For Sale: Final Resting Place Amid Stars : Burial sites: There’s space available for anyone wanting to spend eternity in the company of the famous dearly departed, presidents to movie stars.

Want to spend eternity in the company of a president, rubbing elbows with a music star or in the neighborhood of someone like Marilyn Monroe?

There’s space available--for a price.

A Virginia woman recently spent $9,000 for six grave sites atop a shady, serene hill about 10 paces from flamboyant Confederate cavalry leader J.E.B. Stuart in Richmond’s historic Hollywood Cemetery.

She’ll share Hollywood’s 135 pastoral acres with Presidents John Tyler and James Monroe, and Jefferson Davis, the only president of the Confederacy.

The woman--whom her lawyer, C. Hobson Goddin, declined to identify--answered a newspaper advertisement in May from a man who wanted to cash in his space in a nearly 150-year-old section of the cemetery.

Burial sites near other big names also are available if you search hard enough, said Stephen L. Morgan, executive vice president of the American Cemetery Assn. based in Falls Church.

For $10,000, there’s a four-space lot about 10 feet from the grave of country music star Hank Williams at Oakwood Annex in Montgomery, Ala., said Charles Graham, the cemetery’s general manager.

“I had a man the other day from New York who wanted a space,” said Graham, who will only sell the lots as a unit. “A fan, I guess.”

Some of the most-sought sites surround Marilyn Monroe’s wall crypt at Westwood Memorial Cemetery outside Los Angeles.

“You can get within a number of feet,” cemetery manager Barbara Parker said. “But most people who ask are fans who couldn’t afford it.”

Grave sites at Westwood begin at $15,000 and spaces near Monroe’s crypt cost many, many times that, she said.

“The Lady in Black,” who annually visited the mausoleum of silent film star Rudolph Valentino at Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery, couldn’t get a spot in the mausoleum when she died a few years ago and was buried about 100 yards away, said Greg Smith, owner of Grave Line Tours, which provides maps of Tinseltown’s tombs.

Smith said that a few years ago he helped a friend find an open spot at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Hollywood Hills about 8 feet from the ashes of Lucille Ball.

For himself, Smith is eyeing a more obscure spot at Forest Lawn, the $1,440 lot next to the grave of Jimmie Dodd, emcee of TV’s “Mickey Mouse Club.” Smith, 42, said he has fond memories of watching the program as a child.

“I go (from) time to time to make sure it’s open,” Smith said. “It’s definitely waiting.”

“People choose cemeteries for a variety of reasons,” Morgan said. “It also shows you that this industry is not so much about burial as it is about remembrance and memorialization.”

That doesn’t hold true for the sellers.

The man who sold the lots in the Richmond cemetery said he had little interest in his own burial at Hollywood and plans to use the money to help pay college tuition for one of his children.

The man, who spoke on condition that he not be identified, found the deeds to the lots in his late father’s papers earlier this year.

“I really thought it was sort of a joke,” he said.

Times have changed from a few years ago, when few would dream of selling a family cemetery plot, said John Blake, executive director of the Continental Assn. of Funeral and Memorial Societies in Egg Harbor, Wis.

“People are being more realistic,” Blake said. “It doesn’t make much sense to bury money in the ground.”