Tupelo, MS: Priceville Cemetery

Significance: Jesse Garon Presley's grave marker spot

Address: 691 N Feemster Lake Rd, Tupelo, MS 38804

Location: 34.266704,-88.657370 , Jesse's marker is near the tree line at the back left corner of cemetery

Status: Open to the public, now Priceville Memorial Gardens

I Visited On: May 30, 2023

My experience

Jesse's plot is not the easiest to find without directions or coordinates, so I included those above. The cemetery doesn't even have a website or plot map.

I got to the cemetery in the morning and spent about 15 minutes wandering before I found Jesse's grave stone. Went walking down the main road, and when I got to the tree line at the end of the cemetery, a black chihuahua came from a house down the road and started following me and barking at me. Super weird. Again, the oddest things always happen to me around Elvis places. Is it a sign?

When I finally found the gravestone, I had an oddly emotional experience and just burst out crying at the site of the stone. The only other time that's happened to me was at Elvis' grave at Graceland. I left a bouquet of red roses, two quarters, and a prayer for the little angel, before leaving on more Tupelo adventures.

A excerpt from Alanna Nash's "Baby, Lets Play House: Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him" about Jesse Garon's grave

"However, a bigger mystery than the exact time of Elvis’s birth is the location of his dead twin’s grave. For decades, it was said that on January 9, Vernon had climbed the hilly terrain of East Tupelo’s tiny Priceville Cemetery in the bitter cold with the little coffin, a minister, and an undertaker from W. E. Pegues at his side. There, in the Presley plot, they supposedly carried out their grim task, burying the infant in an unmarked grave that all but disappeared when the grass grew in. But Priceville has been questioned in later years. Billy Smith says that Jesse was, indeed, buried in an unmarked grave, but in another cemetery closer to Saltillo. One of Elvis’s classmates insists the twin was buried in a cemetery by St. Mark’s Methodist Church across from the birthplace. And Joe Savery, who owns the original death certificate, has said that “nobody really knows where that child is buried. . . . Later on, Elvis tried to find out. . . . You would think that somebody in the family would have known where they buried that child, but I have never known anybody that does.” However, Roy Turner believes Priceville is the burial spot after all. Someone put a small marble foot marker there years ago that sets near the grave of Noah Presley. “When I stumbled on what I thought was Jessie’s grave, because of the chronology of the surrounding Presley graves—then a

space for two more that was never used—I assumed this was the spot. A lot of people in that era were not able to afford tombstones. When I first saw the grave, there was only a concrete chunk marking the spot and some artificial flowers.”"

All photos are by me in June 2023. Please, credit me if you use my photos.

The excerpt is from Alanna Nash's Book "Baby, Lets Play House: Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him."