Riley Keough recalls getting ‘trapped’ in Elvis Presley’s room with her mom during Graceland tours

Keough is now the sole heir and beneficiary of the estate, following her mother’s 2023 death. As the eldest granddaughter of Elvis Presley, Riley Keough is no stranger to Graceland, his famous Memphis estate. Since childhood, she has spent plenty of time in the mansion — though not all of it was on purpose.

During her Wednesday appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers, the actress revealed that while visiting the estate with her mother and brother, Lisa Marie Presley and Benjamin Keough, they would often find themselves trapped in Elvis’ bedroom while they waited for the mansion’s daily tours to come to an end.

“If we didn’t get out before the tours began, we were stuck until like 5pm,” Keough told host Seth Meyers. “Elvis’ room and my mother’s room are not part of the tour. So we would stay upstairs and have to wait basically. And we’d get stuck until the tours were over.” When Meyers asked what they were afraid would happen if they walked around, Keough laughed. “It’s funny because, I guess they could’ve stopped the tours for a second so we could run out but they never did that. They never offered,” she said.

Keough delved deeper into her core Graceland memories in From Here to the Great Unknown, her mother’s posthumous memoir which she had a hand in completing after Lisa Marie’s 2023 death. “Upstairs at Graceland is just as Elvis left it—so you can really feel his presence,” Keough writes in the book. “Sometimes we would all sleep in his bed. My mom loved being in her dad’s bed—it made her feel close to him, and we felt it, too, that closeness. But because Elvis’s bedroom isn’t a part of the tour and no visitors are allowed up there, if we woke up late and the tours had already started, we’d be stuck in his room until late afternoon.”

She continues, “We’d have staff members bring food up—usually McDonald’s—and just hang out all day. Trapped in Elvis’s bedroom.” To pass the time, Keough and her brother would often sit under their grandmother’s hair dryer and pretend they were in a salon. Meanwhile, their mother liked to peruse the books on Elvis’ shelf.

“He was clearly searching for a deeper comprehension of the world—most of the books were spiritual or self-help titles,” Keough observed. “Elvis would underline phrases and write things like ‘AMEN!’ next to them. When you saw the underlines and the spiritual searching, you got a sense of the fundamentally broken feeling he shared with my mom. He was searching to fix himself, searching for a deeper meaning, something she would then search for in her own life, too.”

She writes that her mother would go “line by line,” looking for meaning in everything that Elvis had underlined. “Then security would knock on the door and bring us sausage and biscuits and we’d eat them,” she recalls. “You can still feel him in that room. His spirit is imprinted there.”

Keough, who shares daughter Tupelo with Australian stuntman Ben Smith-Petersen, is now the sole heir and beneficiary of the estate, which includes the Graceland residence and the family’s shares of Elvis Presley Enterprises. Keough’s brother Benjamin died by suicide in 2020, and she also has two half sisters from her mother’s marriage to Michael Lockwood.

Following Lisa Marie’s sudden death, her mother Priscilla Presley filed a petition questioning the validity of her daughter’s will, which listed Keough as its beneficiary. They later reached a settlement agreement which, per a 2023 Vanity Fair cover story, involved Keough paying her grandmother $1 million, plus an additional $400,000 in legal fees.

More recently, Lisa Jeanine Findley of Kimberling City, Mo., was arrested for allegedly trying to force the Presley family to sell her the Graceland estate. Per the Department of Justice, she is facing a mandatory minimum of two years in prison for aggravated identity theft as well as a maximum of 20 years in prison for mail fraud.