There is a house that looks almost exactly like Graceland. Same white columns out front. Same stone wall. The same feeling you get when you pull up the drive. But it isn’t in Memphis, and it isn’t even in America.
It sits more than 4,500 miles away, and this weekend Priscilla Presley is heading back to the little country where it stands.
Priscilla, now 81, is bringing her show “An Evening with Priscilla Presley” to two stages this week. She is at Falkonersalen in Copenhagen on Friday, October 16, and at Værket in Randers on Sunday, October 18. Both shows are presented by the museum that built this second Graceland. The Randers date only got added because her first visit there, back in the spring, sold out so fast.
So where is it, and why does a copy of the most famous home in American music exist all the way over there?
A walk through the Graceland copy, room by room
A travel vlogger toured the whole place and filmed it, so you can see for yourself how close it really is.
Here’s the part that surprises people. The man who built it wasn’t a developer or a big company. He was a regular fan who used to sell power tools for a living. He loved Elvis so much that he quit his job and put up his own Graceland, and it opened in 2011. It’s built to look like the real thing at roughly twice the size, and today it pulls in almost 120,000 visitors a year.
When Priscilla stopped by in the spring, she said she was glad a copy of Graceland exists outside America, so people who can’t get all the way to Memphis still get to feel it.
There is one more twist, and it has to do with the name on the front of the building.
Priscilla back on stage in this same town
Here she is at Værket in Randers earlier this year, the visit that sold out and brought her back.
When it first opened, the museum was actually called “Graceland Randers.” In December 2015 Elvis Presley Enterprises raised a concern about the Graceland name, and asked for it to be changed. The founder agreed, and on New Year’s Day 2016 it became “Memphis Mansion.” There was a small payment involved too, and that was the end of it.
And that’s the name it carries today, the one Priscilla’s shows are presented under this weekend.
Watch the tour above and you’ll understand why fans fly in from all over just to stand in a copy of Elvis’s home. It really is that close to the real one.