Lisa Marie Presley kept dead son’s body at home for two months, her memoir reveals

Lisa Marie Presley kept her late son’s body in her home for two months. Presley, who died in January 2023, was left devastated when son Benjamin Keough took his own life in 2020 at the age of 27 and decided to keep his body on dry ice in a separate casitas room on the grounds of their Los Angeles house.
In an extract from her posthumous memoir From Here To The Great Unknown obtained by People magazine, the late singer wrote: “There is no law in the state of California that you have to bury someone immediately.”
Benjamin’s sister, actress Riley Keough – who finished the book after her mother’s death – wrote it was “really important” for Lisa Marie to “have ample time to say goodbye to him, the same way she’d done with her dad”, Elvis Presley, who died in 1977 when Lisa Marie was nine years old.
Lisa Marie Presley wrote: “Having my dad in the house after he died was incredibly helpful because I could go and spend time with him and talk to him.”
She enlisted the help of a compassionate funeral director to get her son’s body to her house and had to keep the room where he was kept at 55 degrees (12.7 degrees Celsius), and she felt “fortunate” to be able to continue to care for him while she decided on whether his final resting place should be the family’s Graceland estate or in Hawaii.
Lisa Marie Presley wrote: “That was part of why it took so long. I got so used to him, caring for him and keeping him there. I think it would scare the living f****** p*** out of anybody else to have their son there like that. But not me.
“I felt so fortunate that there was a way that I could still parent him, delay it a bit longer so that I could become okay with laying him to rest.”
At one point, Riley Keogh and Lisa Marie Presley decided to get tattoos in Benjamin’s honour, opting to be inked on the corresponding body parts where he had had his own tributes to his family, with the Daisy Jones And The Six actress getting hers on her collarbone and Lisa Marie on her hand.
To get the artwork perfect, Lisa Marie invited the tattoo artist to see Benjamin’s own inkings up close.
Keogh wrote: “I’ve had an extremely absurd life, but this moment is in the top five.”
Shortly after they had their tattoo tributes, Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keogh began getting a “vibe” that Benjamin wanted to be moved from the house.
Keogh wrote: “We all got this vibe from my brother that he didn’t want his body in this house anymore. ‘Guys,’ he seemed to be saying, ‘This is getting weird.’ Even my mom said that she could feel him talking to her, saying, ‘This is insane, Mom, what are you doing? What the f***!'”
Benjamin was eventually laid to rest in Graceland with his grandfather Elvis, after a funeral service in Malibu.