Overview

Graceland is a mansion on a 13.8-acre (5.6-hectare) estate in Memphis, Tennessee, United States, once owned by American singer Elvis Presley. Presley is buried there, as are his parents, paternal grandmother, grandson, and daughter.

Graceland is located at 3764 Elvis Presley Boulevard in the Whitehaven neighborhood, about nine miles (14 kilometers) south of central Memphis and fewer than four miles (6.4 km) north of the Mississippi border. It was opened to the public as a house museum on June 7, 1982, and attracts more than 650,000 visitors annually.

After Elvis Presley began his musical career, he purchased a $40,000 home for himself and his family at 1034 Audubon Drive in Memphis in 1956. As his success and fame grew, especially after his appearances on television, the number of fans who would congregate outside the house increased. Presley’s neighbors, although happy to have a celebrity living nearby, concluded that the constant gathering of fans and journalists was a nuisance.

In early 1957, Presley gave his parents, Vernon and Gladys Presley, a budget of $100,000 and asked them to find a “farmhouse”-like property to purchase, with buffer space around it. At the time, Graceland was located in southern Shelby County, several miles south of Memphis’s main urban area. In later years, Memphis expanded with residential developments, resulting in Graceland being surrounded by other properties. Presley purchased Graceland on March 19, 1957, for a price of $102,500.

On August 16, 1977, Presley died aged 42 in his bathroom at Graceland. According to the biographer Peter Guralnick, he “had thrown up after being stricken, apparently while seated on the toilet. It looked to the medical investigator as if he had ‘stumbled or crawled several feet before he died.'” Guralnick adds that “drug use was heavily implicated in this unanticipated death of a middle-aged man with no known history of heart disease.” The official cause of death was cardiac arrhythmia, although later toxicology reports strongly suggested that polypharmacy was the primary cause of death; “fourteen drugs were found in Elvis’s system, with several drugs such as codeine in significant quantities.