Warning: This story contains mentions of suicide.
Lisa Marie Presley was so overcome with grief following the death of her son Benjamin Keough that she kept his body packed in dry ice in her home for two months. According to NBC, the shocking revelation is included in the new memoir, From Here to the Great Unknown, which daughter, Daisy Jones & the Six star Riley Keough, completed after her mother’s death at 54 in January 2023.
“My mom had my brother in the house with us instead of keeping him at the morgue,” Keough wrote in the book. “They told us that if we could tend to the body, we could have him at home, so she kept him in our house for a while on dry ice.”
Keough said that it was important for her mother — the only child of late rock legend Elvis Presley — to have proper time to say goodbye to her son, who died by suicide in 2020. “The same way she’d done with her dad. And I would go and sit there with him,” she said, noting that California doesn’t have any laws that mandate exactly when a body needs to be buried or disposed of. Keough used archival tapes of her mother’s memories to help finish the book.
“My house has a separate casitas bedroom, and I kept Ben Ben in there for two months,” according to Presley, who had begun working on the memoir before her death; Presley died of a small bowel obstruction caused by complications from prior weight loss surgery. “There is no law in the state of California that you have to bury someone immediately. I found a very empathic funeral home owner,” Presley wrote. “I told her that 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 said, ‘We’ll bring Ben Ben [her nickname for her son] to you. You can have him there.’”
She added, “I think it would scare the living f—ing p-ss out of anybody else to have their son there like that. But not me.” Lisa Marie was nine-years-old when Elvis died in 1977.
The room where Benjamin’s body was reportedly kept at 55 degrees and Presley and Keough got tattoos that matched Benjamin’s from an artist who came to their home. When asked if they had any photos of the piece they wanted to replicate, Lisa Marie told him, “no, but I can show you,” referring to ink Benjamin had on his collarbone with Keough’s name and another on his hand with Presley’s name; the mother and daughter got Benjamin’s name tattooed on the matching parts of their bodies.
Even by the unusual rules that the Presley’s lived by, Keough said the tattoo incident was one of the most bizarre ones she’d experienced. “Lisa Marie Presley had just asked this poor man to look at the body of her dead son, which happened to be right next to us in the casitas. I’ve had an extremely absurd life, but this moment is in the top five,” she wrote.
Shortly after that, one of Keough’s brothers made it clear he didn’t want the body in the home anymore and Keough, channeling her late sibling, imagined how he might have observed the scene. “‘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—!,’” Keough said.
According to People, the book details how the family held a funeral service for Benjamin in Malibu and Keough placed a pair of her yellow Nikes that her brother had always loved in the casket. In a previous interview with People prior to the book’s release, Keough revealed, “My mom physically died from the after effects of her surgery, but we all knew she died of a broken heart.”
Both Presley and her son are buried at Graceland, where Elvis is also interred.
