People walk through the Meditation Garden at Graceland every single day to stand at Elvis’s grave, and it feels like he was always meant to be right there. He wasn’t. For the first few weeks after he died he was buried somewhere else entirely, and the reason he got moved home is almost too strange to believe.
Elvis died on August 16, 1977. The funeral was on the 18th, and his body went into a mausoleum at Forest Hill Cemetery over in Memphis. His mother, Gladys, who’d died close to twenty years before, was resting in the same cemetery. For a little while, that’s where the King of Rock and Roll lay.
Then, at the end of August, just days after the funeral, police turned up a plan to steal Elvis’s body. A few men got arrested over it. The charges were dropped later on, and people still go back and forth about how serious the whole thing really was, but by then the family had heard enough.
A history channel actually went out to that original Forest Hill grave and walked through the whole episode on location, the body-theft plot and all.
Inside Elvis Presley’s Original Burial Site
The idea that somebody might go after his son’s grave was more than Vernon Presley could take. So Vernon moved to bring him home. He got permission to bury the family on the Graceland grounds, the house that had been the middle of everything for them. It came through at the end of September, and on October 2, 1977, Elvis and Gladys were both moved to the Meditation Garden out behind the mansion, where the family could keep an eye on them.
Graceland was never meant to be a cemetery in the first place. It was the home Elvis bought once the money came in, the place he packed with relatives. The graves ended up there because a grieving father figured the only way to keep his son’s rest safe was to keep it on his own land.
If you’d rather see where he actually lies now, this one walks the Meditation Garden and the family graves.
Elvis & Lisa Marie Presley: Inside the Meditation Garden & Final Resting Place
The garden filled in over the years. Vernon, Elvis’s grandmother, then Lisa Marie and her son were all buried there too, and fans come from all over the world to visit.