3,100 floral arrangements sent from people all over the world including dozens of floral guitars, hound dogs, and hearts. Attendees included James Brown, Jerry Lee Lewis, John Wayne, Burt Reynolds, George Hamilton, Ann-Margret, and Caroline Kennedy. Following the funeral service, a caravan headed by a silver Cadillac led the white Cadillac hearse containing Elvis’s body and 17 white Cadillac limousines on a two-and-a-half mile trek lined by an estimated 18,000 fans to a mausoleum in Forest Hill Cemetery Midtowns in Memphis. Inside the white marble mausoleum, a small ceremony was held. At approximately 4:24 p.m., Elvis Presley’s body was entombed in the six crypt family chamber next to his mother Gladys. Vernon Presley would be the last to emerge from the mausoleum, visibly shaken. But Elvis would not remain outside the gates of Graceland for long. As family and friends departed the cemetery and returned to Graceland for a Southern supper, someone was plotting to steal Elvis Presley’s body.
Next Week: Part II Graceland Gentrification?
Al Hunter is the author of the “Haunted Indianapolis” and co-author of the “Haunted Irvington” and “Indiana National Road” book series. His newest books are “Bumps in the Night. Stories from the Weekly View,” “Irvington Haunts. The Tour Guide,” and “The Mystery of the H.H. Holmes Collection.” Contact Al directly at Huntvault@aol.com or become a friend on Facebook.
