MORBID TOURIOSITY

BY DAN MILLER
March 21, 2006

What could be creepier than taking a tour of homes in a hearse?

Well, when I lived in Los Angeles, the busiest tour service in town was called Graveline Tours.... and they did just that.
Their tour vans were converted hearses.
They'd drive throngs of tourists past places where celebrities died, or -- as a bonus -- where scandalous behavior was uncovered.

You could see the house where the Sharon Tate and others were slaughtered in the Manson murders.
You'd see the car dealership where James Dean picked up his car just hours before he died in it.

There'd be a stop at the Ambassador Hotel where Bobby Kennedy was assassinated.

Also, there was the house where young actress Rebecca Schaeffer was murdered....
The hotel on Sunset Boulevard where John Belushi died....
The place where they found Marilyn Monroe's body.

But these days Hollywood has competition in the "morbid curiosity business".

In the little town of Oak Hill, West Virginia, the locals have decided to transform a former Pure Oil service station into a museum.
On New Year's Day in 1953, a chauffeur pulled into that little gas station, only to discover his passenger -- Hank Williams -- dead in the back seat.
It won't mark the exact spot where Hank actually died.
That apparently happened somewhere along the highway, after he spent the night at the Andrew Johnson Hotel in Knoxville.

In Tennessee, we have lots of well known "celebrity death spots", not counting hospitals.

Among them, the farmland near Joelton where Stringbean Akeman and his wife were brutally murdered....
The plane crash site near Camden where Patsy Cline died....
And the crash site in Brentwood where Jim Reeves lost his life.

Singer Dottie West died along Briley Parkway here in town.
And Tammy Wynette died inside her house (Hank Williams' former home) on Franklin Road.

But the state's two most "popular" death sites are both in Memphis.

One is the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
It's now a fascinating museum dedicated to civil rights.
They've even opened the little boarding house across the street, so you can actually see where James Earl Ray fired his horrifying shot.

And, of course, there's Tennessee's most visited death spot of all -- Graceland -- where Elvis Presley took his final breath, while in the bathroom, on the toilet.

I don't understand the magical force that attracts visitors by the hundreds of thousands to Graceland.
It defies all logic.
I often wonder.... would Graceland still attract all those visitors if Elvis had died somewhere else?

But I've taken the tour.
And if they ever open the upstairs to the public -- to reveal the bathroom where Elvis actually died -- I'll take the tour again.

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