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Elvis’s home sold to Uri Geller

BBC, UK
May 16, 2006
news.bbc.co.uk

ReligionNewsBlog.com • Tuesday May 16, 2006

Psychic spoon-bender Uri Geller has bought a house lived in by Elvis Presley before he moved to Graceland.

He expects the home in Tennessee, which was auctioned on eBay for $905,100 ( £481,000), to be restored and opened to the public.

“We are unbelievably pleased. This is a piece of history,” said Geller, a former friend of Michael Jackson.

Geller met Presley in Las Vegas in the 1970s when the rock ‘n’ roll star asked him to perform his spoon-bending trick.

“As the clock closed on the bidding [on] Sunday, I felt intuitively I got the price,” Geller said.

“Suddenly the radio started playing an Elvis song. That was Elvis telling me we got the house.”

Geller, who bought the house with two others, said he hoped to take children on tours of the restored property and eventually turn it into a museum.

New York lawyer Jim Gleason and Swedish-born jewellery maker Lisbeth Silvandersson, who lives in England, were his partners in the purchase.

Presley bought the four-bedroom home in 1956 with his royalties and lived there with his parents and grandmother.

He stayed for only a year because his career began to take off and police were frequently called to handle the crowds of fans outside.

In the short time that Presley lived there, he had a granite swimming pool installed in the garden, which at 15 metres (50 feet) in length was the largest residential pool in the city at the time.

He also added a den and housed his motorcycles in a separate building. The hall contains original wallpaper adorned with musical notes, which was uncovered during renovations.

A Life magazine article published five months after Presley bought the house contained pictures of teenage girls sitting with their ears pressed to his bedroom wall.

They were also picking through the grass in his garden for souvenirs.

Mr Gleason said the group wanted to turn the house “into a museum-quality piece of Americana”.

In March 1957, Presley moved to Graceland, the home with which he would become synonymous.