Graceland is the big white house in Memphis where Elvis Presley lived, and more than half a million people walk through it every year. They see the living room downstairs and the famous Jungle Room. What almost nobody sees is the upstairs. Elvis kept his private rooms on the second floor, and that floor has stayed closed to the public ever since. No tour goes up there, and no camera follows you up those stairs.
But the family can go up. And a few of them grew up doing exactly that.
Riley Keough is Elvis’s granddaughter. Her mother was Lisa Marie Presley, Elvis’s only child, and Riley helped finish her mom’s memoir, “From Here to the Great Unknown,” after Lisa Marie passed away. The book came out in 2024, and it goes back and forth between Lisa Marie’s own words and Riley’s. In Riley’s part, she lets readers into that upstairs floor the way she knew it as a kid.
Riley writes in the memoir that upstairs is frozen in time. “Upstairs at Graceland is just as Elvis left it. So you can really feel his presence,” she says. For her and her brother and the other grandkids, it wasn’t a museum. It was just the part of the house where they slept over.
Here’s the part fans love.
One room still had something that belonged to Priscilla, Elvis’s wife and Riley’s grandmother. It was her old hairdryer. The kids found it still sitting there, years and years later, and they did what kids do. They made a game out of it.
Riley writes it plainly in the book. “My grandmother’s hairdryer was still up there so we’d sit under it and pretend we were in a salon.” So the private, off-limits top floor of the most famous rock n’ roll house in the world became, for a little while, a pretend beauty parlor for a handful of grandchildren taking turns under grandma’s dryer.
There’s a tender side to the upstairs too. Riley remembers all of them climbing into Elvis’s own bed some nights. She says her mom, Lisa Marie, loved it most of all. “Sometimes we would all sleep in his bed. My mom loved being in her dad’s bed,” Riley writes. Lisa Marie was a little girl when her father was there, and crawling into that bed as a grown woman with her own kids brought him back a bit. “It made her feel close to him, and we felt it too, that closeness.”
Someone who visited Graceland and walked the upstairs filmed a short look at that private floor, so you can see the part of the house the public never gets to.
Here’s a rare peek at the upstairs rooms at Graceland that no tour ever shows.
A look at the private upstairs floor fans never see
The downstairs is the Graceland the world knows. The upstairs is the one the family kept for itself, right down to a grandmother’s hairdryer and a game that outlasted everyone who first played it.