(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Thu 15 January 2026 19:30, UK
The ultimate experience for any Elvis Presley fan is a visit to Graceland.
It’s not just that the Memphis house was the icon’s home for the majority of his life, but the venue is now the ultimate Elvis museum, offering an insight into his home life and his work, with the obvious elephant in the room being his death, and the room upstairs in which it happened.
At Graceland, most doors are open. Any time I’m with my grandmother, she brings it up because her visit left a lasting impression. As a lifelong fan, the trip clearly stuck with her. She talks about the extravagance of certain rooms, how emotional it was to see the family graves, and how exciting it was to view some of Elvis’ outfits. But more than anything, what struck her most was how small and surprisingly ordinary much of the house felt.
Because at the end of the day, Graceland is simply a house. Bought when he was 22, Presley paid $102,500 for the property and never lived anywhere else after that. While still a sizeable bit of real estate in the grand scheme of things, the house and land is 13.8 acres. However, if you think about just how famous Elvis was, that’s really nothing. In 1979, Paul McCartney bought a property of 150 acres. Madonna reportedly owned a 58-acre farm. So Graceland looks like a hole in comparison.
But the house stands as a physical representation of the kind of man Elvis was. Despite the fame, he remained humble at heart, always staying the classic Tennessee man.
Yet when a lot of people go to visit the house, they probably have one thing on their bucket list to see: the toilet where he died. However, despite the broad access the public has, that bathroom, along with Elvis’ private bedroom, is one of the only spaces off-limits.
“Even if I’m dead, nobody will go upstairs,” Presley once said about his house, and the family have stuck to that. Especially given that the star did in fact die upstairs in his private quarters, his rules feel all the more scared, heightened even more so by the ongoing mocking of just how he died.
Elvis Presley died on the toilet – that’s been the gag since 1977. The joke is that the singer had become so unhealthy, gorging himself on a fatty diet as his career spiralled out of control, that eventually, he died trying to take a shit when his poor eating habits wouldn’t let him. The gag is that Elvis was so full of bacon and peanut butter sandwiches that he was gripped by chronic constipation and conked it.
Elvis Presley’s house in Memphis. (Credits: Graceland)But how did Elvis Presley actually die?
While the autopsy was underway, a coroner jumped the gun and stated that the cause of Elvis’ death was cardiac arrest. The coroner was quick to rule out illicit substances, stating, “drugs played no role in Presley’s death”. However, that wasn’t really the whole truth.
While the immediate cause was cardiac arrest, it’s believed that the heart issues might have been prompted by drug use. They believed it was possible that he suffered “anaphylactic shock brought on by the codeine pills he had gotten from his dentist, to which he was known to have had a mild allergy”. Especially in his later years, addiction gripped Presley, making it far more likely that he’d even be taking prescription pills he knew he was allergic to.
When lab reports finally came back, they found “fourteen drugs in Elvis’ system, ten in significant quantity”. Add that on top of his notedly poor diet, and it became hard to actually pinpoint which factor, or which substance, prompted the cardiac arrest. Weakening his health to an extreme, clearly, his heart gave way under a myriad of toxic vices.
However, what wasn’t the cause was constipation. Although the final autopsy found he was chronically ill with several ailments, diabetes, glaucoma, and constipation, the latter definitely wasn’t the one kicked above the buffet of drugs in his system. It was merely unfortunate timing that the singer’s final moments happened when he was on the toilet.
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