In part I of this article, I detailed our visit to Elvis Presley’s Graceland in Memphis Tennessee on May 22, 2024, the date that the story broke claiming Graceland was being foreclosed on! The lawsuit claimed that Lisa Marie Presley had defaulted on a $3.8 million loan back in 2018 and put the mansion up for collateral. By the time we left Memphis, the plot was revealed to be a scam. Also in Part 1, I detailed the history of Graceland and the death and funeral of Elvis Presley in August of 1977. Most people assume that Elvis’s body has been resting at Graceland since the time of his death. But the truth is, Elvis was originally interred in a mausoleum 2 1/2 miles away in Forest Hill Cemetery Midtowns in Memphis. Elvis had the ornate mausoleum built after his mother’s death from heart failure at just 46 years old on August 14, 1958. Her final resting place featured a large white marble statue of Jesus Christ with arms outstretched descending from the cross as angels pray at his feet atop a pedestal with the Presley name etched on the front. That is, until a plot to steal Elvis’s body was uncovered just days after being placed there.
On August 29, 1977, three men were arrested and charged with trying to steal Elvis Presley’s body. Early that morning the trio of graverobbers climbed over a back wall of the cemetery. The plan was to hold The King’s corpse for a $10 million ransom. As they made their way toward the white marble mausoleum, the gang got spooked and fled from the scene only to be arrested by Memphis police while still inside the cemetery. Officers from the department’s tactical unit were watching the suburban Memphis graveyard. Turns out the plot was foiled when one of the gang, an FBI informant named Ronnie Lee Adkins, tipped off Memphis police and blabbed to a local TV reporter about the scheme. Ultimately, the charges were dropped by the Memphis prosecutor when Adkins got arrested for fraud. Adkins had checked into a local hospital posing as a policeman to claim that he was covered by the city’s insurance plan. No charges were filed against the other two men, and the police refused to identify them.
Remember the Lisa Marie Presley loan default scam? It turns out that the body-snatching scheme had been hatched after the Memphis board had refused the Presley family’s request to bury Elvis at Graceland. According to Adkins, the hoax was first floated by Elvis’s dad Vernon Presley as a way to convince county officials to allow them to move Elvis to Graceland for security reasons. As a result the singer’s body, and that of his mother Gladys resting in the crypt below him behind a gated room, were removed to Graceland. What happened to the monument at Forest Hill? It was dismantled and moved to Graceland where it stands just outside the Meditation Gardens today. The only reminder at Forest Hill is the concrete slab for the Presley monument that is still in place. It seems that from the moment he passed, no other American celebrity has been the subject of more hoaxes than Elvis Presley. Need I remind you of the many sightings of Elvis in the decades following his death? Elvis caught a plane at the Memphis International Airport the day he died: Elvis traveled the country using the name “Jon Burrows” when booking hotels; Elvis was living in Kalamazoo, Michigan in the late 1980s; Elvis was at California’s Legoland amusement park shortly after opening in 1999; Elvis was in FBI protective custody after turning on the mob; Elvis was seen working as a groundskeeper at Graceland in 2016; and perhaps the mac-daddy of all Elvis sightings: Elvis was seen in the background of an airport scene in the 1990 film Home Alone.
Touring Graceland is like stepping into a time machine. The Mansion is 17,552 square feet and has a total of 23 rooms, including 8 bedrooms and bathrooms. If you are a child of the 1960s-70s, much of the decor will be familiar. The shag carpeting, intercom system, rattan wallpaper, natural stone interior finishes, and textured fabric ceilings in some of the rooms appear garish to anyone under 40. The wall of analog television sets (one of which Elvis purportedly shot out while Robert Goulet was singing) look dated and worn to today’s youth. While descending to the “Jungle Room” (an interior cave room added in the 60s complete with a built-in rock waterfall and green shag carpet) via a small flight of 3 to 4 stairs, it is easy to see the tattered and worn edges where guests have reached down and pulled away a strand or two over the years. To be fair, Elvis called this room his den, and that gathered cotton fabric on the ceiling? It was for acoustics when Elvis recorded his last two albums. Elvis’s kitchen is not unlike any “modern” kitchenette we all grew up with: Avocado Green and Harvest Gold. The main difference was that the appliances were more expensive. Elvis paid $1,000 for his microwave (reportedly the first in Memphis) which translates to over $8,000 today.
The self-guided tour (with headphones) leads guests out the back door to Elvis’s multi-stall carport where he kept all of his sportscars (and he had MANY!) and on to Elvis’s custom-built racquetball court (more shag carpet, a piano, a bar, and leather seating in the lounge). In the early hours of the morning of his death, Elvis played a game of racquetball with his girlfriend Ginger Alden. He ended the game by playing a song on the piano before walking back to the main house to wash his hair and go to bed. The two-story court (featuring a floor-to-ceiling shatterproof window designed to watch the games from the lounge) has been restored to the way it was when Elvis used the building. The tour ends up at the kidney-shaped pool and the Meditation Garden. Here guests find Presley’s grave, along with those of his parents Gladys and Vernon, grandmother Minnie Mae, daughter. Lisa Marie, and grandson Benjamin Keough are located next to the mansion. They can be visited during the mansion tours or for free before the mansion tours begin. A memorial gravestone for Presley’s stillborn twin brother, Jesse Garon, is also at the site.
