Museum is gone, but Elvis lives on

Bill Beeny, the 81-year-old proprietor of the Elvis Is Alive Museum in Wright City, Mo., said he has placed his Elvis Presley memorabilia on eBay in hopes that someone else will take up the cause.

His collection includes photographs, books, FBI files, replicas of the Cadillac the King drove and of the casket and gravestone from his 1977 funeral, even a painted Elvis head.

Beeny, a self-described “western Kentucky hillbilly” Baptist minister who wound up in Missouri 50 years ago, is selling the contents of his roadside attraction, a transformed coin-operated laundry 55 miles west of St. Louis that he opened in 1990, to satisfy a desire to serve the needy in his county.

Beeny said he’ll miss Elvis, “but life has its changes. You have to let go.” He hopes someone will buy the collection and open a new museum dedicated to the theory that Elvis lives.