By 1957 fans had made Elvis Presley’s house on Audubon Drive in Memphis unlivable, so he sent his parents, Vernon and Gladys, to find a farmhouse with room to breathe. They found Graceland, named after the original owner’s daughter, and Elvis paid just over $102,000. After Gladys died in 1958 at 46, the house became a shrine to her, and when Vernon’s new wife, Dee Stanley, replaced the curtains Gladys had chosen, Elvis moved Dee, her children, and her belongings off the estate. Behind the Colonial Revival front with Corinthian columns and marble lions, he built a sensory playground: the Jungle Room with its indoor waterfall, a basement TV room with three sets inspired by Lyndon B. Johnson, and a billiard room wrapped in 350 to 400 yards of pleated fabric.

Elvis died at Graceland in August 1977 at 42, hours after playing piano in his racquetball court. By the early 1980s upkeep cost half a million dollars a year, the IRS wanted estate taxes, and Lisa Marie’s inheritance had fallen to around $1 million. Priscilla Presley hired Jack Soden and opened the house to the public on June 7, 1982, earning back the investment within a month and building a trust worth over $100 million. In 2024 a company called Naussany Investments claimed Lisa Marie had pledged Graceland for a $3.8 million loan and moved to auction it. Riley Keough proved the documents forged, and Lisa Jeanine Findley was sentenced in late 2025 to nearly five years in federal prison.

• Vernon’s bedroom swimming pool, jukebox, and closed circuit TV monitors
• Recording most of his final two albums in the Jungle Room in 1976
• The 900 pound copper lined coffin placed in the foyer for mourning fans
• The Florida notary who swore she had never met Lisa Marie Presley
• Why the second floor, with Elvis’s bedroom and the bathroom where he died, stays closed to 600,000 yearly visitors