From there, guests are invited to tour the rest of the facility by boarding another small shuttle bus to the museum complex known as “Elvis Presley’s Memphis.” Here the visitor is immersed in a sea of everything Elvis: stage costumes, sportscars, motorcycles, Army uniforms, boats, golf carts, martial arts uniforms, tractors, and, of course, a Pink Cadillac — all previously owned by Elvis Aaron Presley. There are sections devoted to Lisa Marie augmented by stage costumes worn by everyone from Dolly Parton to KISS. The complex also features a Sirius Satellite Radio studio which broadcasts the all-Elvis Presley channel. A short walk away are Elvis’s two airplanes: the Lisa Marie and Hound Dog II. We ended our tour of the complex by eating Elvis’s favorite snack, a fried peanut butter and banana sandwich at Gladys’ Diner. Rhonda took hers straight up with butter, mine was just like Elvis used to have: made with bacon grease.
The staff of Elvis Presley Enterprises has kept a list of celebrities who have visited Graceland since Elvis’s death. Some are obvious; others surprising. Muhammad Ali, a friend of Elvis, visited in 1978. Musician Paul Simon toured Graceland in the early ’80s and afterward titled his Grammy-winning album Graceland. U2 toured it in 1987. In 2006, President George W. Bush toured the mansion, going so far as climbing the ropes of the Jungle Room with 1st Lady Laura to have a picture taken. Prince Albert II of Monaco toured Graceland in 2010. In 2013, Paul McCartney of The Beatles visited. Prince William and Prince Harry visited in 2014. Other visitors included President Jimmy Carter; countless sitting ambassadors to the U.S.; several governors, senators, members of Congress, and Nobel Prize-winning singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. There were also “unofficial” visitors like Bruce Springsteen who famously jumped the fence on April 26, 1976, a subject which I detailed in my column on May 8, 2016.
While our trip to Memphis centered around Graceland, we also visited Stax Records, Sun Records, and walked right down the middle of Beale Street where legends like W.C. Handy, Louis Armstrong, Muddy Waters, Albert King, Memphis Minnie, John Lee Hooker, and B. B. King developed the Memphis Blues style. We ended our Memphis visit at the Lorraine Motel where Dr. Martin Luther King’s earthly journey abruptly ended and home to the National Civil Rights Museum (not my first visit). While there, I encountered peaceful protestor Jacqueline Smith, one of the few remaining long-term tenants who has been protesting on the corner across from the Lorraine Motel for 36 years and 109 days (she keeps a running total on a board in front of her makeshift booth). In 1988, Ms. Smith was the night manager and last resident of the Lorraine Motel and the subject of my past column on April 7, 2017. Ms. Smith remains steadfast in her belief that Memphis continues to be gentrified, in her case by the National Civil Rights Museum, which, in her view rails against everything Dr. King stood for. She believes the character of her downtown (a formerly poor urban area) is slowly being changed by wealthier people moving in, improving housing, and attracting new businesses, all while displacing current inhabitants in the process.
Ms. Smith stood behind a sign demanding reparations and posts another placard in front of her booth featuring the images of seven white men titled “Men shot in this area. What Goes Around Comes Around” in front of a larger vinyl banner reading “Stop Gentrification in Memphis Today! Relocate the National Civil Rights Museum and establish the Lorraine Motel as a living testimony to Dr. King’s Dream.” When I attempted to talk with her, it quickly became apparent to me that she wasn’t interested in a conversation. Cautioning me to “Look at all those people with backpacks behind you. (Mostly white folks) You know they have guns and knives in there.” I assured her that I was not armed but that did not resonate. Just then, a trio of British tourists saw us talking and proceeded to walk up to ask mundane questions about public restrooms, hours and admission. I then realized that during our trip to Graceland, the only person of color I encountered was that beautiful shuttle driver from Peru, Indiana. Oh sure, there were a couple of friendly black security guards and employees at the museum complex, but I saw no black folk as guests at Graceland.
As a native son of Indianapolis and a proud product of IPS during the first years of busing in the Circle City, I consider myself far from “woke” but socially aware and I support the statement that Black Lives Matter sans caveat. I took Dr. King’s plea to judge not by the color of the skin but by the content of character seriously. So, when it comes to Elvis Presley, it is hard not to be conflicted. The best I can do is to consider the attitudes of three of his contemporaries, all of whom I am a fan of. In 1994, Ray Charles told NBC’s Bob Costas, “To say that Elvis was so great and so outstanding like he’s the king…the king of what? He was doing our kind of music,” Charles said. “So what the hell am I supposed to get so excited about?” In a 1990 Rolling Stone interview, Little Richard said, “If Elvis had been Black, he wouldn’t have been as big as he was. If I was white, do you know how huge I’d be?… But I love him. That’s my buddy, my baby. Elvis is one of the greatest performers who ever lived in this world.” In a 1996 interview, B.B. King said, “Music is owned by the whole universe. It isn’t exclusive to the black man or the white man or any other color. Elvis didn’t steal any music from anyone. He just had his own interpretation of the music he’d grown up on, same is true for everyone. I think Elvis had integrity.” So, when it comes to Elvis Presley, Graceland, and Memphis Gentrification, which side of the coin do YOU land on?
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.
